Your Postpartum Pelvis
a guide to healing and wholeness after childbirth by rebecca cohen and free birth society.
Most women don't know that they can fix their common pelvic floor issues at home, all on their own.
If you've seen a pelvic floor therapist and tried their approach or you've already been recommended a hysterectomy by your doctor, it's not too late to heal.
Every year in America, about half a million hysterectomies are performed. Removal of the uterus is the second most common surgery for women, right after c-sections. You know the allopathic way: remove, cut out, get rid of. The truth is, surgery is almost never necessary. Just like you can birth at home, you can heal your pelvic floor at home, fully outside of the medical paradigm.
After decades of Rebecca working within the medical system, telling women after birth to “come back in 6 weeks” and then approving them for sex and exercise without question, she set out to learn the truth about holistic pelvic care.
This guide is for you if:
You’re feeling broken and overwhelmed by your postpartum body
You have symptoms from a birth years ago that you’ve just learned to live with
You are well beyond postpartum and still having painful sex
You are avoiding things you love because of your uncontrollable bladder
You have been told that the only way out is with a hysterectomy
You’ve been living with pelvic pain, and everyone’s telling you “that’s just motherhood!"
You’re planning to birth and want to be prepared to handle any pelvic issues in sovereignty, at home
You are ready to stop outsourcing the health of your sacred root center
You want to awaken and explore the energetic, creative power of your womb
You serve women in the motherhood continuum and are tired of referring them to the system at the first sign of pelvis complications
You want real tools, techniques, and resources to take your postpartum health into your own hands
You feel scared, confused, and worried that this will last forever. (It doesn’t have to, sister.)
It's time to heal your pelvic bowl at-home.
Your Postpartum Pelvis offers radical insights on every pelvic complication and symptom you might be experiencing post-birth, whether it’s 10 days or 10 years later. This guide is the simple and powerful roadmap to transcending the lies that birth destroys your pelvis, and that postpartum is destined to be riddled with pelvic pain and suffering.
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MODULE 1: THE MIND-SPIRIT-PELVIS CONNECTION
The foundation of self-healing your pelvis lies in understanding the psycho-spiritual layers of your womb center. Learn how trauma becomes embedded in your pelvic tissues, how physiological complications arise from psychological disconnection from the pelvic bowl (and vice versa!), and how to begin healing this relationship with your root. Foster your heart-womb connection and begin your journey to radical healing from home.
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Module 2: Learn Your Body, Inside and Out
Your pelvis is far more than just a center for reproduction and elimination. In this module, you’ll learn how the fibers of this sacred center hold powerful information for the health of your entire body. Understand the fascinating and powerful truths about your anatomy that will be the groundwork for healing yourself at home, and maintaining ongoing vibrant pelvic health for the rest of your life.
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Module 3: Home Practices for your Pelvic Tissues
Fill your postpartum toolkit with real, simple techniques, rituals, and tried & true practices to care for your soft tissues. You’ll also learn the most important things to prioritize, and to avoid, to live free from pelvic tissue pain. This is your source for DIY pelvic care tips and tricks.
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Module 4: The Unexpected & The Complicated
Learn how to heal perineum tears naturally at home, without stitches, along with other pelvic tissue complications. Release the narrative that your tissues are destroyed, or that you need someone else to repair your body after birth. These are your go-to daily methods for healing that can be done from your bedroom, and will be with you for the rest of your life.
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Module 5: Strengthening and Tending to Your Pelvic Floor
Dissolve the myth that your pelvic issues happened because you didn’t do enough kegels. Instead of trying to bounce back with pelvic floor therapy exercises, learn the true (and simple) path to strengthening and rebuilding your pelvic muscles after birth. You’ll learn techniques I used to heal myself and the women I served like diaphragmatic breathing, closing of the bones, and more. Most importantly, you’ll learn what NOT to do to avoid sabotaging your sacred postpartum window with pelvis complications.
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Module 6: Prolapse, Hemorrhoids, & other Complications
What do you do when your organs begin falling out of your body? Almost HALF of all women who have been pregnant will experience some kind of prolapse. If you have a 50% chance in experiencing prolapse, you should know how to heal it on your own terms, at home. This is the necessary information for staying home, in your sacred postpartum bubble, and honoring your body holistically - no matter what comes up. Learn how to naturally tend to hemorrhoids and other complications without the threat of surgical intervention in your postpartum experience.
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Module 7: Diastasis Recti & Healing Your Abdomen
Learn how pregnancy physiologically changes your abdominal muscles without pathologization, and the simple home practices that will help your body easefully find health & balance again. In this module we discuss the common misconceptions about diastasis recti in the medical and mainstream holistic communities, and what you can actually do about it. You’ll come to understand the importance of addressing your abdominals and pelvic floor as interconnected players in the larger picture of your postpartum wellness.
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Module 8: Healing with Vaginal Massage
This life-changing technique will support you through physiological tissue healing, restoring anatomical alignment, and re-awakening the vitality and energy that flows from your pelvic bowl. You will learn about how to connect with and care for your root internally, with gentle and loving touch. No longer will you feel the need to invite someone else's hands into you for assessment and healing. Knowledge is power, and this module will offer you the knowledge to compassionately explore the inner-world of your pelvic bowl without pathology. You will harness techniques to unblock long-held traumas, psycho-spiritual wounding patterns, and more from your pelvic tissues.
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Module 9: Harnessing the Creativity of Your Pelvic Bowl
Inspired by the work of Tami Lynn Kent, learn the energetic map of your pelvic bowl. This in-depth module will address what medical providers and pelvic floor therapists completely ignore: the immense potential for creativity that originates in your pelvis, and how to harness it with ritual, energy work, and internal healing. Move beyond just healing your pelvic complications - claim your right to energetically & spiritually thriving, by starting with the energy of your root center. Birth is a portal that quite literally blasts open your energy centers, and can leave women feeling vulnerable and unsteady on many layers. You can move through postpartum with confidence and new heights of feminine creativity.
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Module 10: Your Postpartum Timeline
Tired of unhelpful and unnecessary appointments throughout postpartum that don’t actually offer you anything besides a 6-week sign-off for exercise? This module will break down exactly what your postpartum timeline can look like from a holistic, sovereign perspective, for LONG TERM health. We’ll specifically address movement and exercise, and offer a radical perspective on when you should be doing certain movements (it’s not when you think!) and when you should NOT be exercising at all.
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Module 11: Sex & Intimacy in Postpartum
Most women are expected to engage in sexual intimacy at 6 weeks postpartum, and are instructed by doctors that the pain or discomfort they’re feeling is normal, and will simply go away with time. We don’t agree. This module will dispel these cultural misconceptions and reveal the truth about your postpartum body, and why you might be experiencing low (or no) libido, pain during sex, vaginal dryness, and more. You’ll learn how to rebuild a healthy and whole-self relationship to sex, even if you can’t remember the last time you actually wanted or enjoyed it.
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Module 12: Nutritional Support & Herbal Allies
Your pelvic health is directly connected to how you care for yourself, specifically how you choose to nourish yourself. This module will address the way your food choices interact with your pelvic floor and will offer you easy nutritional shifts to promote greater pelvic wellness, heal major complications like prolapses, promote tissue repair, and more. Yes, it is all connected, and you CAN support these physiological processes with food and herbal allies at home!
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Module 13: When to Seek Additional Support
Your post-birth body can be confusing, overwhelming, scary, and wildly different than your pre-birth body, even if it’s been 10+ years. But that doesn’t mean you need to outsource your bodily assessment. This module will teach you how to assess and interpret what’s going on with your pelvic floor, so that you can make an informed decision about whether to seek help. We’ll also discuss what kinds of complications truly require external support, and how to identify them.
You can release the need to call a doctor simply because you “aren’t sure what’s going on down there”, and stand in your deep inner-knowing that everything is okay, or that you know exactly what kind of help you need, without shame or fear.
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Bonus Meditation: Harnessing the Birth Energy
Use this guided meditation track to help you tap into the wildly creative and powerful energy of birth, to propel your postpartum into a time of bliss, and to experience your true energetic potential in newborn motherhood. You can return to this meditation anytime you’re feeling stagnation or fear in your pelvic bowl.
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Bonus Video: V-Steam Setups
This added video will walk you through the simple & straightforward steps of vaginal steaming at home, so that you feel confident doing this daily self-care ritual throughout postpartum and beyond, even if you don’t have a fancy steam setup!