The Menstruality Podcast - 188. The Womb as a Portal to Personal, Collective and Ancestral Trauma Healing (Dr Jeevan Singh)

Episode Date: March 6, 2025

Befriending our menstrual cycles and wombs and coming home to the root of our body, and to our pelvic bowls often means negotiating any trauma that we’ve experienced in that part of our bodies, or other traumas that we hold in this part of our bodies. As our guest today, the brilliant Dr Jeevan Singh shares, the pelvic bowl is an organ of relationship that has the capacity to guide our personal and collective. Jeevan’s locates itself at the intersections of mindfulness-based somatics and mental health, traditional earth-based medicines, personal and collective liberation and the pelvic bowl. She is a lifelong student of traditional East Asian medicine, has a masters in integrative mental health and an advanced training in the Hakomi method of mindfulness-based somatic psychotherapy. She founded Womb School and the Somatic Womb Path together with Kris Gonzalez (who was a guest on our podcast on episode 175) and Marissa Coreia. In times that can feel very destabilising, Jeevan brings a deeply grounding presence, and I hope this conversation soothes you as much as it did me. We explore:How Jeevan navigated a series of three traumatic experiences after her Saturn return in her late 20s, and how the the trauma healing that followed catapulted her into her body. The womb as a guide out of the rugged individualism we see in our world. It is an organ of relationship - the first relationship we all ever experienced was in the womb of the mother, the person who birthed us. The earth as an attachment figure, and how we can work with trees and other bodies in nature as a partner in nervous system regulation and how we can co-regulate with the ocean as we co-regulated with the salty waters of the womb in utero. ---Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love---The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [e-mail]---Social media:Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.schoolSophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardyJeevan Singh: @dr.jeevansingh - https://www.instagram.com/dr.jeevansinghWomb School: @womb.school - https://www.instagram.com/womb.school

Welcome to the Menstruality Podcast, where we share inspiring conversations about the power of menstrual cycle awareness and conscious menopause. This podcast is brought to you by Red School, where we're training the menstruality leaders of the future. I'm your host, Sophie Jane Hardy, and I'll be joined often by Red School's founders, Alexandra and Sharni, as well as an inspiring group of pioneers, activists, changemakers and creatives to explore how you can unashamedly claim the power of the menstrual cycle to activate your unique form of leadership for yourself, your community and the world. Hey there, welcome back to the Menstruality Podcast. So befriending our menstrual cycles and our wombs and this homecoming journey to the root of our bodies, to our pelvic bowls, for many of us often means negotiating any trauma that we've experienced in this part of our body

or other traumas we've experienced that we're holding in this part of our bodies. As our guest today, the brilliant Dr. Jeevan Singh shares, the womb is an organ of relationship that has the capacity to guide our personal trauma healing as well as our collective and ancestral trauma healing. Jeevan's work locates itself at the intersections of mindfulness-based somatics and mental health, traditional earth-based medicines, personal and collective liberation and the pelvic bowl. She is a lifelong student of traditional East Asian medicine. She has a master's in integrative mental health and an advanced training in the Hakomi method of mindfulness based somatic psychotherapy. She founded Womb School

and the Somatic Womb Path together with Chris Gonzalez, who was a guest on the podcast on episode 175, and it's a beautiful one if you haven't heard it yet, as well as Marissa Correa. We explore how Jeevan personally navigated a series of three traumatic experiences. The womb as a guide out of the rugged individualism we see so often in our world today, the earth as an attachment figure, and how we can co-regulate with the ocean just as we co-regulated inside the salty waters of the womb with our mothers in utero and so so much more. As I edited this conversation I felt myself relaxing more and more as I listened to Jeevan's very grounding, calming, soothing voice. So this is an especially good episode if, like me, you're finding these times very destabilizing and your nervous system feels a bit jangled and you could do with some soothing today. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Let's get started with The Womb as a Portal to Personal,

Collective and Ancestral Trauma Healing with Dr Jeevan Singh. So Jeevan, I've been really excited for this conversation, particularly in the context of what's happening in our world at the moment. And I've been following your work for a while. I love the way you write and speak and live. And I'm very excited to get to have this time with you. Yeah, welcome. Thank you for being here. Thank you, Sophie. We always start with checking in around how we are cyclically. I'm just curious to hear what cycles are you tracking in your life and how are they impacting and influencing you today? I love this question. It's a question that I sit with often. And I'm really feeling the seasonal cycle here in Portland, Oregon, where I live.

Right? Like we've been in the sleepiness of winter, of moving slowly, of hibernation, ideally. And there's like this up energy coming in. And I'm starting to see flowers like burst through the earth and I can feel it like my in my body like a little bit more um of this spring energy that feels welcome yeah yeah and I'm moving through so many, so many cycles in my, in my menstrual cycle. I'm also coming into my inner spring ovulation, like pre-ovulation time. So feeling it synced up. That's interesting. Me too. So I think it's around day 11. I often lose track of my days

at this point because the upward rising energy takes me with it and I and I move out into the world and um I also just had a dental procedure so if I sound a bit it's because my mouth still I'm still getting my feeling back in my mouth I thought it was so interesting because you know like the the mouth the vagina connection right yeah I was feeling it when I was in the dentist chair. I often try and use it as a time to cleanse, energetically cleanse. I'm like, well, I'm lying here, so I might as well. Let's see, let's see what, what cleansing I could do. And I could feel tension in my, like around my bum and around my pelvic bowl. And I was practicing just exhale and release, like exhale and release. It was was I could

really tangibly feel the connection between like sitting there with my mouth wide open and everything down below was like crunching up and I was like ah let's let's see if we can relax honey yeah yeah and I know I don't we don't have to go too far down this road but it's just so interesting because Chinese medicine the teeth correlate with the kidney and the kidney rules the pelvic bowl oh the element of water and the emotion of fear oh if anyone's listening to this and gets you know some fear around dental work and can feel that tensing in their pelvic bowl that's like all connected through kidney energy and east asian medicine so you can work in ways to support the kidney energy and then that helps yeah exactly

i love this when i chatted to your yeah there's three of you that teach at womb school yes so your colleague at womb school chris gonzalez i was it blew my mind to feel like wow there's so much potential here and all the interconnections you know it's like we know that we're not separate as humans we know that we're woven together and Chinese medicine really illuminates that and highlights that I feel yeah 100% and I feel like that's such I just going to dive into this because you named it like the medicine for these times, right, is really remembering and coming back into this sense of interbeing. Not even that we're returning to connection, but that we're remembering that we are innately connected like we can't not be connected yes yeah I love that term remembering because it makes me it makes my body relax like oh this is something I can rest back into this isn't something else that I need to add to my to-do list and effort and fight for it's here and I can

yeah even even receive it that's kind of my word for the year that I'm working with receive like I receive a remembering of what I am who I am I love that and the somatic womb path with Chris and Marissa we talk about leaning back into our kidneys like leaning back into wisdom and so it's all kind of right like we're we're right here in the web of all of it together I love that lean back into your kidneys well I can feel that we're going to go into a flow together Jeeva and I can hear it but I I saw this quote on your website because I always love to start the conversation by exploring like your

what calls you what what drives you what um compels you to do the work that you're doing and there was this quote on your website from the wonderful Clarissa Pinkola Estes. And I wanted to bring it in at the beginning. It's quite luminous. The body is a multilingual being. It speaks through its colour and its temperature, the flush of recognition, the glow of love, the ash of pain, the heat of arousal, the coldness of non-conviction. It speaks through the leaping of the heart, the falling of the spirits, the pit at the center and rising hope. And it sparked so much for me and it made me want to ask you, you know, have you always been very focused on the body as the place to be and explore? And when did that begin? Yeah, I love that quote so much too. And actually quite the opposite.

I was very far from my body for, gosh, at least a few decades. I mean, even as a kid, I remember being like really daydreamy, like very full imagination, could really land in the world of the imaginal and spend a lot of time there. But when it came to my own body, like I was really sick as a kid. I had asthma and grew up in a household that didn't feel safe. And so, you know, and this is something I tell my clients, that the ways that our bodies adapt to survive, and surviving doesn't just mean like to stay alive, but it also means to belong, because belonging is part of our survival. The ways that we adapt to survive is such a wisdom of our body. And I feel like even in psychology, even in Chinese medicine, in all kinds of healing realms, it can feel pathologizing sometimes right like fight flight freeze or

dissociation and um but actually it's such um such wisdom that our body helped us survive when we needed to so the way my body helped me survive was by taking me out of it. Yeah. For a long time. Yeah. And living life that way was pretty, ended up becoming pretty painful, like in my early twenties, you know, to make decisions from a disembodied place as a young woman.

Yeah. I can relate I can imagine a lot of women and folks listening like yeah especially because in so many of our cultures we've lost the rites of passage of entering into you know going through puberty and then becoming an adult and um I felt too that I was yeah I was just kind of flying around just bouncing from thing to thing following yeah a desire for belonging that I hadn't felt and yeah I really relate. Totally and and culturally like my dad was an immigrant from India and my mom is Puerto Rican and Ecuadorian, but grew up in New York City. And she actually had this beautiful, I don't know where she, she is like, I don't know. My mom is just kind of a magical person, but she tried to kind of bring in some rite of passage.

She gave me like a bell when I first started bleeding and a card. And it was really sweet. But it's like, even that couldn't kind of hold back all of the cultural stuff. And not just American culture, like in Indian culture, too. There's a lot of shame around menstruation and dirtiness, like you can't swim in holy waters when you're bleeding. And so, so yeah, all of that around the body being reflected that my body is dangerous, right? Like it's sex, sex is dangerous and queerness is dangerous and just like a lot of danger signals and so it was really like gosh not until I was 27 that I started working with my first somatic therapist and it's kind of hilarious because as a queer woman of color in my mid-20s, I was like, no, got to have a woman therapist. And then I was like, OK, at least a person of color. No, it was a white male. And it changed my life working with him I mean he really embodied like he could really embody the full spectrum of

um I don't know energy and and a lot of our first sessions were just him like swaddling me in blankets and me just crying like just like my baby self in the room crying and him rocking me and that was it that would be 60 minutes would pass and then we're done and come back and do it again the next week yeah my therapist has done that not not so much swaddling with me, but she's shown me how much I fly away. So it's like, Sophie, come in and let's put the weighted blanket on your knees. Like, let's have you see if you can feel the safety of being here. Yeah. Wow. That's so beautiful. And then what happened next? So you were, you received those sessions. Yeah. So at that same time that I was starting somatic therapy, which by the way, I had seen a few talk therapists in my early twenties and none of that, it was like, I was really good at talking

my way through therapy and not really doing any of this work underneath. So at that same time, I started doing yoga every day at the recommendation of one of my Indian uncles. And he was like, you should chant Aum and do yoga every day. And I was like, okay, I guess I'll do it. I'd been kind of like resisting it. And that was hugely transformative too. Just so yeah, these two ways that I was returning to my body for the first time really in my life.

Yeah. And then I had a couple. Yeah, I don't know how much to share share I guess I should let folks know these are a few traumatic events is that okay to share yeah actually because I feel we're all collectively going through something fairly traumatic and if we're going to speak about the womb as portal like I I was imagining I might share some of mine too. Yeah. As we talk about like what, you know, coming home to the pelvic bowl just naturally means encountering

whatever traumatic experiences we've had, doesn't it? Yeah, I mean, if you're willing to share, it would be really generous and it would be beautiful. Okay, thank you. And yeah, there are guns involved. And so whoever's listening, just to know that. But gosh, yeah, my Saturn returned. So like that 28, 29 window. One night I was out with friends walking back to the car and a man came up and held us up at gunpoint. And it was such a strangely intimate experience, Sophie, to have someone like with a gun waving at your body. And I mean, we were okay.

Like they left, they took our money and left. But it was like a moment. I honestly left that moment just like wanting to know his name like who is he what happened like like he yeah like something else could have happened and it didn't um so I had this wish of like gosh I just kind of wish I knew him. That's such an intimate experience we just shared. And it was scary, but kind of, and got through it. But then a year and a half later, I'm riding my bike through Portland and suddenly I get jumped,

like out of the shadows jumps for men. And they take me down and they have guns and take my bag. And I'm all by myself. It's the middle of the night or it wasn't even that late, maybe 11 p.m. And one of them sits with me. And it's like, oh, here it is. Like I wanted like, who are you?

And I just asked, asked like what's your name why are you doing this and he's like we needed the money and we sat there together and he with his gun and me there with nothing on me and finally he let me go. And he looked really young, like 18 or something. But I would say that those experience brought me closer to my body and my pelvic bowl and life. And I had one more instance after that. It was like a triple incident where I was in a rollover accident, and we'd hit a baby deer, and the mama had been in the road. And so it's wild because the morning that I went into contractions with Nayeli,

a mama and baby deer walked through our garden. And so just coming back to like, it's all feels connected, right? Like a lifelong fear of men and then these men showing up in this dangerous way and the pelvic bowl, the death birth um so I got kind of catapulted into my body to be honest like that could take you out of your body but it drove me closer like it it because I needed um to heal from those yeah no true it really could have pinged you out of your body further

and it didn't okay let me know if I'm getting this right because I'm just feeling my way into this but I just find it's so fascinating to track how life beckons us towards what we're here to be and do and the fact that those experiences which could have led you to dissociate further called you called you further in and the fact that you're even making the connection between being held up at gunpoint and your pelvic bowl yeah yeah maybe I'm still a little bit high from the dentist dentist medication but the way you communicate the presence that you're holding with me I'm being called here and I'm feeling safe I'm curious if our listeners are feeling the same thing it's like the tone of your voice and the pacing with what you're sharing I'm getting a feeling for your gift

you're saying that and I did dissociate initially like those are big traumas you know in the beginning it was a process like there's definitely a few months of being like is this reality real kind of feeling um but I guess the whole point of that that trajectory is like coming close to death and three times in such a short time yeah um then left me in a place of like okay I thought that I would just like be a poet and do like an MFA degree. And I don't know, maybe I'll teach college or something one day. And I had this whole kind of artistic pursuit, but those experiences left me with like, holy shit, life is so finite. We never know. Like death is right here. Like it's walking with us all the time like the hand of death is holding our hands wherever we go and at any moment it can guide us to the other

side and instead of living in fear around that like how do I really live this life in a way that feels impactful like I came here for some reason we we all do. And what, like, why the heck am I here? Like, what do I, what can I bring into this world? And, and I knew for me, like the, the answers that were coming through were to help alleviate suffering. And because I had gone through those experiences, I had received support from healing practitioners. And I had said, if I ever had another life, I would be a natural medicine doctor. And I was like, oh, here's my next life. Like some of me died at 29 in those experiences.

Here's the next life here. And so so why not so I got my doctorate in Chinese medicine wow yeah and while I got my doctorate this is this is relevant um they started a mental health program that was somatic based on hakomi therapy yeah beautiful it's beautiful so that's been a big part of my life and work the last 10 years has been studying and bringing in hakomi therapy into my work with clients and um could you describe what hakomi is for those who don't know yeah so hakomi is a mindfulness-based psychotherapeutic modality that basically invites a person into their body through sustained mindfulness it's, we call it like immersive mindfulness. So you're not just like dipping your toe and we're like really getting super mindful. And what starts

to happen is it's actually so magical. Like as a kid, I had this whole realm of my imagination, but it turns out when we stay with the body and we like really slow down and go into the body it opens portals into a whole world of metaphor and meaning and so the quote like going back to the quote that you shared I feel like that's such a hokomi quote like oh it's like yes the body is a multilingual being you know we talk about the world of a person there's a whole world inside of us and when we can slow down and and really start to be with it things start to unfold and um yeah there's possibility so beautiful hearing you speak of it and i'm i'm thinking of the womb as as a portal now and as as a gateway as an invitation as a possibility, as a sanctuary, or as a way, the womb as a way to be here in this world that we're living in, where we look out and the suffering is extreme. And you shared something

on Instagram, actually, that really spoke to me. To connect to the menstrual cycle is to connect to the pelvic bowl, the womb and the ovaries. And you shared in this post, oftentimes the parts of our bodies that we blame or shame are the parts that are longing for the most tenderness. Oftentimes the parts of our bodies that we avoid are actually the very portals back to our wholeness. The pelvic bowl is one of those places in the body that has been collectively culturally religiously and familially shamed blamed ignored rejected and dismissed and and then you say and yet it's also the root you know it's where we first came from yeah i'm glad we talked about the hakomi because somatic work really draws from this style of mindfulness and brings in the

cyclical wisdom of east asian medicine and our innate connection to the seasons that when we bring that all into the pelvic bowl it's something that we like to call somatic womb work. And so the process of going towards our bodies, you know, it's such not everybody that might not be the starting place for everyone. And I want to say that with just so much generosity of like, a starting place for somebody for a client of mine who might be beginning to tune into their cycles, who might be beginning to tune into their pelvic bowl or womb space. We might start by observing the cycles in nature first. I have this tree outside of my window at my office, and it's really lovely because we get to see it through each of

the seasons and I've been like really geeking out on eco-psychology lately which draws a lot from like indigenous medicines and indigenous psychologies but there's something in there that talks about relationship to place and relationship to land. And I really believe like in this Chinese medicine, and I think so many traditional systems of medicine say this, that our bodies are the microcosm to the macrocosm. So if we can be with the macrocosm, the bigness of the land around us building the relationship to the seasons that is like a way to start coming into our own microcosm inner terrain the earth of our bodies so that might be a starting place that i offer somebody and that we don't have to do it alone. Like another thing that we say a lot in the somatic womb path is that the womb is an organ of relationship.

Our first relationship we ever had was in the womb. And for a long time, like nine months, our gestating parent, the person whose bodies we were in, and mother, that was the first relationship and so relational healing like we're not meant to do this work alone

i think that's part of the wounding and myth of these times is this rugged individualism right i can do this myself it's all me it's all about me yeah and we just can't like we just we want to right we're not meant to we're relational beings and really and these bodies are relational and wombs are relational and so to me like somatic womb work womb medicine pelvic bowl healing is really relational healing and so with that like finding spaces and people that can hold that with you. I'm going to pause the conversation with Jeevan for a moment to share an invitation. If you'd like to explore your menstrual cycle as a gateway to healing and to homecoming to your body, to your pelvic bowl, to your womb, Alexandra and Sharni, the co-founders of Red School, would love to invite you into the heart school, into the heart of the Red School community. And a great place to start

is with their Cycle Power course, where you're guided to develop your own cycle-aware self-care practice. It's their most comprehensive menstrual cycle awareness course ever. They've really, inside it, they've shared such a wealth of experience from their decades with this work. And it's a beautifully intimate journey into the inner seasons of your cycle. So you can explore the course at redschool.net forward slash psychopower. And here's a story from Shalise about her experience of the course. And then we'll get back to the conversation with Jeevan. Hi, I'm Shalise. Over the last six weeks, I have had the most transformative experience of my life. I've been able to connect and learn about my body and menstrual cycle in ways that I

literally never even thought possible and that's thanks to an online course that I just completed called Psycho Power with Red School. A little about me, I was diagnosed with PCOS at 19 and for most of my life have struggled with either extremely irregular periods, I'm talking maybe two to four periods a year max, or completely missing periods. There have been years where I've had no period at all, along with a long list of other symptoms, and that has all left me for so long feeling so confused and frustrated and also completely disconnected from my body. I'm 33 now, I've been living in France for the last seven years and throughout the last seven years of living in France and being married

I've also been battling infertility and trying really hard to get pregnant but having no luck up until this point It's just been a long journey of confusion and frustration But this course that I just did it feels like it's finally broken me into a space and a moment in my life where I'm finally starting to understand my body, finally feel like I can stop being at odds with my body and start to work with it in order to heal. You know, talking of treats, I don't know if you've come across Eve Ensler who's now known as V she wrote a book in the body of the world have you read it no but but I know of her yeah and it's about her cancer journey because she had cancer in her vagina that actually formed exactly the same kind of injury that comes up for the women that

she works with through through V-Day and the City of Joy in Congo who are survivors of sexual violence that injury sort of formed in her body as cancer it's the most incredible story you know she had sat and listened to the stories of these women for years and years and then here it was in her body and she speaks about how you know she had many many surgeries and she had a tree outside her window and it was that tree that she talks about how that tree healed her watching it move through the seasons like you said with the tree outside your office it and it wove her into the world you know she speaks about this journey from from the rugged individualism that she was raised in back into being part of the body of the world in the body of the world and that's what cancer did for her is incredible book one day I'm going to get brave enough to invite her to the podcast, but I'm still. Yes, now is the time.

I think it's perfect timing to invite her. Thank you. Oh, I have like tears in my eyes. That's so powerful. It makes me think of exactly what you described, how the way in can be through nature, but also how we need each other. And she describes how she has her, you know, her friends, her wonderful community of friends all around her.

And it, yeah, it's what, it's what helped her to be here yeah like literally survive keep keep going yeah wow what would you say to someone who has experienced trauma I mean whether it was trauma located in that area of the body or not, my sense in my own body is that we hold trauma there in the pelvic bowl. What would you say to someone who wants to begin exploring, healing, encountering? Yeah, such a great question. And I agree. I do also think that the pelvic bowl is such a convenient place to store trauma, right? It's like a place that's been, it's kind of like the collective closet of the body, right? And so that can feel scary to open the door of like what's inside. But also like I'm thinking of Narnia,

like the Chronicles of Narnia closet can also be, can be a portal into a whole world that we've never been in before. And so in terms of starting place, I'm just gonna lay out some very pragmatic things that I do with clients because, and, and, you know, this is kind of the cool piece with Marissa and Chris and I, I'm bringing them in, right? Cause I'm not here alone. Like they're here with me and we do this work together through the somatic womb path. But trauma is a big, trauma can't not be touched

when we go into the body, right? It lives, that's where it happens. And that's where it gets to be processed. And so that's really what led me to learning a lot more about som traumatic trauma healing was because initially like I was doing womb massage I had studied with Rosita Arvico I was doing like my abdominal massage and kept having these big um like cathartic releases clients kept having them on the table I was like what is happening like I'm just doing

this massage and there's like suddenly all this stuff coming up and memories and I just did not feel equipped and so that's what made me pursue a mental health degree as well as trauma training like training in trauma resolution work and and so starting really small is important and also like not being overly precious right like there's a middle road where we can go right up to kind of like where the edges are and see if we can hang out there like where's that point that feels just a little bit like I get a little bit of discomfort. And so some things I love to do with clients are womb castor oil packs. I've had clients share that that's a really great way to just start to bring some awareness back into the pelvic bowl. And I can speak from

personal experience. I had an emergency C-section with Nayeli, was not expecting that. And so after the birth trauma, it took me like a year and I'm somebody that specializes, right? Like I had had years of doing facilitating womb work and I know all this stuff and right it's it took me a year to start to feel my womb again I mean at first I could only feel my head right I mean it took a year to just breathe into my body and be like this is safe to be here so I want to highlight that, like slow, like real true transformation is a slow process. Yeah.

And so things that bring in external stimuli, like the weight and warmth of a castor oil pack, your own hands somewhere on your body that feel maybe right at the edge of, right? Like if someone listening to this notices that they start to be cut off at a certain place of their body, right? Like, oh, I can feel until my ribs. Maybe just holding your ribs and just staying right there, like right at the edges of where the feeling is. And then, yeah, again, like working with somebody and with nature.

Like I am a firm believer. I had the experience after one of those traumatic events where I got to camp for a month on the earth. And I think that was like better than any therapy I've ever done in my life. And I'm a practitioner. Like, I just think that we also need like nature as co-healer. Yeah. And so that's something I'll often offer to clients if they have access even if they're in the city to like a tree on the sidewalk right or a local park of starting to build relationship with bodies of nature yes yeah you it feels like you're activating my multilingual being because

with everything you're saying I'm like remember all these memories are coming up really beautiful ones actually I think you can fall in love with a tree well any aspect of nature I'm currently in a deep love affair with a river but I also met this tree I was really blessed we actually Alexandra and Charlie from Red School were teaching at this festival the heart of the rose in a beautiful estate that's full of these ancient trees, like huge trees. And there's this cedar tree. This cedar tree was so gigantic. And I formed a relationship with it. And I honestly, in the dentist chair today, I called on that tree. Yeah, it was a real resource to call on when I was feeling afraid

in the dentist chair when my kidneys and pelvic ball were doing their thing and and the fear was there and and I felt held by that tree so just the just the memory of a of a natural well back to relationship the memory of a relationship with something in nature is so so nourishing so holding that's so powerful and beautiful I'm feeling my own like trees coming in as you share that and just like the word co-regulation right it's part of what gets wounded with trauma is is our nervous system, which I also consider like the spirit. Right. That there's like a lot of traditional cultures consider that when we get impacted by trauma, parts of our spirit break off. Right. And go to go to seek safety elsewhere. And so part of trauma resolution work is calling back these parts of ourselves that have kind of gone missing in the woods. And co-regulation is

such a piece, such a big part of that. And that co-regulation can happen with people and it can also happen with bodies of nature. I've been looking into this research. It's really interesting. It was actually in the UK. Gosh, I want to say like third, it was a large study. It was like 30,000 people, I think, tracked like how they felt in different spaces. And of course, the findings found that people felt happier. It was like they're tracking their happiness levels and they felt happier in natural spaces versus like human made spaces. Okay, that makes sense. But then they found like, I think something like four times more happiness when being around large bodies of water particularly coastal waters so like the ocean

and blue it's like a whole emerging thing of like called they call it blue mind which we all know already right it's already here it's like I love when the word when like the research is just kind of echoing what we might already intuitively know and what our ancestors knew but I'm like yeah the ocean the womb right the waters like so familiar we swam in those we didn't breathe through lungs when we were in utero and so to see the the blue to feel right the the that body of water with us it's like something very primordial about that and we can co-regulate with the ocean as a child would its mother. We can co-regulate with the ocean as a child would its mother.

Whoa. Yes, we can. Of course we can. That's making me, taking me towards how we can work with the womb and the pelvic bowl to be part of a collective healing process I don't even know what question to ask here I think I feel it what would you say about that I think it's already like I can feel your feel the question and there's answers bubbling in I mean I feel like firstly just recognizing that our wombs contain

healing potential in all directions. For ourselves, it's also like literally where we store some of our genetic stuff in our ovaries, so like ancest ancestrally and if you're a person that births to your body like your descendants too right so in terms of like lineage is holding the spectrum of like past present future and so one practice i love to do when i'm working with clients is to call in the support of wise and loving ancestors right like letting this medicine be their medicine even in session like naming like you're the first person in your lineage to ever do that we know of right recent lineage to ever do this kind of connecting and that's so profound and we get to um just like i feel like in buddhism right like we get to um receive like the the yumminess of that and what feels good and healing about it but we also get to let it ripple outward right we get to offer this back outward to the collective and i think there's really tangible ways that can happen

too right this is kind of like the spiritual calling in and spiritual rippling out but actually like when a person becomes more embodied when a person is able to anchor into the felt sense of safety of their own body of their own womb space when the womb space and pelvic bowl becomes, yeah, like a wild ecosystem, that's a sanctuary space. We move in the world differently. We voice our needs and we voice what like justice differently right and i do think that that this is a path towards collective liberation for all people we all came from a womb we all came from the womb of the earth so much of the violence i see right now is so synonymous with the violence towards the earth. And so in reclaiming, right, the seed of our innate power is really reclaiming that for all of us, like every single being. Yeah, and we can never really know how it's rippling out

into our families and friendships and communities, work, relationships. Like when we're, yeah, I guess to share personally, my own experience of being connected to my cycle over the last 13 years probably, is that I feel that I belong in the world in a way that that 20 year old or like even that 28 year old that we were talking about earlier our Saturn return selves um she didn't know that she belonged on earth and in this world

and yeah the more I've gone through the journey of the seasons inside every month the more I the more connected I am to the seasons outside and the more I know myself the more I know what I need the more I can the more I know what I want to say no to the more I know what I want to say yes to and then the more coherently I can allow sort of power and agency to move through me and then then we can be a force in the world you know pointing towards whatever it is that we love and cherish and care for yes and if we think of the pelvic bowl and the pelvic floor as the root. If you cut a plant off at its roots, what happens above? Yeah. But if you fortify those roots and you nourish them,

what happens above? And as we know, like trees are in constant, like in communication, right? so it's not just our own roots like we are in network with everyone else's and while we can't maybe always see it with our physical eyes does not mean it's not there yeah yeah all those all those fungal conversations that are happening underneath the old growth forest well everywhere really I saw I used to work for a reforestation charity but I hadn't ever read the book by Suzanne Simard Finding the Mother Tree it was so incredible to to learn about yeah the whole conversation that's happening under the soil yeah and

microscopically we can't see it with our eyes and I kept thinking this is what happens when we gather yeah and like you said we're fortifying our roots the effect of our coming home to ourselves is being communicated out in the world whether we feel it or whether we see it or not yes yes right like this is ecological because we are ecological we are nature yes we are we forget yes my three-year-old was like what we're right because we're primates you know they're like we're monkeys I'm like, we're monkeys. I'm like, yeah, we're mammals. We belong to the family of primates. I'm like, cool. And children are such teachers, right, of our wildness. Like, as you shared, having a four-year-old, I feel like one of the, I just can, like, witness. I'm like, oh,

this is how, like, the kind of, like, I don't know, shaping happens to become more tame. But I so appreciate that about young children is just like, totally, yeah, in their animal bodies. Yeah, I'm in such a dance around. I know he needs boundaries. I know he needs boundaries, but watching his wildness and not wanting to shut it down in any way. It's yeah, it's so fascinating. Yeah. And seeing the like mama animals wild snarl at their babies. It's like, okay, right. him up by the scruff of his neck exactly yeah wow what a beautiful place to land in our conversation I feel like we can all take a collective those of us who have wombs that are listening we can all take a collective like exhale together and recognize that our remembering of ourselves and our belonging is part of our activism, is part of how we are working to create new ways of being together. Yeah, for us as humans,

for the whole of the more than human community, for this beautiful planet. Yeah, that's relaxing. I need relaxing thoughts at this time same and not read the news too much right now right like the our own boundaries around like okay how often to do that but yeah I guess one last thing I'll share is just it becomes really different like part of the psycho-psychology exploration I've been in talks about the, the earth as an attachment figure and a part of modern humanities, the plight, right. Of like climate catastrophe and what's happening politically and this,

yeah, unhealthy, like, extreme version of masculinity. It's like the thought's all connected to this attachment, deep attachment wound with the earth as our parent, as our mother. And I think for me, these last few years of, like, really really feeling of like, oh, there's so much love. Like, yeah, like feeling her love is such a different experience than being with the earth as a material thing that you can use. Right. And when we start to relate to our bodies and our pelvic bowls and our wombs, it's not something that's utilitarian. It's not something that's mechanical, right? I feel like it's treated medically as like this mechanical thing. When we can come back into the aliveness and yeah and beauty and medicine of our womb spaces that feels powerful collectively right now yeah yes very much so I'm getting quite high

hearing you speak. Way to think it. Yeah, yeah, okay. Come on, I get my Labrador and just go and snuggle with him on the sofa in a minute. If our listeners are loving hearing what you're saying, how can they connect with you more

and your work? Yeah, so if anyone listening is a healing practitioner of any kind, each year, Chris Gonzalez and Marissa Correa and I lead a nine month long certification program for those who are interested in really diving into everything we talked about today and learning how to facilitate somatic womb work with their clients. It's such an amazing container with people from all over the world. So that's a really lovely way to come in and connect. I also offer one-on-one somatic womb work sessions which are full right now but you can reach out and i could also refer out to people who have graduated from our program who are doing somatic womb work we're like sending those ripples into the world um and yeah you can find me on instagram at dr.jeevansingh and then womb school at womb.school on Instagram yeah is it online the somatic womb path yeah yep it's all online so we've had folks from all over yeah um mainly like the U.S., Canada, across Central and South America,

Europe, Australia, New Zealand yeah it's really beautiful and we're starting I don't know if this will come out before we start but we'll be our enrollments open now until the end of March 2025. Great. Yeah, I think it will. I think it will. Yay. Yeah. Year of the yin wood snake. So snake year, juicy year. Thank you so much, Sophie. Thank you. It's been absolutely delightful. Thank you. I feel also strengthened, deepened, strengthened. It's been gorgeous. I you I feel also strengthened deepened strengthened it's been gorgeous I hope you have a beautiful rest of your day thank you so much thank you so much lots of love bye thank you so much for being with me and Jeevan today if you enjoyed this conversation if you

benefited from it we would love it if you could share it with a friend who you sense would also enjoy it and we would also and I would also greatly appreciate it if you could go over to apple podcasts and add a rating and a review it's one of the best ways to help more people find these conversations about the power of the menstrual cycle and menopause. I loved reading a new one that just came in from Kay and they say this podcast is my absolute favorite thing to listen to. I laugh along with Sophie, Jane, Sharni and Alexandra as if they were old friends. Their conversations are so moving and inspiring and I'm deeply grateful for the work Red School is doing. I'm also hanging off the words of every single guest too. Every episode hits home and I couldn't love this anymore. A

billion stars and a billion rays of love and gratitude to Sophie and co. Thank you so much, Kay. It's really personally meaningful for me to read these and as I mentioned, it's also a great way to spread the reach of this work. So if you could take a minute to head over to Apple Podcasts to rate and review us, that would be so, so grateful. OK, we'll be with you again next week. And until then, keep living life according to your own brilliant rhythm.