Pelvic Floor Therapy Explained: Chronic Pelvic Pain, Pregnancy & Postpartum Healing with Marlene Handler | The Healing Core Ep. 2

Is pelvic floor therapy only for pregnancy and postpartum? Or is it the missing piece for chronic pelvic pain, intimacy issues, and whole-body healing?

In this episode of The Healing Core, Dr. Maria is joined by pelvic floor occupational therapist Marlene Handler, founder of The Lifted Lotus in Brooklyn, to break down a truly holistic approach to pelvic health.

Together, they explore how chronic pelvic pain, nervous system dysregulation, stress, and lifestyle factors all connect, and why traditional, symptom-focused care often falls short.

Marlene shares her unique occupational therapy perspective, focusing on therapeutic listening, nervous system regulation, habit stacking, and individualized care to help patients finally feel safe and supported in their bodies again.

Learn more about Marlene and her practice: https://www.lifted-lotus.com/

If you’ve struggled with:

•  Chronic pelvic pain or unresolved diagnoses 
•  Painful sex or intimacy challenges 
•  Pregnancy or postpartum recovery 
•  Fear around movement or exercise after injury 
•  Feeling dismissed or unheard in the healthcare system 

This episode will give you a new lens on healing—and practical tools you can actually use.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

•  Why pelvic floor therapy is about more than just pregnancy and postpartum 
•  The connection between chronic pain and the nervous system 
•  How stress, trauma, and daily habits impact pelvic health 
•  Why “just doing exercises” isn’t enough for lasting healing 
•  How habit stacking and small daily practices can regulate your body 
•  The role of therapeutic listening in healing complex conditions 

Healing isn’t about doing more—it’s about understanding your body and supporting it as a whole.

Listen now and start reconnecting with your body.
https://thehealingcore.buzzsprout.com

The Healing Core is a women’s health podcast focused on pelvic floor therapy, hormone balance, chronic pain, gut health, and nervous system regulation. Hosted by Dr. Maria Muto Rodriguez, each episode blends holistic healing and physical therapy to help you heal from the inside out.

Learn more and connect at: https://holisticphysiodoc.com/

Follow the show at the link, so you never miss an episode: https://thehealingcore.buzzsprout.com

Music provided by https://mibemusic.com/

Transcript

Healing Core Welcome

Maria 0:02

This is the Healing Core. I'm Dr. Maria, a woman's health physical therapist, mom, and someone who's lived through chronic pain. Here we connect the dots between your body, nervous system, and what real healing actually feels like. Each week we dive into honest conversations around woman's health, chronic pain, pregnancy, and healing through the lens of the body, mind, and nervous system. So you can finally start feeling like yourself again. Heal from the inside out. Start at the core. On today's episode, we have occupational therapist Marlene Handler, who is in the pelvic therapy space. We're going to be talking about her clinic located in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York, called the Lifted Lotus. Here you can find pelvic therapy, Pilates, massage, all go-to things for Volva owners who are dealing with pregnancy pains, postpartum recovery, and chronic pelvic pain. She is a true occupational therapist who believes in holistic medicine. And I'm very excited for you guys to hear about her approach so you can feel your most optimal best in whatever phase of life you're in. Let's dive in.

Meet Marlene And Lifted Lotus

Maria 1:12

Well, Marlene, thank you so much for joining me today. I'm really excited about this conversation given that we're both pelvic therapists and you're my first guest speaker. So we're gonna dive into all things pelvic therapy. And just as a friend, colleague, and even essentially a patient of yours, like I want everyone to know about you and your treatment approach and how you go about all of this. So why don't we first start with an introduction of who you are and how Lifted Lotus became to be?

Marlene 1:45

Yeah, well, thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be your first podcast guest. So my name is Marlene Handler. I am the founder and pelvic floor occupational therapist at the Lifted Lotus, which is a private practice in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. And we have uh it's a multi-practitioner practice of pelvic floor occupational therapists. We have three on the team. We also have Pilates and Massage as other service models that we provide under the umbrella of the Lifted Lotus. And I had children in my mid to late 30s and had a lot of pelvic floor dysfunction myself and didn't really feel like there were any answers or support out there. So years in the making, but the lifted lotus was born as an occupational therapist.

Why OT Changes Pelvic Care

Marlene 2:39

How is your quite a bit different than a physical therapist? And I would say that is something I really lean on as a pelvic floor therapist. I, you know, I think of myself as a really like OG holistic health practitioner. I'm really thinking about so many aspects of somebody's life as it pertains to what we're working on, right? So I'm not ever just doing exercises. I'm not just looking at symptom management. I'm looking at how stress affects your daily life and your quality of life and how you're sleeping and how you're eating and how you're navigating intimacy and having hard conversations with people and all the things that kind of make you a whole person. I am sort of prioritizing that in each session. And it's so individually tailored. I don't have a protocol. I don't have a, you know, a six-week plan for people that I just use for everyone. Every session is really detail specific based on what that client is dealing with that day. You know, as an OT, that's just sort of the way that my brain works is like, okay, let's tackle the most acute things, but also let's get you leaving here feeling really good and in your body again.

Maria 3:52

Yeah. It's kind of crazy how not many practitioners treat that way. And I feel like that's how we should treat. That's how we should be taught. And I don't really know that many pelvic therapists who are occupational therapists. I know more physical therapists. And being a physical therapist myself, like I can understand how the way that we treat. And I think that this is also why like I love your approach and I love your practice because we treat very similarly. And I think I'm kind of an outlier when it comes to a traditional PT. Like I've always felt that you can't just treat the physical person, even though that is what I am licensed in and that is what I will primarily do. But it's not out of my scope of practice and it's not harmful to ask those simple questions like, did you sleep last night? When's the last time that you ate? Did you go get some sun? Did you go for a walk? Like all of this confounds together and will present of what you are presenting to me today. So if I don't ask these questions, then I'm actually doing you a disservice and it's kind of not as impactful as it could be. I don't want to say it's a waste of time or a waste of money, but like I hate the whole things of like, let's just slab a band-aid on it and oh, just keep coming, keep coming, which is so common in those mill type practices. Exactly. And it's extremely frustrating. You know, we want to help people. So let's build a practice literally of what we do and how we do it to truly help someone, which I know that you started your pelvic therapy practice at a corporate PT office before.

Marlene 5:37

I did. I came from a the the MIL model, insurance-based model, which I do think has a place and it has a real value for a lot of different diagnoses. But in pelvic health, it doesn't, it doesn't really translate. And, you know, when you're when you're saying like, you know, you're asking about sleep and nutrition and stress and all these things, right? That is taking all the pieces of the puzzle that make a whole person into account in their healing journey, right? If we're not looking at those things, if we're not looking at how they're eating, how they're sleeping, how they're managing stress, how their intimacy and sex life looks, right? We're missing a majority of what makes up a human. It's not just symptoms that makes up somebody's day. It's like all the things that they engage in that they find meaning in. And that's such an occupational therapy hat. That's like all, you know, we we really do look at all of those things, routines. It's like the original biopsychosocial, right? Biological, biological experience, psychological experience, and social experience. And we're really looking at how those three things are always interacting to make somebody's life really feel really happy and joyful and content, or to make somebody feel all of the, you know, stressors and anxieties and everything that I think many people are feeling now in this in this present moment.

Maria 7:08

Yeah, for sure. That's definitely something that we were taught in some beginning course, I think, but it was like never really like reiterated, which is kind of crazy because you're not really going to truly heal unless you address all these aspects of life. And essentially that's the foundation of this podcast where it's like we need to address everything. And it all kind of comes back down to our nervous system. What is our input? How are we co-regulating our system in order to achieve the greater outcome of what we want? And it's all of these things that need to be addressed to kind of reach there. And it's not all just about the physical, it's about the mental too, and coming back down to the breath. You'll hear every single pelvic therapist talk about the breath, but it really is super important because it's going to work physically on those muscles, but also mentally for our nervous system and really help us systemically.

Who Pelvic Therapy Helps

Maria 8:10

So what would you say is more of who you treat at the lifted lotus within the pelvic therapy category?

Marlene 8:18

Well, at the lifted lotus, we're we're working only with vulva owners or folks that identify as women. For me, I would say that, you know, now several years into practice, I'm seeing a lot more clients with really complex cases, really complex pain diagnoses that have gone to, you know, many providers and not had any, not had any lasting relief. They've had relief occasionally and they've they've had acute relief, but not anything that's lasting. And I also see a significant, I would say there's a comorbid diagnosis of eating disorders that's also happening within the client base that I'm seeing. So complex pain and eating disorders as a combined pattern. So that's really interesting. Uh, those are my clients. You know, I would say at the liptid LOTUS in general, um, we're seeing everybody from like pregnant postpartum, postmenopausal. We see our clients' mothers postmenopausal that are that have been dealing with urinary incontinence for 20, 30 years, and then they come in and they don't have urinary leakage anymore. Right. So we're seeing we're really seeing everything across the board, young girls all the way through, I would say, like 80, lots of pregnancy and postpartum clients, people that have significant sexual trauma, that have pain conditions, things like that, even post-surgical considerations like hysterectomy, endometriosis, hernia repair, kind of a little bit of everything.

Maria 9:52

Yeah. No, I mean, that's amazing, right? Like there's so much that falls within the category of pelvic therapy. And I think one of the biggest misconceptions, if you can agree, is that pelvic floor therapy is strictly only for pregnant and post-natal women. And that's just like the furthest from the case. Um, I mean, even men have pelvic floors, but I love to hear more on your approach when it comes to complex pain conditions. Cause I think now we understand that chronic pain is also very much of a mind experience nervous system issue. So I love to kind of see what type of like specific techniques and modalities you like to do within your therapy.

Marlene 10:38

Okay.

Complex Pain Starts With Listening

Marlene 10:39

Um, I mean, you know, baseline when I have somebody coming in with a complex diagnosis like that hasn't really been solved or hasn't been supported properly, just the act of therapeutic listening is so, so valuable, right? I mean, I think that's something that if you're not doing as a pelvic floor therapist, you are really missing the magic because it's so often in healthcare that people are being seen for three to maybe 15 minutes. They're not really been, they don't give them time for questions, they don't give them time to really just help them process what they're what information they're giving them. Um, so I I do think that the most valuable tool that I provide as a pelvic floor OT is that I I use therapeutic listening with every, you know, with every person that comes in my door. And I'm not just looking at the symptom presentation of pain. I'm asking you, you know, what was happening in your life at the time that this started? What was a precursor thing that, you know, that that maybe preceded this onset of pain, right? Is it trauma? Is it something stressful that happened? Was it the death of somebody in your family, right? Like we're looking at, I'm just look listening to a whole story, a whole health history. Sometimes that first session is just like an hour of talking, right? And just really taking in what they're saying and really validating what they're saying, right? Pain is very real in somebody's body. And when somebody's dismissed for so many years, that that can make people feel really gaslit and really crazy and like, you know, have more anxiety around sharing the story. And so that's the first tool, right? First tool, just listening and really validating. And I think it really part of what I do is connect the dots, like start to connect the dots for them, start to give them some like independence around listening to their own bodies. That's a tool that I use a lot is that self is like reflection. What do you notice? How are you sensing this in your body? I'm not the expert on pelvic pain. I just know what we can do to sort of navigate how that shows up in somebody's body and how we can disrupt those signals and how we can work to relieve those symptoms. But somebody that comes in with pain, I'm teaching them how to tune into those sensations for themselves also. So that's another tool that I use. Another intervention is obviously with almost every client, it's become such a staple in my practice, is like nervous system work, right? Just like tuning into yourself, breathing a little deeper, noticing where we're holding tension, creating some systems or or practices around finding how to calm our bodies down. When we're living in this like wild, crazy time where we're like inundated with sensory information and traumatic information and political information and divisive family dynamics, right? There's so many things that are just causing us to be in that fight, flight, freeze, fawn response, right? That activation of the nervous system. And it's become such a essential part of my practice to address that because the way that I explain it is if we're if our body thinks we're being chased by a bear, then you know, pleasure and like feeling hungry and feeling tired and feeling rested and intimacy and all of those things are not prioritized, right? But we do also need some level of nervous system activation to get up in the morning and feel motivated and feel inspired. So it's a very balance, right? So I, you know, those, those are like, I would say, my sort of go-to in every session therapeutic modalities. And then it's a lot of touch therapy and manual work and creating that relationship and conversation that creates more wholeness and comfort in the body and in the tissues of our body. Mm-hmm.

Maria 14:56

Yeah. I mean, I think that your approach is so spot on and it's huge. And when we really break it down, it's really simple, right? Like we're reserving the time to just hear someone out and to support them. And that's really big, especially in this medical community and our healthcare system here in America. We don't often go to practitioners that are within our reach that actually give us enough time to hear us and to actually say, you know what, like you might be connecting to the dots there, or tell me if this is right. Did I hear you say this, this, and this? Well, okay, let's connect it back to the main reason why you're here. And just saying it like that, I think will help reframe and even just release some tension that they might be holding in their body because now they feel safe. And that's so huge because then again, it ties back into the nervous system. And so, do you feel, especially being in New York City and women under so much pressure here in the city for various reasons, that it's more so difficult for us to actually really tap into the parasympathetic nervous system and like really find consistency with some of this work? Because if we feel that that's like the foundation of let's get this right so our tissues can heal and relax, how are we actually really giving real tactical tools for them to leave the clinic, bring it home, stay consistent? So then all of this stuff will actually last after the therapy.

Habit Stacking For Nervous System Calm

Marlene 16:32

Yeah, I think it's incredibly hard to find a nervous system practice or some sort of calming practice every single day. But I think that as an OT, right, that's what I'm looking at. How do we integrate things that are going to be reasonable within your schedule and attainable for you to complete? And so this is like the part of the puzzle for me is asking them, you know, what is the thing that you do every single day without question? You usually brush your teeth, right? No matter what, you usually brush your teeth or you have dinner, right? So let's partner or let's have it stack something like a meditation or a breath practice or five cycles of cat cow while you're also like after you brush your teeth, right? Let's pair it with something you're already doing. I don't want to give you 20 minutes of exercises three times a day. Go do five, 20 minutes of meditation three times a day. Like nobody's gonna do it, right? We want things that are, we want attainable goals. We want things that are that are realistic in the context of these very busy, overwhelming lives that we live lead to like add in as like a little bonus that's gonna give us a little reprieve in our day, right? So I've actually recorded my voice with some breath work, a body scan, some pelvic floor release techniques. And it's just like a three minute, three to six minute audio recording. And I just send it to my clients and I say, if you have a few minutes while you're like right after you brush your teeth, just listen to this before bed. Listen in your headphones, listen with your partner, listen with your children. There is nothing inappropriate. It's just a moment to find the breath in your body. And if you can do that consistently, you're gonna start to feel better. You're gonna start to notice these three minutes is gonna shift everything over time. So it's not like, you know, an hour working out every day. It's like get up and do, you know, one sun salutation. Get up and do five cat cows, just anything that's like tuning into yourself. That's really that's self-care. To me, that's self-care. I love listening to guided meditations with my kids. They love that part of our routine now. You know, don't make it something scary that takes up so much time. Make it something that you're already connected to something you're already doing. If you're doing maybe while you're cooking dinner, put it on while you're cooking dinner. You know, you don't have to have this like perfect circumstance of quiet and nobody's around and there's nothing going on. Just set your phone on, do not disturb, and like give yourself like three to five minutes a day. And it's going to change your life legitimately. Over time, it will change your life.

Maria 19:27

I couldn't agree more. I mean, I think that this is probably one of the biggest changes that I started to do in the end of 25 into 26. So now I found other modalities to incorporate in my day where I'm habit stacking and I'm finding these cues, just like you mentioned. I brush my teeth every day. I put on my socks every day. Whatever that moment is that you do every day, associate that now with this is when I'm gonna go and actually like stretch my peck. This is when I'm gonna go listen to that activation, this is where I'm gonna go do X, Y, Z. It's now becoming a habit on top of a habit that you're doing. And simply even just listening to Mimi, like an activation that has really calming music in the background. Yeah. Mimi, like you don't have the attention to listen to the words. But the point of the activation with the calming music is that you're also listening to the calming music, which is going to help your nervous system just release the tension. And I've also found that too, where I'm like, I don't know what she's saying right now. She's saying something about financial stability. And I don't know if I really, but that sounded really calming and the baby's kicking. And I'm like, this was really good. And then funny enough, the next day I paid all the parking tickets that I needed to pay. And I'm like, was that a coincidence? I don't really know. But it's all these little things that kind of add up. And essentially, as therapists who are movement experts, like a lot of what we're talking about and what we're doing is like not even just focusing on the movement anymore. It's like focusing on that bigger thing that's gonna help you move better. Absolutely. So

Rebuilding Trust In Movement

Maria 21:06

I think my follow-up question is then when someone comes in and they're in this like ridiculous cycle of pain and they're so fear-based for moving. Let's just say, for example, to kind of like break it down simply, if someone is so scared to do a deadlift because this was the episode in the experience that then first caused their pain, which we know it's not just that episode. It could be all the other things now associated with it. How do you try to overcome that and try to literally talk down and allow this person to overcome this fear with this movement?

Marlene 21:43

I would start with a different movement. That's what I would do. I would start with something different to create a new association with movement. And I wouldn't go back to the thing that's causing them that initial pain that might be a trigger for them, but I'm gonna. Incorporate other things to get them moving maybe in similar way. Maybe we're we're sort of working to get them to a deadlift, but we're gonna do other things to activate that posterior chain that are going to maybe have a better association or a better uh relationship to them. And we're gonna continue like stacking, right? Like each time we might try something different that's also targeting that same movement pattern, maybe from a different position, maybe in a different, I don't know, just whatever in a different context. Maybe it turns in for, you know, again, as an OT, I'm looking at how are we doing things functionally. So I'm not like, I don't say like, let's just do deadlifts. I'm like, let's do this move so that you can pick up your children out of their off the floor. Oh, so you can pick up your heavy laundry basket, so you can pick up groceries. So I might practice, like, let's go to this, like, we're gonna pick up a heavy basket of laundry, right? So I might put it into like a context of like a functional movement so that their association is now with what do I need to get done, not what is that exercise that like caused me pain last time. So that's like how my brain would break it down. I also, you know, I have to say, as like in in my practice, there's three treating full-time pelvic floor OTs. I would say my other two clinicians are much more much more exercise focused, and I'm not really. So I, you know, I live in Williamsburg and I work in Williamsburg, and everybody has such a rich, robust fitness activity life here, or most people. So, unless I'm giving somebody something that's really going to be a useful tool in their day-to-day function, I'm not giving exercises that often. That's just me. That's my approach. I would rather spend time and touch and do manual work than give somebody like an exercise protocol. I would way more likely send them guided meditations and breath work to navigate stress because I think what you're saying, you know, you're saying like you noticed that the next day after you did this listening, you like got all your bills paid. I think connecting those dots for people and giving them those tools that they can really, you know, show up as a better parent, sleep a little bit more deeply, go to work and not feel as frazzled are so much more important than if I have them doing like 15 pounds versus 18 pounds of a deadlift to me as a clinician.

Maria 24:46

Yeah. I mean, I couldn't agree with that more. Sometimes don't necessarily like the type of reputation that PTs have where, oh, you're just the glorified masseuse. I'm coming to you for the manual work and only just the manual work. And I think that that's really, really founded more in orthopedic care, unfortunately, which kind of pushed me to fall out of love with it. And then when I found Pelvic, I was like, oh, this is super underserved and there's more value in this where I can really educate. And that is what I love so much. And a lot of my sessions like run over time because I am just educating and people want to hear me talk. They're so curious. And now, because I think of just the personal life season I'm in, I really am treating a lot of pregnant and postpartum women, and there's so much to cover in those sessions. But I find myself really spending even more time in manual work where I'm just like, okay, that's not always what I want to focus on outside of the education. I really want to get into movement patterns, but I feel like you cannot optimize your movement pattern if we're not doing the simple things of like me really trying to influence the tissue to do X, Y, and Z, or you need the guided assistance of just my touch here. Or, all right, well, you can't do this pelvic release yourself in this manner unless we actually maybe go through it together first. So I think like kind of accidentally, that's where I first spend a lot of my time. And then I can kind of graduate more into exercise. So kind of along the same lines, I want to just move into pregnancy and postpartum because I think that there's a lot of fear with movement in both early pregnancy, especially with first-time moms, and then returning to movement in postpartum.

Pregnancy And Postpartum Support

Maria 26:46

And I think that that doesn't matter if you're a first-time mom or not. There's always some sort of new fear because each postpartum experience is different. What would you say you focus on as far as like prepping the patient's body for more controlled and stable movement in both pregnancy and postpartum?

Marlene 27:06

Okay. So for my pregnant and postpartum clients, I think I think for pregnancy and postpartum, I say whatever you're doing that feels really good, keep doing it. And we're gonna respect that those are just changes that are going on with your hormones and your growing baby and your body changing, right? So just giving them permission and education and autonomy to make those choices for themselves. I think that's important, right? Foundationally. I also think that I also think that people are told, like, if you're running, keep running. If you're doing this, keep doing this. And they don't really have that individualized guidance. And it really is like week to week a different situation, right? What's going on? Are you feeling pain in your hips? Are you feeling pain in your back? Are you feeling incontinent? Are you having incontinence, right? We're really just we're sort of modifying what our our recommendations are and what our our treatment plan is based on what the changes are in those bodies every single week that looks very different. I also think that there's a big component of being like touch deprived in the medical community right now. So that, you know, when we were going back to that idea of like manual work versus like exercising and breath work and education, I do think that there's a really big essential component of touch in sessions with pregnancy and postpartum because doctors are not touching patients anymore. And I hear it time and time again. If I say to a client, would you like to do more manual work today? Do you want to focus on some exercises? What do you, what's the split that you want? They're like, I just want your hands on me. They just want to be held, they want to be touched, they want yes, you know, manual work, yes, manipulations, things like that, but they just want to be touched more, right? So I think for for me, it's a lot of manual work depending on what they're experiencing. You know, a lot of we're talking a lot about stability around the pelvis, keeping that posterior chain active, keeping the core, those deep core muscles active until we get really late in pregnancy. We are talking a lot about keeping everything really strong and stable and navigating stress and keeping our habits really healthy, right? We think, oh, I'm getting up to pee every hour. Okay, that's gonna happen for a little bit and then that should stop. We don't want to keep that habit up, right? So we it's so much education, it's so much manual work, and also modifying movement patterns, right? Just how they're getting up and down off the floor, how they're getting in and out of in and out of bed every day. All of those things are really, really important for keeping their body feeling good and stable and strong throughout their pregnancy. And then also postpartum, right? Just being really mindful of those considerations. And in pregnancy, doing lots of like birth prep, positioning, talking to them about all the different things that happen in the environment of a hospital or a home birth, who's gonna be in the room, what they're gonna ask you to do, what does research show for the best birth outcomes? I mean, it's just there's so many, there's so many ways to support this population. And I think when they go to appointments with their birth providers, they're getting a like, they're getting like 10 to 25% of what they need.

Maria 30:57

I it's very wild to me that doctors don't really take the time to tell you what's going on. And I think because for me personally, this is the second time around, I'm not reading as much as I was from my first because I already have the experience, but I learned more about what was to come in this book I was reading than from the doctor herself. And that was a little frustrating. But even still after that, like there is experiences where it was nice to receive an ultrasound every time, but like they're not really doing anything else to really help support you. Like it's actually really not about you in pregnancy, it's more so about the baby. And I get that coming from an OB, but it's still very frustrating. And I think sometimes when we are to see the other practitioners that are more so like for the supporting mom for the baby, I do think some clinicians may, like this is probably an assumption, but this is just like from my experience. I think that there are some individuals that might have a little bit more of a fear of treating the mom. Like they get scared that they don't want to do something that's going to influence maybe early labor or something like that, or they're afraid to do more of a deeper touch or XYZ. And I think that this also comes with our territory, just being the clinicians that we are with the experience and the knowledge and the training. You know, we have to also maybe level down the patients and say, this technique is not going to do harm to you andor baby. This is to benefit you from this position and that position. And we're coming from this angle because X, Y, Z. Um, and it's great that we're able to do that. And I do find more people are like, well, this is therapy. I want you to do more of this type of hands-on technique because I need my body to be supported. And what's great in a multidisciplinary office is that you have a movement expert where you're like, go do that treatment and do the Pilates to really better support your body. And we can tackle the therapy here and do the finite little movements to better support you in this bigger, grander things. Before we close out, is there anything else, last words that you want to share with the audience? Oh, that's a big one.

Marlene 33:21

Any just to put you on the screen. Any last things to share?

Pleasure Truths And Final Encouragement

Marlene 33:26

I think some important things to note that that you know I still feel shocked that are going around is that that sex should hurt, or sex is sometimes supposed to be painful. It's really not. And there's so many ways to find pleasure and intimacy that that don't involve pain unless you want pain, and that's something that you're into. There's so many like creative ways. And I think that's another thing that we provide as pelvic for therapists that some people don't really know. They think, you know, just pregnancy postpartum. So I think that, you know, people are really the most expert of their own bodies. They just have to tap into that. I think that people, you know, have the tools. This is something I tell everyone you have the tools in your in yourself. You don't have to look outside. You know, it's good to have support, but ultimately at the end of the day, like we know ourselves better than anybody. We just have to slow down and and tune into that inner voice and that intuition and what our own needs are and create boundaries. And yeah, if you need support, we're here for you. And there's so many different ways of providing support. And you're not alone. If you have pelvic floor dysfunction, there's so many, so many of us. I was once there. So just, you know, lean on us and reach out and you know, don't feel ashamed or embarrassed or alone because there's so many people that are here to support you and support the community.

Maria 35:00

Yeah. Speak up, right? Because more people are going through it than you think. You're not an outlier. It's not normal, it's common, and we're here. And usually the people that are helping those that are suffering may have actually have shared that experience so we can really empathize. And that's what I find the beauty in all of this is like we're in this together and let's just build this community. So I love it. Amen. Yes, absolutely. Thank you so much for being here. I'm sure you'll be back on. Thank you. Thanks, Maria. I'm so excited to see you. Thank you for having me. Of course. Thank you, Marlene.

Share Subscribe And Next Steps

Maria 35:40

If this episode resonated with you, share it with a friend, a fellow mom, or someone who needs to hear that their body isn't broken. It's communicating. And if you're enjoying the podcast, it would mean so much if you subscribed and left a review. It helps more women find this space and start their own healing journey. If you're ready to go deeper, you can connect with me at Holistic Physio. You can book a consultation or explore my resources in the show notes. Remember, healing isn't about doing more. It's about understanding your body and supporting it from the inside out. Until next time, keep listening to your body. Start at the core.