Supporting women through the many stages of life is my passion. I have always been working to improve women’s well-being through coaching, or supporting women who have lost the connection, freedom and joy in their bodies, through personal training.
For me, life changed after the birth of my daughter Kaia. She has been a very large newborn and the unforeseen challenges of my home delivery combined with scar tissue in my cervix made my delivery an overall traumatic experience. The challenge of pushing out a 4.5 kg, 56 cm baby, at 38 years old, along with scar tissue, was that my cervix would close off as Kaia’s head descended. But the story of my birth, be it traumatic, is worth at least a blog post on its own. I’ll make a note to make sure and write it, so that we can discuss more about our experiences.
This traumatic home birth does however play a huge role in how I connected, responded and healed after my delivery. I spent a decade as a women’s mental health coach, personal trainer and being an athlete for more than 20 years, so you might think that I was equipped with some sort of indestructible body/mind, but boy was I wrong. There I stood, a seasoned women’s coach & trainer for over a decade, in the most lost, lonely and totally confused moments of my life, both mentally and physically. A place known to most of us: the physical and mental shock of giving birth later in life.
I can remember thinking ‘why did no one tell me about the aftermath of birth?!’ I couldn’t walk without pain in the left side of my pelvic floor, caused by scar tissue restriction, I had been peeing my pants at the slightest cough – could never make it to the toilet in time – and my back, oh the pain in my back! A never ending knife stabbing my sacrum…
And there I was, left alone, with this beautiful strong baby. My heavily trained body broken down, heavy and in serious pain. My mind looking for solutions. The competitor, the tough trainer, the supporter of women was lost, feeling unsupported and not knowing what to do. The easiest thing anyone can think of, of course, is hit the gym, at least I could lose the baby weight, right? So that’s exactly what I did. Or what I tried to do. Both me and my pain – we were inseparable those days – back to running and lifting heavy weights, at the oversight of the gym’s trainer. Things only got worse and worse. Eventually, the pain in my pelvic floor just became something I perceived as normal, so did my urinating when coughing, so I just tried moving on with this new body, until the back pain just took over.
Seeing a specialist, an osteopath, I was told that my body was no longer in alignment. That my movements were restricted and that I had to create balance back in the pelvic floor. She massaged me and sent me on my way. Now what? I was to move across the world, to Groningen, Netherlands, with all of this disconnection and pain dragging me down and no real solution. This was the light bulb moment!
I dedicated the next years to figuring out what happened to my body during labor. I got educated. I reconnected and only then did I begin to once again find freedom and joy of movement. Presently, more than 7 years post-natal, I feel & look better than ever before.
And it’s all because I learned from the best, doing the Holistic Core Restore® Program, https://wisewomanfitness.com/holistic-core-restore/ , listened deeply to women and dedicated these years to developing how I could best serve other women who know and feel what I’ve known and felt.
Women bring life into this world, we need to help bring life back into them! SHE is often forgotten after the kids come. SHE is also still growing and needs to be looked after. As a Holistic Core Restore coach, it is a privilege and honour to work with women of all ages and stages of life, who are experiencing a disconnection and the lack of joy in their bodies. I offer the gift of total body reconnection and transformation from taking care of the entire woman, mind and heart, and that is where I start.
If this resonates with you, please feel free to reach out and take time out for yourself, to learn if I can support you on your journey back home, to yourself, to your inner strength and to feeling your best.
renee@wisewomanfitness.com
Be well Be Wise. Be Wonderful