Mastitis – Experiences and Observations on Women’s Health – Part 2

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by JK, UK

I am a woman who has experienced a number of women’s health issues (see Part 1 on Endometriosis). One of those women’s health issues was mastitis. I also have a curiosity about women’s health statistics and articles on the state of women’s health today.

Around 10 years ago I had very sore lumpy breasts, much sorer than they were around the time of my period. I went to my GP and I was quickly referred to a local specialist Breast Clinic. On arrival at the Breast Clinic I underwent a series of tests and investigations, including what I experienced to be an uncomfortable mammogram. For those of you who have never experienced a mammogram, it is like having your breasts squashed and pressed between two cold, hard metal plates in the most awkward of positions, whilst standing half naked in the middle of a cold, clinical room. As I was standing there I was nervous as I was also wondering ‘do I have breast cancer?’. This specialist Breast Clinic offers a ‘one-stop’ shop in that over a couple of hours you have many x-rays, tests, examinations, and then you wait in a corridor of chairs to be called in and given your ‘diagnosis’. Continue reading “Mastitis – Experiences and Observations on Women’s Health – Part 2” →

Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places, Only to Find it Was Already Within Me!

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by Sharon Gavioli, Registered Nurse, Birth Educator, Counsellor, Brisbane, Australia

All my life I have had a knowing that life was about people and loving people. Despite this, as a young girl I learned that love meant that I should be good and put others’ needs before my own. This meant working hard to please my parents and friends. Throughout this, I felt a frustration at how I felt I had to be and at times would step out of line, which left me feeling bad that I had let another down. Then I would brush myself off and get back in the game in the pursuit of this love.

In my teenage years, I directed my quest for love in pursuing boys, hoping that a relationship would bring me the elusive love that I hadn’t quite found as a girl. After a few false starts, I found the man whom I was sure was going to bring me the love. Within a year of marriage, I started to feel disappointed and again frustrated that the love wasn’t pouring forth in our relationship. I tried to express this, but in the end decided that maybe having a baby would definitely be a sure winner to finally find that true love that I so longed for. Continue reading “Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places, Only to Find it Was Already Within Me!” →

Media & Women: True Qualities of Women

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by Shannon Everest, Australia

While sitting eating my lunch at work, and fanning through the latest Vogue mag. in the patient waiting room, I read bits and pieces of an article about a new and upcoming young actress called Alice Englert. The article was titled ‘Alice in Wonderland’.

The article itself is not what is important here – what is important is the ponderings that occurred after reading the article.

This young woman of only 18 years was being celebrated with such expressions as  ‘Englert heads into the light’… She was being placed on a pedestal for all the world to see, described with such beauty and awe, but for all of the things she can ‘do’, the way she looks, the way she ticks boxes – and not for who she actually is. Lauded for how she has managed to carve her way into the industry, descriptions of her physical beauty and the uniqueness of her old-world ‘look’.

I found myself wondering, how does she really feel? What does she do to care for herself working in the film industry? What did she have to go through to get there? Continue reading “Media & Women: True Qualities of Women” →

Inspiration – My Periods have Returned through Returning to the Real Me; Joy!

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by Shevon Simon, London, UK

There has been extraordinary change in my body in that my periods HAVE (NOW) RETURNED after some time of absence….

I never thought of myself as a person with difficulties with their period. Yes there was pain, but doesn’t everyone experience pain? And I’ve only in recent months contemplated that experiencing such excruciating pain during my periods could be my body telling me that I was out of sync with the way I was choosing to live and be with myself. An extraordinary concept for me!

I began having my periods around age 11. I was still in primary school and was geared up and excited to have them. My Mum openly had pads and tampons in the house and as she mostly wore pads, I knew this was what I would wear when my periods began. I was so excited to have my period as I could feel my body preparing for it to come, and two of my friends had already started theirs. I wanted to be one of the first so I didn’t get left behind – I was already running the race of competition! My periods began during the Easter break whilst at my grandma’s, but what a shock I received…. Continue reading “Inspiration – My Periods have Returned through Returning to the Real Me; Joy!” →

Endometriosis – Experiences and Observations on Women’s Health – Part 1

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by JK, UK

I am a woman who has been a women’s health statistic – I had endometriosis for over three decades, which I found was an extremely painful and debilitating condition.

I recently re-visited some statistics on endometriosis and found that approximately 176 million women and girls worldwide suffer from endometriosis; 8.5 million in North America and 2 million in the UK and rising. ‘Endometriosis; the presence of tissue, histologically similar to endometrium outside the uterine cavity and the myometrium, is one of the most common gynaecological conditions in women of reproductive age, but it remains one of the most complicated and baffling’ (Rizk & Abdulla, 2003). I too had found the condition baffling…

I started my periods at age 11 in my first few weeks of starting senior school. I knew something didn’t feel right within my body not long after I started my periods, given the amount of pain and discomfort I had each month at the time of my period. I found it debilitating and sometimes had time off school (or work), lying on my bed with a hot water bottle and taking painkillers. My tummy was sore, my breasts were sore and my period cramps were extremely painful; with often no painkillers touching the pain, to the point that on a couple of occasions I went to A&E even in the middle of the night, desperate for some pain relief. I would sometimes nearly pass out with the pain. I remember walking home from school one day and having to lie down on the pavement as I was in so much pain I couldn’t walk. I would have hot sweats and feel nauseous from the pain as well as having thick clotty lumpy dark brown period blood. I would get bowel pain at the same time, diarrhoea and lower back or right hip pain. I knew some of my friends had painful periods but they didn’t seem to have the other symptoms, and often for them a painkiller would do the trick.  Continue reading “Endometriosis – Experiences and Observations on Women’s Health – Part 1” →

Time to Change My Period

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by Anonymous

I’m going to talk about the horrors of my period, what I have been through and how over the years I have been able to change it according to how I live on a daily basis.

At first I didn’t have the same dreadful pain that my other friends had. I was really happy to have my period but as the years went on the symptoms started to really kick in. I didn’t get any of those hormonal periods where you shout and groan about the pain. I remember that as the pain got more and more intense there was still a level of enjoyment of it, even though it was strong.

I felt I understood the nature of its process as I began to observe each aspect of my period. (blood clotting, different colours that the blood came out as, I was also interested in the fact that a woman had to lose a lot of blood each month coming out of her own vagina). It helped me give attention to my body and also respect it by looking after it with a pad. I thought I was too young to use a tampon and I remember seeing what it had looked like in a movie called ‘She’s the Man’ where the main character pretends to be a boy and gets caught using a tampon and then sticks it up her nose, I found that quite funny and disgusting at the same time. The characters were playing around with this thing that you stick up yourself, which put me off a bit. It’s quite nasty the things you can do with a tampon.

Before I had started my period we had a class at school about how to use one and the health rules about applying a pad every three or two hours. It was a whole other responsibility to take other than just doing daily tasks like homework or the chores. It felt like a period of growing up. Continue reading “Time to Change My Period” →

Body Hair – The Celebration of the Beauty that’s Inside Me – Inside us all

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The more I connect to the purity which I can feel inside my body, the more I feel the delicateness and loveliness I know is naturally me.

And the more I connect to this feeling, the more ‘stuff’ I’ve taken on that’s not delicate or lovely starts to pop up its hard and ugly head offering me a choice to make – do I want to hold on to these perceptions and ideas I’ve taken on about myself that push me down and ‘curse’ me as it were, so that I never truly claim how delicate I actually am?  OR… do I make the choice to feel those ugly bits without numbing myself or going into protection and hardening (not always easy!), and feeling instead how much they hurt to hold on to – so that gently and firmly, I am able to claim that all this does not belong in me and to my way of being?

One of these false ideas which has plagued me ever since I was twelve years old is the notion that ‘I have unattractive hair on my body’ and that therefore my body in its natural state is not worthy of being loved. The irony is that I was never actually ‘very hairy’, but back then I chose to believe I was…. Continue reading “Body Hair – The Celebration of the Beauty that’s Inside Me – Inside us all” →

Taking Bra Shopping To a Whole Other Level

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by Sara Harris, Health Practitioner, Australia

Recently I have been feeling it is time… time for some new bras!! I simply feel that I deserve it! I have grown more into being me and more into myself as a woman, and have found that my breasts have changed – my breasts and I have moved on!

I never thought I would say this in my lifetime… but my breasts have actually grown! Not a huge amount, but I can certainly feel that ever since having the Esoteric Breast Massage (EBM) with the EBM trained practitioners from Universal Medicine, and committing to claiming more of myself as a woman –  my body, including my breasts, have taken on more of their natural shape and fullness.

So today was the day where I finally made it to a store that a friend had recommended a while ago. It is a very cute little boutique which has very carefully selected brands of the finest quality ‘intimate wear’. I had saved some money and had a specific and quite generous amount that I was going to spend… but I quickly learned that I was not going to be walking out with a few bras… that I may just have enough for one – good bras are expensive!! Continue reading “Taking Bra Shopping To a Whole Other Level” →

Fashion, Styling and Retail: We are all Beauty-full

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by Adele Leung , Fashion Stylist / Art Director, Hong Kong

My work has been in fashion styling, art direction, publication and fashion retail for the last 18 years.

I started out in this industry because of a very simple knowing in my heart that there is so much beauty around. Of course I didn’t know then that this beauty is within myself to begin with, but I did know it was this beauty that propels me to express. Continue reading “Fashion, Styling and Retail: We are all Beauty-full” →

Re-discovering the Delicateness of a Woman Within… Continues

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Over the past 6 weeks I have lived with an awareness of the delicateness within me. More and more I have connected with this internal reservoir of beauty and I have discovered a few more things in the process.

First was the awareness of a hard, cold, heaviness in my body – I felt like a human bulldozer, pushing through whatever lay before me. There’s a limited turning circle with the track wheels, so it was just straight ahead through life with that big steel front. Feeling the delicateness within (think of a butterfly) was quite a contrast to the bulldozer-style body I had encased myself in. For so long it had felt safe and protected: it had worked, but it came with a cost – hardness, coldness, heartlessness, force ­– and my body paid the price. Continue reading “Re-discovering the Delicateness of a Woman Within… Continues” →