So for all of you who are listening out there, I just want to encourage you to take the break.

Ditch the guilt and stop wearing busy as a badge of honor. Definitely not a badge of courage. The courageous thing to do is to take a break. So I have been embracing self care this summer in such lovely ways that fit me. Now I’m going to break and talk about that for just a second because I want you to find what your passion is.

And because our, especially in the United States, our work-life ethic balance is really skewed. I know I bought into it hardcore.

Lean in, do the work, excel, excel, excel, accomplish, accomplish, accomplish. And that gets you a heavy dose of burnout, but not much more. And for some of us, for some of you, maybe it got you a lot of monetary gain too. But I think at the end of our day and lives, none of us and all of us know basically that, yeah, money keeps the roof over your head. But beyond that, it can bring tons of headaches too.

So getting back to the self-care point and kind of wrapping up season three here.

I want to encourage you to A, find that passionate, lovely thing that maybe you forgot about, the thing that you lose track of time doing. Get back to that, whatever that is, before the end of the summer. Just make that a personal goal or commitment or promise to yourself because sometimes you have to say it out loud. I know as I was beginning to learn about boundaries because I was never really allowed to have them or a thought that I couldn’t have them and didn’t feel strong enough to enforce them or even create them. 

It took me longer, I think, than the average person to set them. But once you begin to set them and you voice that out loud, that was one of the key pieces that allowed me to, well, find my happy. Find my joy, find my santosha or true contentment. Santosha in Sanskrit means like a place.

It’s almost like the word, the Greek word eudaimonia, a place beyond happiness. That’s what santosha is. That’s what contentment is. Contentment is not buying a new pair of shoes. It’s not that joy, although that can make you happy. It’s fleeting, right? And it’s transient. I’m talking about deep contentment and deep satisfaction, which has nothing to do with the house you drive, the shoes you wear.

the house you drive, the car you drive, the house you buy, the clothes you wear, whatever, because all that goes away. So I encourage you to give yourself permission. And that little practice thing that I did was, and I think the first big boundary I set was when I had my third kid, my third baby, who is my favorite, James. 

And I promised him while he was still on the inside, still baking, still growing, I looked down at my growing belly and I said, I promise you, I am taking a year off to do what I should have done with your first, with your brothers, with my first two. And that is to take the break that you deserve and that I deserve. And really, it’s not a break. You’re giving birth. And at that time I had a six-year-old, a four-year-old, a full-time business and I was pregnant with my third.

Crazy and I was considering entering into a doctoral program and also writing my first book, which I went on to do, which was crazy. After I took that year off, that’s what I did. I worked too hard again. But anyway, the point is I gave myself permission to do that and voicing it, saying it out loud really helped.

So ironically, that’s the focus of this last episode, is how to use your voice, how to exercise, and in this case, exercise your voice without wetting yourself. And from a figurative standpoint, we could talk about this in terms of how to exercise, which can include using your voice, right, without shoulding yourself. So two titles really that we could give to this episode.

How to exercise without wetting yourself, how to exercise without shoulding yourself. And that exercise is like encompassing of self-care and the notion of self-care. So what is one of the dead giveaways that you’re shoulding yourself? Well, one is you, you know, from a big picture 40,000 view scenario or situation, you don’t enjoy the things you used to enjoy anymore.

I mean, that could at that point be like full out depression. So make sure you get mental health help for that because you can’t just exercise your way out of that. But one of the red flags that, you know, the bigger perspective of your life is getting skewed is that you don’t enjoy those things. You don’t pursue those things anymore. You start becoming a smaller version of yourself. If that’s you, it’s a red flag.

It’s time to shift the gears or just turn the motor off entirely, press the restart button and figure it out. Do you need a different career path? Do you need a different relationship? Do you need a different, you know, living situation? What do you need to pare down? What do you need to unplug in order to stay plugged in for the long term? 

No one can answer that question but you. But I would encourage you that in your commitment to your self -care that continues past the summer, that you ask yourself that question frequently. Am I finding true santosha and contentment? Or am I becoming a smaller version of myself and I can’t even use my voice anymore? 

That’s a big one. Now, let’s take that literally. We’ve got the figurative big 40,000 foot, am I really happy with my life picture? 

But then when you drill down to the pelvic and sexual health side of it, you can drill all the way down. You get all the way down in the weeds. I know I’m mixing metaphors, sorry. But you get all the way down into the weeds and you go, can I use my voice and exercise in a way? So that’s the voice to pelvic floor connection that I’m not actually leaking, right? Which is not too far away from shoulding yourself.

And the red flag for that is when you clear your throat. So I’m going to do it now. When you clear your throat, put your hand on your lower belly. If you clear your throat with your hand on your lower belly and your lower belly bulges, now your whole belly could bulge, but I want you to specifically pay attention to your lower belly. And this is for, particularly for athletes, this is for everyone.

But athletes really tend to struggle with it because they’re like, I’m in shape, I’m doing my ab work, I go to the gym, I have my personal trainer, I’m fit, I’m doing my thing. And then they come in and see me and there’s problems. I have marathoners. These are not people sitting on the couch, never working out, right? These are smart, fit people. And those are the ones I think that I struggled, that can struggle the most with retraining. Because what happens is they clear their throat, their lower belly bulges, their upper abdominals really kick in and are tight, but their lower belly just bulges out. 

And when I image them in the office, pelvic floor is just, it’s just off. It’s just not doing anything. And then when I asked them to voice on top of it, they’re not able to voice, to really even say their name without what I call oblique speaking or psoas speaking. Now that’s not the only two drivers for this. 

What I mean by oblique speak is that if you put your hands just below your rib cage, and you clear your throat and you feel those top abdominals really kick in, you might think, that’s a great thing. Not necessarily. Especially if it’s kicking out and bloating your lower belly. And so what does this look like, particularly in women, but men can have it too, right? Not leaving the guys out. Is that particularly in women, and especially if you’ve given birth and most women have, but even if you haven’t, you can still have it.

Well, you have this just kind of lower belly slope pooch, right, that just sticks out and it’s your lower belly. So it looks like you’re bloated all the time, even when you wake up in the morning and you haven’t eaten anything yet, right? You haven’t put anything in your stomach. It’s empty from fasting. From the overnight fast, which side note, can be a good thing.

Meaning the overnight fasting. You don’t want to be getting up in midnight eating. Your gut needs a break too, okay? Just like your brain needs a break for sleeping. So, side note for good nutrition there, but back to the point. If your lower belly bulges when you clear your throat and when you cough and when you try to voice, that means you are putting positive pressure, which positive is not a good word in this scenario. 

You’re positively pressuring that abdominal system so that it is bulging the pelvic floor, bulging the lower abdominals, and you’re creating spinal stiffness. That’s why you will see, let’s see, weight lifters blow out and hold their breath, right? They’ll push the breath out, hold the breath, and then lift. That’s another way to create spinal stiffness, but is it a sustainable thing for your pelvic floor and the abdominals long -term? I would submit not necessarily. 

It’s not necessarily a positive thing. And if you’re dealing with something on top of it, like diastasis rectus abdominis or split abdominals, which I would say the majority, well, I’m a little biased because if someone comes in, they already have back pain or something like that, right? So 100 % of men over the age of 50 usually have split abdominals.

They just haven’t worked the core. And 100 % of moms postpartum will have split abdominals. But it’s not just those populations, anyone can get that. So that’s probably not helping a DRA is what we call it for short. Although, although it’s not necessarily important to just close the split abdominals, but aesthetic wise, if people can close it doing rehab, right? 

Good pelvic rehab, then why not? Why not close it? But for people who have really big split abdominals, we can’t necessarily close it and it’s not necessary for you to be functional and strong and fit. Okay? So if you have split abdominals and it’s a big split, don’t worry. There’s so much that you can do and you don’t have to close it all the way. What I like to call close the barn door all the way in order for, again, to be fit and strong and well.

However, when we are talking about optimization of abdominal wall and pelvic floor coordination, you want as you throat clear, just a gentle throat clear, you don’t have to, you know, hack up a lung testing this. You want, if you’re watching this on YouTube, you’ll see my hands, but I’ll describe it for you. If my bottom hand is the pelvic floor and my top hand is the abdominal region, I want the abdominals to come in and the pelvic floor to rise.

Why? Because on an exhale, the pelvic floor should be coming up anyway. Right?

And a forceful exhale means the pelvic floor comes up, it rises. But if the coordination of the core and the pelvic floor are off, then it won’t happen. And you’ll get the lower belly pooch that pretty much stays there all the time, even if you’re not bloated, even if you’re not full, okay, from eating something, which shouldn’t happen anyway, right? So if you’re getting that, if you eat something and you’re getting bloated, that’s a red flag, something else is going on with the gut microbiome. So you could go back and listen to, I think it was episode seven, the guts in your sexual and pelvic health. Go listen to that one because there’s a lot we can do in pelvic, as a pelvic PT that I can do to help with that. 

So now what do we do? You know your red flags for the 40,000 foot view contentment and then also the micro view of, you know, how to use your voice and exercise without wetting yourself. Okay. Now you know that, how to identify it. 

Now what to do. I would say go back and listen to episodes one, two, and three. They are short and they are easy and it teaches you how to NAP. The NAP is an acronym that I created a long time ago and it is about the voice to pelvic floor connection. It teaches you how to pressurize the system in a good way. While creating really, I mean, if you’re the hardcore athlete and you want to be really strong, yeah, it’s a good way to create hardcore, very flexible though, strength from the voice to the pelvic floor. 

And if you’re someone that’s just wetting themselves and you’re sick of it, right, either bowel or bladder, or you’re someone that’s like, hey, I never want to have that happen, then do this, okay? You can practice this. Of course, this isn’t a prescription. I’m not your pelvic PT.

I’m not your doc. I’m just talking about what I do when I see these red flags. So of course you are free to try it at your own risk. I want you to go back to the NAP. Now if you have not listened to the first three episodes, go back and listen to those and then come back to this one. But if you have, you’ll know that the N in NAP stands for neutral larynx. I have a problem saying that word. I always say it kind of twisty.

Everybody has a word that they struggle with saying, mine happens to be that one. So neutral larynx. Apposition, A is for apposition, good apposition of the diaphragm, which just means shape, and P is for pitching. Good pitching so that you can bring in and pull in the pelvic floor involuntarily, which is what it’s supposed to do, and not have to worry too much about what the pelvic floor is doing or what the core is doing. They’re just doing what they were born to do.

But being on the planet, whether it’s birth or an accident or just inactivity, whatever it is, if you’re on the planet long enough, you’re gonna have a problem with this and you’re gonna have to address it. So I want you to go back to episode nine if you want to, to listen to at the very end, I talk about how you can visualize literally and figuratively the pelvic floor and how it works correctly.

Which is if you close your eyes, as you exhale silently, you probably won’t feel the pelvic floor come up unless you’re really good at it. But when you do something like this, just a ha or a hiss, or sss.

If you’re really plugged in, now this may be where you have to visualize the pelvic floor. That means pants off mirror, okay, on the skin and the muscle between the sitting bones. And when you do the exhale or the ha or the his sound, that should rise. We call it the perineum. The perineum should rise. That’s what it should do. Nice and easy. 

I have worked with PTs that struggle with this. So, don’t give yourself a hard time if you can’t get it and you need to do the pants off version. Everybody does. Because if even pelvic PT struggle with getting it right and Pilates instructors and yoga teachers and all kinds of fitness professionals and that rehab professionals, right? Doctors, if they’re struggling with it, of course you’re going to struggle with it. All right? So again, don’t give yourself a hard time. Just practice it. There’s a learning curve to it. But once you get it,

It’s like riding a bike. You’ll never forget it and you’ll come right back to it. And even if you give birth again or you have another abdominal surgery or you have a car accident or something and the abs in the core get turned off because sometimes they do when you go through surgery or some kind of trauma. We don’t understand why, but the motor pattern gets shut off, but it’s in there. Okay, it’s like riding a bike. The motor pattern is in there. You just have to access it again. So I want you to just…

Come with me. And if you need to put your hand on the pelvic floor, do that. So hand right in the crotch, sitting on the pelvic floor, and I want you to hum.

you don’t have to hum pretty, okay? If you want to, you could go…

or you could just go, hmm.

Now, as you’re humming.

Two things. One, when you start humming, your exhale gets longer. More pelvic floor power, more core power. Singing is a sport, y ‘all. Okay? So that’s the first thing you should notice is, wow, when I hum, instead of just exhaling, it’s better. My voice is better, my voice sounds better, my voice is stronger. And there’s a reason, because it is an exercise, okay?

Humming is not just humming for humming’s sake alone. It is actual core exercise. So that’s the first thing. Singing is a sport and humming makes you stronger. And the second thing you should notice as you get better and better is that as you hum, the perineum rises, the skin between the sitting bones rises up, not a lot, but it will rise.

And then I want you to make it harder. And here’s the key, okay? This is the key to exercising without wetting yourself, to using your voice to pelvic floor connection without wetting yourself.

Is I want you to extend that out to a count of 12, if you can. It seems hard, but I typically shoot for 30 to 40 seconds on an exhale when I’m working the voice to pelvic floor connection. So you can definitely start with that six to 12 second exhale. Most of you, the vast majority of you will need to visualize the actual pelvic floor as you’re doing this until you get good at it.

And then afterwards, you could probably just sit on your hand. I can just sit here and feel it when I’m humming. The pelvic floor just gradually rises. And every time I do that, I know I’m creating that strength. Now, that’s how you make it harder, okay? And then you might try, even if you don’t have a beautiful voice, whatever, it doesn’t matter. You don’t have to be a singer to sing. Then you can start doing something very simple like,

Very easy. Vocal glides or little vocal sirens as they’re sometimes called. This isn’t big, it’s not fancy, it’s not hard and it doesn’t have to be pretty or beautiful in any way. You just want to start gliding a little bit up and gliding a little bit down. I can even do it while I’m talking but I will say this. If you’re talking it’s worse on your voice, more stressful, more grating, more irritating to your vocal folds than singing. 

That’s why when I talk, I tend to talk with more modulation and kind of a smoother transition between words because it’s more melodic, one, and having a voice that’s more melodic is actually easy, easier on your vocal folds for the long term than barking out kind of a staccato, sharp, strong, you know, torch voice, which sounds great.

I sometimes find myself doing that with my three boys. I’ve heard Will Ferrell joke about having to be a drill sergeant when you’re a parent of boys. And I’m just like, I’m here for that. I know exactly what you’re talking about. As a mom of three boys, as a boy mom, yeah, sometimes you have to put on that drill sergeant voice. Not great for the vocal folds. When I’m doing that, I am conscious that I’m not popping my pelvic floor down when I have to like shout something out. But you know, that’s a much higher level task. We’re not gonna worry about that right now. 

What I want you to be concerned about is knowing that it’s harder to speak than sing on your vocal folds. And everybody wants a good strong voice their whole life. So no reason to ruin that. And then when you are struggling is to pitch up a little bit and just be more melodic with your voice, a little bit lighter, maybe a little bit breathier, like…

like I’m gonna talk right now, just a little bit breathier. It’s a little softer, but it’s a little easier on your voice. So if you’re having trouble leaking right now, pitching up and being a little softer and a little more breathy and melodic might stress your pelvic floor out less until you do enough of this work where you’re back in the saddle again and you’re back and bold and strong and loud as you as loud as you want to be. And of course, not leaking. Okay.

All right, that’s it for this episode. That is it. Unless I change my mind and have one more idea to share with you, that will be it for season three, the summer of self care. I am super excited to launch season four. Not gonna tell you what it’s gonna be yet, but that trailer will be out soon. But if you have not yet subscribed, please take the time to do that. 

And if you have enjoyed this series or anything else in the podcast, please take the time wherever you review podcasts to do that. It’s super easy. It means a whole lot to me because I can reach more people. And then that allows me to keep doing this because it does cost me to do it. And I am not making a dime off of it. So it’s a big cost. It is not a revenue generator. So your reviews mean everything to me. 

And at one time, sometime in the future, hopefully that will change and we can start to do even more. So help us grow, help us reach more people. Thank you for listening. Thank you for tuning in this season. I look forward to seeing you in season four.