As a pelvic health therapist, I had developed programs that went beyond treating and training the local pelvic floor region. My love for a full-spine approach, including the ribcage and breath, steered me toward the Professional Yoga Therapy training, through Ginger Garner’s Living Well Institute. This started with her course connecting the PF and hip issues, when I struggled to find others who looked at the combined issues. The PYT education and practical weeks of instruction proved to be the missing link for connecting medical treatments to wellness and prevention.

The other amazing connection was the level of attention Ginger gave to the throat and voice region. My deeper spine training began with the head and neck for working in a new specialty of head, neck and jaw pain. I had become a pediatric therapist, and loved the work with the moms along with the children. This was before we had good strategies to protect ourselves, so I had a severe back injury early in my career. I had to look for ways to work that didn’t involve lots of bending or lifting, as both were central to most of our rehab treatments. My work with TMJ quickly expanded to jump into our fledgling field of women’s health and onwards to ergonomics of child care.

The crucial link was that many of my TMJ clients shared that they thought they had something going on “down below” but they weren’t concerned about leakage. Turned out they had tension and pain from their head to their bottom, and what was in between. It was wonderful to explore many ways to address what Ginger taught as our 3 Diagrams..

I began work on a booklet that incorporated pelvic floor training with Medical Therapeutic Yoga. This evolved throughout the program levels and I considered how to share this.