The moment I sat in quiet meditation with an energy healer, I never anticipated the floodgates of emotional pain that would open from my womb space. That pivotal encounter ignited a journey into womb healing, leading me to create womb healing retreats that help women to release emotions stored in the womb space.
On today's episode, I replay a conversation that my sister, Jen, had on her show, Leading with Grace. We venture into the transformative power of acknowledging and addressing womb trauma, not just for those who've grappled with infertility or sexual trauma, but for any (and we argue ALL) woman.
You are going to discover:
This one is more than just a conversation; it's an invitation to transform your deepest wounds into unparalleled strength.
To find out more about our Energetic Womb Healing Virtual Retreat, visit sherijohnson.ca/womb
Deadline to sign up is Thursday, Feb. 29th.
Where to find Jennifer:
Instagram: @jenreimerleadership
Website: virtuousradicals.com
References:
Women Who Run with the Wolves By Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Where to find Sheri:
Instagram: @sherijohnsoncoaching
Website: sherijohnson.ca
If you want to create your best life in 2024, even without kids, download my free guide. You'll discover how to find purpose, joy and fulfillment and what might be standing in the way.
Click here for your free guide
The moment I sat in quiet meditation with an energy healer, I never anticipated the floodgates of emotional pain that would open from my womb space. That pivotal encounter ignited a journey into womb healing, leading me to create womb healing retreats that help women to release emotions stored in the womb space.
On today's episode, I replay a conversation that my sister, Jen, had on her show, Leading with Grace. We venture into the transformative power of acknowledging and addressing womb trauma, not just for those who've grappled with infertility or sexual trauma, but for any (and we argue ALL) woman.
You are going to discover:
This one is more than just a conversation; it's an invitation to transform your deepest wounds into unparalleled strength.
To find out more about our Energetic Womb Healing Virtual Retreat, visit sherijohnson.ca/womb
Deadline to sign up is Thursday, Feb. 29th.
Where to find Jennifer:
Instagram: @jenreimerleadership
Website: virtuousradicals.com
References:
Women Who Run with the Wolves By Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Where to find Sheri:
Instagram: @sherijohnsoncoaching
Website: sherijohnson.ca
If you want to create your best life in 2024, even without kids, download my free guide. You'll discover how to find purpose, joy and fulfillment and what might be standing in the way.
Click here for your free guide
Today's episode is going to be different for so many reasons. Number one you are going to get to hear how spiritual I really am and one of the very spiritual experiences that I had a few years ago and how that led me to to create womb healing retreats, and we're going to talk about what womb healing is and my radical experience of healing my own womb, and I think you're going to love it. So this is actually a special episode, also because it's I did it with my sister and it was originally aired on her podcast, which is called Leading with Grace, and you're going to hear it here as well. So stay tuned if you want to hear more about womb healing and why you need it. Hi, I'm Sherri Johnson, and you are about to discover how to embrace your life as a childless woman who wanted to have a family and never could. This is where we combine mindset shifting tools with practical tips so you can break free of outdated societal norms that condition us all to believe that women without kids just don't measure up to the moms. It's where we take action on processing grief and accelerating the healing journey so you can feel free. When childless women awaken their self worth, they transform from hopeless and inadequate to worthy, accepting and purposeful. Think of this podcast as your weekly dose of light bulb moments that will shift your perspective as a childless woman, about yourself, about your any power to change yourself, your future and maybe from the world we live in. If that's what you want, then keep on listening.
Speaker 1:A few years ago, I was working with an energy healer and coach I'm not sure what to call her and she invited me into a meditation right in our session together and in that meditation she asked me to imagine that I was a tiny version of myself and she asked me to go to the place in my body where I felt I needed some healing. And I'm going to tell you what happened, because this, this is something I've never shared before. It's actually really scary to put a voice to this because it feels so wild and woohoo and you might not even believe it, and that's okay if you don't. What happened was this I found myself when asked to go to a place in my body where I felt I needed healing. I found myself in what felt like the bottom of a dry well and I was looking up and it seemed so far away to get out of this well and suddenly I felt water seeping into the bottom and that water started to rise and this is something I have nightmares about being stuck in, you know, a sinking ship and the water filling up or that kind of thing, and drowning. And so I was starting to feel pretty panicky because I'm in the bottom of this well and I don't know how to get out. And the water is filling up and just as it reached my neck I realized that I could just swim toward the light at the top of the tunnel. And as I did this, I realized that that dry well was actually my cervix, and it was not just dry, it was also dank and musty and not a very nice place to be. And as it filled up with water, I realized that this was a sort of flushing out, of clearing out. And as I swam up to the light, I felt in my larger regular body the movement of my tiny self swimming up to my heart. It was one of the wildest things I have ever felt and one of the biggest realizations for me that not just my cervix felt like there was a motion stuck there, but my entire womb space, my uterus, the fallopian tubes. I had placed so much hate, so much shame in that part of my body for so many years, not just through my fertility, my infertility journey, when that part of my body was poked and prodded in so many times and shamed in so many different ways. But since I was a young girl and what my energy healer caused me to realize, just by inviting me into this meditation, was that I was carrying all of that emotion in that part of my body and it needed to be released and fast forward it wasn't actually that long a few months I realized that this is something that actually we all need.
Speaker 1:All women, not just women who have been through infertility, not just women who have experienced such sexual abuse or had a miscarriage or had something physical happen to that part of their body, to that womb space, their uterus, their fallopian tubes, their cervix, their vagina, whatever it is. We also carry with us this trauma that stems from and I use trauma carefully here. This is what I want to call it because it is I don't know what else to call it, put it that way, but everything from. There's so many. You know what I'm going to get into this in the episode with my sister coming up. There's so many things that we experience as women that cause us to carry shame, pain, anger, all kinds of emotions and store them in the womb space, almost like we store stress in our shoulders, sometimes we store it in our hips our neck as well and so what I took from this fast forward a few months.
Speaker 1:I felt I needed to bring that to other women, this ability to clear the womb space and allow in fresh water, and so I created my own version of womb healing. You may have heard the term womb healing, and there's people out there doing retreats and workshops on that subject. I didn't realize it at the time. I thought this was my own thing. It clearly is not, and other people have had this idea as well. I think I have my own version of it, and so this is something that was so impactful for me. It's so impactful for my clients, for the women that I've worked with who have attended my workshops, all of these things so I had to start to share it and talk about it in a more active way, and the first place that I started was on my sister's podcast, and so she has graciously shared with me her the mp3 sound track of that podcast episode, and she did such a wonderful job introducing me and the subject matter that I'm going to roll that. Roll it right from the beginning. So you'll hear my sister Jen start talking about the leading with grace podcast and then we will dive into womb healing and why every woman, childless or not, needs womb healing. So here we go. Hi, welcome to leading with grace.
Speaker 1:I'm so excited to talk to my sister, sherry Johnson, for the second time on this podcast. Sherry helps women who wanted kids to get through grief and triggers so they can find purpose and meaning in a pro natalist world. But she also had a 20 year career in the corporate world as an HR professional, working for large organizations like Fidelity Investments, blackberry and Thompson Reuters, before her own personal journey led her to create her own coaching business for childless women. She's an amazing coach and she talks about a lot of topics that are not talked about in the corporate world very often, and that's what we're going to do today. So she's back to talk about something that blocks women's creativity and connection with our intuition Womb trauma. We get into what it is, why it affects almost every woman on the planet. We both get really vulnerable and share how we've experienced it, and we talk about how it keeps us hustling. It keeps us from making good decisions and tapping into our creativity. Hi, sher, welcome back, thank you.
Speaker 1:So the reason I wanted you to come back is because you gave me another mind blowing moment when you told me about womb trauma and how it affects women in life, in their relationships, and I started to think about how it might affect women in the workplace and how we lead. I think, since I know that the womb is the center of intuition and creativity, it's bound to affect women in the way that we work and lead, and so I'm really excited to talk about it and think about how it will affect my listeners. Yeah, you know, when you first started talking about that, I was a little bit skeptical about how we were going to tie that all together, especially because womb trauma, womb healing it can get kind of woo-woo, as you know, and I was wondering how. I wasn't sure how your listeners were going to feel about that, but we're going to get into it. So, and there, of course, there is a link to how you lead, how you work, because it affects all parts of your life when you have womb healing to do. So I'm glad you made that connection and thank you for inviting me back, because I'm excited to talk about this. It's going to be fun, me too, and one of the reasons that I started this podcast is because I want to push the boundaries of the way that we're thinking about leadership, especially the way that women lead, and I think this is a topic that is going to do that. Yeah, definitely, and pushing the boundaries sometimes means, you know, delving into stuff that we know nothing about, or things that we have never even thought about, or things that feel a bit uncomfortable and woo-woo and, you know, unscientific, and yet those things all have science behind them anyway. So so let's get into it.
Speaker 1:Okay, so, cher, why don't you start by explaining what is womb trauma? So, the way that I think about womb trauma and, by the way, before we even get into this, this is something that I I don't know where it came from. Really it it came really from, I think, our work with Susan, our energetic healing coach, during a meditation that we did together, and now I have learned that there are people out there who actually do like other people who do womb healing. So the way that I talk about this might be a little bit different from the way that other people talk about it. So what I think about as womb trauma is anything that. Of course, it's the things that directly impact our womb physically, but it's also things that impact us sort of sexually from an energetic standpoint. So maybe it's best if I just give you some examples. Yeah, and let's start with the physical ones, and I want to actually say upfront that, before any of my listeners hit, stop here. Wound trauma effects is not about sexual abuse. I want to start with that because that's the way I originally like we.
Speaker 1:When we think of trauma, we often think of trauma as these huge, really horrible things that have happened to some people in their lives or in their childhood, and wound trauma can be really small things. So let's start with the physical things, because that will be most tangible for people, and then we'll talk about some of the energetic things. Yeah, and I would add on to what you just said that it affects all women, like no one. I don't think there is a woman out there who is immune to this. It affects everybody.
Speaker 1:So some of those physical things are any kind of invasive procedure. So most women have had a pap smear. That is invasive. We push through it and, you know, tell ourselves that this is all okay. That somebody is shoving up a cold metal instrument into inside of us and taking tissue, like that is not normal, it's not, it's actually really invasive. So there's any kind of any kind of physical interaction with that, with your room space. So that could mean any kind of fertility treatment, any kind of test testing that you've had done to test for fertility or test for cyst, laparoscopic surgery, anything like that would fall into the physical category. Wow, yeah, it's any of those things. I mean, think about it, it's a lot. It's ultrasound, the what are they called? Vaginal ultrasounds. So a lot of women have had those? Yep, it's. It could be related to birth, so the use of forceps or, you know, having a DNC afterwards, it could be just any like any perception of this is uncomfortable for me. What this doctor is doing right now, regardless of you know, you tell yourself it's a doctor, it's okay, and yet your body is perceiving that as uncomfortable, both like emotionally and physically. I get emotional just hearing you talk about that.
Speaker 1:Still from my fertility treatments, and I'm going to, I'm going to tell and I know so this is Jen here if people are having trouble telling our voices apart. I'm going to tell a quick, very personal story, and before I tell that story, I want to say that if this conversation does bring up any kind of real trauma for anybody, we aren't therapists, so please seek their therapeutic help. So the emotions that that brings up for me, or the story I wanted to tell what was when I was getting fertility treatments to have layer, I had this one procedure done where they the doctor, he wanted to look inside of my uterus and so he had a steel rod with a camera on it, like it was a miniscule camera, so that that wasn't what was painful. It was that a woman's vagina is curved and the steel rod was straight and I lay on that table for what seemed like forever, but it was probably I don't know five to 10 minutes. And when I, when he was, and I felt faint during it and Sherwin was holding, he had his hand on my shoulder and he was kind of holding my hand because he could see how much pain I was in and I couldn't sit up afterwards, not because of the pain, because the pain was gone when he was done, and that's, I think, why people often don't think of these things as traumatic because it doesn't leave a bruise or a scar. Really, yes, but the doctor, actually he apologized to me afterwards because he looked at me and he said you're white as a sheet, don't stand up yet. And and looking back, I'm it's still like you telling me that that is trauma and validating how awful it was for me. Mm hmm, is is kind of mind blowing and releasing all at the same time, because it's at the time I was just like, well, I'm doing this so I can have a baby, I'm doing this for me and for my husband and I just got to suck it up. Mm hmm. Yes, exactly, I have to suck it up. Mm hmm, so continue. What else? Yeah, so so all of those.
Speaker 1:So you've already touched on the emotional impact that those procedures have, and it's not just fertility procedures, because I had a bunch of those, but it's also a pap smear or an vaginal internal ultrasound or whatever it is. It's the emotional impact that that makes on on you. That is the room trauma and if you think about it from that perspective, that it's the emotional impact, it's not the physical. You said to yourself you weren't left with a bruise and in some cases people are like, yet they are left with scars or you know they've had their uterus removed or there's a whole bunch of other things and, by the way, if you've had your uterus removed, it still applies to you Probably. Emotions, yes, yeah, absolutely, it's the emotional impact that really causes the trauma. So if you think about it from that perspective, there's a whole bunch of other things that now fall into that category.
Speaker 1:So it could be the guy that you slept with that you felt icky about afterwards. It could be the guy who, like, started dancing with you on the dance floor and you felt really uncomfortable about it and didn't know how to say, like bugger off. It could be that someone gave you. It could be anything that you, if you remember it, if it stands out in your memory, it probably has caused some sort of emotional impact. So you know, if you start thinking through all of those kinds of things, interactions that you've had, I'll tell you a story that that really impacted me.
Speaker 1:I remember being out with a group of girlfriends and had the dancing experience and I seem to be I don't know they pick, they pick us out of the crowd somehow. I don't know how they know that we're not going to tell them to bugger off. But they seem to know that. And so I was on the dance floor with a bunch of friends. We were all having a good time and this guy came up behind me and he started kind of grinding and doing all those things that I was really uncomfortable with because I didn't know who he was. And suddenly there's like people forming a circle and then I got really uncomfortable because then I'm like I'm going to look like a bitch if I tell this guy to bugger off now. But that's really all I want to do, because I am so uncomfortable, first of all with the attention, second of all with this person that I don't know who is in my personal space and touching me like not in a sexual way, but in a sexual way, like he's not touching my private parts, he's not even touching my butt, nothing, but he's in my personal space, he's touching my arms. So that left a big imprint on me and it's not the first time that had happened, and I am not the only one who that has happened to.
Speaker 1:And when I've talked about that scenario with guys, they fluff it off. They're like oh, they're just having fun, it's no big deal. And yet when we experience that as women, it is that is that causes womb change, that causes womb trauma, that causes us to feel uncomfortably, just uncomfortable. I can't even describe the icky feeling that that gives. There's shame around it because I feel like I've been taking advantage of. I feel like I've been taken advantage of and I didn't say anything and so I'm shameful of that. I somehow feel like he took ownership of me and my body without my permission and feeling like quash, like feeling like he's, like I'm somehow less than as a result. So all of that is when you carry that with you, you carry it in your room space. I'm sure there are thousands of women who have had that kind of thing happen to them.
Speaker 1:I can think of many experiences when I was younger, especially in a bar, dancing or whatever, when a guy has touched my butt, even touched the small of my back, mm-hmm, that may sometimes feel invasive. Yeah, yeah, and if you're a people pleaser, you're taught not to say anything because you'll be safer if you just let them do it. Yeah, and most little girls are taught to be nice girls. You're not supposed to be aggressive or get angry, or, you know, we're taught to be nice girls. So I constantly had that conflict going on in my head where I wanted to be nice, like I need to be nice to this person. I look at it now in hindsight and go like that's ridiculous. Why didn't I just tell him to get out of here? Why don't we speak our minds?
Speaker 1:But because we have been so conditioned to be nice, to not get angry, to not rock the boat, to just, you know, hug the people, yeah, yeah, and like when you know, like little girls, it's like hug the person, goodbye. That's making you uncomfortable. There's a reason little kids don't want to hug somebody and it's because they're uncomfortable with it. And we keep making them do it, mm-hmm. So what we're teaching them is let the creepy person touch you, do something that you intuitively know doesn't make you feel quite right. Yeah, when we know that that person isn't a creep, they feel, for whatever reason, they don't know that person well enough to allow them into their space and we don't honor that. Yeah, so we're teaching them to let people into their space that they don't know very well yet and to be nice to them, and that's how we socially interact and that's what we should do.
Speaker 1:Anyway, we're going off on a tangent. I want to just add to that like these physical and relational energetic types of womb trauma are in addition to those potentially really big traumas that some people have felt, like sexual abuse, of course, of course, yeah, so we're talking, we're kind of focusing in on the little ones, because those are the ones that people get surprised about that these are considered womb trauma. I know that I was. I never thought of a pap smear as being womb trauma and but now I do. Even like, even when it's a female doctor, it's still a really uncomfortable, awful experience. I dread it. Yeah, of course. Yeah, I mean some people will say like, oh, you know, I'd rather go get a pap smear than go to with the dentist. And I'm like, no, you know, you're lying there on a table with your feet up in the air, spread eagle, yeah, you're so vulnerable.
Speaker 1:And then, and then they're like, on top of that, then they're, you know, shoving a cold instrument, metal instrument, up your vagina, into your cervix. Yeah, I mean the other some of the other things, like IUDs, people, women, will just like that's like, oh, yeah, I'll just go get an IUD. You're like someone is also putting a metal, a copper piece of wiring up into your uterus. That is like, whether you're choosing that or not, it's still causing an energetic imbalance in your physical body and your emotional one. Yeah, that's like probably a good segue into how we suppress our cycles, because that's effectively what we're doing when we get an IUD.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and this is one of the things I wanted to talk to you about. This was was that we use these invasive procedures to force ourselves to our cycles and our womanhood to be different? Yeah, we suppress them so that we can become more like men and operate in a man's world, and we do. We've done that since we were teenagers and we've been so. It starts usually in phys ed, and I'm sure that every woman remembers at least, if it wasn't themselves, it was another girl in the class who wanted to sit out of gym because they had their period, and the sometimes even the other girls will roll their eyes, but at least the phys ed teacher will.
Speaker 1:And that's the first, you know, the first interaction where you were told you're not like I don't believe that you have an issue, I don't think you should honor where you're at in your cycle and you should just like shove it aside and get back on the basketball court, whatever it is, and so that tell, like, what that's doing is you know that leads to I'm going to suppress my cycle. So I'm going to either take birth control or an IUD or birth control, will you know, let me control my cycle so that I know exactly when I'm going to have my period. Iud I'm going to suppress it entirely so that I don't even get a period. Yeah, those patches and stuff, and then we, you know, and then we can show up to work, but we don't honor. We don't honor our cycles. We don't honor the release that our bodies actually require. When you get your period, like that is a natural process that actually requires more rest than usual. You know this, yep, and yet we're trying to operate on this 24 hour, seven day a week, 52 weeks a year kind of a cycle. So we don't honor our cycles, we suppress them so that we can operate in that world, that corporate world that was set up by men and works well for them but it doesn't for women.
Speaker 1:Well, and share from my understanding of what you've said in the past. This is that kind of behavior is actual womb trauma as well. Well, it is because it's shame, it's energetic room trauma because of the shame that we're carrying around our periods being dirty or being a pain in the butt or whatever it is and that has that is thousands of years. I mean, there are still cultures where the men will not sit on a chair of that a woman who has, who is currently on her cycle, has just gotten off. They will not sit on that chair. That chair is considered dirty. That's still. That's today's world. There are cultures that still practice that. So that gives women the message that their body is dirty, their body is is when they're on their cycle. That is not, that is unclean and that is shame. And you carry, as you said before, the womb is the seat of shame, that is where we carry our shame. I think you said before we started recording it's. It's like we carry our tension in our shoulders, we carry shame in our womb. Wow, and you know, when I think back talking about shame and and energetic trauma, wound trauma.
Speaker 1:This wasn't all the kids in high school, but I remember there was at least for us talking about the female body and talking about our period felt shame, just talking about it. Felt shameful in our house Cause mum never talked about it. No, she didn't really Like she did. She never gave us any privacy. But on the other hand, yeah, we, we didn't really talk about it and we didn't talk about it amongst our friends. I know there are I mean, I have friends now who are very open about it, but our group of friends certainly wasn't. I remember there were certain girls in our group of friends who who talked about it and then others who we never would talk about it with, and we and I remember we didn't talk about it with each other. No, like I was. Even I was so ashamed when I had my period in our house so I always wanted, I wanted to hide it. So, and and no fault to mum that was what she was taught.
Speaker 1:You know, sexuality and anything to do with that was shameful in in our culture, in our Christian religion and in our family. It was passed down. But it felt like all this secrecy around it and then not talking about it or barely like barely telling us this is what's gonna happen and this is what you do about it, like that was the conversation we had. And so all that quiet and secrecy around it and the way around it bred this feeling of shame around it. Whatever you have secrecy or silence around something, you can bet that there's shame underneath of that always and that's womb trauma, right, sharer? Like if you've got shame around your own body and what it's doing. Yeah, oh yeah, shame around pleasure, shame around all of the things that religion teaches us that your body is only meant at least in Christianity. Well, and many other cultures I mean, there are still.
Speaker 1:I was just listening to something the other day that there are thousands of genital mutilation cases that are happening in the US because people have moved from other cultures into the US and there are doctors there who are willing to do those procedures and those procedures are specifically designed to to quench to what's the word I'm looking for Quash female pleasure. So your body, sexuality, sex is only for the purposes of procreation, and when you're taught that, then you feel guilt and shame every time you engage in any kind of pleasure for anything besides the purpose of procreation. We're getting off topic again. No, I know, but I'm sort of chuckling because it just goes back to our conversation about pronatalism and how, how, like, if we're not supposed to have sex for procreating, then there's all this stuff that tells us that we shouldn't be having sex at all, right, and I think that that is a big reason why there was so much shame around any sort of relationship, that is, any of the LGBTQ relationships. If it's not intended for procreation, then their whole relationship is shameful. According to Religion yeah, the, but religion, yeah, well. And then also a childless couples relationship is also sinful, right, because we're not in it to procreate, right, okay, yeah, so, yeah, I was gonna tie it.
Speaker 1:Let's bring this back around, okay, so we've talked about the physical symptoms of womb trauma and we've talked about some of the energetic symptoms of womb trauma. Before we move on, are there any other energetic causes that we haven't talked about? Hmm, probably, I mean, there's so many. I mean, what I do in my womb healing retreats is just have people like free right, listed all out, and there's things that we can't even imagine that people will think of as womb trauma and the way that I guide them through that is just, if you remember it and it's coming up as if you're wondering whether it's womb trauma, it probably is, because you've remembered it. It's standing out as something that's related, and so it probably is. At least it's causing some sort of energetic something you're holding onto. Anything your brain remembers is important. That's what your brain has deemed that important. That's important. So, okay, so let's talk about, let's get into what does all this mean then? So we've talked about what it is and what are some of the causes.
Speaker 1:Now let's start to talk about what, how it affects the way that we live our relationships, and then we'll get into working in leadership. So maybe first let's talk about how it energetically affects our relationships and how it's linked to chakras and our creativity and intuition. Okay, so most people I think at least women who are listening who have been to yoga, are probably aware that we have many chakras actually, but we mostly talk about seven, and they run the meridian line in the center of the body, and the first one is the root chakra. That's sort of your legs, your let me stop you there, sherry, for a second. So chakras are the centers of energy in our body. Yeah, that's an easy way to describe it. Yeah, okay, now you can go through some of them. I'm not gonna go through all of them, I was just gonna go, like the bottom one.
Speaker 1:The very first one is our root chakra. That really has everything to do with our sense of belonging in the world, our sense of security and safety. And then we move up to the womb chakra, which is the sacral chakra, and that energy center sits in the womb space and it includes, physically, it kind of affects anything in that area. So it's the uterus, the ovaries, the adrenal glands, the hips, the small of your back, that whole area. And it affects men as well. It will be their genitals, adrenals, kidneys, usually, bladder too, yep, bladder as well, and, yes, and it would be their lower back as well. So it affects men as well, but we're gonna talk about women in terms of the womb.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so that chakra is associated with your creativity, which kind of makes sense, since that is where we create life. It's also where you create, where you bring other things to life. So it's your creative juices, your any of that sort of creative energy, whether you're applying it to creating life or a project, or a book, or a meal, whatever. It is a piece of art. So it's your creativity, also your intuition, which are sort of linked, like when you think about problem solving or coming up with an idea. That is creativity, but that's also stemming from your intuition. You know like we talk about it's coming from somewhere. It's coming from somewhere invisible.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think of it as a download, like I'm in the shower or for me, it quite often happens when I'm out on a hike, cause I'm usually by myself and I'm out in the forest and there's nobody else around and I'm just my mind is wandering and all of a sudden, I get this great idea and I know, like I have this, knowing that I need to talk about this or I need to do, I need to start this project or whatever it is. You have this. When you get those great ideas, you know that you somehow know that they're great, like there's something inside of you that is your intuition. Yeah, so it's. There's a very closely linked like creativity. It is, it's almost like it is your intuition. Yep, it's an intuitive hit. When you get that great idea and you're like I know I have to follow this through. So I'm thinking about in work, how we've become so. This is gonna affect women at work, because if they've had wound trauma, it's gonna affect their creativity at work and their connection with their intuition. Yeah, and that is one of our gifts we can. How many times have you? I was just talking about this on my own podcast.
Speaker 1:You make a list of the pros and cons to help you make some decision. And on paper it looks like the decision should be A, a or B. It's A, I'm gonna go with A. And then so you choose, you make that decision, you go with option A and then, down the road, it didn't work as well as you thought and you look back on the decision making and you think I knew this wasn't gonna work. I knew I should have chosen option B. Well, how did you know that, like you, your intuition was telling you option B. It doesn't matter what it looks like on paper. You have this gut feeling and we don't.
Speaker 1:In the workplace, we're taught to suppress that. So we're suppressing, yeah, boom. Once again. We're taught that logic and analysis and data and facts that is how you make decisions, and it's not actually how a lot of men make their decisions. They go with their gut feel. Entrepreneurs especially, they go with their gut feel. And yet in this patriarchal society, we're taught that to suppress our intuition, in the same way as we're taught to suppress our cycles and suppress our sexuality and all of that. We're taught to suppress our intuition and our creativity in favor of logic and analysis and data and that tying that into leadership. That's gonna keep women in overthinking analysis data and it's gonna keep them from making good decisions. What a paradox.
Speaker 1:So when we so I was just talking about this in the last episode, how we masculinize in the workplace so we try to work on a 24 hour cycle, we try to be linear and work in this way that men do so, in that by suppressing like taking birth controls and pills and IUDs and trying to suppress our cycle or just push through it and work on this linear time frame, we are causing ourselves room trauma because we're suppressing our own cycles and, at the same time, the womb trauma is causing us to not be creative and intuitive at work, so we're less effective. And so we get really busy and get into action and try to show that we're good enough in the workplace and we're valuable and we can keep up with the men, and so we suppress our cycles even more and try to get into their linear, action oriented world and cause ourselves even more trauma. Yeah, so we're the cause and the effect of our own and we're the cause of our own conditioning. It's actually ridiculous. It's not ridiculous, of course, because it's not our fault. This is what we've been talking about. No, right, it's thousands of years of conditioning. Ugh, it's so weird, but now it's time to unravel all of that.
Speaker 1:It's these kinds of conversations that allow us to unpick all of this conditioning and get to who we truly are as women and operate in a way that is intuitive and creative, like let's let go of all of this so that we can be, you know ourselves, our true selves. Yeah, I can feel my voice and starting to get like I'm on my soapbox here. I'm getting passionate about it because it affects all areas of our lives. You know, I don't even really talk about it so much in the context of leadership. That's your area, but it affects, you know, the way that you operate in your relationships, because you're going to suppress your creativity. At home, too, you're going to do like all of this stuff it's not. We don't have, we don't live, as you know, little boxes in our lives. We it's all interconnected. We're not separate. We don't separate different pieces of our lives. They all it's fluid. We each one flows into another. So the way you behave at work is going to flow into how you behave at home or with your friends or whatever One of the areas that I feel as though it shows up most clearly is in decision making, as we talked about earlier, and you make decisions all day long, and when I started to think about my intuition I was just thinking about this earlier today.
Speaker 1:You know, I go to a restaurant and I can't make a decision between two things, because I think, well, if I order this, what if I? What if I don't like it as much as I might have liked that? And which one is healthier and which one, like I don't just intuitively go with what I feel my body desires and needs. Yeah, instead, I'm looking at well, this one's healthier, this one is going to taste better. I'm looking at the data, I'm looking at the. You're trying to analyze the menu. Right, I do it too. It's a simple.
Speaker 1:When I noticed it, when Sherwin I talk about this actually in my program too when Sherwin, I only noticed it when I sat down in a restaurant for the first time with Sherwin and actually this happened time and time again where he reads the menu as far, only as far, as the point where he gets to to till he sees something that he wants and I stopped the whole. And then he stops and then he closes the menu and says okay, I know what I want. I read the whole menu and I go okay, is it gluten free? Which one's healthy? Which one's vegan? What do I really want, though? But I shouldn't have that. Oh, and it's like and then and he gets so mad at me because it takes me so long to make a decision, and that was how I discovered that I'm over analyzing, right and so many women in my audience.
Speaker 1:They don't actually think they're over analyzers because they're senior leaders or they're like senior managers and they're not necessarily doing the analysis. So they don't necessarily think of themselves as over analyzers, but they often are, because they keep collecting data and more information to try to make a decision in the workplace, and it's the exact same thing as the menu. They eventually get to a point where they have so much information they can't make a decision. Yep, and it doesn't matter whether they're the ones doing the analysis or their team. They're asking their team to do this analysis and bringing them a report or a presentation, whatever it is. It doesn't matter that they're not, that they're at a leadership level, that they're not doing the work. They're still asking for the work so that they can make a better decision, and yet none of it is actually leading them to the right decision.
Speaker 1:Because they're not paying attention to their intuition. Well, and they're trying to get the answer in the numbers. Yeah, because they're not trusting, they're suppressing. First of all, they're suppressing their intuition and telling they've been taught that our intuition is not right, it's not relevant. Good enough, it's not relevant, that's a better word. And so we don't pay attention to it. And even if it keeps popping up, we'll still say get back over their intuition, because you're not welcome here. It's the numbers that are going to give me the answer. But then we also, because we're also shoving down our creativity.
Speaker 1:Problem solving is creativity, and so when you're looking for a solution to a problem, you first of all don't have the space, because you're so busy getting numbers but you're not open to other possibilities, so you're not in a space where you're like what else is possible? What else could we do here? You're not even asking those questions because you're so busy analyzing and trying to make a decision based on logic in the numbers. Yeah, well, and God forbid, if you don't make a decision using the numbers and it's wrong, then it's going to be really embarrassing. At least, if you made the decision based on the numbers, you've got backup Right.
Speaker 1:But the other thing you know what else I was thinking about when you're talking about so many things is that people always also said there's an art to decision making. Yeah, and nobody ever talked about that part of it as being intuition. But that's effectively what it is. That's true, yeah, and so so yeah again, if we're suppressing that, then we're not going to be able to ever make decisions and then, and even if we are in touch with our decision or our intuition, we're not listening to it, because that would be embarrassing in the workplace, especially in a man's workplace, like if a woman were to use her intuition to make a decision, then that could be shameful.
Speaker 1:So back to this creativity, part of it. One of the things that I talk about in my program is and just in my social media and stuff is that if we're so busy in action, we can't access our intuition, because we need to be silent to be able to access it. We don't get those great ideas when we're running around in a frenzy or juggling 100 different things at work. So we're disconnecting from that creativity with all of this wound trauma. But we're also disconnecting from it when we're trying to be action oriented and logical and fact based. So that's another like all of these things are just keeping us in this vicious cycle of being less effective. Yeah, it's. And then we don't get promoted, yeah, yeah, or we don't get that seat at the leadership table, or we don't get the respect that we want, or we don't get the credibility, whatever it is that you're looking for as a leader.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's fascinating how it's all connected. It's really, you know, how our physical, how you know? It's something like a pap smear Actually, like how do we go from that to our creativity at work? And yet there's a connection. It's all our emotions, our physical body, our intuition, our creativity, our ability to problem solve. It's all mental, physical, emotion. It's all connected, yeah, so how do we start to resolve the trauma, first of all, and reconnect with our creativity and intuition?
Speaker 1:Well, so I have a whole process for doing this, as you know. Yeah, maybe what? What we should do is give them the first step, which is something we were already talking about earlier, and that's just identifying. Like, let's just identify what are all those things that might be causing womb trauma. Just get out a piece of paper or journal and start listing them out, because once you actually like this really is the first step is becoming aware that that there's a link here, that there is such a thing as womb trauma, and then how might it be like? What are the things that might have affected you and your, your womb space? Once you are able to just identify that, things will start to open up. Obviously, you know I have a whole process for this. We can't it can't be covered in one podcast episode, but I think that's a really important first step and that can start to open things up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, when I started to write down all the ways that I believe I had been, either I had caused my own wound trauma or I had it kind of inflicted upon me, I had two pages of stuff, yeah, mm-hmm, and like the tears were running down my face and like it was a lot. I had no idea. Yeah, yeah, and it can be very cathartic, yeah, and I'll reiterate you know, if you're going through this process and you are alone and you've had like, you suddenly remember something that I want to say you I mean your listeners you know you come across something that you cannot handle. Like please seek out therapy, because this process can bring up a lot. It can be really cathartic, but it can also be too much so so, yeah, be aware of that and seek help if you are doing this on your own, you know.
Speaker 1:Another thing that I would recommend share is I read a book quite a long time ago called Women who Run With Wolves oh, yeah, by Clarissa Pinkles what's her name? I'll put it in the show notes because I can't remember. Yeah, I think it's called Double Barreled. Last Name Pinkola Estes, I think, and it was enlightening about how we disconnect from our feminine cycles, and I think that would be another good place for women to start to read more about this kind of stuff if they were interested. Yeah, I just read that, like not that long ago, like a couple months ago, okay, and I'm thinking about some of the stuff that I teach as well about connecting with creativity and intuition, and I can give an action step here, a really simple action step, and that is when you get up in the morning, don't get on social media. Instead, when you go like, get up to brush your teeth and get in the shower and all that stuff, think about how you are being nurtured in the shower and how you're nurturing yourself while you're brushing your teeth, and that will give you some space to have intuitive hits.
Speaker 1:Because, like what I used to do when I was in the shower is like I'd get up out of bed and I'd always be rushing, because I snooze my alarm 20 times before I can get out of the bed so I'd get up late for work. I'd get in the shower. I'd be thinking about. In the shower I'd be thinking about what am I going to wear? My plan for my lunch, my plan for the day, what's up for my day? I'd be already getting myself into work mode and just brushing all the creativity and ideas that we get in the shower. And I used to kind of I almost would laugh when people said, oh yeah, I get my greatest ideas in the shower. And I'd be like what? And now I do? I get great ideas when I'm lying in bed in the morning and I get great ideas in the shower. Because I stopped starting work from the second I woke up and I gave myself some grace to just be and have a great morning, just to be nurtured and just to nurture those creative ideas.
Speaker 1:The creativity needs to be nurtured, yeah, in the same way, and nurturing yourself is your room space is also the seat of self-worth, so that nurturing that, taking that time for yourself, is a show of self-love and a show of I am worthy of spending this time nurturing myself instead of jumping into all the things I need to do to get through the morning so that I can get to work. We didn't even talk about self-worth. Now that's a whole other episode. I know I think you're going to have to be a regular feature on this podcast. Okay, I like that action step, though. It's a great one. Simple, yeah, so two action steps. Go right down the ways that you've had room trauma. It doesn't matter if you think it's right or not. Just write anything down that comes to your mind and start nurturing yourself in the shower so that you nurture those creativities and you nurture your own self-worth. Yeah, I love it. Okay, so another step.
Speaker 1:Should we tell them what we were talking about before we got on this call? I think we should. We just came up with this idea and it's a way to take your this wound healing like a hundred steps further. You tell them, jen. Okay, while we were talking about this, before we hit record, we kind of had this twin tuition. I'm going to call it because Lea watches. Lea watches how to train your dragon raise to the edge, and there's a set of twins in that and they always call it twin tuition.
Speaker 1:So we had this combined moment of intuition and creativity ourselves as we were talking, and that is to create a combined womb healing retreat for women who want to be better leaders, or for women who want to be better leaders whether you're in corporate or you're an entrepreneur or you work in some it doesn't matter what you do for a living, or even if you're working for a living If you want to be more creative and intuitive and you want to get out of this masculinizing that I talk about and step into your feminine power and heal, so you can heal that and make intuitive decisions. We haven't even come up with exactly what this is going to look like, but we have decided to do a retreat together for women who want to dig deeper into this and heal themselves and relate it back to their working lives. Okay, this is Sherry. I'm going to stop rolling right there so that I can tell you that the womb healing retreat is on. It's going to be a virtual half day retreat on Sunday, march the third.
Speaker 1:So if you are someone who has been struggling to find meaning and purpose and or to tap into your creativity, your intuition, your worthiness, then you're going to want to join us, and this one is not. It is going to be transformational for childless women, but it's not just for childless women. All of us actually need womb healing, so share this and bring a friend with you. You can find all the details at SherryJohnsonca slash womb. I will link that up in the show notes so you don't have to worry about the spelling of Sherry. But in case you're wondering, it's S-H-E-R-I, one R and an I. It's a little unusual and so I hope you will join us. It is going to be transformational, as I said, and my sister Jen and I are so looking forward to it. And join me next week for another episode on the Awakening Worth podcast. It will be a solo episode, just me, and we'll see you then. Bye for now.