How Are You Gonna Be a “Medicine Woman” When You’re Scared of Your Own Womb?

When a woman is not at peace in her womb it is not possible for her to be at peace in any other aspect of her life.

Let me say this again:

It is impossible for a woman to be at peace, to be vibrant, to be aligned, to be in her juiciest and most creative expression of self if she is not at peace in her womb.

It is impossible for a woman to truly feel good in her body, in her relationships, in her work, in her spirit when her womb is not at peace.

This is not a woo-woo theory. This is literal female biology. And I am not speaking hypothetically. I am speaking from my lived experience of suffering in my womb space for the first 26 years of my life.

I am speaking as someone who experienced a large degree of sexual abuse since childhood and whose womb echoed the trauma of that abuse for over two decades. I am speaking as someone who struggled with chronic vaginal infections for 8 years. I am speaking as someone who was finally diagnosed with pelvic inflammatory disease after 9 months of pain, suffering, discomfort, embarrassment, fear, and sadness. I am speaking as someone who took hormonal birth control for 4.5 years and then had a copper IUD for another 3.5 years after that. I am speaking as someone who had horribly painful periods with horrendous cramps, heavy bleeding, ovarian cysts, and uterine abscesses.

I am speaking as someone who very aggressively and adamantly tried to divorce myself from womanhood and femaleness for the better part of 7 years when I claimed a non-binary identity. I am speaking as someone who believed that my womb made me vulnerable and weak. I am speaking as someone who enacted profound violence and hatred towards my female body for 26 years because I didn’t understand how truly powerful and divine it actually is to be a woman. I am speaking as someone whose self-hatred of womanhood was directly reflected in the state of my womb dis-ease.

Most importantly, however, is that I am speaking as someone who has healed.

I am speaking as someone who now has entirely painless periods. I am speaking as someone who has learned how to track my fertility and avoid pregnancy without hormonal contraceptives. I am someone who has learned to truly nourish my body and menstrual cycle with food and herbs. I am someone who has unlocked my deepest, most life-giving creative potential through an artistic practice that is directed related to the ease that I experience in my womb. I am speaking as someone who found my way back to womanhood, to femininity, to the sacredness of yin reverence, to MYSELF.

I am speaking as a woman who is walking the medicine path of the wise womb which is, at the end of the day, the life work of the medicine woman. But, to be explicitly clear, I am not special. I have not been “chosen”. I am no different from any other woman. Because the fact of the matter is that all women are medicine women who are meant to walk a wise womb path. Every single woman is capable of and destined to be fully aligned with the brilliant, ancestral, divinely crafted blueprint of female biology that begins and ends with our wombs.

Somewhere in every single one of our matriarchal lineages was a long line of medicine women who were the keepers and guardians of women’s medicine—that being the medicine of the womb. Every single one of us has female ancestors that understood how to work with plants to either prevent or promote pregnancy. Every single one of us has female ancestors who attended births and supported postpartum families. Every single one of us has ancestors that knew how to tend to heavy bleeding, painful cramps, pelvic prolapse, infertility, morning sickness, vaginal infections, and all the other healing symptoms that women experience in our bodies. Every single one of us comes from medicine women. Even if we have to look back 2, 3, 6, or 10 generations in our ancestral line, our ancient grandmothers are there waiting for us to call upon them and remember what it is that women have always known.

Nowadays, everybody wants to be a medicine man or a medicine woman and that’s not a “bad” or “wrong” thing. We all carry deep medicine inside of us in our songs, our prayers, our stories, our pains, our rebirths, our joys, our traumas, our laughter, and our tears. We are all overflowing with teachings to be shared, lessons that we carry in our hearts, instructions that have been stitched into our bones. No one person’s medicine is better or worse than another’s.

However, something that puzzles me is the rampant trend of women who want to help heal other women but who still have not taken the time to come into peace with their own wombs. This is not to say that you cannot be of service to other women if you are struggling with your womb, quite the opposite actually. For it is the struggles that we experience in our own bodies and the healing processes that we undergo that teach us that healing is even truly possible. And in the knowing that we have healed and/or are in the process of healing from these female reproductive ailments, we thus have deep medicine to share with our sisters, our daughters, our cousins, our neighbors, and our friends. But we have to begin with ourselves and ask, very honestly and very directly, “How the fuck am I gonna be a medicine woman for my community if I don’t know shit about my own womb???”

I say this as a woman who once tried to be of service to other women without being in service to my own womb first. I say this as a woman who fought with my womb for years while attempting to help other women heal theirs. I say this as a woman who was scared to go deep into the pain that I held within the life-giving portal that I carry inside of me. Scared to look at the trauma, the violence, the hatred, the sickness, the sadness, the true darkness that I held within my flesh. Scared of what, or rather who, I might find if I allowed myself to go deep inside and know myself for who I am, who I have been, and who I could potentially be. All of the answers to those questions were held in my womb and I wasn’t ready to go there. So instead, I distracted myself and avoided my true work by attempting to help other women heal something that I wasn’t yet capable of healing within myself.

But, this is a very real question that I continue to come back to: What is a medicine woman if not the tender of the womb and all of it’s magic? What is a medicine woman if not the initiatrix of the womb’s sacred rites of passage? What is a medicine woman if not the midwife who doesn’t intervene unnecessarily in births, the abortion doula who supports pregnancy release outside of the system, the fertility awareness educator who teaches women how to break away from the medical chains of hormonal contraceptives, the rape hotline volunteer who calmly accompanies a woman through one of the most horrifying experiences of her life, the pelvic floor therapist who helps a new mother resolve her bladder incontinence, the postpartum caregiver who cooks and cleans and supports the tender moments after the birth of a new family constellation?

What other medicine is needed, truly, for a woman to find peace?

Because the fact of the matter is this:

It doesn’t matter how many cups of ayahuasca you drink. It doesn’t matter how many Vipasana retreats you go to. I doesn’t matter how many years of therapy you’ve been in. It doesn’t matter how much chanting, ecstatic dancing, or kundalini kriyas that you do. You can do alllllllllll of the other healing work ~perfectly~ but it’s highly unlikely that it will resolve the deep seated pain, sadness, and suffering that your womb is still holding onto.

Now, to be clear, I’m not saying that all of these other healing modalities are useless. Quite the opposite actually! I was in talk therapy on-and-off for almost two decades and learned some immensely valuable tools and teachings that I still implement in my day-to-day life.

I’ve drank hundreds of cups of ayahuasca and some of my deepest healing has been facilitated through the experiences that I’ve had in ceremony. I pray the rosary. I pull tarot cards. I meditate. All of these things have and continue to have a beautiful impact on my wellbeing because they are all medicinal tools of reflection, curiosity, acceptance, and transformation.

However, what actually changed things for me was when I found the courage to put my hands on my womb and ask, “What the actual fuck is going on??”

And then…I listened.

I listened and I listened and I got scared but I listened some more and my body, feeling heard for the first time in it’s life, began to whisper it’s precious and sacred story.

Nothing and everything happened overnight.

My life changed in an instant. Slowly and also painfully fast.

My womb began telling me stories of my time in my mother’s belly. It told me of my grandmother’s heartbreak from losing so many children through miscarriage, stillbirth, and early childhood death. It told me of my cousin’s rape. It told me of my aunt’s abortion. It told me of my own childhood sexual abuse that I had completely blocked out for two decades. It told me of all of the women in my lineage who had experienced coercive and violent hospital births. It showed the root cause of so much suffering in my family for both the women and men alike. It showed me the sadness that we carried. The emptiness. The loneliness. The isolation. The despair. The brokenness. The chains of immeasurable pain that had remained deadly silent for countless generations.

These were dark time. Days that I wanted to die rather than see more of the truth. Nights and weeks and months where I felt like I was truly going insane. So many broken attempts to share what my womb was telling me with the people in my life. Deep loneliness, profound grief, immeasurable sadness, unending mourning. And, to be fully honest, it never got less painful. I just became more capable of holding the painful truth of it all. I became softer, more compassionate, more loving, more understanding, more forgiving, and more grateful for all that I had learned and experienced, for all that I held in my blood and cells and bones. I eventually found myself at peace in the darkness and I slowly remembered how to shine my light once more.

And when I found peace in my womb I could more easily find peace in my heart. When my world was turned upside down, time and time again, I placed my hands on my low belly and whispered, “Everything is going to be okay.” When I spent 6 months completely alone in the jungle with my elders, puking and purging my guts out in ceremony multiple times a week, I placed my hands on my low belly and cried out, “I am going to be okay.” When my painful periods had me glued to the bed for the first three days of my bleed every month, I put my hands on my low belly and prayed, “Dear God, please tell what it is that I need to know for my womb to be okay.”

And the truth was and is that everything is always okay. All of that suffering and pain and horror and trauma and evil and sadness and hatred and rage and self-abandonment and disrespect…all of it was and is and always will be okay.

And okay doesn’t mean enjoyable. Okay doesn't mean excusable. Okay doesn't mean recommendable or amenable. Okay simply means that I am no longer fighting against the reality of the past and present versions of my lived experience. Okay means that I’ve accepted my circumstances and histories and genetic inheritances for what they are. Okay means that I am devoting my energy to co-creating a more joyous, aligned, and sovereign future for myself and my lineage based on all that I have learned through the suffering of our collective wombs.

For the truth of the matter is this:

If I had never been raped, I would not know how to walk alongside other women who have been sexually violated themselves.

If I had never struggled through my 8 years of medicalized “birth control” and the vast plethora of reproductive health issues that followed, I would never be able to counsel women who are currently in the process of transitioning off of hormonal contraceptives.

If I did not come from a lineage of traumatic and coercive hospital births, I would not know the true value and importance of supporting women in their desire to birth at home outside of the medical system.

If my own mother had had a truly nurturing, loving, and supported postpartum period after any of her three births, I would not understand how profoundly vital and non-negotiable it is to create a strong and stable community network of care that centers around the health of the MotherBaby dyad.

If my grandmother had not lost so many children, I would have no idea how to comfort a bereaved mother who would rather die herself than swallow the death of her own child.

There is true magic in the pain. There is deep medicine in the suffering.

And what is a medicine woman if not one who is unafraid of the dark? An elder, a teacher, a birth shaman, a wise woman who has walked into the forest alone at midnight and come out on the other side with sharper eyes and a softer heart? And what is the womb if not the portal of divine, mysterious, ineffable darkness that births LIFE//LIGHT into this world? How can I, how can any of us, claim to walk a medicine woman path if we are so afraid of our own bodies, our own power, our own magic?

And, so, I ask myself, again and again, every morning and every night, “Claire, how can you make peace with all that you carry inside of you? How can you come home to yourself even deeper? How can you meet your fears with tenderness, discipline, and acceptance? Claire, when will you become the elder, the wise woman, the one who walks in service of girlhood, sisterhood, maidenhood, motherhood, and womanhood?”

And, as always, the answer is so simple and so sweet: I will lovingly place my hands on my womb and listen, once more.