Monday, January 11, 2021

How to Tap Into the Power of Your Pelvic Bowl with Tami Lynn Kent [Episode #541]

Tami Lynn Kent [Podcast #541] Blog Graphic for How to Tap Into the Power of Your Pelvic Bowl with Tami Lynn Kent on the Feel Good Podcast with Kimberly Snyder.

This week’s topic is: How to Tap Into the Power of Your Pelvic Bowl with Tami Lynn Kent

I am so excited to have my very special guest, Tami Lynn Kent, who is the author of Wild Feminine, Wild Creative & Mothering from Your Center and the Founder of Holistic Pelvic Care & training program. You’re going to learn about the pelvic bowl, about this part of our body and our energetic center and how it affects your ability to be creative and empowered in your life.

[BULLETS]

  • Tami shares some backstories on raising three boys and the male energy when her healing work is female dominant…
  • The differences in raising girls versus boys…
  • What the feminine is and how to be in touch with it…
  • Tami and I discuss how we define beauty…
  • How to reconcile with the heart opening when it comes to our creative power…
  • What the pelvic bowl is and how to take care of it…
  • Learn to heal some of this ‘wanting to control’ everything…

[FEATURED GUESTS]

Tami Kent on the Feel Good Podcast with Kimberly Snyder.

About Tami Lynn Kent 

Tami Lynn Kent is the founder of Holistic Pelvic Care for women and author of Wild Feminine: Finding Power, Spirit & Joy in the Female Body. Tami is passionate about empowering women in health & teaching them how to cultivate their creative energy in all stages of life through her practitioner training programs and personal sessions. She is also a mother to three beautiful sons.

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[❤️ FAN OF THE WEEK]

Tami Kent interviw Fan of the Week on the Feel Good Podcast with Kimberly Snyder.

[RESOURCES]

Tami Lynn Kent’s Interview

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Transcript:

Note: The following is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate. This is due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.

Kimberly : 00:01 Hi Beauties. Welcome back to our Monday interview podcast. I am very excited for this podcast today. Our guest is someone who I tracked down after I read her book and became very interested in her work. Her name is Tami Lynn Kent, and she is the author of Wild Feminine. She’s the founder of holistic pelvic care and training programs around her whole philosophy.

Kimberly : 00:26 So today, you’re going to learn about the pelvic bowl, about this part of our body and our energetic center and how it affects your ability to be creative and empowered in your life. Her work is fascinating, and I cannot wait to get into this interview with you today and to share it.

Fan of the Week

Kimberly : 00:45 But before we get into it, I’m going to share our Fan of the Week. Her or his name is Everyday Lunchtime Listen. He or she writes, “Listen to this daily. I listen to this daily on my work breaks when I’m out for a jog or a walk with my dog. This podcast has timely topics and introspection and it creates for me every day. It creates introspection for me every day. Please keep the episodes coming.”

Leave a Review and Subscribe on Itunes

Kimberly : 01:14 All right, Everyday Lunchtime Listen, well, thank you so much for your review. I am so grateful for you and for being part of our community. I send you a huge virtual hug and thank you again so much. And Beauties, for your chance to also be shouted out as our Fan of the Week, for me to read your beautiful words, please leave us a review on iTunes, which is free and easy and just a wonderful way to support the show.

Kimberly : 01:39 While you’re over there, please be sure to subscribe to the show and that way you never miss out on any of these amazing interviews, our solo cast shows or our Thursday Q&A community shows. All right. All of that being said, let’s get into our interview today with the incredible, fascinating Tami Lynn Kent.

Interview with Tami Lynn Kent

Kimberly: 00:00:35 Yes. So, thank you so much, Tami, for coming on. I am-

Tami Kent: 00:00:39 For sure.

Kimberly: 00:00:39 … fascinated with your work. I have been very excited for this interview. I read your entire book I think over a weekend, which is a lot for me because-

Tami Kent: 00:00:52 You just dove in. Yeah.

Kimberly: 00:00:55 I dove in. I’m also a boy mom.

Tami Kent: 00:00:57 Oh, you are.

Kimberly: 00:00:59 Our baby is about six months, and then we have a four year old boy too.

Tami Kent: 00:01:07 I’m just seeing what it looks like. So you know that, and yeah, you’re in the early… So four year old is like the wild thing face. They’re like…

Kimberly: 00:01:15 Wild and with the pandemic there is no preschool for him now.

Tami Kent: 00:01:20 Oh my goodness.

Kimberly: 00:01:21 It was a lot during the pregnancy, of course, and the aftermath. But I also value this time. I feel like it’s magical that I get to be with him so much. But it’s been a lot. And your book came to me at a time where there was just so much going on for me. And I’m writing my sixth book right now, in the process, had the baby, running the business, doing the podcast, and then this book came in and there was all these messages about the left, which we’ll get into, and the yin and the beingness.

Tami shares some backstories on raising three boys and the male energy when her healing work is female dominant

Tami Kent: 00:01:54 Yeah. For sure. There’s so much. Yeah. Oh, God. And I always feel, it’s funny, people will say to me like, “Too bad you didn’t have a girl.” because I’ve got three boys, and really, this pertains so much to males too and it’s like the women are actually more whole in a lot of ways because they have permission to look at all these different things. And it’s amazing how the feminine gets shut down in males really early on.

Tami Kent: 00:02:18 You’ve probably seen it a little bit, but I feel like I started to see it when my oldest went to school, and not as much in preschool, but in kindergarten and then beyond it was like, oh, the world is going to shut you down in your feminine and not even realize, especially, I mean, this is a whole nother thing, but it’s like from a feminist perspective. So it’s like strong girls and you think there’s a lot of good messages, but then there’s this shutting down that’s happening, yet we want males to be strong but then we’re shutting down the part of them that is sensitive. There’s so many layers to that.

Kimberly: 00:02:49 Tami, how old are your boys now?

Tami Kent: 00:02:52 Well, I have a 20 year old. And I was just going to ask you, because he’s ba… Yeah. He is back from college, living. We have an ADU thankfully. We built this little house because of the pandemic, so he’s working. He’s online and he’s also doing music, which is really awesome. So there’s a whole bunch of stuff happening there. But he’s lifting weights right below me. I don’t think you can hear it.

Kimberly: 00:03:13 [inaudible 00:03:13] but I’ll let you know if he does. It’s so funny.

Tami Kent: 00:03:17 He’s like…

Kimberly: 00:03:18 My husband is a weight lifter too.

Tami Kent: 00:03:18 Speaking of male energy. Yeah.

Kimberly: 00:03:21 And speaking of the male energy, Tami, it’s so funny when you were saying that because recently I was talking to my husband about feeling to his body. And that’s a very foreign concept to him. I think comparing the spectrum of a lot of males he’s more in touch with his feelings, but he started to feel this deep uneasiness in his core, in his stomach, and he just said, “I didn’t even know that was there. I didn’t know there was so much in my body.”

Tami Kent: 00:03:48 Oh, my God. Yeah, I mean… I’m just trying to make the lighting better in this room. It’s a little dark. But there’s so much, and I didn’t realize how much. So I have a 20 year old, a 17 year old, and a 13 year old. So I’m in definitely the older mom vibe, which is another… It just keeps going is all I can say. The things I’ve witnessed, it’s just a trip.

Tami Kent: 00:04:11 I think the early part is them having a container with someone who’s in tune with their body, and a lot of males don’t have that. And so I didn’t realize how much my boys would need to be held and want to be touched, and that continued all the way up until about when testosterone hit and then they were kind of like… distance. And they still snuggle with dogs and I think it transposes into relationships and stuff, but they needed a lot of touch and so much of it is unconscious, those early couple years from zero to four.

Tami Kent: 00:04:42 When I work with women’s bodies I’m often doing healing in that realm, but then because I… I mostly work with women, but I can work with men’s energy, I just don’t really have time, but I have males so I get to witness how sensitive they are but how less verbal. They can be verbal but it’s like… So I guess part of the secret of healing males is having mothers that give them permission to be touched and held in their body. So that’s where their safety comes from first.

Tami Kent: 00:05:10 And I nursed and touched and held and we did a lot of co-sleeping, and not that you need to co-sleep or anything, but it was just a lot of body contact and a body permission. And so when that gets shut down, which you get shut down for a lot of men because the mother isn’t comfortable in her own body and then pushes them off too early, they don’t have a container. And I think they find it sometimes through a partner later, but it never quite feels grounded and safe.

Tami Kent: 00:05:37 And one thing I feel really good about is my boys all have a really good connection to that center point. And I can say since I was there that I know how much was given for that, but it’s… this is so many threads, but when my oldest was one years old I caretaked another daughter, I mean, another girl with a friend of mine who we were like trading, so I got to be with a little girl, and it was interesting because we were together every week for about two years, this little one, and I got to hold her and touch her. And I was a lot more comfortable with touch. I guess later when I saw her when she was older we chatted and she didn’t have any really memory of being in our home, it’s like, because it was from a certain age. And so much of our-

Kimberly: 00:06:45 Wow.

Tami Kent: 00:06:45 … early time is founded on that contact yet we don’t have conscious memory of it.

Kimberly: 00:06:51 So, Tami, I want to say that, when you were saying there’s so much that resonated with me, I nursed my first son to almost four until I was so pregnant with this one that my doctor was like, “Oh, it’s probably a good idea to stop now.” And then we just moved Moses out of co-sleeping in our bed at six months. We were just keeping each other up so much. But this idea of touch has been very central to my mothering. And I wasn’t sure if it was because we parent sometimes to heal ourselves, and I didn’t receive a lot of touch as a child.

The differences in raising girls versus boys

Kimberly: 00:07:26 So I guess my question for you, we’re talking a lot about giving touch to your boys, do you think that is the same for girls, because you didn’t have a daughter? But I was also really curious because in Wild Feminine you talked about there was a point in your life where you didn’t want to have a girl, you actually loved having boys, so can you talk a little bit about that too and then also raising girls.

Tami Kent: 00:07:49 Yeah, sure. I would say I think I was afraid of my own wounding and my own wounding around the feminine, and boys somehow seem safer. This is all unconscious. But that’s why I think I end up on this journey with the feminine really delving and I’m really exploring it and then realizing it pertained to the males just as much, just as much to the boys as to the girls, it just has a little different shape to it. So I think females often get it co-opted so we think… Like I thought lipstick and high heels, that was feminine, it can be, but it’s when it comes from the inside.

Tami Kent: 00:08:22 So the thing I started to differentiate as I worked with women’s bodies, as I came into contact with my own body, as I had sons, was that feminine is a way of receiving energy. So feminine is a way of downloading energy, and it’s where all creativity comes from I would say. So it is something that artists and people who create are in touch with, and there is an element of color and brightness to it.

Tami Kent: 00:08:48 Before I was in touch with the feminine personally I wore more black and tan. Those were my go-to colors. And I actually love black. I love black as a color in clothing, but I just wasn’t even aware of color. And so as I started delving into the feminine then I would go through phases of color, like blue, like this bright turquoise or red and just everything started… I was like this bag is not bright enough for me. And so I started to understand from the inside what an artist might feel like or someone who has kept the feeling of artist alive. They’re just like, everything is a lot of color.

Tami Kent: 00:09:26 And when I saw this in my children, so like little girls sometimes will be sparkly, princess, all that kind of… So mothers do shape this. So there’s a level of responsibility or curiosity or whatever you want to call it. I always think we should be really loving with ourselves and not be judgmental, because mothers get enough of this, but there is a place where we can protect it and bring it forward, and it’s in that early time.

Tami Kent: 00:09:51 So mothers have a different, depending on their own relationship, and you’re right, your wounding impacts a lot of things, so some mothers are like, they love that sparkly energy and they celebrate it, others are like, oh my god, you shouldn’t be a princess, you should be a knight or… So there’s all kinds of ways we reject or work with these things. And I think the more we can be free in it the better, but we have to do our own healing.

Tami Kent: 00:10:14 And so with my boys I think all this was unconscious for me that I just hadn’t really delved into it. So once I started to delve into it and play with it and then realize that boys had it, it was a permission level for them too of their own beauty. And so all of my boys love their own style, their own expression, and there was a lot of permission to explore that. And still I feel like I have to hold it open, because at first they were very free in it, whether they’d put on costumes or they’d like [inaudible 00:10:45].

What the feminine is and how to be in touch with it

Kimberly: 00:10:46 Tami, I got to tell you, my son hasn’t worn clothes, I think, in 14 months or 15 months. He has a million costumes. And I’m really surprised how many people say to me, “Oh, wow, you really let him wear costumes all the time.” It doesn’t feel weird to me. That’s what he wants to wear. Who cares? He’s four, just let him wear what he wants.

Tami Kent: 00:11:07 That’s a beautiful expression, keep that open as long as possible. The world will shut it down, so it’s like the more you can keep it open… And it starts in the home where you have permission.

Tami Kent: 00:11:16 And I tell a story in Wild Feminine about pink boots, my oldest son picking out pink boots and that story. But I thought it was so awesome but the store person was pretending they were out of his size, but I was like who cares, of course, and I thought we were all good and then I came home and my husband was like, “Why did you let him pick out pink boots?” And I just felt so shut down, but then I realized he was trying to protect him because he had the male experience of walking in the world and being shut down.

Tami Kent: 00:11:42 So, again, there’s so many layers of growth around this, but for me it started out, I’m going to just keep this open for my son, and then it was through my husband’s eyes, oh, I see, right, they’re going to run into all these layers. And he was trying to prepare him so he wouldn’t get hurt. And then we had lots of dialogues around, well, how do we prepare him to actually encounter it and keep part of himself intact and not just shut it down for safety, and oh, so many layers. But the conversation just keeps going.

Tami Kent: 00:12:11 And there is a lot around touch. And what I noticed, so I just got to parent one little girl for a little while for a couple years, she was in my heart, this little one, but what I’ve noticed-

Kimberly: 00:12:20 How old was she at the time?

Tami Kent: 00:12:22 What’s that?

Kimberly: 00:12:23 How old was she, Tami, when you are talking?

Tami Kent: 00:12:24 She was six months older than Nick. So Nick was six months when we started, she was a year and we had this relationship for about two years. Still she’s near and dear to my heart, beautiful young woman now, but amazing how much they don’t really recall from that period when we had a chance to sit, because they went separate ways because they were in different schools and you know how life goes. And so we got together later when she was about to go to college and they just had almost no memory and I had held them and touched them, everything.

Kimberly: 00:12:52 But their memory is deeper.

Tami Kent: 00:12:55 Totally. Okay. There is a memory because she reached out to connect, but there isn’t a conscious memory. And so it’s another reason why I feel so protective of that time and space, even around diapering and things like that, I wanted it to be always loving and positive language so that they wouldn’t feel shamed. And there’s so many layers to this. And what you were saying earlier about the co-sleeping, I always think, yes, we might repair our wounding through touch with our children but when it’s child-led, when the child is craving, I think really we’re wired for touching connection.

Tami Kent: 00:13:28 And I remember listening to this talk from this man who, he’s an amazing photographer who did some of the last photos of tribes around the world that were maybe more isolated and not as much contact, and they’re these beautiful pictures where he got permission to come in and photograph, but I listened to him talking one time and he said that someone was asking him, “How were you changed by this experience?”

Tami Kent: 00:13:50 And he said, “Well, one of the things was contact and bed sharing, and when I came into a tribe everyone slept together and they expected to sleep with us.” And so he had to shed his Western concept around that and then came to love it. And they came to, as a family, he had two daughters that they grew up through this process, and they came to really have a family bed. And that was the experience.

Tami Kent: 00:14:12 And so I think in a way we’ve shut down what is normal and so this is a repair, but it is hard to find the way. It’s like, what is normal if you don’t know what it is? So there can be a way we repair through wounding, but at the same time children will lead searching for touch. Touch and contact for them is like food.

Kimberly: 00:14:30 It’s a nourishment.

Tami Kent: 00:14:31 It’s nourishment. And I think we’re in a touch deficient culture in the Western world and so it’s about shifting that lens. And what I found was my kids soaked up as much as I could give pretty much. And so the difference might be though for a mother, I want to make sure mothers always feel permission, if you’re not getting sleep, it’s not like what you should do… You should sleep with your child, you should wear your child, it’s also honoring your own boundaries and your own needs. So, some people just don’t sleep well with their child.

Kimberly: 00:15:03 Yeah, I mean, it got to-

Tami Kent: 00:15:04 So there’s that.

Kimberly: 00:15:05 … the point where for the first six months it was fine and then he just did very much feel childlike. He just felt more fussy, and then, why don’t we put him in his own crib? He just rolled over. That was the first day. It was like, thanks, mom, for my space. So I think every child is different.

Kimberly: 00:15:21 And one thing, Tami, you were talking about struck me, when you said, “What is really normal?” So I look at my son Emerson, my older, that I was telling you about that wears costumes all the time, but he wears costumes or he prefers to be completely naked.

Tami Kent: 00:15:35 Naked.

Kimberly: 00:15:35 I just think, oh my gosh, where was that point where we started to have body awareness, because he doesn’t have… He just comes home, if we’re out somewhere wearing a costume, he just peels everything off, he peels his underwear off and he just loves to… We live here in the mountains. I feel protective of that. At some point he’s going to school and it is weird, so that kind of… I don’t know, I feel a little sadness about knowing that innocence is going to end at some point.

Tami Kent: 00:16:04 Yes. Yeah. I think I had to make peace with the way the world is whereas I think some of those stories and what I share is my early awareness, was, oh, I’m going to keep this open, but I’m only one imprint in many.

Tami Kent: 00:16:16 So the beautiful thing about being a mother that’s aware of the power of the feminine, so meaning that space where all children feel their beauty, feel their connection to the mystery, feel alive, that to me is what the feminine is. It can be sparkly or lipstick or color for someone, but it’s not when the outer world puts it in, it’s when you feel it from the inside. So, the more you can keep that open for the early years as a child the better, because then they have a secure foundation in it.

Tami Kent: 00:16:44 And if you don’t even know what I’m talking about, that’s why I wrote Wild feminine, to help all people pick that back up again, like what is my relationship with the feminine? And my hope is that we come more into relationship, because when you’re in touch with the feminine you have less need to take that beauty from someone else, you really feel your own.

Tami Kent: 00:17:05 It is in everyone. It’s everyone’s birthright to feel that aliveness. So keep it as much as you can, and then, yes, the world will have its impact. And it has just offered a lot of rich dialogue, and I’ve had to make peace with it and also trust my children’s strength that they will navigate it in their own ways.

Tami Kent: 00:17:23 And part of having sons is I don’t understand the full experience of being a male in this culture, so I share and I try to keep that door cracking open and that self love and that connection to beauty and creativity and all that. And then when they run into barriers around that or judgment we dialogue, but sometimes they have their own take on it or their own way of working it out. And so part of the growth is really trusting that they can do that too, that they have the capacity to work it out in ways for themselves.

Tami and I discuss how we define beauty

Kimberly: 00:17:52 So, Tami, you’ve used the word beauty a few times, which is something that we explore here a lot in the community, something I’ve explored a lot in my journey of thinking. The world talks about beauty out here and hair products and how skinny we are and all this stuff, but now for me when you think about Yogananda and Rumi and the spiritual meaning of beauty, to me beauty is about connecting in with our essence, with our unique expression of the divine inside of us. It’s such a different way of looking at beauty than most of us have been raised. How do you define beauty, Tami?

Tami Kent: 00:18:28 Yeah. I mean, I think of beauty as the mystery and the life force that moves through every person. So it really is-

Kimberly: 00:18:34 It’s really inside.

Tami Kent: 00:18:34 It’s spirit. It’s like it’s the breath. And so much of what I do even… so here I am a pelvic floor physical therapist working in the bowl, often working on issues even [crosstalk 00:18:44]-

Kimberly: 00:18:44 Which I want to talk about next, we haven’t even gotten to.

Tami Kent: 00:18:46 I know. Well, there’s so much there. But that’s what I work on, right? But I feel like what I really do is give people permission to feel and receive their beauty. So it’s such a needed repair because it has gotten into this external way. And this is even part of the repair of the feminine, is a lot of people aren’t in touch with their own essence and so we become marketed to and there’s all these things. And…

Kimberly: 00:19:12 That’s right.

Tami Kent: 00:19:13 … not that you can’t enjoy some products and things, but it’s that the more you realize it’s your birthright, it is the divine force that moves through you. It’s the breath of life, and it’s meant to move through you and move you into your work in the world and your connections with others. And so it’s really about permission and access to that I would say.

Kimberly: 00:19:33 Beautiful. So, Tami, I was reading your work and there’s so… Again, it was just lighting up so much in me because I have a yoga background, I’m a yoga practitioner and teacher and it’s such a big part of my life. And I feel that so much of my meditations is focusing on my third eye, opening the crown, opening up the heart, the anahata chakra, and then I think, oh, the “lower chakras”-

Tami Kent: 00:20:01 Oh my God.

How to reconcile with the heart opening when it comes to our creative power

Kimberly: 00:20:01 … the muladhara, svadhisthana, yeah, that’s there, but I never valued it as much. So I guess my first question to you before we get really granular with the pelvic bowl is the muladhara is the root, svadhisthana is the sacral. It seems the pelvic bowl works within those two areas. And I guess my first question when we talk… You talk about so much of our creative power and our radiance coming from here, how do you reconcile those centers with the heart opening, the third eye opening that’s such a big part of yoga and other practices?

Tami Kent: 00:20:35 Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the more I’ve worked on the body the more I look at it from an oriental medicine perspective of the chief flow through the body. So, of course, I am a Western trained physical therapist and there’s a specialty of that called women’s health physical therapy, which people may or may not know about, I mean, I didn’t even know about it till the last little bit of my graduate training.

Tami Kent: 00:20:56 And I’m super excited because I love midwifery and all things that are female, but there’s also a lot of baggage around particularly our pelvic bowl which I explore in a lot of different ways. But what I found was also there was this power and this beauty in the space and it was more about how do we access it, how do we clear this off. And so I started looking at the ch’i or the life force that moves through the body.

Tami Kent: 00:21:20 And one of the ways that I think maybe I can explain it, might be helpful, is there’s three deep reservoirs in the body, there’s the head, the heart, and the bowl, and they sync up. So it’s like the third eye, the heart-

Kimberly: 00:21:33 The heart, the bowl. Okay.

Tami Kent: 00:21:33 … and the bowl and the womb. So there’s a really powerful ch’i connection between the heart and the womb. And in oriental medicine it’s said that women have two hearts, the heart in the chest and the heart in the pelvis. And if you think about it, those organs are very similar, the womb and the heart, they have even a similar shape. And where does our heartbeat start? It starts in the womb, right? So our heart is deeply connected to the womb, and so sinking those up. And that’s another-

Kimberly: 00:22:01 And so, Tami-

Tami Kent: 00:22:01 Yeah.

Kimberly: 00:22:03 … does the head include the throat, the throat chakra?

Tami Kent: 00:22:05 I mean, I think of it as a connecting point. So I really think of it like a reservoir and then a river, and then a reservoir, and then a river, and then a reservoir. That’s how I tend to think of it. And so-

Kimberly: 00:22:15 So the river would run through the solar plexus, the [crosstalk 00:22:18].

Tami Kent: 00:22:19 Exactly. And you can think of the different chakras for sure, but the deep reservoir is really… The third is so powerful in how we vision and it helps if you line these three up.

Tami Kent: 00:22:31 So women were the visionaries for the tribes, and so we are the ones who really see on different levels, which is why, I think you were asking me a little bit about daughters and sons, there’s many genders, so I won’t even get into that layer, but just if you have a daughter or if you have a son, daughters do have this capacity, and I think a lot of transgender folks do too, this ability to be centered in their… to take the vision and the love and the creativity. And it’s why communities often orient around a female, because we have this ability.

Tami Kent: 00:23:04 And so when you sync up your head, so your inner vision, with what you love, with then the root, what you’re creating, that’s how we move forward into a time where we’re really taking care of the community in ways that honor the feminine for everyone.

Kimberly: 00:23:22 Wow.

Tami Kent: 00:23:23 And I do think you’re right, people have been either too spirit or too body and they’re not… If you’re totally in your body you can’t even feel spirit. What’s the mystery? I mean, it’s hard to access. And then other people are so in the mystery and the spirit but they really can’t get down to the body, and we’re supposed to run through. Spirit comes down, body comes up, and they meet and mix in us.

Kimberly: 00:23:50 It took me a while to get that, Tami, because, like I said, I was always up here and I felt very comfortable in meditation being up here until I started realizing we’re meant to be having an embodied experience that is not really in my body. So then when I started to connect, and there’s a lot of work I’m still doing around here…

Tami Kent: 00:24:10 Yeah, absolutely. Of course. Yeah.

What the pelvic bowl is and how to take care of it

Kimberly: 00:24:12 So maybe could you explain a little bit, Tami, about… People listening are probably like, what is the pelvic bowl and-

Tami Kent: 00:24:18 I know.

Kimberly: 00:24:18 … integrated pelvic care? Can you explain a little bit, because it does span that root and that sacral. Tell us about it please.

Tami Kent: 00:24:27 Yeah. [inaudible 00:24:28] my model here, I guess I would just say maybe look up the anatomy a little bit. There’s a couple things, one is, so when I first came into women’s health physical therapy I was working on symptoms. So women can have symptoms with the pelvis. So they can have urine leakage or they can have pelvic heaviness or they can have postpartum issues or they can have-

Kimberly: 00:24:47 Prolapsed uterus.

Tami Kent: 00:24:47 … pain. Yeah, prolapse pain. There can be symptoms that drive the care, right? And so then I started working on women’s bodies, and what I really found was a deep lack of care and that the symptoms had maybe gone on subtly in a long time and now they were to the level that they needed care. The deeper issue is the lack of proper care for our bodies as women on so many levels that may be too much to get into, but really we need to have better care with our bodies.

Tami Kent: 00:25:20 The other thing is to say, I think the patriarchy, which is not male or female, it’s a system that doesn’t include respect and honoring of the feminine, has subtly cut off the power by shaming and traumatizing this space. So we don’t even want to go there, right? We don’t want to go down in the root. And so on a subtle level it might be, uh, my period, or, uh, that part of the body, or the over-sexualization or the trauma, but it creates a disconnect.

Tami Kent: 00:25:50 And so I got to sit in the pelvic bowl with woman after woman after woman after woman who really wasn’t present because of many factors. And so there was this deep disconnect and also a complete lack of awareness of how to take care of that space.

Tami Kent: 00:26:04 Okay. So when I was working that’s what led me, even though I was in a repair mode, a fixer mode, into a deeper question of, I could feel the power in the space and my question was, why aren’t we here, why aren’t we here? Well, that’s a very long, probably ancestral, answer. So the antidote is to come down to the bowl, get to know it, and start taking care of it. And so one piece is just looking up the anatomy and get to know the muscles a little bit. And I teach women the anatomy of the pelvic space, and oftentimes it’s the first time they’ve really thought about it.

The concept of over-sexualization in peoples work

Kimberly: 00:26:40 But, Tami, I want to get into that because I did try your vaginal massage. Before we get in you said something very interesting, which was, you hit on this concept of over-sexualization which we see rampant in society today. So there’s tremendous power here but can you explain a little bit. There’s some women that are like, “I’m a feminist, so I’m allowed to be naked and to be overly sexual.” And then there’s some people that may not realize that they’re leading with that all the time that their work is so tied up in their sexuality. So, [crosstalk 00:27:15].

Tami Kent: 00:27:16 Yeah, I mean, the key piece in all that is embodiment. And many times I’ve worked with women who felt or thought they were empowered but actually they were subtly abusing themselves. And they were seeking valuation through a trade, like I’ll give you this, can I be valued? So an embodied place would be I am inherently valuable, I am inherently already have everything I need and therefore I’m moved creatively to share myself, and that’s a little different. It just has a different quality.

Tami Kent: 00:27:49 And so that’s where I think it is tricky, because people might feel like they’re empowered, but they’re actually lacking. And some of that you have to just read energetically, I mean, I would have to work with each person so we can’t generalize too much, but every person might look within themselves, am I seeking value for something I already have, am I trying to trade…

Kimberly: 00:28:11 Right. And they’re not in touch with the fact that they already have that. So it’s like slowly, slowly let me show more, let’s say, on social media, let me take off more clothes, trading it for likes, attention, money, whatever.

Tami Kent: 00:28:26 And the problem is-

Kimberly: 00:28:26 It’s such a big thing in our society, Tami. I worry about younger generations of girls that are getting on social media so young.

Tami Kent: 00:28:31 Right. Well, and they’re not embodied so they’re not even really protected. The other thing is, so if you’re really embodied in your feminine, you have your own inner feminine, your own inner masculine, your own inner masculine will protect that feminine. And so often, in that case, you’re not embodied so you’re not even in touch with how you really feel in your feminine. The feminine tends to be more private, at least part of the… in a cyclical way, and needs internal checking.

Tami Kent: 00:29:00 And it’s very much a contact with self first, so if you’re too external… And there’s different personalities and ways of working, but a lot of times people are moving out of wounding rather than true form. And when you’re moving out of wounding it means you’re seeking something that you feel like you’re missing on a deep level, and it can be that desire for… If you didn’t get a lot of contact you seek it in this way. I hold this with a lot of love because I’ve sat with more than 10,000 women, so I’ve-

Kimberly: 00:29:29 Oh my God.

Tami Kent: 00:29:30 … heard everything you can imagine. And so many women feel, I mean, are moving from their wounding patterns rather than their true authentic nature. So it’s about repairing that so that you get to download what you’re seeking out here, you get to download, and then it’s a different movement. Yeah. It’s a different movement, has a different quality to it.

Kimberly: 00:29:52 It’s true. It’s an energy that you can send sometimes, it’s hard to put into words, but there’s something that feels different when someone’s coming from, as you said, an embodied place of sharing versus almost like a desperate seeking. It’s different.

Tami Kent: 00:30:09 Right. And I think for some people sexuality is their journey and their path. They’re working these things out in different ways. So it’s not necessarily a negative thing, it’s just… Ideally people can get more in touch with their own needs and their own feminine container so that they are not actually adding to their wounding, because sometimes that is happening too.

Tami Kent: 00:30:31 And so, I mean, I’ve worked with women that work as strippers, and there’s a range, you can’t ever say all these people are like this. I’ve worked with a range of women too, women who feel pretty embodied in that experience to women who are really working out of trauma, past with trauma and kinds of things. And, in general, when you are in that realm you’re going to get a lot of projection on you too that isn’t necessarily healthy, and so whether or not you’re protecting yourself properly. There’s just so many… We could go down a rabbit hole with that.

If we all have wounds from our childhood

Kimberly: 00:31:06 Working with 10,000 people, would you say it’s a true statement that everybody has some sort of wound from their childhood?

Tami Kent: 00:31:13 For sure. Yes. Also being in a female body there’s just history of wounding to the female body. There’s a deep dishonoring of the female body. Really. Okay. So, there’s so many things to this, but women’s bodies are sacred, we are the downloaders, we are the ones that download life and we also download the energy. And so when I’ve talked to more native people who are living a little bit more intact there’s a few places where I found that there’s a whole belief of literally the women are downloading the truth.

Tami Kent: 00:31:47 So, for example, I talked about this in my TED talks, I thought it was important to have this perspective, but Don Eligio is a healer that was a Belizian shaman, and he worked with a teacher of mine, and it’s a long story, but he told her something that I asked if I could pass on in my books, and that was that his people used to sit around the fire in the morning and listen to the dreams of the menstruating women for guidance.

Kimberly: 00:32:15 [crosstalk 00:32:15] that in the book a little bit, just the seer.

Tami Kent: 00:32:17 Yeah. I put it in the book and I put it in the TED talk because it blew my Western mind. It was like, first of all, I have to come through my own layers of… There’s a lot of disconnect and shame, and you go try to get a menstrual product and it’s all about perfume because of the smell, and there’s just lots of subtle layers that separate us from the power.

Tami Kent: 00:32:34 So hearing that story of the leadership of the village listening to the dreams of menstruating women, it’s like imagine that, imagine our leadership in this country listening, saying, “Hi, you have knowledge coming through you.” That just blew my mind in so many ways, because the patriarchal system says the knowledge is outside of us, it’s not in us. And there are subtle parts to that and there are traumatic parts to that. But reclaiming your own download capacity and understanding the womb is a portal is a major shift. And when you do that you just move from a whole different place.

Tami Kent: 00:33:12 So a lot of my work, I rarely see women in contact with that, very rarely. It’s rare that someone comes in with that, even when we’ve done lots of spiritual work and energy work, because, like you were saying, a lot of it’s up here but not down here, or they’ve done tantra work and it’s super sexual but it’s not necessarily connected to spirit. And so it’s just so rare. So a lot of what I do is help women sort through that baggage that is ancestral, it is cultural, it is subtle messages, it is outright trauma, but it’s all dissociating us from this powerful place.

Tami Kent: 00:33:52 So the hope and the beauty is that I’ve seen countless women reconnect to that place and have it change the orientation of their lives. And I believe we’re in a time where this is going to become more the norm.

Kimberly: 00:34:04 I feel like, Tami, that a lot of shame that women hold already we come into this life, like you said, maybe it’s a precursor from the past from ancestral or just limiting beliefs is held in the pelvic bowl in the woman’s body.

Tami Kent: 00:34:18 Absolutely. I mean, I think a lot of it’s directed there and that’s why in some ways women are equal perpetrators, because they get it onto… whenever you have something on your body then you sometimes turn into that. We talk about men being perpetrators, but actually, sometimes men are more allies, because they want to honor the female body, they haven’t been in the bodily experience of that shame.

Tami Kent: 00:34:44 And so, yeah, there’s a way that it gets encoded on you and it takes even more strength to turn it around and shift it and move it. But I think that is one reason too that in the TED talk I did, The Vagina Whisperer: Moving from Shame to Honor in the Female Body, I talked about talking to my sons about menstruation. And I share a family story about that, how I did it and kept it light.

Tami Kent: 00:35:11 I would just say watch it because it’s too much to probably talk about, but taking the shame off and shifting to honoring of the body is in so many micro levels throughout so many things. It’s teaching young women how to honor their cycles and what that means and how… They might retreat, they might not want to be out on the soccer field when they’re a young female, or they can, but it’s their choice. So they really understand that. And then it’s talking to the young males about the power of the female body.

Tami Kent: 00:35:40 And so I share in the TED talk how we talk about talking to our girls, but what about talking to our boys about this power? And even I talk to them about being gentle and thoughtful because it’s not easy to bleed. And in that way I was subtly reorienting them back to understanding this is a place of knowledge. So it’s women re-embodying that and clearing that off and it’s also teaching males to shift their perspective so that everybody can come to a place of honoring the female body because if we do that that will be a major shift back to-

Kimberly: 00:36:13 Major.

Tami Kent: 00:36:14 … honoring the feminine. Yeah.

What integrative pelvic care means and how to get started

Kimberly: 00:36:15 So let’s go back to pelvic care for a moment, Tami, because there’s so much now, the shame, this energy we hold. And I’d love for you to talk about more detail about what integrative pelvic care means to you. One thing I did try was the vaginal massage and the exercises, and I felt it a little bit hard for me to understand what a tight muscle was in there and what was loose. So I was in there exploring, and I said, “I don’t know if I feel tight. I don’t know if this is normal.” What do you say to people that don’t get the chance to get in to see a practitioner such as yourself?

Tami Kent: 00:36:53 Right. I know. I think it’s bound to be awkward, I would just say that. Start with the awkward of it. You don’t know what you’re doing really. And-

Kimberly: 00:37:01 Except for putting in a tampon I’ve never really been in there.

Tami Kent: 00:37:06 I know. Okay, and so part of repairing that connection with the body is understanding the anatomy and then taking care of the space. And one of the big ways of taking care of the space is being more connected and aware, and body work can help that, so using your own touch and doing a non sexual massage so you really work more on the muscles. So, the clitoris is more towards the top of the pelvic space but if you go deeper into the vaginal opening there’s muscles, and they sit like this, like if you took your two hands like this, and they’re at the base of the pelvic bowl.

Kimberly: 00:37:38 The bowl.

Tami Kent: 00:37:38 There’s two hemispheres, yeah, they’re thin muscles and they go on each side, and they remind me a lot of the top of the shoulder blade. You can get knots in the middle just like you get knots here in the middle of these muscles. And so starting to just feel and touch and be in contact in a non sexual way, that’s the beginning. And it can bring up feelings, it can bring up the awkwardness, it can also bring up shame, but just continuing to work with it.

Tami Kent: 00:38:02 Just like you would rub your shoulders, you could rub your root. And if people feel even shame around that that can be from early shaming where, let’s say, maybe you were nude and someone told you, “What are you doing?”, like that, or children will often touch their root because it’s grounding. You’ll see them touch themselves and well meaning adults will go, “Don’t do that.” And it’s okay to lovingly give children guidance so they aren’t out in the world thinking they can do whatever whenever, but it’s the tone and the honoring that comes with it.

Tami Kent: 00:38:32 And so you have to think back through when you’re even touching yourself, you’re probably working through some unconscious layers, and it is awkward. And I describe how to do the self massage in the book but because I answered a lot of questions in that chapter sometimes people then make it too mental. So it’s really about connection. It’s really about breath.

Kimberly: 00:38:51 So how long is this supposed to be? When you’re massaging your shoulder sometimes you take an hour to work out those knots.

Tami Kent: 00:38:56 I know. I mean, even just a couple minutes. I like to do it in the shower, so I am alone. First of all, I’ve have three children, they’re always coming in and things like that, so I knew I’d be alone usually in the shower. And so, it could be a couple of minutes where you check in.

Tami Kent: 00:39:11 And this gets into a bigger discussion, but the two hemispheres are roughly the left hemisphere tends to be more than feminine, the right hemisphere tends to be more the masculine. And this is has to do with brain hemispheres, and it’s a lot, you probably have to look about them and read chapter four on that to understand it more. But I looked at lots of different ways people were encoding and patterns and started to understand, oh, the left side has to do more with the right brain, that’s that fluid, intuitive, creative download which is the feminine. And the masculine is the left brain, right side, tends to be more the linear, logical, let’s get things done, it’s very rewarded in this culture.

Kimberly: 00:39:47 [crosstalk 00:39:47].

Tami Kent: 00:39:47 And so people will have imbalances in those two fields from their family, but also from the culture they live in depending. And so it’s about getting to know those two sides, it’s about starting to connect. And then just in general because we are out of touch with seasons, we’re moving too fast too much of the time [crosstalk 00:40:05].

Kimberly: 00:40:04 And we talked about the daily rhythms.

Tami Kent: 00:40:06 The daily rhythms, maybe not as much this year, but in general we’re out of touch with our body pace and our body rhythms. There’s a lot of stress and congestion in the root, so even just connecting, getting, like you said, from the head down, bring your breath and awareness, that can help with reembodying, that can help with health.

Tami Kent: 00:40:26 It is a place where I’ve found people hold a lot of tension, just like the jaw, so the pelvic space, and there’s a lot of reasons for that, one is not living seasonally, another is menstrual products, actually, like tampons often create inflammation and tension. It can be shame, it can be trauma, but we want to shift that by caretaking and connecting.

Tami Kent: 00:40:47 So, I like to keep it simple. It’s like these are big issues, right, but if we can keep it simple of just starting to touch your root, starting to connect with your root, starting to say hello. And then as you get into a deeper relationship it will actually dialogue with you. The body has a lot of wisdom that we can start to hear. And it’s different than the head voice.

Tami Kent: 00:41:04 When I have women talk to their root it’s usually slower and more simple. It’s like a beautiful mother. She loves fresh food and a beautiful home and cozy things. That’s the womb energy. And so people will say, “Is that it? I should rest more or I should… ” It’s like yes, but are you listening to that part of yourself or are you marching along?

Tami Kent: 00:41:27 So the root will have a different quality to it and a different tone, but as you start delving into it, that… For me when I started changing into that it changed my whole life, I mean, it is where all of my work and creativity and inspiration started to come from, so it was a very bountiful place once I cleared off the debris and the layers that were in the way and worked through the awkwardness and started to get more connected.

Tami Kent: 00:41:56 For me it’s like surfing. My son’s a surfer, so I love that analogy, but I’ll get a download and then I’ll move when it’s time on that download. And so I didn’t just write Wild Feminine, I wrote three books, I read Wild Creative, Mothering From Your Center and Wild Feminine because there was so much to say-

Kimberly: 00:42:15 Well, I can’t wait to-

Tami Kent: 00:42:16 … about this repair.

Kimberly: 00:42:17 … read the other ones, Tami. So now that you’ve been doing this work on yourself for a while, are you doing the vaginal massage weekly, daily?

Tami Kent: 00:42:28 Yeah, I mean, I would say it varies, and that’s where it’s about really being in touch with your body. So when we first went into lockdown and all of that there was a lot of disorientation for everybody, and so that is a time where the root really helped me get anchor and get clear and stable. Everything’s changing around us, so I would up my pelvic root work just to get that center point. And then now it might be once a week.

Tami Kent: 00:42:57 Whenever I feel stressed I usually will check my root, and for me, again, the shower is really easy but you can do your own massage or whatnot, I just happen to… Now I have my son’s back around, they’re just all over the place, like here we are in our house. But I would say I don’t even need the physical because my energetic connection is so strong, so that is both helpful to clear tension but it’s also a practice to get you more energetically linked.

Tami Kent: 00:43:24 When people say grounding they’re really often not really there. So even touching the external part of your bowl and really seeing, are you down there, that’s how you get grounded. So for me it is a practice that I use a little bit every day, and then when the ship is going then I use it more, because I know that my body has wisdom and access to downloads from the stars, from the spirit realm. I mean, it isn’t just for downloading babies, it is for downloading the new patterns and the wisdom of what’s coming in for the next phase.

Kimberly: 00:44:01 So, what you meant by that is in the beginning it helps you connect physically, oh my gosh, there’s tightness and you breathe, but over time there’s less actual physical that’s needed and you can just connect energetically to release tension?

Tami Kent: 00:44:15 Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.

Kimberly: 00:44:18 Wow. And so, Tami, I used that word too, download, and I feel, again, the meditations are coming through here, but then you’re saying the creative is… Is it that flow you were talking about down the river into the womb?

Tami Kent: 00:44:32 Yeah, it should come all the way down, and it does…

Kimberly: 00:44:34 So in the womb’s where it’s being birthed into this world?

Tami Kent: 00:44:37 Yeah. And so for you it’s getting a little bit blocked in your heart, and that is common, and that might have to do-

Kimberly: 00:44:45 You’re saying for me personally?

Tami Kent: 00:44:47 Mm-hmm (affirmative)-.

Kimberly: 00:44:48 Wow.

Tami Kent: 00:44:48 I can see you when you’re doing it, it’s coming down and it’s not getting through a little bit, and that is not you-

Kimberly: 00:44:54 [crosstalk 00:44:54] my heart too.

Tami Kent: 00:44:55 I know. And that’s not you personally, that’s from wounding. That is what happens, it’s a process to get fully embodied that usually starts from our early time. So what I would say for you, which would be really good, in Wild Creative I talk about doing our own birth field repair, which comes from years of work with mamas and babies and, it’s a long story, working with birth trauma and the download.

Tami Kent: 00:45:22 So, for me, so I used to work a lot on baby’s bodies and then I started working on the mamas and I didn’t… The babies aren’t holding on to anything, so if the mamas will shift it the babies don’t need anything. But then when we’re grown up we have maybe established patterns, right?

Tami Kent: 00:45:35 And so it’s like when you are born there is a field that dilates, that opens for you to come in. So it’s not just a womb dilation, there’s a spirit door dilation, and you probably experienced this when you birthed your babes. And then there’s a download that comes through that door, and this is where I think we talk about the spiritual movement through the chakras and things like that where we’re really talking about coming into our bodies. So the energy comes down, touches the crown on the head, and it goes through the body all the way down to the feet and then you’re walking around on the earth. And we can also pull nourishment up the other way [crosstalk 00:46:11].

Kimberly: 00:46:11 Yeah, I was going to ask. It comes up from the birth too.

Tami Kent: 00:46:14 It’s both, and I think it takes practice to really move that ch’i back and forth because… There’s just too many things to say about that, but one is-

Kimberly: 00:46:25 And we need to have another podcast.

Tami Kent: 00:46:27 I know. I mean, we don’t give children enough contact. So what you were saying I can also relate to. It’s like we don’t get enough contact. So I try to repair that for my children, but we’re really trying to make up for a tribe. It was Sobonfu Somé, I don’t know if you’ve heard of her work. She’s from the dagara tribe in West Africa, and she came over and was working in this country. She died a couple years ago, an amazing healer and did a lot of grief rituals in the US because she felt like people were carrying so much grief and not really moving it.

Tami Kent: 00:46:56 But one thing she said that I heard her speak and I thought this is really amazing, she was about four or five years old before she knew she came from one woman’s body. So that meant she had been touched and held, she didn’t know that she came form one woman. Again, blew my Western mind, it’s like, what? That means she was being contacted. And so-

Kimberly: 00:47:16 Very tribal.

Tami Kent: 00:47:17 Very tri… But lots of touch. There can be problems in tribes too, we can’t glorify any one thing, but it’s important to understand what is missing to repair it. And what is missing in Western culture is deep contact from many people in a very loving way that helps you come into your body. And so when you don’t get that you tend to meet more up here. And you’ll see a lot of people walking around like that, especially in the yoga community where it’s like spirit even though they’re doing bodywork practices.

Tami Kent: 00:47:47 So it’s a practice to just keep working with, and one of the practices that I’ve developed from working with women is a repair of that birth field where you open that doorway and you really download it through. And I write about it in Wild Creative for adults, because in the mothering book that I wrote I talk about repairing birth trauma because that’s a passion of mine for women. I think everyone should have access to the birth field of that child, regardless of the birth they go through, and there’s medicine that I’ve written in there. But then grownups are always like, what about me, what about my download? And so Wild Creative I write about that.

Tami Kent: 00:48:18 And you can work on it just by feeling the ch’i come down and then work on it. It comes easily here and then just rub that heart and invite it to keep moving down and then down to the bowl. And as you open up and practice accessing the lower parts it will start to flow more, but it’s a practice because it wasn’t necessarily given to you as a child.

Kimberly: 00:48:42 Well, two things, Tami, I have endless questions for you, but you talked about many people touching the child, what if that’s not possible? I mean, I’m always touching my boys but we don’t live in a tribal society, none of our family lives in LA.

Tami Kent: 00:48:56 Yes, I know. You do the best you can and you have a lot of compassion for yourself. And so I think-

Kimberly: 00:49:02 [inaudible 00:49:02] is just primarily the parents touching.

Tami Kent: 00:49:04 Yeah, I mean, that was our reality. That was our reality. And so, it was good enough, our kids are all very relationship oriented. They all seek peer relationships, and they have strong and deep connections. I wish I had pulled in more people earlier on, now, that’s one thing I would say. Maybe when you’re out of COVID and you have nursery school or things like that I would just pull people in a little bit more. I think we maybe even didn’t notice that it was just us, we just filled those spaces, but the more contact they have with people, the better, because they learn different things from different people.

Tami Kent: 00:49:43 And even if it’s a tutor relationship or a coach relationship or just looking for those mentors that might be able to be, they don’t have to necessarily be touching them, but they’re contacting them. Because my younger son I’ve done a lot more with tutors, he’s had some learning needs and things like that, but those tutors have become beloved people in his life, and I’ve noticed how they’re giving him a container. So it doesn’t always have to be physical touch, because that just may not work, but contact.

Tami Kent: 00:50:10 So whatever your children are in, maybe they’re into drama and you pull in those people, maybe they’re into sports and you pull in those people. I wish I’d pulled in more of that earlier and not necessarily tried to be everything, but, at the same time, that’s the reality we’re living in. And my thought is my children will be more whole and hopefully that will go forward as we work to repair that. Yeah.

Kimberly: 00:50:36 You’re so perceptive, obviously, when you were talking about my heart, I try to lead with my heart, but I do feel there is a bit of a numbness for me with the root, and you talk about ancestral work a bit her in Wild Feminine. And when I think about my lineage, I come from a non… I’m half Filipina, and the Philippines is a very traditionally matriarchal society.

Kimberly: 00:51:01 So I actually come from a line where the mother in the family was the breadwinner, and my mother was that way, and my grandmother was that way. So she was the head. My grandmother’s really, really tough, and so there was this sort of, how do we say it nicely, like a turning away from the nurturing feminine, just that real tough, that right side, that masculine. So I feel that ancestrally to connect back to that, the left side, where you say just being still in this, not doing this is a bit more challenging. I think it is for a lot of women.

Kimberly: 00:51:32 And you talk about [inaudible 00:51:33] lawyer, the female lawyer and she needs to connect to that side. So, when we have this ancestral DNA, is it clearing it, is it integrating it, is it awareness? The healing takes place across time, space dimension. Tell us a little bit about that [crosstalk 00:51:51].

Tami Kent: 00:51:51 Yeah, I think it’s so individual, and this is where you have to go in and do your work. And I will say as I was working on Wild Feminine, writing Wild Feminine, I started noticing how much ancestry and lineage played a role. And I was dumbfounded, because, again, in the Western world it’s just you and what you see and not as much like… Actually, in Asian culture there’s a little bit more honoring of ancestors or awareness for that. So you’ll see these intact threads here and there, and what I thought of as these quaint rituals. I think that’s how it’s seen in the Western world.

Tami Kent: 00:52:25 I ended up going down to Day of the Dead when I was 19 and celebrated it in a village just accidentally, and it’s [inaudible 00:52:34]. I was with my friend. We were down at Universidad de Guadalajara and we were… We wanted to go see this festival and we ended up there.

Tami Kent: 00:52:40 Of course, being 19 we didn’t plan and there were no hotels and we ended up basically with no room. And so we ended up in the graveyard that night with the people celebrating, which was probably a cultural hiccup, but also so beautiful because we were children and they were so embracive. But that is the first time I felt ancestral energy that was intact, and it blew me away. I was used to, again, in America the cemeteries are kind of… And actually, I used to always be drawn to cemeteries as a kid. I was a strange child in that I think I knew something was there.

Kimberly: 00:53:12 By Western standard I know.

Tami Kent: 00:53:14 Yes. Right. I was more intact in some ways. So in America they’re just so lonely feeling, and so this was anything but that. It was warmth, and there was this sweetness, and it was like the spirits were coming forward because there was a bridge to meet them. And it was like the most loving, warm experience just being in that. And so that’s what it is, it’s about working with that spiritual energy and always… So what I can see in you is you’re one of the bridgers. You’re from this line but you are very heart centered. I don’t know if you’re a Leo, but you have that kind of like…

Kimberly: 00:53:55 I’m Aquarius.

Tami Kent: 00:53:56 Okay, Oh, wow. Well, welcome to your time then because that’s that. You must have Leo in your field because your heart is so prominent. And that is often when you’re called to do something, it’s like that’s part of your calling, is to go where the wounding was. And it isn’t even your wounding, but you’ve embodied into the structure of your family.

Tami Kent: 00:54:18 And what happens is when we embody we have a choice to dissociate from the family or come into our own truth. And it’s hard to… It’s like you can reject the family and then try to embody but then you stand without a history, or you can try to embrace the family but then you feel restricted to that family pattern. So bridgers try to do both. They try to embrace the family and bring in that and then also expand the potential. And that’s a high calling, and it is a lot of work. And so there’s no one answer to what you’re asking, it’s really individual and I think it’s very much on the ground.

Tami Kent: 00:55:01 It’s what I wrote in Wild Creative actually. It seems like a lot of themes are coming up for you for Wild Creative. Wild creative is how do I live a life embodied with the feminine values? And when you have ancestral work like that you have the freedom to work on it in different ways than your mother line. And I would bet you those women did that more out of survival than in true. There’s a warrior energy that I can feel that is really part of the tradition and powerful but it also is somewhat out of survival, that they had to step into that.

Kimberly: 00:55:34 Survival and lack and getting past poverty, which is my lineage very much.

Tami Kent: 00:55:38 Yeah. So there’s more truth behind them of what that energy really is that you’re trying to bring through, and so sometimes it takes a few generations. It’s sort of like I would say for black Americans in this US time, they’re moving past the wounding of the past in order to come into the more fullness of who they are. And, again, it’s like your family, your mothers and grandmother had to move in a certain way just for survival, and so you have the freedom to move beyond that pattern-

Kimberly: 00:56:09 Totally.

Tami Kent: 00:56:10 … and start to reclaim more of the original.

Tami Kent: 00:56:12 I would bet you there’s some powerful medicine behind that. That’s a reaction to a circumstance, but behind that is almost a regal energy. There’s other things back there that you would be reclaiming. So you’re asking me what is it, it’s a lot of deep prayer and work with energy where for me… So, this goes forward to say that I now spend time in prayer everyday, and especially this year when we’ve been in such a transformational time.

Tami Kent: 00:56:41 So I have a little medicine wheel with the directions that I go out, and I say prayers to the ancestors on a regular basis. And I talk to the spirits of the land and also my ancestors, but all the ancestors, just asking for their strength. And that’s why there’s a whole chapter in Wild Feminine and there’s a prayer to the ancestors, because those things aren’t quaint rituals, those are powerful ways to draw and repair energy.

Tami Kent: 00:57:04 So it isn’t one thing for one person, it’s like sometimes you could lean towards that line and draw through more strength that your mother and grandmother couldn’t because they were too busy surviving. So you can go and pull more energy from that, and part of that is an energetic download, part of that is working through prayer, part of that is working through the seasons and maybe setting intentions around that, another is just honoring who you are and what you’re doing, that you’re bridging this and you’re more than what you see, you’re really the download of these different threads and these different tapestries.

Tami Kent: 00:57:37 And each one of us has our piece of work to do. So it’s like this is your piece and then your children will have their piece and your two children will have two different pieces. They won’t be the same piece, and they draw through the lineage in different ways. And so in the chapter on Wild Feminine I talk about lineage energy. And when you want to really strengthen the flow of some aspect of your lineage delve into the music and the food and the cultural aspects that might awaken that in you.

Tami Kent: 00:58:07 So, I did some different things. I know very little about my ancestors and so I had to really do this on an energetic spiritual level. I would feel into it. But my son just did this too, he’s like, “Don’t we have an ancestor from Scotland?”

Tami Kent: 00:58:19 And I was like, “Yeah, we do.”

Tami Kent: 00:58:21 And what’s crazy is that ancestor happens to be buried just a few miles from us in a weird circumstance of things. So-

Kimberly: 00:58:26 Wow.

Tami Kent: 00:58:27 … he’s there, and he said, “I want to go visit him.” And so we went and we did prayer, and we did tobacco, and we blessed him. And then my son wanted to know more about the name and the Scottish pattern that goes with that clan. And I said I happen to have it because a few years back I pulled it out. And so he wore it for a little while.

Tami Kent: 00:58:47 And it’s that kind of thing. It’s like you’re delving into the sensory part of it, which is often through food and music and language and tradition even if you weren’t raised with that. And some of you you might be raised with some aspects of it, but it’s like bringing that forward and then strengthening it and bringing the beauty while also doing some repair around the wounds, which you might just do through ceremony or ritual or prayer for those who came before.

Learn how to heal some of this ‘wanting to control’ everything

Kimberly: 00:59:13 Wow. So many tools, Tami. Again, I think I’m not alone in connecting more with the right side versus the yin left side. And in this anxiety epidemic today, which I think is so much worries and so much wanting to control, so talk a little bit about control in the book and this tightness versus allowing and surrendering which feel like very yin feminine qualities. What are some of the ways in your work that we can learn to heal some of this wanting to control everything?

Tami Kent: 00:59:47 Right. I mean, first of all, I think is always lead with compassion and just honoring. So this, again, this would be chapter four in Wild Feminine. You have to understand the feminine and the masculine tendencies, and again, these are not gender, these are tendencies and energies.

Tami Kent: 01:00:01 And so the feminine is more the being stayed and the download, but it happens when we feel safe and we feel like there’s space. And the right side is more like let’s take it into action, but many of us were raised with that as the primary lead. It should be actually you download first and then you move into action. And so many of us have this divorce in our bodies where we don’t even know that and we’re plugged into external structures and external authorities, like you tell me what’s right, you tell me whether it’s medical.

Kimberly: 01:00:29 Right, validation outside of ourselves.

Tami Kent: 01:00:31 Yeah. I mean, our whole school system, everything is like… over here everything’s external, it’s not internal. It’s not the tribe listening to your bleeding time, I mean, it’s the opposite of that. So part of it is compassion for the ways that we have maneuvered or been raised that maybe turn us away from that naturally.

Tami Kent: 01:00:47 And then other thing to know is in this time one thing that’s happened with COVID is it has forced a feminine time, and so what I mean by that is I usually… When I talk about the feminine I say usually you aren’t in touch with that unless you have a baby or you get sick or you tend someone who’s sick in the Western culture. There’s not a lot of permission for rest and slowing down unless that happens, or you’re forced. Baby pace is very slow, it’s more the pace of the body and how many of us go that way. I mean, I was shocked when I had my first son 20 years ago. It was like I was wired for movement and going and getting things done and it was just like this slam.

Kimberly: 01:01:26 Babies just being.

Tami Kent: 01:01:28 Yeah, but it felt terrible to me. I mean, I was not wired for that. I was not wired for the joy of that and it created a lot of anxiety and I had to work on healing that. And so I think part of it is compassion, just, we’re in a structure that encourages constant going, rewards it, validates it.

Tami Kent: 01:01:45 And then this time if you’re feeling out of sorts there’s so many reasons to feel out of sorts, but one that I’ve noticed as I’ve worked with people’s masculine energy this past year is because all the external structures have stopped there’s been a big pause because COVID and people having to not travel and having to contain and not go to work and not have all these distractions, not go to the gym, not go… There’s all these things that just got stopped, it’s forcing everybody to come back and deal with their feminine wounding.

Tami Kent: 01:02:13 And that’s, I guess, the challenge, is sometimes it’s not easy to just often be, right, because what you first are with are all the accumulation of the needs that weren’t met and so it won’t feel great. It didn’t feel great to me when I was first home with my son, it was like, I don’t even know what this is, it’s so cold and it just didn’t feel good. I was used to movement and being outside the home. And so it’s good to just be compassionate and then start to build a bridge with that being state and start to nurture it. And it might be your early wounding, it might be that nobody was really there when you were little so you started going out here to find connection.

Tami Kent: 01:02:50 So, it’s little bits compassionately of really making that and nurturing in a warm and a cozy space so that it will serve you, and that’s a really good thing to work on this year because the masculine cannot plug into the external structure. So people feel a lot of anxiety about that. And there were a lot of coping strategies that weren’t great, but people might not know that until something happened, maybe they got sick or something. And so this is the blessing in the challenge of this time, is it’s like, hey, stop and just take a moment and really look, and look at what’s there, and clear out what doesn’t serve you.

Kimberly: 01:03:26 Yes. Awareness.

Tami Kent: 01:03:27 Yeah. Develop-

Kimberly: 01:03:28 Reflection.

Tami Kent: 01:03:28 … some habits that are helpful for that. And so I always think The Great Mother is one of my favorite things for anxiety, and for me it’s in the earth. So really developing a habit of something holding that, not just trying to get rid of it, but literally something that meets you and holds it because, of course, and especially those of us that are sensitive, which I’m a little canary and super sensitive, we feel everything and so a lot of things… Things can feel good but things can feel not great too, and so having a container, something to hold that. I like to call in The Great Mother, and for me that is the earth, the trees, the fields, the ocean, to hold me, and that’s one good technique.

If radiance’s are centered in our ovaries

Kimberly: 01:04:09 Tami, I could talk to you all day. I have one last question for you, one last fear. I mean, I have so many questions and we have to have you back please. But I’m going to start with a quote actually, this is on page 127 of Wild Feminine, and you’re talking about ovaries here. And you write ovaries, they, nourish the female body and their health determines a woman’s radiance. So it’s a two part question. I want to ask you about that quote, what you mean by her radiance. Are radiance’s centered in our ovaries?

Kimberly: 01:04:39 And this is part of, we’re about to release a fertility, pregnancy postpartum course in a little while that we’ve been working on, and I just feel there are so many women right now struggling to be able to get pregnant, unprecedented numbers as you know, women trying to do IVF, women doing IVF in their 20s. There’s so much. So, what is going on with our connection to our ovaries, what’s going on with radiance coming from our ovaries, and what are some of the reasons you believe that there’s this… Besides the chemicals and the physical things, what are some of the energetic things that are keeping women from being able to get pregnant easily?

Tami Kent: 01:05:18 Right. Well, so just to back up to the physical for a moment, because I think that’s actually really important to acknowledge. I know really our bodies reflect the state of the earth, and I think we can’t ignore the fact that the poisons and the toxins have gotten to such a level, we’re not escaping that, and it is hitting younger generations partially because it’s a cumulative through time.

Kimberly: 01:05:41 Got it. Yes. Sure.

Tami Kent: 01:05:42 It’s like my grandparents had the joy of health that wasn’t… it was because they hadn’t been exposed to as much. But then they were exposed and that passed down the line, and so I think we can’t really ignore that level, and to bring with it compassion, because there’s such an urgency, like what can I do, what can I do? And so taking off some of the pressure and at least acknowledging there are some real physical challenges, there’s more children with sensory issues and other kinds of things. So there’s that.

Tami Kent: 01:06:12 And then I think really that requires is a team, and it’s challenging because this gets into privilege, but really finding people and if… even just reading books, because that’s a good access point, of understanding how to clear the toxin loads out of our body. So for me that’s been Chinese medicine and naturopathy. Ayurvedic is also good. I think go to the earth medicines to try to help your body.

Tami Kent: 01:06:38 So, part of this is understanding the body’s loaded, so we have to bring in more care, we have to bring in more support. And that’s also true… I have a child who had a lot of sensory issues after a health trauma, and so I really got to experience what a lot of mothers are just having because of toxin exposures to children with sensory issues and things. So I’ve walked deeply with people who really are looking at the next level of gut, brain health and things like that.

Tami Kent: 01:07:02 So you’ve got to find the people that can help you so you don’t think it’s just you trying to figure this out. That’s the masculine model, if I can just go hard enough. So, it’s about bringing the feminine in, which is the knowledge and the earth based knowledge that we’re missing, it’s seeing if you can live a little more rhythmically. One of the things is all the lights and all the computers is really throwing us off, so if you’re having fertility challenges, definitely I would be trying to go to bed a little bit earlier and shutting things-

Kimberly: 01:07:34 [crosstalk 01:07:34].

Tami Kent: 01:07:34 … dimming things down, really working on your exposure level. Energetically, it’s about connection. So we’re still doing it from the mind. Mentally, we’re trying to connect to the body and driving the body, it’s test ovulation and it’s this mental place.

Tami Kent: 01:07:53 So energetically it’s come down to the root and really start to try to build a relationship of listening and connecting and understanding that the womb has wisdom. And you start the dialogue, ask from there, ask your body what is needed and start to connect into that space, talk to the womb, develop a connection, talk to the ovary. The ovaries to me, the womb is like the great mother within and the ovaries are like the girlfriends. So the womb is super steadfast, kind of serious, but really powerful.

Kimberly: 01:08:22 Very wise.

Tami Kent: 01:08:23 Yeah, really wise. And then the ovaries are more chatty, and they’re a little different, the feminine versus the masculine. The feminine might be… really an action can be to rest and nourish yourself and it might seem like you’re not going in the right direction.

Tami Kent: 01:08:38 To get Wild Feminine published I had to track out of the masculine publishing world, high level publisher, this is how we’re going to do it, that did not work at all, major door block. So I switched over to the feminine realm, and that is really where Wild Creative is written too so it might not seem like you’re… It’s like, but this isn’t getting me pregnant. It is a different route. It’s more circuitous.

Tami Kent: 01:09:00 So come over here and start spending time in your pleasure, in beauty, in creativity has nothing to do with what you think because it will bring you more into the feminine receptive realm. And you have to do it without an agenda, which is tricky, because it’s like, you still are like, but I’m not pregnant, what… That’s the masculine, you’ve got to come over to the feminine, it’s more like…

Tami Kent: 01:09:21 And I learned how to walk this deeply in order to bring Wild Feminine out, and I wrote it in Wild Creative. If anybody wants to understand what I mean strategically look at Wild Creative, because it’s how do you go into this deeper, more fluid realm and then you’re still… That’s where you can access the energy of what you’re trying to bring through. It’s just, it is not linear, it is not logical, it’s a whole different flow pattern.

Kimberly: 01:09:45 It comes beyond thinking from a different place completely.

Tami Kent: 01:09:49 Yeah, it’s a lot more intuitive and it’s a lot more… like when you’re in connection with the earth and you move in this deeper, slower way, that’s what it looks like. So it’s that sort of movement. And for me it was a deep spirit journey too. When I’ve been through struggles, like my child’s health issues were a major struggle, so this could be similar to fertility, I went to my body and said I need help and asked for spirit to come through that place, that deeply receptive, deeply intuitive, deeply creative space.

Tami Kent: 01:10:21 And then I took action. So the masculine will be the action. It’s not that you might not have to take action, maybe you need acupuncture, maybe you need some certain herbs, maybe you need to cut your work schedule down, maybe you need to really work on your stress levels. That’s where the action can take place, but it’s read from the left side, from the feminine download and the intuition and the guidance and then you move into an active space with it.

Tami Kent: 01:10:46 You’re not just like, I got to go, I got to do this, I got to do this because someone said do all this things and you’re still in this frantic energy, which I have compassion for because… conception, when you want to have a baby it’s a really deep journey if you’re not able to have that and you start to question like, what’s wrong with me? This is, again, where we have to take the lens to more. It’s what’s happening to the earth, that’s the intensity of what’s going on. It’s like the earth pressures are creating this and we’re having a natural response in our bodies, that doesn’t mean we can’t do work to move through it. Yeah, that’s probably enough.

Kimberly: 01:11:26 We’re so connected, everything’s so connected we can never get away from that, we can’t divorce ourselves from what’s happening on the collective. So, Tami-

Tami Kent: 01:11:35 And just one other thing though, I would say the pelvic bowl is part of our immune system, and that isn’t something we talk about a lot. So, I think clearing, clearing, clearing, clearing, sitting on the earth, doing pelvic massage to really clear and get the energy flowing, salt baths. I would be detoxing and clearing that pelvic space as much as possible, doing self massage even over the ovaries and warming with the breath, movement, all these things is like this is part of our immune system. And I don’t think we think of it like that, so we want to get flow, moving energetically, physically so that we can get the vitality coming back. Okay.

Kimberly: 01:12:13 Tami, you are just amazing. I have so much respect for you and your work, and I’m so grateful that this work is coming through you into the world, especially at a time that I think it’s so needed more than any other time perhaps.

Tami Kent: 01:12:26 Oh my gosh.

Kimberly: 01:12:27 It’s like ah. So, thank you. Thank you so much. It’s been such an honor having this conversation with you truly.

Tami Kent: 01:12:33 Thank you so much. Thank you for tuning in and finding this work and for sharing it with more women, though I feel like this is the secret sauce. When women get this really embodied, imagine, because everything is connected through women, whether it’s a mother or a partner. So when the women get this for themselves, not only do they get more support but it’ll really shift how things are happening.

Kimberly: 01:12:55 It’ll shift our whole communities.

Kimberly : 02:01 All right, Beauties, I hope you enjoyed our interview today as much as I enjoyed doing the interview. For more information on Tami Lynn Kent, please go over to our show notes over at mysolluna.com. You’ll also find links to other podcasts that I think that you’ll like as well as research and other information, and also a direct link to her book, which again is called Wild Feminine.

Kimberly : 02:30 I feel great after that podcast. I feel like I learned a lot and I feel inspired to keep going on our journeys together to keep sharing. So please be sure, again I will mention, to subscribe to our show, that way you don’t miss out on any of this information. You never know which guest or which podcast, which community show is going to really light you up, and also just keep you inspired. That really is the goal of this, to keep taking those small simple steps in your everyday life to keep growing. So we keep growing together and evolving, especially this year, 2021, which is going to be amazing.

Kimberly : 03:08 So thank you again so much for tuning in. I send you so much love. We will be back here Thursday for our next Q&A podcast. Until then, see you over on the site, see you on social media at _kimberlysnyder. I’m sending you so much love right from my heart.

The post How to Tap Into the Power of Your Pelvic Bowl with Tami Lynn Kent [Episode #541] appeared first on Solluna by Kimberly Snyder.

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