Push = Shove

This is going to be quick. I think. 

It’s about inversions, prolapse, trying something new, and then deciding whether to talk about it. 

Let’s start with the last item. I decided to talk about it. Now, everything will go in and out of order, as it usually does when it comes to surprising yourself. 

Long story super short, I gave birth, and I ended up with a prolapse. And a baby. Let’s not forget the baby. But I also ended up with my organs deciding to live a block away from their original location. 

Researching prolapse can take you down a deep well of terrible health issues that may occur postpartum, and then you get to the Ancient Greeks because, as is the case with most things Western World-in-ized, you must find the roots in Greece. 

This is what Hippocrates came up with—inversions to treat rectal prolapse. 

Okay, it was one way that the “father of modern medicine” treated prolapse. This short article describes some other treatments, all of which have the same purpose: to get the organs to shift back into place. 

Here is where I would like to pause my seeming nonchalance. I have a prolapse, and it has been an emotional roller coaster and an immense physical challenge. Technically, I don’t even have a “bad” one. Many of us have heard the jokes about our mothers always having pee or folks not jumping in a class because they’ve had babies. As a professional Pilates person with lots and lots of pre-natal training under my belt, specifically geared towards saving your core and preventing a prolapse - my experience made me feel like a colossal failure. Tack that on top of the extreme case of postpartum anxiety I also had, and WOW. Draaaama. 

In the midst of my tenacious need to “heal” myself, I recalled a workshop led by one of the lead Anatomy instructors at Mt. Sinai Hospital, where I heard a speaker say that everyone ends up with a little bit of stenosis, and it is due to gravity.

Stenosis is the narrowing of the spinal canal, listed as most commonly caused by osteoarthritis, a condition caused by the gradual wear and tear of joints. 

Prolapse - when one or more organs drop and creates a bulge, either into another internal space within the body or via the exit routes of the vagina and/or rectum. 

Could both of these be resolved by defying gravity? Yes, I absolutely hear that song in my head…iykyk. 

Our bodies listen to us. Our fascia is its own nervous system, separate from our brains—fascia is emotion embodied. It holds our organs and our muscles. When fascia is traumatized, through impact, ligament laxity, or whatever, it responds in kind to how we feel. 

Bogged down by lack of sleep and months of feeling like my body had failed me (kind of sort of implied by the healthcare industry…), having a day where I let my brain rest because I could feel a certain type of way about gravity instead of my body was actually pretty great. It was a reset that led to inspiration. 

One night after perusing the socials of folks doing headstands, elbow stands, and whatever stands, an ad for the FeetUp trainer moseyed on into my feed. This mid-century modern-looking bench/stool is apparently a way to help the wary get into a headstand and is perhaps a necessary training apparatus for artistic swimming teams. As I once was in the process of putting together a show where clowns did synchronized swimming on land - I felt like this was a good fit, and ordered one post haste. 

I don’t typically like somesaulty acrobaty things, but for the sake of my insides, I spent weeks practicing throwing my legs up in the air while my shoulders were trapped aka supported by a leopard print cushion. Eventually there was success. 

It took six months of weekly inversions to actually feel my organs move, which more than likely had to do with all the jaw clenching (to be discussed at another time, the connection between our jaws and pelvic floors). 

What does it feel like? Considering our bodies are meat sacks filled with fluid, i.e., our organs shift all the time, it’s possible I didn’t feel anything at first because I wasn’t feeling anything new. However, when I did feel something, it felt like an internal plop and it made the accompanying sound one would associate with a plop. It was honestly, quite satisfying. 

There was also an immediate release of tension, mostly around my lower back, that I had not previously acknowledged. Upon descent, I also queefed like it was my day job. And that is how I learned, in my forties, what a queef actually is. Ta-da! New tricks abound. 

I bought my FeetUp trainer in 2022 and continue to use it at least three times a week. I don’t regularly use it to “exercise” with, and I mean that in the sense of working up a sweat, but occasionally I do (series posted below). I’m an end-of-the-day; let’s reverse some gravity type of FeetUp person. And it has been lovely. 

Would I recommend one to everyone? I don’t know if I would tell them to rush out and get one—they do take up a little bit of space, and it’s not quite clear if they should be in a gym space, the living room, or if they should be traveled about the house—but I would share my experience as I’ve done here and let them make up their own mind while also leaving myself open to more discussion. 

Prolapse does not ever fully resolve. It is measured in degrees, and it is up to the individual to decide what is bearable or manageable. There are many “solutions,” but as I stated before, my prolapse is “not bad,” and a portion of its current degree is still correlated to my hormones figuring out their lives. Now, I’m satisfied with defying gravity and being gentle with myself. But who knows what could happen? A lesson I have taken from this is being mentally flexible shedding frustration tears can sometimes lead to good for me ideas.