Numbers

Wow. There's a website called IHadCancer.com that has a neat functionality of being able to find people to connect with in your area according to various criteria - age, location, type of cancer, etc. Maybe in the future we can start connecting in more real-time chat or geography based. http://www.ihadcancer.com

1. ability to ping another member directly/direct message/email
2. ability to tag someone like on Facebook @Sierra
3. to be notified of a follow-up content to any of your posts, comments

This comment probably belongs in a different forum :)

So true that east coast is behind west coast with all of these approaches. Wonder if you can fuse some of the trendiness around yoga retreats in Tulum Mexico and Kriss Carr's Crazy Sexy Cancer and the wholesome nurturingness of WW and brand an entirely new and unexpected approach to POP that takes the world by storm?!

The time is now for disruption - the world is ready and all generations - from boomers to younger and younger women (I'm at the older end of the millennial generation myself) are ready for a new perspective on this!! It's the era of the global woman and women's issues have been in the spotlight more and more.

Do it!! #likeagirl

Track function thanks! And good to know about privacy/messaging people. Will keep the chit-chat to a minimum LOL

i didn't know you can track people here - will do! where you live sounds amazing... it's supposed to be spring here and it's SNOWED this weekend. look forward to hearing more about your business plan. i have a phone consultation with Christine tomorrow - i'll tell her to check out your post but I won't steal your thunder ;)

I so agree with your three wishes above re a way to chat without confusing things on the wonderful advice site here. The WW set up is a fantastic,life saving achievement by Christine,Lanny and the team but I feel very drawn towards chatting with other regulars here,especialky as it is almost a forbidden subject in every day life. I would be happy to pay to be in such a group chat that was securely set up and wondered about a FBook page too.

WW has a Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Whole-Woman-Inc/372777748545

I have long felt that there should be a link to this on our site. It would be great to have more traffic to that page and you could certainly set up a group for messaging and discussion there. I do feel that the complete anonymity and privacy of our Forum are things that we will preserve at all costs. - Surviving

For sure, you would want to set up a separate account if you didn't want your prolapse splashed all over FB. - Surviving

Me neither. I ditched my FB years ago! But I'm sure people have multiple accounts for all sorts of reasons. - Surviving

I have to add my two cents too, I do think it's a great idea. Sierra you are on to something for sure! I can't say anything useful about Facebook, never had one, never was interested.

for the detail ,perhaps there is such a person on this site already?, Obviously Lanny is a whizz on this subject but probably very very busy. I tried to join a prolapse page in UK on FB and they had a system for monitoring people. I wanted to tell them about WWoman but as I am listed as my male dog I was the wrong sex to join!! I was wondering about setting up another account too. There must be a way.

Are you guys looking for something that is similar to this forum but is not monitored? (Referring here to everhopeful's last comment). Not sure we can help you with that. - Surviving

I was just picking up on the thread above where several of us are chatting but not wanting to put irrelevant comments which r off the subject of prolapse. Some of us know how easy it is to chat with friends on FB using the side,private text bubble . I think we just feel drawn together over these shared experiences and I guess if we were to meet ,for instance , at the WW Conference then probably we would exchange email addresses ! This site is just too brilliant!

the other account I referred to in my previous post was picking up on your statement that there is a FB page for WW but if we post directly then our FB names will appear,although I will be my dog,lol! As u said we might want to stay anonymous and that would require another FB account,not shared with all our friends etc.

I am in a secret group on FB, I was invited and had to "friend" that person for inclusion in the group - perhaps the mechanics of how it worked.

Some of the posts still appear in my newsfeed so if anyone is looking over my shoulder, or I leave it on and walk off, they could read about it.

So it is not entirely private. Anyone could be operating anyone's device other than the owner/user.
There are also groups on FB who say that they are inclusive, however they are not.

I think a discussion facility here using the same pseudo names, like the one the WWpractitioners/ trainees have would be a better alternative.

I also think that many of us are too time poor to spread ourselves any thinner so it would not necessarily something I would join. And who have the time and dedication to volunteer to monitor it?

Aussie Soul Sister

I'm not really sure what the big deal is, because we seem to chat about all sorts of things on this forum, and nobody minds, they can choose to chime in or not. No one has ever discouraged that kind of chatting, though it doesn't interest everyone and can indeed obscure the message where new members are concerned. Someone recently commented that I shouldn't be concerned about that, but i am and will continue to be. Meanwhile ladies....chat away. - Surviving

@sierra had my fabulous chat with Christine this morning and mentioned your entrepreneurial ingenuity - she was into it, told you you're onto something!

Hi Ladies,

Ha! When you mentioned WW and the east coast, BeingHuman, I thought you were asking me to come do a workshop. It never computed that you were suggesting Sierra create an all new brand of the WW work.

Sierra, I think you should become a WW Practitioner! We seem to be kissed by angels and our work is not stopping at prolapse, but quickly progressing to encompass a total picture of vaginal, bladder, and bowel health that does not exist anywhere else on the planet. And by the way, we already have marvelous WW yoga teachers who are changing the way traditional yoga has conceptualized the female body. Our 2015 class of WW students are brilliant midwives, physical therapists, and others who are fired up to take the WW knowledge base out into the world.

I would love to interface the WW site with Facebook, but first things first. We are moving in several directions at once, not the least of which is a commitment to place a WW team in Nepal to teach prolapsed women how to avoid the “humanitarian hysterectomy” currently being offered to them.

IMHO, babes in spandex are not a high priority at this time.

Christine

I think you're onto something there Sierra. For it to become widely adopted, Whole Woman Yoga in the community has to be more than a therapy for prolapse. Even though it will hopefully become less so, prolapse is still so taboo, that I don't think you're going to see women lining up for that reason alone. If it becomes part of a wider approach to health, and more preventative than therapeutic then I really think you could get something going. I would have loved something like this when I was newly postpartum (and prolapse discovery was years into the future - and possibly avoided - who knows?). I remembering asking the PT I saw about my sore posterior pelvis and lower back (which had begun during pregnancy) literally *how* to stand. I just didn't know what posture to adopt to make it better. (They of course said neutral spine and the rest is history ;-))

It's not the yoga moves that put the "Whole Woman" in Whole Woman Yoga. It is the posture, which takes dedicated prolapsed women months and sometimes years to assimilate. They are highly motivated by prolapse and the need to manage it. The "babes in spandex" who never heard of prolapse are unlikely to take this posture out the door when they leave class, and struggle to make it second nature as we have. I wish they would, but it's pretty far-fetched. - Surviving

I have one more thought that I would like to add to this thread. It is worth pointing out that this forum is not really the same as a typical support group or open chat room for people with a particular health condition. Rather, we have an agenda here, which is to promote the products and services of Whole Woman, and to make these resources and essential concepts accessible and understandable to the widest possible audience of affected women. The Forum sometimes gets used in a way that does not violate any guidelines, but nevertheless does not always serve our purpose in the most helpful way. Therefore, it will always be monitored and a moderator may choose to express herself at any time, in ways that not everyone may appreciate. That's just the way it is, folks! I get bashed periodically, which is always a good wake-up call for me and my bedside manner; but still, this is how I see my essential function. - Surviving

Thank you, Surviving. I agree completely and just happen to love your bedside manner! Thank you with all my heart for carrying forth the WW mission in such a quality way. There is so much work to be done and if we can stay on track here, it will make it much easier for new women coming to the forum for help. Love you all! C.

I think you do a brilliant job on this site and you put my mind at rest a year ago with your first friendly and practical comment to me and it was certainly a big turning point for me. You can c from this thread how much confidence you have restored to us all and we r very grateful! It is so good that this site is developing so positively and how wonderful that Christine plans to help the women in Nepal.It is very repetitive but I just want to say THANKS for keeping us on track and for all your help and humour :)

hi all,

this is an interesting thread. i very much appreciate the passion and enthusiasm expressed. we've been at this as a business for over 12 years now and have thought about and explored many many avenues of how to expand the awareness of the postural work in the community of women. christine and i feel that we have just scratched the surface.

that having been said, part of the reason is that there is significant cultural resistance to this work.

the yoga community is heavily invested in their lineages, and in spite of the fact that more than half the yoga practitioners in the US are women, questioning the underlying assumptions of yoga has not been well received in our experience. christine developed the whole woman yoga video series specifically for the yoga practitioners who want a yoga-like exercise program that is friendly to the pelvic organ support system. (by the way, whole woman yoga is a registered trademark of whole woman.) but for women who have no clue that prolapse even exists, the whole woman message is not compelling. i can't tell you how many calls we have gotten from long-time yoga practitioners and yoga teachers exclaiming, "how could i have prolapse? i've been doing yoga for 30 years!"

culturally, we haven't progressed very far from corsets and hoop skirts. only today it's spandex and six pack abs. as a species, we are deeply divorced from nature. all we have to do is look at how we fail to nurture the environment on which we all depend for life, and how we honor or more accurately, now we fail to honor our natural physiology. the "suck and tuck" mentality has deep roots in our culture and it seems that it may take the shock of prolapse to wake up to the fact that women have a natural shape and configuration, which is necessary for their long term health, not just physically, but intellectually, emotionally, and even spiritually.

the intransigence of the medical system speaks for itself. the fact that the multi-billiion dollar institution of gynecology is built on a fundamental misconception of pelvic alignment should make it clear that there is no financial motivation for this system to exclaim "mea culpa" and fall on it's sword. and again, the cultural roots of the medical system run deep. it is not an accident that in the US we seem to be OK with surrendering a shocking $0.17 of every dollar that changes hands in this country to the medical establishment.

my point is simply this: transforming the lives of women is a complex issue that is being played out in the political, religious, medical and popular culture arenas. is there more that whole woman can do? no question, and we are doing what we can, working 7 days a week to bootstrap whole woman to the point where we can begin to do the many things we aspire to do.

i say all this not to dampen anyone's enthusiasm for the work. quite the contrary. but it is useful to be reminded of the magnitude of the problem. just the notion that the condition of prolapse is the most common women's health issue in the world and women as a group are almost completely unaware of its existence gives us a feel for the scale of the challenge.

as far as the medical system goes, our strategy has been modeled after a famous poster from the viet nam era, "suppose they gave a war and no one came..." when women quit showing up at the gynecologist's office, maybe he or she will go into dermatology or something where they can't do so much damage.

what we can do is slowly build momentum until at some point, perhaps beyond our lifetimes, the collective awareness of this condition and its root cause becomes common knowledge.

a great spiritual teacher once said, "no drop of love is ever wasted." every women who overcomes her shame, embarrassment and privacy shares what she has learned through the whole woman work with her daughters, sisters, mothers, aunts, nieces and friends contributes in a big way to the long term goal, making awareness of prolapse, it's root cause, prevention and management ubiquitous.

an avalanche is the result of countless individual snowflakes falling on a mountainside building up to a breaking point. each snowflake may seem a trivial contribution but it is the accumulation of all the snowflakes that makes the avalanche possible, even inevitable. every conversation about prolapse with friends and family is a snowflake that is building to a transformation in the lives of women.

this is the ultimate responsibility of all the women who have benefited from the whole woman work.

the passion and enthusiasm expressed by all of you are the engine that drives whole woman and keeps christine and myself in the work day in and day out. but this is a marathon, not a sprint.

and yes, we understand that blind spots we develop through long experience are a real risk, so we welcome new ideas and challenges to what we have done historically. we do not want to discourage those things. the dialogues we have on this forum is how we coalesce around a common vision, to make the world a better, healthier, and more friendly place for women. bumping heads is a natural part of that process. what is essential that we keep our eye on the prize and not let the bumps deter us from staying focused on the bigger picture.

i wish i could express how much christine and i appreciate the time, knowledge, attention, and bruises our beloved Surviving 60 has invested in making this forum available to the women of the world. tough love is part of the moderator's job. for those of you who are parents, i know you understand how painful, difficult, and emotionally challenging that role can be.

as we approach the major milestone of 10,000 forum members, i hope you will all join christine and myself in thanking her, as well as the many long-time forum members past and present, who contribute day after day, year after year to reach out, support, educate, and comfort the women who come here devastated and lost, feeling that their lives are over, when with all of your support and help, they come to realize that their new lives are just beginning.

the whole woman work is both an amazing challenge and an astonishing privilege for christine and myself. your commitment to doing your very personal work of learning, awakening to the challenge of transforming your bodies and lives, and supporting each other is our inspiration.

thank you.

lanny (christine's DH)

What a lovely post Lanny, brings tears to my eyes.

Dear Christine, Lanny, Surviving60, Aging gracefully, & so many of our enthusiastic forum members, new and not so new...

Thankyou so much for all you do and continue to do for women across the world.

I expect that more people will realize the enormity of the paradigm shift needed in the deeply entrenched perceptions, practices and industries of the world, after your post, Lanny.

All the more reason as we know you and Christine are lights to the world, to keep going.

Much love to you,

Aussie Soul Sister

I too would like to express my gratitude for Christine, WW, this site, all the people who have contributed to it ( I have scoured it and learned much ) for all the people who have welcomed me, and hope Sierra gets her wish. It is because of WW I can avoid destroying my body for the hope of making it better. It is because of WW I have learned the truth about the surgeries, and I am glad that so many other women have the resources to spare them from irreversible and life changing damage.