Today's conversation with Lynn Schulte, founder of the Institute for Birth Healing will take your understanding of pelvic floor health to a whole new level.
In this episode, we're sharing:
Lynn Schulte has been a Birth Healing Specialist and Pelvic Health Physical Therapist for over 30 years.
She founded the Institute for Birth Healing, an educational platform for practitioners, and the Center for Birth Healing, her clinical practice.
She has been helping thousands of moms heal from all the issues women experience after birth and is now teaching courses to bodyworkers to help them do the same. She found a common birth pattern that shows up in the pelvis after birth and knows how to release these patterns effectively.
Knowing we are more than just our bodies, Lynn works on all levels, physically, energetically, and spiritually, with women to help them access their full potential. She also teaches bodyworkers how to respectfully work with the body's tissues and access and use their intuition in bodywork sessions.
She offers a certification process to help birth professionals become Birth Healing Specialists.
Lynn holds a Bachelor of Science in Physical Therapy from St. Louis University, St. Louis Missouri, and is on a mission to improve postpartum care worldwide.
Connect with Lynn:
Feeling inspired and ready to learn more about how you can actively revolutionize postpartum care?
Today's conversation with Lynn Schulte, founder of the Institute for Birth Healing will take your understanding of pelvic floor health to a whole new level.
In this episode, we're sharing:
Lynn Schulte has been a Birth Healing Specialist and Pelvic Health Physical Therapist for over 30 years.
She founded the Institute for Birth Healing, an educational platform for practitioners, and the Center for Birth Healing, her clinical practice.
She has been helping thousands of moms heal from all the issues women experience after birth and is now teaching courses to bodyworkers to help them do the same. She found a common birth pattern that shows up in the pelvis after birth and knows how to release these patterns effectively.
Knowing we are more than just our bodies, Lynn works on all levels, physically, energetically, and spiritually, with women to help them access their full potential. She also teaches bodyworkers how to respectfully work with the body's tissues and access and use their intuition in bodywork sessions.
She offers a certification process to help birth professionals become Birth Healing Specialists.
Lynn holds a Bachelor of Science in Physical Therapy from St. Louis University, St. Louis Missouri, and is on a mission to improve postpartum care worldwide.
Connect with Lynn:
Feeling inspired and ready to learn more about how you can actively revolutionize postpartum care?
Depression, anxiety and autoimmune symptoms after birth is not how it's supposed to be. There is a much better way and I'm here to show you how to do just that. Hey, my friend, I'm Miranda Bauer, a mother to four kids and a biology student turned scientist obsessed with changing the world through postpartum care. Join us as we talk to mothers and the providers who serve them and getting evidence-based information that actually supports the mind, body and soul in the years after birth. Hey, everyone, I cannot believe that I am here sitting with Lynn Schulte.
Maranda Bower:Finally, lynn Schulte has been a birth healing specialist in pelvic floor physical therapist for over 30 years. We have been in each other's space for so long and have been trying to connect, and here she is on the podcast. If you don't know her, she is the founder of the Institute for Birth Healing and it's an educational platform really for practitioners. She also does the Center for Birth Healing, which is her clinical practice. She's been helping thousands of moms I'm serious, thousands of moms heal from their issues after birth and she's now teaching courses and to body workers helping them do the same, and she's actually found a common birth pattern that shows up in the pelvis after birth and knows how to release the patterns effectively, and we're going to dive into that here today. Lynn, I am just blown away. I'm so excited to have you. If you can't tell I'm talking with my hands, I know you guys can't see me right now. It is so wonderful to have you here.
Lynn Schulte:Thank you so much for having me. I am so grateful to be here because I just love any chance I get to share this information with people, because it's so important and it's so impactful, as you know, and helping moms to heal and feel better in their body after birth. They're much better moms when they feel good in their body.
Maranda Bower:So true, and I'm going to come out right at the gate. We know women need pelvic floor physical therapy after birth, right? We know it's not okay to be leaking and peeing or having any sort of pain in our pelvic region whatsoever. Those are not normal things. And I want to move beyond that in this conversation, because the pelvic floor issues are not purely physical. Can you tell us more about how addressing this? Emotional and mental aspects are also occurring when we get pelvic floor physical therapy.
Lynn Schulte:I see in my experience in the clinic and working with the thousands and thousands of women that I have, I feel the pelvic floor muscles are like sponges and they just hold the emotion in that muscle. And it's very, very common or it should be common for anyone doing respectful pelvic floor intravaginal work that when you tap into those tissues in a respectful way, a lot of emotion comes up for clients and a lot of tears are shed on my table and it just is. It's such a powerful area, this pelvic space, and we need to understand that we have these energy centers in our body and two of them are in the pelvic space. We have the root chakra, which is goes from our perineum down into the earth and so that's our connection or grounding into the earth. And we also have our sacral chakra, which is our belonging or sense of connection to family and that sacred connection, the sacrum is actually sacred, the bone is sacred and it's just. There's so much juiciness that just can get held in that pelvic space, good and bad. And we know that birth is a very, it's an intense experience and, yes, most, some women are able to have this beautiful, lovely experience and others feel like they just got run over by a truck and that we can hold. I call this. We can hold all that in our pelvic space. Our pelvic space is like the storage house of all of our unprocessed emotions, traumas, events, things that have happened to us get held in this space in our body. It's important for us, especially after birth, is to reclaim this space like come back down in and be present and connect back into your pelvic floor muscles.
Lynn Schulte:What I experienced with my clients is that anytime we have an event that was overwhelming to our system, too much scary it could be even someone coming at you that is really intense or almost invasive. Sometimes moms could be overbearing to children and feel invasive to their being, to their energetic space within them. We abandon that pelvic space, we abandon that connection to our pelvic floor. My goal in my work with my clients is to help find a way to bring them back down and reconnect back in. What we find is that the pelvic floor muscles tend to have tension or tone. They could have too much tightness on one side, or it could be the other side, or it could be both sides. It's not always physical. Not every physical therapist who does intravaginal work knows how to address the emotion and the trauma and the energetics of what's being held in this tissue. They just address it from a physical standpoint. What I teach, I teach other body workers and people who do intravaginal work how to work respectfully with the tissue.
Lynn Schulte:One of my biggest teaching points is please don't ever create pain. Pain is a sign that the body is not happy. The tissues don't like what you're doing. Instead of just forcing and making the tissues relax, we need to get more curious with them. That's what I encourage everybody listening in here is get more curious with your body and just explore it without judgment. See what might be being held in there. I tell you, after birth I just worked with someone yesterday who had some scar tissue from the birth.
Lynn Schulte:The scar tissue was really tender and sore for her and instead of trying to work past and beyond that soreness and trying to make the tissues release, I backed off and I got more curious. I'm like so tell me what was going on for you during the birth, during when this scar tissue was formed, and she said I felt it when my pelvic floor muscles ripped open. She said I felt like I ruined my pelvic floor and that's what was being held in her tissues and it was this fear, this dread that I've ruined myself and if we don't address that, that stays held in those tissues. And so we just honored that feeling of being ruined and it just softened the whole tissue and the scar tissue had more flexibility, the tenderness was gone, and that's why we need to be just curious with the tissues.
Maranda Bower:I have goosebumps because it reminds me of my own pelvic floor physical therapy journey and it was after third kid and I was like I'm going to do this, I'm going to get the work done. And she was doing an internal exam and she was like do you feel my hand? I mean, she was so gentle, Everything was so easy.
Maranda Bower:And I was like yes, I do. And she said can you tell me, am I on the right or on the left? And I was like you're on the right. And she was like no, I'm on the left. And I was like no, no, you're not. I was so you know, I was so twisted and turned. I didn't know the directionality or the feeling. It was so messed up and I remember in that moment I started crying and she said she said to me tell me about what you're feeling. And I said I'm so confused in my body. That was how I felt during my birth experience. Everything felt so confusing and I felt like you know, and it brought up so much of this emotional I just sat there and cried and afterward I was so exhausted, yet so relieved that I continued on until child four working with her.
Lynn Schulte:Great.
Maranda Bower:But it was such a beautiful experience and through that I was able to work out some serious childhood issues and trauma, and even I'm going to say this and I know that it sounds absolutely crazy but even the wounds that my mom experienced, yes, that were passed through me at a cellular level and you know what, for all of those of you who are listening and you're hearing chakras and you're hearing, you know the cellular memory and things this is real science. Right, this is absolutely real science. It has been proven over and over. It's just our Western world has. You know, it's behind.
Maranda Bower:But these were the things that I was able to work out by having somebody who is trained with the wind to do this work, which is just so powerful. So, thank you for all that you are doing. And I know that you have this you mentioned it before and we've talked about a little bit where there's this common birth pattern that shows up in the pelvis and it holds these patterns, and I really want you to speak on this and not just share what this means. But how did you come to this? How did you recognize this?
Lynn Schulte:Yeah, I started I really work respectfully with the tissues in the body and I allow my hands to kind of read the story of what's going on in the body and I tuned in. I've always had I've taken a course on the pelvis that was just transformational for my practice and so I really got good at feeling what was going on in the pelvic bones and what I started noticing is that this right side ischium, your sit bone, the bone you're sitting on felt more splayed out to the side compared to the other side. And I was confused by that because I'm like don't babies just come out the middle? Like shouldn't they just come straight out the middle? Why am I noticing this asymmetry in the pelvis? And then I started, you know, palpating and figuring out what was going on. And I also noticed my moms would come in and they'd lay down on my table and I always started to feet and lift up their legs and kind of get a read of the body from the feet up as they're laying on their back, and I started noticing that their pelvis was rotated to the left. Every single postpartum woman that laid on my table their pelvis was rotated to the left. I'm like what's causing that? And again I just got curious and palpated and I noticed that their sacrum was kind of shifted off to the right-hand side which was creating this rotation to the left. And I figured out how to release these patterns and bring the bones back to the midline. And I was having women get off my table who had been dealing with back pain for months and seeing chiropractors and massage therapists and in five minutes I had them out of pain because I was getting their bones back to their original alignment, understanding what happened during birth to these bones.
Lynn Schulte:So I studied like the mechanics of the bones open up to allow baby in and then they go the opposite direction to allow baby to come on out. And I took that knowledge with what I was feeling in the bones of the client's laying on my table and I realized, like holy cow, these bones don't go back to their original position after birth most times. And I recognize this when I was seeing all these postpartum moms. And then I flew back home and I was working on my aunt who had a 47-year-old son and I found the same exact thing in her pelvic bones and that really shocked the heck out of me because, like holy cow, these bones can stay in this position that long? And the answer is yes, especially if there was trauma around the birth, and my aunt had a super terrific birth with her first boy, who was 47 years old, and so that's what helped me to realize, like whoa, this can impact a person's pelvis for the rest of their life If we're not addressing this after birth and I was getting women the clients that would come into my practice were getting off the table and feeling so much better, and a lot of them I was helping the leaking of the urine and getting them out of back pain and pelvic pain in one session, and I knew I had something significant then when I was able to make that significant amount of a change in a person.
Lynn Schulte:I'm like I know something here and I knew that I wasn't going to be able to see every single birthing person in the world, so I chose to share my knowledge with other body workers, and that's when I founded the Institute for Birth Healing to share what I know about how to heal the body after birth, and I'm happy to say that my students are getting the same amazing results too. Yes, so you just got to know what to look for and how, what to do with it to make that effective change.
Maranda Bower:I'm curious did you discover the connection between this emotional and mental health within the pelvis during this time, or did that come later?
Lynn Schulte:No, it all kind of melded in together because I've always, instead of forcing something to happen in the body, I've always just gotten more curious with it and again forcing something to happen. I know earlier on in my career when I did that, nothing good ever happened and people would come back in more pain. And that's why I've learned to just get really curious with the tissues to see what's really going on, get to the root cause of what's being held in those tissues, versus forcing something to happen. And so when I have my finger or when I'm trying, you know, encouraging the bones to find their original position, and it's like it's not willing to be mobilized, then I know that there's something more being held in those tissues. And that's when you have to dive in and get more curious with it and help the client to become more curious with what's going on. And all of that is really helping a client to reconnect back into this area, because when it's been overwhelming we abandoned it. So helping them to come back down in and get a sense of what do you notice left side compared to right side? What are you noticing in this area? And then working with whatever shows up for them to help them process that.
Lynn Schulte:And then what's amazing is just the tissue, once you get to that core issue, the tissues just melt and relax. There is no forcing. That needs to happen because we've gotten to that root cause of what's really being held in there. And you know one of the big signs that when the bones are open in this open birthing pattern, the pelvic floor muscles are like being stretched like a tightrope and they are increasing tone trying to hold the bones together, like that's their job, is like, okay, we got to help stabilize this person, so we're going to tighten up to try to create some sort of sense of stability in their body for them.
Lynn Schulte:And if they're going and seeing a physical therapist whose only focus is getting that muscle to relax and we're starting to do dry needling which I'm not a big fan of because they're bypassing why that muscles tighten the first place and if they do that in the muscles relax and their bones are still in that open birthing pattern, their pain gets worse Because we've taken away the job of what those muscles were trying to do for them in the first place. So if someone's had an experience of well, yeah, I went to my physical therapist and they it was really painful and it hurt as they were trying to get the muscles to release. And then I got up and I was in more pain. Your bones are not in their proper place and we need to get the bones back together and then the muscles can let go, they can relax.
Maranda Bower:Hey, I'm going to be 100% straight with you. The postpartum world is changing right now and I know you feel it. It's in the politics, our community spaces. There is an urgent need to implement a different approach to postpartum health. If you're an alternative provider or postpartum advocate, you need to be with us in the postpartum university membership. Get the method, the tools, the handouts, the advanced trainings and so much more to not only help your clients and your business grow, but to help you grow too. Marketwatch says that the after birth services and nutrition and support is set for extraordinary growth by 2030. Don't miss your opportunity to help women and families who desperately need your holistic support. Go to wwwpostpartumU. The letter U dot com slash membership. We're accepting registrations right now and we can't wait to see you there.
Maranda Bower:This is so enlightening on so many levels, because I'm thinking about not just our experiences as women and mothers going to a provider and saying this isn't working. It is across the field and there is always someone who does the right thing for your body. I think, coming and just listening to you. Keep finding that person, keep reaching out, because they do exist, whether this is a physical therapist or a counselor or someone who is there to support you and your day-to-day staff. There is somebody out there who can and will recognize your unique body needs. I'm curious too how do you work with women who've experienced significant trauma in their life? We know pregnancy and birth trauma alone in the US is over 30 percent, and I am betting that statistic is even much higher, especially post-COVID. I'm wondering. The idea of having internal work is really, really difficult. How do you navigate that with your clients?
Lynn Schulte:I'm reading their body and there are times when the body is not ready to do intravaginal work. And this is not everybody's training. Those therapists doing intravaginal work have not gotten trained to this level or to this understanding. They just go in and do the intravaginal work and now they're traumatizing and already traumatized person. So and what I teach is helping my students, my therapists that are training with me, to be able to tune into the body and get the yes from the body and not just the head, because the head will be like, yeah, I'm here for you to do intravaginal work, but the body is saying heck, no, I'm not okay with this. And we need, as practitioners, we need to be listening to the body and reading the body and being able to understand the yeses and noes of the body. So that's number one. And when I've had people come in and tell me the most horrific stories and in my head I'm going, I have no idea how I'm supposed to help this person, but I listen to the body and I follow the guide of the body and either from muscle tension or energetic blockage or something there's, you know, I get drawn into an area and we just work in that area and it may be, you know it may be their shoulder. You never know, like where we start. And I've heard a lot of times the body needs to get used to my touch and used to working with me to feel safe enough to then be able to do the intravaginal work. And there have been times I have a system that I teach of like checking in and making sure that someone's not disconnecting from me, not checking out as I go to do the intravaginal work.
Lynn Schulte:And I had this one client that came to see me and she had a lot of trauma from in vitro fertilization treatments and in that process you can't listen to your body. You have to perform when the timing is right and so there was a lot of disregard to her body and the body's willingness to be able to accept what was being done to her. But she also had a really good girl persona, so she was a very good. She always did what she was told and she was coming to see me to do this intravaginal work and I missed a couple of the signs until I got her disrobed and draped. So you know you're completely covered when we do the work and I go to lift up the sheet and I touch.
Lynn Schulte:I always touch at the top of the knee. I don't just go straight in and touch the labia, because that's jarring to a person. So I'm like, here's my touch, way up here by your knee, and it was at that point where I was like, oh my gosh, her body is saying no. And I told her I'm like your body's saying no, I can't do this. And she was like, oh, but please, please, please. You know I really that's why I'm coming. And I said, if I do this to you, I'm just going to traumatize you more because we're overriding what your body's wanting. And she came back to me and she said, lynn, that was the most powerful thing that she's ever had, she's ever experienced in the medical system, because everything's being done to you and we're not able to respect what your body's really feeling. And as physical therapists especially pelvic health physical therapists I really that's it's my passion to help train them to be able to tune in, to really know when the body's saying yes or no.
Maranda Bower:Just a moment there to recognize the power that is in what you just said. I'm wondering too like what role do things like mindfulness and meditation and breath work and all of those other things that we do for our mental and emotional well being, or at least know that could support us during that? How does that support the pelvic floor as well? Are they intertwined?
Lynn Schulte:They can be when there's a connection down to the pelvic floor. So we could be totally mindful and working on our breath from our waist up.
Maranda Bower:Yeah, that was me. That was my experience totally disconnected, had no idea if you were right or left.
Lynn Schulte:Yeah, right, and it's very common for most people in the world today. And in one of the you know, after I do the intravaginal work that I do, I have a protocol that I teach providers to help get the muscles to, you know, function better. After we get the muscles functioning better than the next thing that I focus in on is is their breath connecting down to the pelvic floor. When you go to breathe and you breathe in, ideally the diaphragm and the pelvic floor work together and they both descend down as you breathe in and then they should ascend as you breathe out. Now I don't want to get too technical, but the the diaphragm is contracting as it goes down while the pelvic floor lengthens and then the pelvic floor contracts while the diaphragm lengthens. So they're doing opposite. So I don't like to get to. That gets people confused. But they both go down together, they both come up together, but a lot of times the breathing won't hit the pelvic floor muscles. So there's, it only comes down to the top of the pelvis or maybe even to their waist. It just depends on the person, and we can have.
Lynn Schulte:I worked on one client. This was in a class that I was teaching and I got drawn into and she was like I'm having a lot of hip pain, like okay, so I definitely got drawn into her left hip and I could feel like, but her muscles and her bones and everything felt normal in there. But there was definitely an energetic block. And when I asked her to tune into it she was like, yeah, I got no connection to it and I'm like, okay, then we're gonna hold this and let's go figure out where you are connected in your body. And it was right at her waist. She had a block in her waist that wasn't allowing her to get into her pelvic space. So we had to address that first and then we could go work in the hip.
Maranda Bower:I love the intuitiveness of your work and really your medicine that you are providing for so many. And to be able to teach this is such a gift as well, because, let me tell you, there's such a difference between knowing this information and then knowing it in a way in which you can teach it effectively those of us who are in this space. I have my own certification program. It's intense. So thank you for doing that work and for sharing your genius and bringing that intuitive touch to women's healthcare which we are so lacking in our world right now.
Lynn Schulte:It's so important and I just want people to be aware that there are different practitioners out there, especially in the medical world, where people who are very evidence and research-based. There are those people that are stuck in that and, don't get me wrong, there's value in the research and the evidence. Yet those people who are stuck and I've heard a provider say, I'm only gonna do what's in the research it's like, well, you're 20 years behind the eight ball here. The research is really lagging in what we know in the body, and that's what my challenge has been is there is no research to support this idea of an open birthing pattern in the pelvis, and so trying to get those providers who are so evidence-based to know that, hey, this is a thing and we just don't have the research yet, come on over here and help me. Let me show you the effects and how we can make effective change.
Lynn Schulte:There are those that are stuck over there and those people I feel tend to be more stuck in our head. And then there's people that are really attracted to me and my work because we're more heart centered, we're more intuitive based, we're allowed to get out of our heads and into our hands, and that's what I really teach. It's like what are you feeling? What are you feeling? It's not what you know in your head, but what are you feeling underneath your hands and what is the body trying to tell you? Everything is stored in the body, and the body tells a story, from our posture to the tensions in our tissue. It's all telling a story, and when you can tune into it, the body guides you. The body knows way better than I do, and so I trust the body more than I trust my mind.
Maranda Bower:You know. The same is true for nutrition, and postpartum nutrition specifically. I always hear well, where's the evidence that we lack digestive enzymes after birth? And it's like well, if you're looking for a very specific study that says this, you're not going to find it. But when you look over here and when you look at cultural, traditional practices around the world, everyone is saying the same thing, except when it comes to women's healthcare. It's like there's a whole block. We know nothing In terms of science, but the women of our generations you, I and the countless others who are listening into this we know better and we're here and we're doing this work. Lynn, is there anything else you wish? I would have asked that. Maybe I didn't.
Lynn Schulte:One of the things when I'm working with someone who's traumatized. A lot of times what comes up for people is like I wished I would have. I wish I could have, and sometimes there's some shame around what happened. Yes, and I just invite anybody listening in who didn't have the birth of their dreams or who didn't, who had something happen to them and they wish they would have done something different.
Lynn Schulte:I want you to actually honor your body's response, because the body knew what it was doing to help keep you alive. And that's important for us to recognize and we need to understand that there was a threat to our wellbeing, to our sense of survival whenever we've been traumatized. And helping to honor that and then to help shift any limiting beliefs that kind of got implanted during that time is super, super helpful in healing that, and I want people anybody listening in to realize that we can do this work at a distance. You don't have to be in my clinical space and working hands on, although I love that A lot of this healing, especially of birth trauma, can be done over Zoom.
Maranda Bower:Yes, and you offer that right.
Lynn Schulte:I do yes.
Maranda Bower:Yes, tell us.
Lynn Schulte:Yeah, so at the centerforbirthhealingcom is my website for my clinical practice.
Lynn Schulte:The Institute for Birth Healing is my educational practice platform for providers.
Lynn Schulte:So centerforbirthhealingcom, there's a form you can fill out and just fill that out and that'll reach out to me and then we can schedule and you can let me know if you're wanting an in-person or online session and I just if you're working with someone and you're only getting so far, or your muscles are always coming back tight again or you're not able to save the changes, if you're seeing a chiropractor and you're constantly doing the same thing over and over again, there may be a trauma response in your body that needs to be released first, and then you'll find those techniques are way more effective.
Lynn Schulte:So another thing I'd love people to know is that I do host an online birth healing summit every April. It is more geared towards practitioners, but moms are more than welcome to listen in. But I interview experts from all over the world talking about pregnancy and postpartum recovery and in 2024 this year we're actually talking about pregnancy and labor, and so in the past we've all focused just on postpartum and this year we're actually addressing the pregnancy aspect of it, and it's just been really beautiful some of the interviews that I've had, so I'd love people to know about that.
Maranda Bower:And we're gonna have all of those links for everybody listening in in the show notes. Lynn, thank you so much for your time and your attention. I really appreciate you and all of the amazing, incredible work that you're doing and just such an honor. Thank you.
Lynn Schulte:Thank you, Miranda. Thank you for having me so appreciate this opportunity. Thank you everybody for listening.
Maranda Bower:I am so grateful you turned into the postpartum university podcast. We've hoped you enjoyed this episode enough to leave us a quick review. And, more importantly, I hope more than ever that you take what you've learned here, applied it to your own life and consider joining us in the postpartum university membership. It's a private space where mothers and providers learn the real truth and the real tools needed to heal in the years postpartum. You can learn more at wwwpostpartumU. That's the letter U dot com. We'll see you next week. We'll see you next week.