An Ode to the Body's Wisdom
Her face slowly began turning a flushed, vulnerable red as her eyes shimmered behind her glasses. She pressed her lips together, trying to contain what was rising. “I don’t even know why I am crying and feeling this way,” she whispered, shame and confusion flickering across her features like passing weather.
It was only our second therapy session, yet somehow, without planning it, we had wandered right into the center of things — the soft core she had spent years tiptoeing around.
She had come to me saying she was at a juncture in her life where even the simplest decisions felt impossible. She described feeling suspended—caught between who she had been and who she wasn’t yet sure she wanted to become. Her intake form painted a picture of stability and sweetness: an amazing relationship with a wonderful partner of three years, a shared home in Chicago with their cat and rescue pup, a sense of mutual dreams. They planned to move abroad within a year or two. She was in a master’s program in biology, preparing for the career she had always envisioned working with animals. She was an animal lover to her core—the kind of person who found genuine joy in volunteering at shelters, whose happiest moments often involved walking dogs or crouching down to stroke a timid rescue.
She was also a yogi, or at least had been, and her mat had once been a place of deep solace. But she hadn’t touched it lately. Everything that used to ground her now felt strangely out of reach.
Still, she was a vibrant young woman, luminous in the way that people are when they are both earnest and searching. Her smile, when it came, lit up the room like someone opening a window.
As we continued to lean into the deeper layers during that second session, I reflected aloud on what it means to live life from the inside out—to learn to listen differently, to attune to the internal world in a way that reveals one’s true desires. To lead with the heart rather than the relentless chorus of societal expectations humming in the background of her thoughts.
As we spoke, something shifted. A quiet knowing flickered in her eyes… followed almost instantly by the familiar panic of but how? It was written across her face before she even said it.
A question rose up from somewhere deep within me—instinctive, womb-deep.
“Tell me about your cycles.”
“My cycles? You mean like… menstrual cycles?” she asked, blinking.
“Yes. Tell me about that.”
She went on to explain that she had been on Nexplanon for as long as she could remember—a hormonal birth control implant in her upper arm. Before that it had been various other hormonal contraceptives since she was a teenager.
“So when was the last time you had a period?” I asked.
“I don’t remember,” she said. “I just know that as soon as I started having bad cramps as a child they put me on birth control, and I’ve been on it ever since.”
I wish her story were unique, but it wasn’t. It echoed the experiences of so many women I’d met—friends, clients, and even my own. When I was eleven, barely stepping into womanhood, I was diagnosed with dysmenorrhea and immediately prescribed birth control, too. It was a familiar pattern in Western medicine: symptoms medicated before the body’s language was ever translated.
Much of my career had quietly, slowly become an ode to women’s bodies—an offering, a reclamation. An attempt to help women remember the wisdom buried in their flesh, the kind that had been ignored, overridden, or forgotten.
She stared back at me now, desperation pooling in her eyes.
“What do we do?”
“Well,” I said gently, “one step at a time, we turn you back toward yourself. You learn who you are from the inside out. You relearn the ways of listening… the ways of knowing. The wheel will begin to turn again. And your heart—and your womb—will be at the center of it.”