Episode 1: Why we need to take back our healthcare as women
Welcome to the first episode of Women of the Well.
Have you ever felt like your healthcare was more about managing symptoms than truly healing?
In our debut podcast episode, we explore why it’s crucial for women to reclaim their healthcare and how embracing a holistic approach can lead to genuine wellness.
Join gynaecologist Dr Peta Wright and holistic counselor Sam Lindsay-German as they discuss why it’s essential for women to take back control of their healthcare.
🎧 Listen now to find out:
🍃 How the current medical model can often overlook the cyclical, dynamic nature of women’s bodies, leading to disempowerment and lack of real solutions.
🍃 Why it’s important for women to reconnect with the intuitive knowledge of their bodies and how this can transform the way you approach your health.
🍃 The deeply moving story behind the name of this podcast, Women of the Well.
🍃 How a holistic perspective that integrates mind, body, and spirit can help you achieve a deeper, more genuine state of wellness.
Resources Mentioned:
If Women Rose Rooted by Sharon Blackie – A powerful exploration of women's connection to self, nature, and the cycles of life.
Vera Wellness Clinic – A multidisciplinary health clinic offering a holistic approach to women's wellness.
Transcript of episode:
Ep1: Why we need to take back our healthcare as women
===
[00:00:00]
So welcome to our first episode of Women of the Well. I'm Peta Wright. I'm Sam Lindsay-German and in today's first episode we want to really discuss with you the things that you might be feeling around different healthcare issues that you've been experiencing and perhaps some of you have felt like your healthcare was more about managing symptoms than truly actually healing.
And so in today's episode, our first ever one, we want to uncover. Why it's crucial for women to reclaim their health care and explore how holistic approaches can lead to actual genuine wellness. How does that make you feel? So good! I think it's not just for the women that it is important and crucial, but it's how that then ripples out.
And I guess I feel like it's so important, because I've had years and years of seeing women being treated in this very band-aid way where their symptoms are always seen to [00:01:00] be representative of a pathology or something wrong with them intrinsically, that not only disconnects them from their bodies, It also isn't very effective and so that it's like kind of playing whack a mole with symptoms and we get one and then another one comes up or a side effect of a medication or a complication of a surgery and women feel their healthcare isn't being taken seriously like they're not being validated.
They're often being, uh, you know, that word gaslit, which is often thrown around a lot, but they're just not validated. And they're not really ever given the time and they also have such little understanding of how amazing and incredible our bodies are. It's all just about what can we find that's wrong with it and then often beat it into submission with a hormonal contraceptive or, you know. remove something and that'll fix you. And then I think women are left feeling deeply [00:02:00], worse than empty, but almost, you know, I mean, traumatised, disempowered. One of the things that I got from this and reading this was actually made me feel teary. You know, do we even know what genuine wellness is?
Have we, you know, how far have we moved from that? Can we actually truly ever understand what it is to be well? Or is it that we have moved into a space where because of the way we're living, we're just accepting certain things? I think that's completely true. And then also it's this problem, I think, with allopathic medicine, which is, you know, the word to describe medicine, that is focused on the study of disease.
So of course, if you come and see like conventional Western medicine, it's not focused on wellness, it's focused on finding and treating disease. And if you don't have an outright disease, whatever you're coming with is kind of [00:03:00] dismissed. And that pursuit of wellness is almost seen as frivolous, you know, I think just the model of care doesn't focus on wellness and what wellness is.
And I think it's, again, you know, when we're living in a society where many people don't have their basic needs met, why is that something that we would want to aspire to? Well, When we're well and not depleted, we can give more to the community around us and solve problems and help with those other things.
And I actually think that this lack of wellness is not just this disconnection from our own bodies, but it's a disconnection from nature and our environment. Yeah, the separation, the thinking that nature is something separate to us rather than that we are part of it. And that's something that I know. We really work to embody here and you have embodied in Vera.
And that's what I love so much about being here. And, you know, thinking about what we're doing today, starting this podcast when we were discussing this under the tree and we came up with what we [00:04:00] wanted to call the podcast. It was around this idea of getting back to remembering who we truly are as women.
And what it is to be a woman because so much, I think has been taken or suppressed. So with this podcast, we've called it Women of the Well, we've got this inspiration from this book, which I'm going to show you all because everyone should read it. It's, which is called, If Women Rose Rooted by Sharon Blackie and it's the journey to authenticity and belonging.
And it's such a beautiful book. And Sharon Blackie is a psychologist by trade, but she also is a mythologist and she weaves a lot of English, Irish, Celtic mythology folklore through her writings and very, a lot of it is about women's connection to self and nature and landscape. And she tells this story in her book that was an old story from England about a myth.
And it was about a time where the [00:05:00] waterways and the wells were tended to by maidens. And there was this reciprocity that existed at the time. So there was abundance in the land and the keepers of the well would give the water to passers by and they would, you know, treat these women with respect and they were revered.
And there came a time in, in the myth where this king came who didn't cherish these customs or understand the contract with the land. And on the day the well maiden offered him food and water, and he drank it, and then he raped her while his men looked on, in this myth, right? And after that violation, he took her golden vessel, and then what happened was the land really responded, and everything went dry.
The wells went dry, the land was no longer abundant. I think this story, like it's really upsetting to hear, it's obviously a myth, but as Sharon Blackie writes, “The story of the rape of the well maidens [00:06:00] has immense potency. And just as I have never said the words, the voices of the wells were lost when telling the story without a crack in my voice.
I have rarely told the story to a woman who has not shed a tear. The parallels are clear in our culture, which has for centuries suppressed those qualities. dreaming, creativity, openness, nurturing, and community, which are perceived to be feminine. Much of the unique wisdom that women hold has been eradicated or driven underground, out of sight, away from the dangerous damning eyes of men.
And it's no accident that this systematic suppression of the feminine has been accompanied down the centuries, not only by the devaluation of all that is wild, and instinctual in our own natures, but by the purposeful destruction of natural ecosystems.”
So I think we see and we talk about the impacts of what's happening to the climate and how [00:07:00] disconnected we are there all the time.
We can see that in nature, but what has happened to women's bodies and that wild, natural, cyclical nature and wisdom, Over centuries, thousands of years, that suppression like that is part of the pain that women carry. That suppression is the collective pain. Mm-Hmm. And it's coming up in these symptoms and the despairing nature of some of the pain that we are suffering.
Mm-Hmm. And that we can't quite get to the root cause of why am I feeling this pain? Why can I not? Mm-Hmm. just seem to. Find what's wrong with me. And the spiral continues. Just like, you know, Sharon Blackear said in there, it's basically what we're seeing now is in a lot of ways, the fact that as a result of this, the women aren't taking care of the lands now.
And therefore, we are all in this slight drought. And our own, [00:08:00] and our own terrain isn't being taken care of because also because everything's been suppressed. I'll have women who will even come to me and they'll explain to me a cycle and the symptoms throughout a cycle, like it's pathological. And because they have been conditioned to think that if they feel different one day to the next, if their boobs are a bit more tender before their period, if they feel a bit more crunchy before the start of their bleed, that's.
Means they've got a condition or they've got a, that's something intrinsically wrong with them, rather than understanding that our whole concept of our cyclical nature is like as other as wrong as pathological, just by its existence. And then that is how women's bodies get pathologized and women feel distressed because we can't, or our environment doesn't allow us to be in that feminine cyclical way.
Which is. nature. It's like the complete mirror of the [00:09:00] suppression and destruction of nature. And um, I think one of the things that really struck me, it was very early on when we were talking about things like this, was just the fact that there really is not very much pathology done on women anyway. You mean, yeah, no studies.
Yeah, that's right. On what's normal. That's right. It's mainly that we're actually trying to base ourselves off, you know, male studies and it's not the same. And the only time up until the nineties that women were even included in studies were, they would only include women who were on the pill because their hormones are flat and there aren't the variables that happen with the natural cycle.
So even all of the medical research up until like the late nineties. Haven't been done on cycling women. Like we, the only concept that we have about the, you know, if you go on Tik TOK, if you go on Instagram, you go on Facebook, it's like you're being hit in the face by a thousand things that are telling you, you've got all these menopausal symptoms, you have to do all this, you've got all these PMS symptoms, you must have [00:10:00] this diagnosis.
You have to do this. Like it's all what's wrong with your body. There's nothing out there saying. What is right about your body? What is the incredible, like if we can go with the flow and if we're allowed to, and we're educated on the things that are happening that are incredible. Like if we were to go out into nature and we, we, people go to places that are well known for beautiful fall or autumn leaves, and we revel in it.
We revel in going to the snow. We revel in summer and spring. And yet in our own. Like menstrual cycle and then across our life cycle. No, we weren't linear because that is what has been said is the standard. And anything that deviates from that is needs to be managed. And I think that is what I see women now coming and they're like, I don't want to be managed.
I don't want my, Symptoms to be managed. I want to understand what's happening with my body so that I can have choices [00:11:00] about how best to support myself. And I think the, the understanding that the environment that we're in has such a huge impact on how our hormones and our immune system and our gut and all of that work is such a, so crucial because then that gives us power that we don't need to be managed.
We can live in the flow, in the harmony with it. And if we need to use other things, people are educated so that they can know the benefits and risks, et cetera, and make that decision for themselves. And so when we go through this podcast, we'll be looking at, obviously these examples where there are things not going right currently for women in the way that they're being looked after medically, but also we're very much going to be looking at ways in which the holistic approach can be.
sought after and what the way you do it differently here at Vera and the different options that are available for women. And also [00:12:00] discussing how women can actually take that power back. Yes. And really, I like to think about it as it's something that we know in our bones, like we know when something isn't right, but that intuitive quality really gets It's told that those things are less than and that's not important in this kind of mechanistic masculine linear world.
And I don't, this isn't about saying that men are wrong, but it's that there has to be the balance again. And I think we have gone very far from that balance because that linear or growth at all costs is unsustainable for women's bodies and women energetically. Feel that and it's unsustainable for our world and our planet.
And so understanding more about the cyclicity of our bodies, understanding how we can work with our environment and flow of things helps. Not just us, but everyone around us is that real [00:13:00] deep going to the roots and looking at the petri dish that we exist in, because we need to do that to be able to fully heal as women and as a community.
So that's what this podcast is going to be about. It sounds like kind of a deep sort of intro episode and we're, we're wanting to go. Deep rather than just surf, surface level. I think there's so much out there that are soundbite and that are often scary and taken out of context and taken out of context.
So yes, this will be in a podcast that will be a bit deeper. And I hope that that's going to serve people. Well, I should say, I don't think we said what Vera was. But we are here at Vera today recording. Vera is just outside of Brisbane in the Samford Valley. And it is a multidisciplinary, or I like to say now multidimensional health clinic.
And we have, I'm a gynecologist who works in a really [00:14:00] holistic and integrative way. And we have some other gynecologists who you'll hear from during the series. We have amazing physio pelvic floor physiotherapists. We have a naturopath, we have psychotherapists, psychologists, dietitians, nutritionists, beautiful yoga teachers.
Sam is our amazing yoga teacher and holistic counselor. And yeah, we're, we're a place that we hope women can come to in person and online to find that remembrance of their own inner wisdom. And we're here to help you find that. And that's what this podcast is about. Absolutely. So in the meantime, you can follow us at VeraWellness.com.au on Instagram and subscribe to this podcast on all the platforms and stay tuned for some new episodes. Thank you. Thank you, Peta.
