NYR Ep3 - Let’s Talk About Her: Vaginal & Pelvic Health, Pleasure & Power w/Jenni Russell

Welcome to another empowering episode of Naturally You Radio, where we help Black women eat for health, think for happiness, and live in harmony.

In this heartfelt and fire-filled conversation, I'm in conversation with the amazing  award-winning intimate health coach Jenni Russell, as she shares 30+ years of wisdom on vaginal health, pelvic floor empowerment, prolapse recovery, sexual wellness, postnatal healing, and feminine energy restoration.

🔥 Topics We Explore:

• The true power of your pelvic floor
• How posture, digestion & confidence are all connected
• Prolapse: what it is and what you can do about it
• Fascia release therapy and the emotional body
• Breathwork, feminine healing & the importance of reconnection
• Why “She Comes First” and what that really means for YOU

🧘🏾‍♀️ Jenni’s Programs & Contacts:
✨ Book 1: Pelvic Floor Secrets
✨ 60-Day Journey – She Comes First
✨ Fascia Release Therapy – Limited offer: 5 women only
✨ Coaching, Classes & Unfiltered Events

📲 Connect with Jenni Russell:
 Instagram: @pelvicsecrets
Website: https://jennirussell.com
Email: jenny@jennirussell.com

🎟️ Join ‘Unfiltered’ – July 19th (In-person & Online)
Topic: Let’s Talk About S.E.X. (Sex After Celibacy, Childbirth, Hysterectomy & Trauma)
Sign up via Instagram bio or JennyRussell.com

🌱 Mention “Leah Fascia” in your email to get a 50% discount on 5 fascia release sessions.

🌍 Let’s Connect:

Instagram: @thenaturallyyoucoach
TikTok: @thenaturallyyoucoach
Facebook: The Naturally You Coach
Website: www.thenaturallyyoucoach.com

For more episodes visit www.thenaturallyyoucoach.com/podcast

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

And I want sisters to stop going home too early because I think when they get to heaven, God is saying, what are you doing here? I never called you. And this whole thing, well, you know, if it's your time, it's your time. No, no, no, no. It's not that it's your time. It's that you're going home too early. Greetings and welcome to another episode of Naturally You Radio. I'm here to empower Black women to eat health, think happiness and live in harmony and where I get the opportunity to highlight and introduce to you sometimes for the first time amazing female experts and teachers in the field of natural and holistic health that you can use on your journey and that will be teaching you valuable information that you can use on your natural health journey. Today I'm I'm sharing the space with a wonderful sister who I've known for a really long time. Literally, I just told her this. I was just asked for a recommendation of a teacher on Black women's health that could bring the fire. And I said 100% this sister. We are joined today by the amazing Jenny Russell. She is an a women's intimate health coach with over 30 years experience. She's an author of two books. She's probably got a couple more up her sleeve as well. So welcome to the Naturally You Radio, Jenny. Oh, thank you, Leah. Thank you for having me as well. I'm excited. So let's get started. Who are you? What do you do? And why do you do the work that you do? Oh wow, that's a great question. So I am an advocate for female health. And I mean, I have a penchant, a little passion for our black and brown sisters. They need to have the same passion for themselves. So this is what I'm trying to tell them. I'm known as the queen of the pelvic floor and I help women to kind of heal the parts of themselves that they ignore, that society says is hush hush and shouldn't be spoken about and let them realize actually that that part of the body is literally the base of the trunk, the foundation of the trunk, it's their stabilizing system, it's their confidence, it's their continence, it's their sexual satisfaction, it's their posture, it's their performance, and it's their body shape. That is what I do. And I show them a holistic way of being able to get in touch with, reintroduce themselves back to, and allow the energy to flow through so that the whole person can stand strong and firm for life and I love that when you came to the natural you um when you came to naturally even you did a talk that's one of the things that really resonated with me is that and I think you shared this as well a lot of women just think like they don't even think of their pelvis we don't we've never been like informed and educated about our pelvic structure it's just your pom-pom and you have a baby out of it and you have a period out of it and then at some point the period's going to stop and when the period stops you're going to have you know challenges and that's where you get your intimacy from but all those other things you just mentioned the fact that it's the base of your trunk and it's your your stability and it helps with your posture and it helps with all the things is I think news to a lot of people, even if we might have known it on an intellectual level somewhere, nobody speaks about the importance of it and articulates the importance of it as much as you do, which is one of the reasons why I wanted you to be here. What do you feel is the mission behind the work that you do with the talks and the coaching and the online programs and the spoken word that you're doing? I've got literally the mission is to help women reclaim their health, their energy, their power, and to break free of the systems that tell them that these things are impossible or these things are temporal, right? Life is temporal, but the way in which you live life is a different story. And so I want women to realize I'm on a mission to get them to just to become back in touch with themselves. It's more than, as you said, it's more than your pom-pom. And it's quite funny actually, because when I used to talk to people, I'd say to them that, you know, you can tell a fully functional pelvic floor by the shape and contour of someone's bottom. So people will come to me after things and say, can you look at my bum, please? Can you look at my bum? I had to laugh, but I want women to live long, vibrant, healthy lives. And, you know, I'm looking, you know, I just went to my neighbor's sadly passed away a couple of weeks ago and we went, we had a celebration for her life. Yes. And you know, and she was 72. And so that's literally just a decade above me. and you know if I and I know you know I'm a I'm a wife my husband's gonna find me I know all of these things all this stuff I have for my future and I don't see my life as being stagnant I don't see my life as being over there's a lot that God still has for me to do on this earth before I want sisters to stop going home too early because I think when they get to heaven God is saying what you're doing here I never called you. And this whole thing, well, you know, if it's your time, it's your time. No, no, no, no. It's not that it's your time. It's that you're going home too early because you don't understand. My people perish for lack of knowledge. You don't acquire the knowledge. You don't value the health that God has given you. You don't value, you know, vagina. You take away the VA and Gina is Italian for queen. That's the queen that God has given us. It's a queen. You know, when she was alive and you went to meet the queen, you had to curtsy. You couldn't just stand there and you had to curtsy, right? You had to give her the regalness that she deserved, according to monarchy. Well, we have a queen. Every woman is walking around with a queen and a VA, a virtual assistant. That's their job to make your Gina vibrantly appealing. And she is the most sought after girl I know. She is the entrance to a gateway that brings love, life, and flow. But many underrate her and call her all kinds of names, not understanding that queen that lives right there at the base of the trunk, every day, every day, doing more. Sex is the ultimate reward. Her everyday role is to protect and to assist in stability, to assist in elimination, to assist in digestion. She's the emotional powerhouse. You know, everything is stored there. You're looking at your related issues around finances. It is affecting her. She's affected by all of that stuff. She is affected. She shall fight, flight or freeze. So let's get to understand her. Let her relax. Let her have the energy and the vibrancy that she should have. And let us have the life we're supposed to have with, you know, great posture, great bodies, great vitality, great movement ability and the feminine essence to flow and about being stagnated and feeling like you have to be in masculine all the time and fighting your way through life. That's my mission. And it's a brilliant mission. How have we got here, Jenny? How have we got to the place where women don't, where we don't understand anything, where we feel disconnected, where we don't have good posture and we're not enjoying intimacy and we feel shut off and shut down and we're leaving. How have we got to the place where we're going home too early? Gosh, that's such a great question. We are chasing the wrong stuff. We're chasing things. We're not chasing health. Then, you know, healthy people want everything. Sick people, really sick people just want one thing. They want health. So we're chasing health in sickness. We're not chasing health for wellness sake. We're chasing health for recovery and rehabilitation sake. And that's the problem. We focus on the stuff that's outside of ourselves and we don't focus on the stuff that's in ourselves. We've been taught and we're being conditioned and we're being trained by social media and all other things to chase after things. So we're living in heightened, elevated, prolonged, elevated levels of stress without actually recognizing that first and foremost, the seat of the soul, the pelvis, the pelvic floor shuts down when it's being overworked. it starts to tighten up. It starts to shut down. It starts to become dysfunctional. And it starts to happen inside the butt. So you start getting, oh, I've got sciatica. Oh, I've got back pain. Oh, I've got this. The obturator internus, these little muscles in the body, in the piriformis, you know, the sciatic knot runs through that. When it becomes really tight, the butt was sitting on it. And the bottom was never meant to be sat on all the time and spread like butter, right? It wasn't meant to be like that. It was... It is... It's the driver. It's the biggest muscle in the body. It's the driver. It's the lever. If you lift the chest, the hip goes forward. The bottom has to move. If you drop the chest, the hip goes back. The bottom has to move. And it encapsulates around over half of the pelvic floor. So it plays a role. But our modern life of sitting, not moving, junk masquerading as food, Being angry all the time, not willing to forgive, holding the breath, not drinking water because you want something sweet. You're not sweet enough. I mean, I'm sweet enough. Why do you need to have something in your water besides a piece of Celtic sea salt? What is your problem? So what's happened is there isn't an education on the real biology of the woman. We don't understand feminine essence because even in the masculine world, in the corporate world, chasing that CEO and that C-suite position, we have to become more masculine. Well, we believe we have to become more masculine. And as a consequence, we don't understand that feminine energy is about connection. It's about collaboration, about creativity and reproduction. And we're shutting that down. The masculine energy is like the architect of the building. but the feminine energy is actually the artist. We bring things to life and we can do it in a softer way. We don't have to be so aggressive with it. Thank you, sis. So to start that process of education, firstly, can you just let people know where the best place they can find you is, because people do start Googling in the middle of a podcast. Okay. Yeah, they can find me on LinkedIn and it's Jenny with an I, because my real name is, my full name, shall I say, is Jennifer. So you take away the F-E-R and it's Jenny with an I, right? People ask me, no E, just Jenny with an I. Jenny Russell. They can find me on LinkedIn. They can find me on Facebook on there. They can find me at Pelvic Secrets on Instagram, TikTok. I don't really do X very much. And I'm redoing JennyRussell.com, but it is there. They can find me on JennyRussell.com, but it is going to be much more of a corporate site. So the programs that I had before that I offered, all the pelvic floor programs, they're still there. But, you know, over the next couple of months, it will transition from a personal site, customer to customer, to more of a corporate site. That's wonderful. Thank you. So... speaking on pelvic floor, because that's one of the, I think that's the first book, it's not the first book that you wrote, but it's the first book I read. And I read it, I think I read it after I had most of my children, but I was actually fascinated by some of the things that you shared in Pelvic Floor Secrets. And when somebody writes a book, it's, you know, even if you write a book in a month or 10 years, no matter how long it takes someone to write a book, writing a book and deciding to write a book, especially a good book, you know, you have to be passionate about that subject. What made you, of all the things that we, you know, you could have written a book about with the 30 years of experience you've had, what made you want to focus on writing a whole entire book on the pelvic floor? Wow, that's, you know, no one's ever asked me that question in that way before. And I think that's a great question. So let me just backtrack and say that, you know, I've written a book beforehand. I wrote the first book in 2005. Literally, it's quite funny because I did a sales course a couple of years ago. And, you know, people ask you, why do you want to do this? What's your passion? And, you know, whatever. And I told him and then he said, with all due respect, Jenny, what's your real reason for getting into pelvic floor? And I was thrown. I was like, oh, that's it. Oh, OK. I didn't want to have bad sex after having a child. So what do you mean? And it really was a throwaway comment that a friend of mine made years ago. when he said, oh my God, Russell. Everyone used to call me Russell when I used to teach my classes back in the day. Now I know what they mean when they say it's like dipping your wick in a well. So I thank him for that statement because it's horrible if that sounds. It was his statement that drew my attention to that part of the body because I was as oblivious to that area as literally everybody else. But that statement made me think, oh my God, is that what happens after you have a child, you know, there's a, are we there yet moment. I didn't want to have that experience. So I was teaching 21 classes a week. Wow. And we just focus on doing reverse curls. We lived on reverse curls rather than doing crunches. I lived on reverse curl because everything had to come from that bottom half. And then a lot of my, my clients, their husbands will be saying, oh, you're doing Jenny stuff. It was working. I'd get stopped in the street. I stopped everywhere. But when I met Paul check in 2001, when he came over to the Harbor club in Chelsea, I had already been competing in the 90s, Britain's fittest woman, three golds, four silvers, bronze record holder. But he put this, we did a little exercise on the Swiss ball and I was struggling. And I was thinking like in 95, when I set the record in ultra fit, I was on Sky Sports. And when they talked about the press ups, they said I had the press ups for the day for both men and women. So I always remember those little statements, but I couldn't do this little exercise. And Paul was like, oh, something's sleeping. So I started, I kind of undone my training and then restarted again. But then in 2001, so I was single at that point. In 2001, I met this guy, God have you. But I had this really amazing experience. And I was thinking, wow, this man is amazing. But actually, I then said, learn it wasn't him it was me and that's where it really first came from and so that's how I ended up writing the first book then I was washing the dishes that's how the title just dropped into my head just God gave me this can of vagina really by a Mercedes which makes everyone jump and then it's subtitled what can your pelvic floor do for you but it wasn't a sex book it was a book about the lower abdominals and the multifidus those muscles that are on the same loop as the pelvic floor how they come together and their impact on sexual function. That's what the first book was about. And then I was teaching classes at the Harbour Club. And so women would come to me and talk to me. And I've got this long email. I've got a prolapse. I've got this. So I said, okay, fine. I'll help you. But I didn't do it one-on-one. I did it in the Swiss ball class. And then this lady had been with a physiotherapist for eight months and her measurements on a pelvic floor were not changing. Six weeks later, in the Swiss ball class where I made sure I put exercises in that were really for her, but I put them in for the class. And her readings went from like eight millimoles to 23 and she was signed off. So she invited me to her house. Her husband stood behind her. They gave me a bottle of champagne. He stood behind her. He kissed her on her head and he said to me, thank you for giving me my wife back. And that was a moment when I thought, I need to write another book because people don't know what they're doing. And I didn't know that I was going to get those results because I wasn't working one-on-one. I worked in a group setting, but I just said to her, because she took the time to email me, I made sure that every week she came to class, I would put things in that I knew would impact the pelvic floor to the point where she was signed up from the physiotherapist within six weeks. So eight months of physiotherapy, and I don't have a physiotherapy degree, six weeks in a class with me and her life changed. When you say her life changed, just for women that don't know or haven't, because what I also know, me and you both know this, is that people can be experiencing a health challenge and they just think that's just what my body is. And then when they present to you, you're like, no, do you realize you have boom, boom, boom. So what is a prolapse? And what's a prolapse womb? And what were your pelvic floor exercises that you included able to give this woman that gave her her life back? Right. So a prolapse. So what can prolapse for women is the upper part of the vagina can actually collapse into itself. That's what women don't realize. The upper vaginal fault, they call that. The rectum, the colon, the uterus, the bladder. So there's five different prolapses that women can have. A lot of medical professionals recognize incontinence as a stage one prolapse. A lot of women don't realize that. They don't think it's got anything to do with it, but that weakness there can progress into something further down the road. So you have like grade one, two, three, and four. So grade one, you just feel a little bit of discomfort. Grade two, it's kind of beginning to descend into the vaginal canal. Grade three, it's literally sitting at the orifice right at the opening. And grade four is actually literally hanging out of the vagina. You're talking about the womb. The womb, the uterus. It's slowly coming out of the vagina. It's slowly coming out. The uterus is, or the bladder is, or the colon is, or the rectum is, or the top part of the vagina is. Wow. So that's what women don't realise. But what happens is, when it gets to that point where the... The... the organ is actually hanging outside of the vagina. Many women are so embarrassed. My friend was a gynecologist, said a lot of women take about a year before they go to the doctor. They're too scared because he's male. So they keep pushing it back inside. And a lot of the times when you have that test, if you think about it, it's not easy to do a vaginal exam for a woman standing up. You're kind of like underneath them doing this. But you need gravity to give you the true measure. So any prolapse a woman has when she's lying down, because there's no gravity, everything falls backwards, it feels better. It's when she stands up and starts to go into her day that it begins to, gravity starts to bring it down. But also you can look at a distension of the belly. So all of our internal organs play a role in holding, sorry, not our internal organs, our abdominal musculature, plays a role of holding your internal organs in their natural anatomical position, right? You have this statement that people hear about intra-abdominal pressure and people don't understand what that means. And it's literally the pressure that happens that comes onto the organs because they naturally rock and move with breath and you cough, sneeze, run, jump, whatever. That's the pressure that it's talking about. If the abdominal wall is deconditioned, and it's extended, and a lot of people breathe shallow, there's a lot more pressure in that abdominal cavity. And that pressure pushes down on the organs and the natural, and those organs push down onto the reproductive organs, which then come down onto the pelvic floor. So there is a reason why, not the washboard abdominals, because that's another problem right there when the organs can't rock, right? So the organs don't want their natural rocking motion. But you need to have a level of conditioning in your abdominal structure. So the more overweight you are, the less deconditioned the muscles are, the more there is a potential for prolapse. But there's also more potential because there's more pressure inside of the abdominal structure, just in how you walk and load and land. All of those things produce pressure. So you've got the internal pressure, then you have the external pressure of moving, lifting and whatever. So that's what causes prolapse. or can be a contributory factor to a prolapse. And then it becomes, and then of course, you've got a deconditioned vagina, deconditioned pelvic floor muscles. There's no support, but you've got to think of the pelvic floor, right? It's like, you know, the foundation of your trunk is your pelvic floor to support and protect as if a trap door. Understand it will value its role, confidently continent. stretch sexually satisfied, structurally sound, you know, good gate, whatever, whatever, be at your goal. That's what it, that's what those things play. And they're really, really important. I think the sad thing is when we move it right back to looking at, you know, black sisters and brown sisters, particularly, we are less likely, we're two to four times more likely to suffer in maternity. We had this conversation when we spoke, you know, that we have less poor maternal outcomes. We're more likely to suffer from trauma. We're more likely to suffer from things like prolapses. The very first time I ever heard about a prolapse was from a black woman first before I heard it from any white woman. And we're the least likely to go and seek help until we get to that point where I was saying three and four. I'd helped this lady to go from a grade two prolapse to a grade one inside the class. So that meant that by what we did was we didn't specifically do pelvic floor exercises because people always think I've just got to squeeze and lift, squeeze and lift. We focused on actually understanding how to activate the lower abdominals. We focused on a set of muscles coming like little Goni wires in the back called the multifidus, right? Just under the erector spinae because the multifidus, the transverse abdominals and the pelvic floor are like a little triangle. They're on the same level. neurological loop, so the same firewire from the brain. So when you activate one, there should be a co-contraction from the other two. Then it comes together like this to be like the natural girdle. So it kind of does this coming in together and this lifting up to protect. So you've got this little natural protection that does this and a lift to stop that pressure from creating too many problems. So what we did was focus on those muscles there and look at how we can then also the internal obliques we looked at the obliques as well we looked at the lats we looked at what you know the diaphragm the breathing so the diaphragm is the top of the can the pelvic diaphragm is of the pelvic floor levator and i say you look at they work together they kind of bounce up and down together so we looked at breath we looked at Pelvic, we did some pelvic floor activation thinking of drinking through a straw, but we looked at activating the transverse, the multifidus, and we put those exercises, we looked at strengthening the can, the top, the bottom, and the sidewalls. And by strengthening those things there, we, we, we alleviated the pressure on the pelvic floor. We, by strengthening that as well, if you think of the, okay, so this is my new pelvic floor model, but if you think of the pelvic floor, and you understand it, it would help. So it has a left and right side, right? So every muscle is the same on the left and the right. It has a left and right side. If the muscles are deconditioned, if you just put your hands up, audience, put your hands up in front of you so your palms are facing each other and take them apart. So you think of your pelvic floor muscles just being flat like your hand. They're deconditioned. But if you strengthen those muscles, if you curve your fingers out, audience, so you're making almost like a V shape. So now, if you've got just straight lines and you've got all this pressure coming down, it can just fall straight through the middle. But if you strengthen those muscles and muscles, you look at your arm as well, look at your bicep, when you flex it, no matter how small it is, it has a curve, right? So think about the pelvic floors having this plumpness, this curve. If it has a curve now, can things fall through as easily? No. The answer is no. And the things are the organs. The organs. Right? And also, that's that. And the ultimate reward is if those muscles are much stronger, if you've got the straight line and he's there, he's there. Let's hope he gets something, yeah? But if you strengthen those muscles, he's got to work to get in, hasn't he? Come on. I mean, it's not rocket science. Sorry. I have the fire you were talking about. So my youngest is, my youngest is nine. I know women whose youngest is 30. And, you know, one of the videos- Yeah, my youngest, no, my youngest is 19, yeah, yeah. Okay. So the, I did a video the other day talking about the fact that a lot of women don't realize that they haven't recovered from their last child, whether their child is just about to go into nursery or is graduating from a PhD. some women's bodies have not recovered. If a woman hasn't recovered from pregnancy, because we know culturally, you know, as soon as a woman gave birth, she would have her tummy bound. She would be doing vaginal steaming. She would be nourished. None of that is happening now. How can somebody, is it even possible for a woman to be able to recover from whatever it was that caused her pregnancy? her challenges in her pelvic region whether it was pregnancy or birth or you know maybe obesity over time not looking after ourselves sitting down too long you know eating unhealthy food is there a part is there a time where it's past the point of no return or is there always something that somebody can can do to get themselves back on track fantastic question the only way it becomes an issue where it's past the point of no return is if you lose the ability to have the brain communicate to the vagina and to the rest of the body. So if my mum, she's dementia, bed bound, that's past the point of no return, right? The body's not working properly. But first and foremost, every woman listening to this podcast, your body is not your enemy. It's your best friend. It is your best friend. I mean, I did this Swiss ball videos as well. Years ago, I did my Swiss ball videos. The first one was the next level, but it was kind of advanced stuff. It was standing on the ball, doing all sorts of crazy things. But the second two I did, I went backwards and did the beginning. And I called them, the Swiss ball is your best friend, part one and part two. Your body is your best friend, right? The pain isn't something to be ashamed of. You know, you've taken yourself, you know, 20 years to suddenly decide you want to do something. You know what? You've decided to do something. So congratulate yourself, right? Number one. Forgive yourself. Forgive yourself. I mean, look, let me say something. People are good at one of two things. They're either good at making money or good at looking after their health. Very few people are good at doing both, right? And it's health and finance in harmony. Very few people are good at doing both. I'm good at looking after my health. I'm learning late to start looking after my money. Do you understand? But the difference is, It's easier for me to learn this and get the finance than it is for me to chase the health. It's easier, but I'm not chasing the finance. That's it. I don't need to chase the health either. I want you to tell yourself you want to be healthy. And then because if you're chasing health, you think that you're chasing it. If you think of things that take you away from optimizing your health, you start to think you're being deprived because if we keep calling ourselves Junk, masquerading as food, treats. I'm going to treat myself to a cake. I'm going to treat myself to a biscuit. I'm going to treat myself, right? Then when someone says to you, right, you need the discipline to do it. That's why people lack discipline because they don't want to not have their treats. So I changed the language. I treat myself to optimal health and I have a biscuit with full awareness. I have a glass of wine with full awareness. I do drink people because I need to cut my drinks, but I do drink. I don't, I'm not a lush, right? I don't go to the pub. I don't do that stuff. But the point I'm making is I have a drink. Some people are shocked, but I do have a drink. And I tell people that my body is my temple, but I, you know, behind me here, like I'm a number two over there. I've got my Vitamix, you know, we, you know, the food process that we used yesterday to make the hummus. I soak my chickpeas and make them fresh myself. It's a process, right? And it takes time. You know, this thing here is like 600 quip. I use it every single day. I celery juice. I've got my, when I finish, you know, I'm going to do my oranges, my orange, my lemon, my ginger, my turmeric, my black pepper. You know, I make my juices all the time. Like watermelon, lime goes into the vitamins. I make juices for myself and my mum. I go to the market, get my coconuts. I do the whole lot, right? That's what I like to do. I go to a different shop to buy my meat. I don't buy meat from the supermarket. I go over this place over here to go and get my wild fish. I don't buy it from the supermarket. So, but I treat myself to optimizing my health, right? What I want women to know is that you don't have to suffer. You can shine, yeah? You're like the sun. You can shine, right? So it's, as long as you have the ability to learn, you can learn to do something different. Because if this was about money, you would take the time to learn it. Because if someone said to you, I can teach you, I've got all the tools you need to be a millionaire in six weeks, I guarantee you, discipline wouldn't be a problem for you. Because it's something that you're thinking, and in your head, you're like, well, I've got this million pounds, I can buy this, and I can do that, and I can do this, and I can do that. Well, I'll tell you what, If you've got the vitality, you can get up every morning without having to go, oh, my back. You can jump around without having to think, oh, my God, I wet myself. I don't line my knickers. You shouldn't be lining your knickers. 500 years it takes for one of those incontinence pads to disintegrate in landfill. Stop. It's the third biggest contributor to landfill. We've got to cut that doo-doo out. You're not meant to leap. We're not meant to leap. We're not meant to have that. But first and foremost, just distracting, I said to Leah at the beginning of this before we came on air that I wrote this poem and I'm in this spoken word. It was just for Black women. And I feel like this is us. And I think once we start to look at ourselves this way and forgive ourselves and recognize what we can do, we'll be good. I have a 60-day journey called She Comes First. And you are the she and she comes first. Every single letter of she comes first stands for an area of health that you tend to not think about. And I look at them like the 13 spokes on a bicycle wheel. You know, on a bicycle wheel, if the spoke is bent and it's out, that wheel's not going to turn properly. So if you look at that there, that's what you are. But you are the she and that she is self, hormones and emotions. That's what underpins everything, your self-love or self-care or self-awareness. Your self-love governs your self-care. Your self-care governs your self-awareness. Those overall govern your self-esteem and your self-worth. But because of your self-love, your hormonal harmony and your emotional empowerment are really about what you think about yourself and how you see yourself in this world. And then all the other letters are around connections, oxygen, movements that matter, exercise, sleep, food, Intimate health, rehydration, spirituality and thoughts. That's your she comes first, right? Empowered black woman. Pound for pound. Let it go. Put it down. You know that load is heavy. Emotional trauma weighing down the heart, the head, the body. It's like weight loss when it's gone. That feeling of, wow, I've done it. It feels good. You look good. Even if you can't see it, but I can. No longer do the shoulders round forward like a boxer, ready to step in the ring. They're back and down, the trunk elongated, the head held high. Not in arrogance, but in confidence. You're struck, you're stride. Now a glide, light, airing. You're finally free to forgive yourself first. Finally free to let go. Finally free to move forwards. Finally free to let the world know the real, true, authentic you. Feminine essence glowing, the light that lights the city. No longer hidden, no longer hiding, no longer fighting for your rightful place. The queen within you ready to rise. Your health takes its rightful primary place. The statistics they quote for illness, no longer will you be counted as one. It's your time now to reclaim your life, your time to reclaim your power, your fun. Together we move in unity, a collective women of worth, because one by one we've discovered our she and know that she comes first. Yay! Thank you for sharing that, sis. That's all right. What is the mission that you feel that you're on with the work that you're doing? What is the end goal? How do you see the future of Black women's health with you being a part of it? Wow. I see that this is a movement towards empowerment. I know that this is our time to rise. This is our time to, like I said, step into our rightful place without the shame, without the load, to leave it behind. I see the future of Black women's health being something that is celebrated right across the globe, that this becomes a movement. Because even with, I do these bi-monthly meetups now in Soho, unfiltered. They have this big, massive projector. That means I can make it a global event now. And I can, if you can't, obviously, if you live in a different part of the world, you can't make it to Soho. but it doesn't mean you can't make it to the event because Zoom is fantastic. I have a business account. I've got a hundred spaces on Zoom. It means that everything that I talk about when we have this conversation, when we do the next one on the 19th of July, it's let's talk about sex. And I've put a full stop in between the letters after celibacy, childbirth, hysterectomy, menopause, trauma. because it's an opportunity to reclaim your feminine essence, your confidence, and, you know, who you are. Essentially, what is the missing link there? If you've had a traumatic childbirth and, you know, especially perineal trauma, the impact it has on your relationships with yourself, with your spouse, how you see your world, you know, your career, it spills out of the bedroom automatically. and it just moves into the boardroom and into the wider space. So there's a whole conversation around sex after hysterectomy and there's different types of hysterectomy. So a total hysterectomy, I know three women who had total hysterectomy who've had really, really poor experiences with intimacy because the man just feels like he's walked into the middle of the airport hall. There's nothing there. And, you know, it's just even in terms of emotional disempowerment, because that's your emotional powerhouse and center has been removed. The conversation that the ovaries have with the brain and cardiovascular function has been removed. That's why heart disease and cardiovascular disease after hysterectomy can be significantly increased so us as black women we're in pain because of fibroids and different things we just go just you know they say whip it out that's i've heard them speak at the international continent society whip it out it is not it's not something you're gonna pull out so we need to understand that we need to understand as a christian myself right we need to understand long-term celibacy as we're aging and and the biological changes that are happening down there You meet somebody and before that relationship gets a chance to get hold, you get married quickly. So you're not doing anything wrong under God's eyes. And then actually you've not paid attention to the energy downstairs has been trapped. It's not even able to come out. And the marriage has fallen apart before it's got started because intimacy just isn't happening. So this is a conversation. you know, that needs to be had. It needs to be had with the Christian woman, with the black woman, you know, it needs to be had with women. And as black women, you know, the unforgiveness, the anger, we've experienced a lot of physical trauma, sexual trauma, you know, verbal trauma, but it traps itself down there. I think when women start to recognize that they don't have to be trapped, it'll be amazing. And I've just finished, Lee, I've just finished doing, fascia release therapy and that fascia release is the is the business we've been practicing on our you know we practice with the coaches and i had the background and done the other day and i had to get back to play a tennis match and the lady turned up late so we literally just finished and i had to just run out the house but as i was walking back into the gym to go and play tennis i was like i phoned her i said friend my gina is Talking. I was walking, I'm thinking. So before you go on, for women that don't know what that is, can you explain what that is? The fascia. Yeah, and the fascia release. Okay. So the fascia is the membrane that covers the muscles and all the systems of the body. The lymphatic system, the connective system, it's connective tissue, literally. And the central nervous system. If the fascia is tight, everything gets locked in it. If it's tight, then nothing can move. The energy is blocked. The muscles don't move freely. The joints don't move freely. The central nervous system, nothing's flowing really well. So there's five different lines in fascia. And what you do is you release those lines over five different sessions because it takes quite a bit of time. And by releasing those lines, you can unblock trauma. You can obviously, because everything's flowing better, you can improve blood pressure, improves posture. performance. It's just amazing. Body shape, muscle response. It's amazing. Injury prevention. You can see people with functional flat feet, the natural arch coming back up. You know, I did it on Sonia. I did the back line on Sonia on Wednesday and she was just happy because her butt is up nice and she had a little cup butt. But you just see them just even just doing the first session and you just see the structural changes, the postural change, the front line you finish, it opens you up. And literally everyone's like, you know, they're just here, they're back, their head is back better on the axis. There's some real emotional release that goes on. And I think a lot of black women would do really well with that. It's a lot of work, a lot of work for the therapist as well. But it's very, very, very, very powerful. And so I'm weaving it into my programs because actually by releasing the fascia, you'll even get better results than I was getting before. The results would be even better because now you've released the fascia and things can flow and the energy can flow. Then like I'm saying, especially around this area here, it's a game changer. How would the fascia get shut down in the first place? It's just trauma. It's where it's locked. It just locks itself in there. And funny enough, we don't think of the fascia so much. Everything needs to slide because the fascia needs to glide and slide. But everything is not gliding. It's not moving. So where it's acidified, holding of the breath, the diaphragm becomes rigid. So the diaphragm for a lot of people doesn't move freely either. So releasing the diaphragm from some people, especially the deep front line, the last one is, it can be quite a painful and traumatic experience, but you have to go through the lines from the front line, back line, lateral line, spiral line into the deep front. Cause you, cause that's when you're like peeling the onion. So you need to release the layers. Yeah. You know, each time I've done a background on the client and she's finished and then she just shaken her teeth and chattering and she's, and I had to just cover her with blankets because literally that was just an emotional, released there and the whole body the feet went turned to ice teeth were chattering the body was you know like this it was uh it was really really powerful um really powerful you know I was doing just a some shoulder massaging like this on my niece who's 14 and she's crying crying crying and my sister-in-law's like what's because I'm not painful mommy it's not painful I don't know why I'm crying but I know there's there's a few traumas been happening recently so It was just, and again, the left side is feminine. So I knew exactly what it was. And so I knew, I know the history of this, my family, you know, but that emotional release was, was massive, was massive. So I've seen my brother, he's got, he's carrying the weight of the world as his daughter. I got a text the next day, I did the front line on him. I got a text, mate, your brother's a different person. Yeah. but it's fashion fashion work is brilliant so the fashion freedom is and i'm also going to be doing vega testing as well from um next month as well so it's really uh yeah this is it's a game changer it really is a game changer for for posture for performance for intimate health but for black women i think they might start there first because you know we're still always a bit skeptical i want us to not be don't be skeptical about your body be intrigued and be willing to invest in you because I can't breathe for you. I can't do do for you. I can't do it. You know, Leah can't do it. We can't do it for you. And we have both spent years investing in ourselves, you know, so, you know, don't look and go, oh my God, does she say that investment is, you know, because you are the Mercedes you park outside your door. You are the five bedroom house with the 200 foot garden. And, you know, you are that, you know, That's the stuff you leave behind. It doesn't move for you, it doesn't breathe, it doesn't have feelings, but you do. So if you're willing to pay monthly for those things, so you look good behind the wheel or you've got a beautiful house, be the beautiful house. So what kind of, just again, to start the process of education, whilst I would obviously just recommend people search you out and work with you do your programs and do all the things can you give some tips and advice as to things that women can do now that can start to improve their health so i remember you saying for example that a lot of the pelvic floor exercises that women are given after they've given birth don't particularly work that well So for a woman that's listening to all of this and they're like, oh, I got pelvic floor, hold yourself like you're stopping yourself going from the toilet. Let me just start doing that because Jenny's saying that the pelvis is important. So I learned that. Let me start doing that. What would you say to that lady? Okay, so to that lady, I would say before you start holding your wee, lay on your back, put your hands on your lower tummy, And your hand across, one on the lower tummy, one on your belly button, and cough. Just lay on your back, bend your knees, feet flat, and just go. And then see what happens with your hand when you cough. If your hands get pushed outwards, then your lower abdominals are deconditioned. And that's where you would need to start. So let's look at the muscles that build the can, that become a part of the whole can, and let's strengthen them. You know, because sometimes you can strengthen the lower abdominals and because you get a co-contraction in the pelvic floor, you will have that. Also, so that's the first one. So you're laying on your back, knees bent, feet flat. When you cough, do your hands go forward or do they come in? Most, 90%, 99% of people, their hands go forward. If they haven't done any of that work, they're not going to go in. Don't kid yourself. Just do it first. Yeah. Then... The next thing is when you cough, what do you actually feel inside your vagina? Because that's an opportunity for me to know how connected you are because trauma, heartbreak, hurt, anger, all those things shut you down and you become disconnected. If you're disconnected, then it's very hard for you to do the exercises that you need to do because you won't actually understand how to do them because you're disconnected. So you need to be able to see how you do those exercises. And that will really come back to whether or not you are connected to yourself or you're not connected to yourself. Does that make sense? Yeah. So if you're not connected to yourself, then we have to now try and look at a way in which we're going to get you to be able to become connected. So that's why sometimes when people go to the toilet and they try to stop the urine halfway, they pull everything. They just tense in everything. And that tension just means that you can end up having tight muscles, but they end up being weak muscles. So we need to learn that whole thing. So we've got to do the cough to find out what the tummy is doing, to find out what we're feeling inside the vagina. Then we need to look at our breath. And you can do that by standing and looking in the mirror. Take a deep breath in. What do you see happening when you breathe in? Now, many people might be thinking, but I want to do an exercise for my vagina. I am telling you, these things come together and they will exercise your vagina. But you need to, first of all, understand that if your breathing is short and shallow, if the diaphragm doesn't move freely, the abdominal wall won't move freely. And it works. So if the diaphragm's not working properly, the abdominal wall won't work properly. And if the abdominal wall is not working properly, the pelvic floor won't work properly. That's why we need to see what's happening with the diaphragm. So when you breathe, you know, take a deep breath in. Look at your timer. When you breathe in, can you breathe in for four or five seconds? Most people, it's a sniff. They can't breathe because we're just so heightened now. We don't even realize, you know, we're behind the wheel. Get lost. You get lost. And all of it, especially when you're driving. That's the way you can alter your breathing without even realizing there's a time. You have got to be able to cross that man and then go and get yourself back to life is good. So what happens when you breathe, when you take that deep breath in, what's happening downstairs? Because when you're taking a deep breath in, there should be a movement downstairs. So already you want to know whether or not you're connected or you're disconnected. And that's where you need to start is always the beauty of breathing. Everything starts with breath. Breath is life force energy. And if that life force energy isn't getting downstairs, then we need to get the diaphragm moving. And we need to think about breathing as if you put your hands on the top part of your nose, top part of the bridge, literally. That's like the top of the sinuses. That's where the breath needs to be, up here, not down here at the base of the nostrils. But up in here, when you breathe in, it's a much more earthy sound rather than a... Yeah? Most people go... That's sniffing, yeah? But you want a... And I'm writing my microphone now. So you want a much more earthy sound that happens. And as you breathe in, when you're breathing in, what's happening to your shoulders and your chest and your tummy? Look in the mirror. Can you take a... What's happening to your shoulders? What's happening to your chest? What's happening to your tummy? Because that's really, really important. I'm going to give you the answer in a minute. I don't want to give it to you right now because you're going to be saying, oh yeah, that's happening. I want you to think about it first. I'll come back to it in a minute because now you see you're either doing it and you're just like, what am I supposed to be looking at? Look at yourself. This is where we need to be. If we want to be connected, we need to start looking in that mirror and looking at ourself. We're not looking at ourself. We're not aware of ourself. That's what I said. Without self-love, self-care is superficial. That's why the eyebrows, the eyelashes, the hair, the nails, it's all superficial. It's all external stuff. That's what it's like. So, but when you take off the mask, when you take off the makeup, when Leah knows me, she knows I wear makeup. I haven't got any on today, right? I'm not scared to be seen natural. I know that that makeup will just give me a bit more of a glow and enhance my skin. But if I'm so scared to be seen natural, I'm saying that my natural self isn't good enough. We've got to get past that, right? I don't need, you know, eyelashes and stuff. I put makeup on. It's very rare I do my eyes. Yeah, if I had my makeup done and I do my eyes, it's very rare I do my eyes. I might every now and again put a bit of eyeliner, but I'll do my whole face, but my eyes just remain as they are. But we know already you can do the eyes and make them look big, but it's great. But I'm not scared of who I am. That's the important bit that we need to get to. And without self-care, self-awareness is misguided. If you don't understand as part of self-care, when you breathe, what are you doing? What's happening to you? What are you feeling inside? Sometimes you do an exercise and you say, what did you feel? And the people go, nothing. When you do the fascia work, it's really interesting because You want to know what people are feeling. And sometimes I go, I feel nothing. That means they're totally disconnected from themselves. But if I run, if I do one line and I get you to stand up, trust me when I tell you, you're going to feel lopsided. And one leg's going to feel heavy. Then I do the other leg and you go, oh, you might get up and you go, oh, I feel a bit light. Then you're connected. But if you stand up and move around and you don't feel nothing, you won't, you're not even allowing yourself to be connected to yourself. Now I come back to the breath. what you should what you should see because now you should have done a few yeah is it your shoulders rising is it your chest lifting is that's what's happening because that's that's one response is your belly button and your tummy going in or is it going out that's another response because all of those responses tell me the coach about your breathing and It tells me about, it gives me an idea of how you may be inadvertently acidifying your body without realizing. Think about putting air into a balloon. If you're putting air into a balloon and you're breathing air into a balloon, it expands. When the diaphragm drops, the tummy should expand. The diaphragm, the rib cage should expand. It expands outwards and forwards and back. The tummy should expand. It's like putting air into a balloon. And then as you release that air and you breathe out the balloon, you release the under the balloon, what does it do? The air goes out, the balloon shrinks. That is what your tummy should be doing. It's supposed to be two thirds tummy, one third chest. If your shoulders rise as soon as you're breathing, that's you carrying the weight of the world, not allowing yourself to breathe, not allowing the oxygen to move down, which means the diaphragm isn't moving freely, which means the abdominal wall isn't moving freely, which means the pelvic floor can't work properly. So that is where I would really start. And I know it may be a bit of a disappointment for some people, but trust me when I tell you, when you start to breathe life downstairs into Gina and Gina comes to life, you will thank me for it in the end. And, you know, that connection, because obviously there's people who don't really have much sensation vaginally and it's more clitoral. But if you have no connection, generally, you can't be connected. nothing is gonna be satisfying and stimulating. And because of all the benefits of intimacy and releasing the happy hormones and reducing the stress hormones and helping the circulation of the blood and helping the sleep and there's so many benefits, whether we're intimate with ourselves or whether we're intimate with somebody else, but no one's been intimate with it. There's no intimacy happening if we're completely shut off from such an important part of our body. So I think the work that you do is really important. And there is a big movement to remove the stigma of talking about our intimate health and our body and connecting to it without the shame of misogyny, which has marred a lot of the education that we have received. So how can people get in touch with you? How can people start working with you? Are there any projects that you're working on right now that people can... plug into if they do want to take their intimate health to another level lovely so you can come to the unfiltered event in july whether you come online or whether you come in person you can come to that event so you can find that all over my social media pages so that's at pelvic secrets it's in the bio Jenny Russell on LinkedIn. The link for it is in the bio as well. So you can get that link and you can click onto that link. That's everywhere. It should be on JennyRussell.com as well. But if it's not there, because like I said, the website's been transitioned over, then yeah, find me on Pelvic Secrets. But you'll find it definitely on Instagram. You'll find it in the bio. The link for it in the bio is right there. Then you can also email me. You can email me Jenny at JennyRussell.com. So if you email me Jenny at Jenny Russell, then I will come back to you I will give you information because I do do one-to-one coaching. So you can book for one-to-one coaching. You can also, I haven't got anything put up yet for the fascia release, but if you're interested in having some fascia release therapy, which honestly I can recommend it highly enough, it's fantastic. Then you can also book on that. I'm doing a special offer because as I said, it's, it's a lot of work for the therapist as well, but it's really amazing. So actually it's it's, I'm doing the five session at the moment as a special offer. So at the moment, I'm actually doing it half price. So instead of it being a thousand pounds, because it is a thousand pounds for the five sessions, I'm doing it for 500. So if you're interested in booking those five sessions, because that is a steal. yeah then um yeah so you're literally getting it for half price if you want to book those that's not 500 pound a session don't panic people it's 500 though that would not be uncommon for jenny exactly exactly it's not out that's not out of the question but it will be and then when it goes because what we do normally it's sold as a package of 10 because once you've done the five sessions you can then now go a bit deeper and so obviously that's going to be like a 2000 pound package but once it goes into the main bigger programs you're right it's it's not you know my my top clients pay like you know 16 000 pounds for 12 months of coaching so um but yeah so that's what that's what that will be so that if they if you're interested in the fascia release which i i can't recommend it enough really and it's a steal right now because it ain't gonna stay at that price for very long yeah yeah um and i was doing that for like five people so i'm doing that for five people that listen to this podcast if you just put if you just send me an email and put leah just put leah's name just put leah fascia, then I will, um, honor that, that for you. Um, but unfiltered is the 19th of July. So that's the one I'm doing. You've got the one-to-one coaching, um, and the 60 day journey for she comes first. The next one, um, will be probably won't start till September now because I won't be doing over the summer holidays starting September. And that's a really, really good program. Cause like I said, it's a 13 spokes of the bicycle wheel and it allows you to sort of We dig into each one over the first two weeks and you can really then be able to see which spoke you don't pay attention to or which spoke in your bicycle will need attention. And we build that up into a whole 60 day journey that can follow into a mastermind program for accountability. So yeah, that's it. That's me. On my books, of course, my books, my books. Oh yeah, yeah, your books. Yeah, on JennyRussell.com, you can get Pelvic Floor Secrets because my secrets are for sharing, of course. They are on JennyRussell.com. You get the books on JennyRussell.com. Thank you, sis. How much of this can be accessed? Because you're based in London. How much of this can be accessed? Which of the services can be accessed remotely for people that are not in London or, you know, abroad? Abroad. So internationally, they can access... The 60 Day Challenge is an online program anyway. Unfiltered, as I said, it's a live program that they can access via Zoom. There are some coaching packages that can be done remotely, but obviously fascia. And if you really want to do some deep pelvic floor work, then you need to come in. But I've had people flying from Australia. So I do do... If somebody's flying in from abroad or they're coming from very far, I do... I do a program that kind of condenses a three month program. So they come in and do a full assessment over the one day. And then we go through, it takes about four or five hours to go through the program, go through the nutrition, the lifestyle, the things they have to do and the exercises. Then they come back after eight weeks to get a few more. And then yeah, 12 weeks we see where we're at. So yeah, so there are programs that can be done and people have flown in from abroad to spend two, three days to do that and it's worked really well for them. So yeah, so that's that. But yeah, the 60 day journey unfiltered and if I do workshops and stuff, but if you just follow me on Instagram or connect with me on LinkedIn, then whatever I'm doing, I can let you know. What's the message that you want to leave women with today? What's the last thing you wanna share with women before we wrap up for today? Your body... is the best thing that you will ever, ever have. It's the best thing you can invest into. You are fearfully and wonderfully made, blessed and highly favoured, and you are definitely designed for signs and wonders. Stop wondering what's wrong with yourself and start looking at investing into you because if you won't invest into you, no one else will. Thank you, sis. Thank you very much for being here. I am a great fan of your work. I love speaking to you. I love listening to you. And I do definitely recommend everyone gets in contact with and just, you know, starts their journey, starts their Jenny journey. I do know what as well and just saying that thank you also because honestly and if you haven't been to see Leah and get your bloods done I honestly suggest you do that too because you know Leah doesn't live in London it was like a three hour drive I think we went down there and it was a really really interesting really really interesting journey and I was so happy I was so happy that is something that I think you honestly people you underestimate the value of that and I think you definitely give you give that away so I honestly thank you if you don't understand how much that does can change your life and Aaliyah gives it away then you know because you know if we talk and she starts making Jenny prices you're not going to cry you understand thank you sis have a wonderful day thank you everyone for being here and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode of Naturally You Radio take care and Stay healthy.