Centering the Womb: Pain, grief, & ourselves

Taking the why out of the equation, this workshop centers how people with wombs relate to the chronic, physical, and mental pain as well as the joy we can embody. Through sitting with the grief, the pleasure, the delight, the playfulness, the worry, the social constructs experienced within the womb through gentle somatic meditations and writing prompts, we can access new ways of understanding ourselves, our gifts, our inheritances, and our love.

Who: This workshop is for people with a womb who are seeking a compassionate space to honor its hurts and hopes. You may have many reasons for wanting to speak to or through your womb, but likely there is a desire to seek a renewed, deepened, or more tender relationship with this space of creation and cycles; you may have a hope to integrate experiential wisdom or compost old stories into a reclaimed sense of power and purpose. Together we can tune in. While this space will certainly influence our writing, it is not a space to gather research for character or plot development.

How: This space is intentionally created to make space for slowness to wonder and explore. While operating within the confines of timeframes, we value earthtime and non-linearity, meaning this is not a space to provide medical or results-driven advice, but to downshift into experiencing the current moment of the body, how it is/as it is. While this space may feel therapeutic for some, it is not a substitute for therapy. We encourage all to show up as you are and to push no further than your capacity, as we will send a follow-up with writing prompts to the community after the workshop concludes.

Free workshop, RSVP required!

3-4:30pm EST / 12-1:30pm PST

Centering the Womb: A call to creativity

Blog post by Sheila McMullin

As a Wellspring Fellow for The Well in 2023, I held a writing workshop titled Centering: Pain, grief, ourselves for folks experiencing chronic pain and wanting an expressive outlet to process and narrativize the mayhem, disruption, and isolation pain can create in one’s life. I held this workshop mere weeks after a life-saving and -transforming emergency myomectomy that removed several tumors, called fibroids, from my uterus. Through misdiagnosis, medical minimization of women’s pain, a global pandemic, and my own fear of becoming an experiment as a woman of color within a field of gynecology built on forced experimentation on Black women and poor women, these tumors kept me hostage for years.

Through my own chronic pain and illness, I know the exhaustive labor of being in pain while resisting the urge to define yourself by it. That you, yourself, are not pain. Pain deepens because so much of our society stymies and disincentivizes mutual aid and caregiving. Pain is not a personal failing. Through writing in community, I wanted to center pain narratives and our relationships to them, and also, self-servingly, remind myself that I, too, was not alone.

In the years since my surgery, my pain is different. It’s no longer the pain of requiring iron infusions, walking with a cane, weeks bedridden, or worry about sick leave. The pain is in dealing with the aftermath: an infertility diagnosis, another invasive abdominal surgery, grief for what my body experienced while under anesthesia, evolving understanding of what it means to live in relationship with a body that has survived medical intervention.

It is from this changed terrain that I now seek to gather community with a focus on the liminal space at the center of the body.

My experience as a cisgender female-identifying mixed-race woman undergoing regular gynecological intervention has shaped my perspective on the capacity of the womb. Building on the legacy of writers and theorists who examine the body as archive and battleground, alongside my own herbalism practice and devotion to the divine, I am learning to keep one foot in Western medicine—grateful for its life-preserving interventions—and one foot in the unknown, in reverence and trust for meaning that unfolds through observance, reflection, and community. I have seen photos of my opened abdomen, my uterus, and fallopian tubes. I have sat in meditation where my ovaries announced their names to me. I have spoken to my uterus in sacred womb ceremonies where she told me that she wasn’t the one who was afraid; I was.

I don’t want to be afraid. I want to deepen my capacity to be present.

The womb can mean so much and hold so much. The womb is about our relationship to time and mortality, to purpose and delight. It’s a site of political control and cultural projection. It is organs, metaphor, threshold. Rather than define it, I want to expand our capacity to sit with all it has endured—and all it is asked to represent, repair, and hold together.

If you have a womb and would like to join a compassionate space to honor its hurts and its hopes, you are welcome to join us.

Womb

by Sheila McMullin

A womb is not a uterus

or a bird’s nest

The fallopian tubes

a bending forest of hollow reed bamboo

The ovaries

pith stuck to a thumb

plucking seeds from a blood orange

A womb is not the vagina

or the black hole at the center of the universe

It does not become a womb because of a placenta

nor because of the lack of one

A womb rests in what is illuminated by sun in shadow

greater than the sum of its parts

held in a pelvic bone at the seat of creativity

A womb may hold more than this

more than secrets and truths

more than metaphors

It is how we all came screaming into this world

a place where we’ve all spent time

between this world and the one before

a place we can never return to

a place of keepers