The Postpartum Window and Healing Touch

Tatiana Berindei:

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the SuperPower Mommas show. I’m your host Tatiana Berindei, and we have another episode in the series that Christine Devlin Eck and I are doing around how to best support our postpartum mamas. Today we are talking about the postpartum window and healing touch. Christine is back with us today. I’m not going to read her bio and everything because we’ve already covered that. We’ve already done a couple of episodes. I’m just really thrilled to welcome her back so we can continue to go deeper into this journey of how we can really revolutionize the way we care for new moms in our country, in our culture and in the world at large. Welcome back to the show, Christine.

Christine Devlin Eck:

Yeah, and it’s unfortunate because okay, well yes, I would love for every postpartum mom to be able to have a practitioner offer them a postpartum oil massage. However, the empowering piece of it is that we can do self-massage. We can apply oil to ourselves. We can have our partners apply oil to our bodies and give some of this healing touch. And at the same time, we can offer this to our babies, and that’s a whole nother aspect of this conversation that we can get into at some point. But absolutely there’s so much we can do without having to pay somebody else to do it.

And that was really important to me. When I guess I was expecting my second baby, at that point I had understood. I learned a lot about the postpartum traditions in the Ayurvedic perspective and really started to understand that there was so much missing in the Western understanding and what myself and so many of my peers were really just missing when we were preparing to give birth.

And I was concerned that there wasn’t anybody in my town who understood this type of touch, this type of treatment. And my teacher, the late beautiful Yisha Oaks shared with me. She said, “Christine, don’t worry. There is so much that you can do just with knowledge, just with understanding some basic things. You can get yourself some oil and have it on hand, and you can give the self-massage to yourself with your own hands.” And that’s something that’s a very basic daily tenant of an Ayurvedic routine like a Dinacharya is what we call it in Sanskrit. It’s a daily, daily routine.

And that’s a very basic part of it at any stage of life is Abhyanga, putting oil on the skin. Because of the beautiful part of what this does, it’s not just a luxury first, making your skin soft or whatever. What we’re doing is we’re actually inviting the pores to take in that oil, which it does very efficiently. And what it does is it helps the toxins that have built up inside in our tissues, inside of our bodies, to loosen and to release.

And what happens is those toxins are then able to find their way to our digestive tract, and then we can eliminate them. That is the only way that we can really get rid of things in our bodies. We can eliminate them through our digestive tract. It’s really a very beautiful, brilliant thing that our body automatically wants to do. And the oil massage is one way that we can help facilitate that process.

Tatiana Berindei:

What if someone has super oily skin already, to begin with?

Christine Devlin Eck:

Great question. Yeah. So there are different types of oils that have different qualities to them. For example, you would probably want to switch the oil you were using depending on the season you were in. So if you are a person who has a lot of oil in your body already, you probably have a high Pitta constitution. There’s a lot of fire in your constitution already. So you could use a more cooling oil like coconut or sunflower. That would be a much lighter, more cooling oil. If you are someone who is always cold, you have a tendency towards dry skin, you would want a much more warming oil, like almond oil.

There are beautiful, herbal-infused oils that are used in Ayurvedic Abhyangas that, depending on what you’re using it for or what stage of life or what constitution you are, you can choose accordingly. For postpartum, this is a special time, as you know, and so a lot of folks are really going to experience similar qualities at this time. And I don’t recommend for postpartum people to use coconut oil. I actually find that to be too cooling at that time.

For someone who maybe has naturally more oily skin, a really nice general oil that really is good for all body types is sesame oil. You can use sesame oil. You can use either an infused one. You could put a few drops of your favorite essential oil into that sesame oil and use that for your self-massage. And it’s really beautiful.

And I think we like to go from the top to the bottom with a postpartum self-massage. Starting with your head, moving down into your shoulders, your breast tissue, your arms, your belly, your hips all the way down to your feet, because that’s really bringing your energy down. There’s a lot of spacious light upward. If you think about anxious-y, flighty-type thoughts that can happen and experiences during that sacred window. So what we want to do is really bring things down. There are different thoughts about that, but we really like grounding during this time.

Tatiana Berindei:

So we’re going to go more in-depth into detail of what constitutes healing touch and how to perform this for yourself and also how to vet a practitioner and all of that kind of stuff when we get back from the break. We do need to go for a quick break. Christine, before we go, will you tell people where they can go to find out more about what you’re up to?

Christine Devlin Eck:

Yes, thanks so much. Sacredwindowsstudies.com is a great place to find us.

Tatiana Berindei:

Awesome. We’re talking with Christine Devlin Eck. And if you have not yet had a chance to go and check out our SuperPower Universe, please come and play with us there. There’s so much good stuff happening. We’ve got really yummy courses on. I’m big into pampering, y’all. This is my thing. I love pampering. I think all women deserve more pampering. I think it’s something we don’t do enough of just in general.

AngelaMaría and I have put together this wonderful course on using essential oils to do just that and to really increase our vibration and live a full life, and that’s in the membership. I’m offering these new moon circles in the membership. There’s lots of good stuff going on. If you haven’t checked that out yet, you can go to superpowermommas.com and come and play with us in the membership. You get a seven-day free trial when you go in there. But we are talking with Christine Eck about the postpartum window and healing touch. So stay tuned. We’re going to go in-depth when we get back. Don’t go anywhere. We’ll be right back.

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