The womb doesn’t forget
Over the years, I’ve worked with women of all ages, and one theme that has repeatedly appeared is that the womb holds onto a lot of energy—the good, the bad, and the ugly. Now science is catching up to the womb wisdom that female mystics, shamans, and energy healers have known for millennia: the womb affects our memory.
Physically speaking, the womb is good at holding onto things. Without this ability, it would be difficult to have a pregnancy come to full term. This skill carries on into the energetic anatomy of the womb regardless of whether a woman has had a hysterectomy or not.
Energetically speaking, women are very good at holding onto a bunch of energies that are oftentimes not even ours in the first place. I’m talking about emotions, problems, memories, pain, regret, and the list goes on. Sound familiar?
By the age of 60, one in three women has had a hysterectomy, which is an alarming figure. About half of these women keep their ovaries, while the others undergo an oophorectomy (removal of the ovaries. “Ooph is right”!).
To recap: the ovaries are the female body’s main producers of the female sex hormones estrogen and progesterone, both of which affect cognitive function and mood in various ways. Estrogen can also be produced in fat tissue, skin, hair follicles, the liver, and the adrenal glands in much smaller amounts. Estrogen in particular, is neuroprotective, meaning it helps maintain healthy brain and memory functions.
Modern medicine views the uterus and ovaries as used goods by the time a woman reaches menopause, but is this true?
Are older women’s wombs (would that technically be uteri?) really just useless organs?
New research shows that the uterus and the autonomic nervous system, which regulates unconscious functions like breathing, communicate directly with each other and this connection could affect cognition. For example, women who undergo hysterectomies but keep their ovaries before reaching natural menopause have a higher risk for dementia.
Experiments in rodents reveal interesting insights into the womb-memory connection
Although not always a direct translation to human physiology, rat studies can shed a lot of light into how our bodies work. Since no previous studies had looked into how hysterectomies might affect cognitive function, Stephanie Koebele and colleagues conducted a study in female rats who underwent surgeries that human women commonly undergo which were either a hysterectomy (uterus removal), an ovariectomy (ovary removal), full removal of the uterus and ovaries, or a sham hysterectomy to analyze the effects surgical menopause has on cognitive function. Six weeks after surgery, researchers taught the rats how to navigate different mazes to test their spatial and reference memory. They also analyzed serum hormone levels (estradiol, progesterone, a type of androgen androstenedione, FSH, and LH), and ovarian follicle counts.
The womb-brain connection
They found that rats who underwent hysterectomy with ovarian conservation had detrimental effects on spatial working memory 2 months after surgery. The researchers discovered the rats who had only their uterus removed did not tolerate an increased memory load and were unable to remember how to navigate the mazes. On the other hand, the rats who had just their ovaries removed or both their ovaries and uterus removed performed well on the memory tasks.
The womb-hormone-brain connection
Moreover, the researchers noted that the size, shape, and structure of the ovaries of the hysterectomy-only group were similar to those of the sham surgery group, but the hormone levels were different between the two groups. The researchers reported that the rats who underwent a hysterectomy-only surgery had lower FSH (follicular stimulating hormone) 2 months after surgery compared to the sham surgery group who had all of their female organs intact, which could indicate an increased disruption in the hypothalamic-pituitary-reproductive tract communication potentially causing women to experience an earlier menopause.
The researchers concluded, “Moreover, findings demonstrate that the nonpregnant uterus is not dormant, and indicate that there is an ovarian-uterus-brain system that becomes interrupted when the reproductive tract has been disrupted, leading to alterations in brain functioning.”
Koebele performed a follow-up study in female rats to see if these cognitive changes post-hysterectomy are long-term and found changes in the brain like neural pathways.
Therefore, memory and brain function (neural pathways) change post-hysterectomy suggesting that there is a strong yet largely misunderstood womb-brain connection in women, which any skilled female energy healer could tell you.
Is fascia the missing piece?
I can’t help but think about the role fascia plays in how the body holds memory and communicates electrical impulses throughout the body. How does this work?
The Oxford Dictionary defines fascia as: “a thin sheath of fibrous tissue enclosing a muscle or other organ.”
Fascia is everywhere and is what connects all of our organs and muscles so they can communicate harmoniously and so our body maintains its proper structure and function. If you’ve ever had massage therapy or osteopathy done, you know how powerful releasing fascia can be.
Now let’s dig into the quantum biology of fascia.
Here’s where it gets interesting.
Two researchers have developed a new definition of fascia: “The fascia is any tissue that contains features capable of responding to mechanical stimuli. The fascial continuum is the result of the evolution of the perfect synergy among different tissues, capable of supporting, dividing, penetrating and connecting all the districts of the body, from the epidermis to the bone, involving all the functions and organic structures. The continuum constantly transmits and receives mechanometabolic information that can influence the shape and function of the entire body. These afferent/efferent impulses come from the fascia and the tissues that are not considered as part of the fascia in a bi-univocal mode.”
Basically, this is saying that since fascia synergistically connects different tissues throughout the body from the skin to bones, it serves as a medium of continuous cellular communication that can influence the whole body.
Fascia is connected to quantum entanglement by facilitating this cell-to-cell communication across multiple systems of the body. In other words, every cell is aware of what happens to another cell, no matter how far away, also known as non-local entanglement.
How does fascia do this? Primarily through its microtubules and structured water.
Microtubules are intracellular proteins that give cells their structure and have electromagnetic properties via their positive and negatively charged ends. When cells change shape through movement (i.e. stretching, physical touch like massage, or physical activity), microtubule-associated proteins release an electromagnetic charge, which allows for cellular information to be received and sent waaaay faster than the antiquated lock-in-key model of cellular communication.
Fascia also releases ultraweak biophotonic emission (aka biophotons), which is when our cells emit very minute amounts of UV light, which could also play a part in cellular communication. So yes, humans are like walking mini suns! Fascia is sensitive to light, sound, and mechanical pressure.
Finally, fascia contains structured water, also called the fourth phase of water by researcher Gerald Pollack. Cell-bound water is water that is inside and just outside cells that have a hexagonal structure to them, which is a much different structure than “bulk water”, which you can find in a glass of water. Cell-bound water is gel-like and allows it to adhere to cells and create a proton wire inside and outside the collagen tubule which kicks out a positively charged proton of the hydrogen atom of water, causing a separation of charge allowing for electrical energy to travel at light speed. Our cells create energy like a battery! Infrared light exposure is particularly helpful at creating structured water within our fascia.
For more on structured water, proton wires, and cellular communication, I highly recommend reading Living Water H2O by Mae-Wan Ho.
Fascia and the womb
How does all of this sciencey talk relate to hysterectomies and memory, you ask?
Yes, memory is now believed to be stored within various locations throughout the body beyond the brain, i.e. in the fascia. So the collagen fibers within fascia dictate the structure of connective tissue and control the body’s movement, or lack thereof. As I previously mentioned, fascia plays a major role in cellular communication, including the nervous system.
On a more theoretical level (although I believe it to be true), Rupert Sheldrake’s theory on morphogenic fields presents an interesting perspective on how the fields of a species’s collective memory can affect us.
Here it is beautifully said, “There is increasing evidence that organisms may communicate between cells and tissues by electromagnetic radiations, phonons and photons. Biophotons are believed to be emitted from a coherent photon field within the living system (Popp et al., 1992) that may work as an energy (and possibly as a memory) storage field. It appears then that the body matrix, as a continuous physical and energetic system, is capable of conducting message units in the form of electrons, vibrations, protons, photons, phonons. It is therefore an informational network that distributes regulatory signals throughout the body, coordinating cellular and extracellular activities involved in growth, morphogenesis and regeneration (Ho et al., 1994).
A yet more interesting possibility is that the liquid crystalline continuum may function as a quantum holographic medium, recording the interference patterns of local activities interacting with a globally coherent field. Holographic memory is distributed globally and yet can be accessed and recovered locally. Possibly during bodywork, the interaction of vibrational, biomagnetic and bioelectric fields between therapist and client may allow an exchange of information about the history and the present status of the living matrix (Oschman and Oschman, 1994). The information encoded in cell and tissue structure and activity may be read holographically, by tuning to the appropriate frequencies. This may even lead to a recall of past traumas and of an array of related sensations. The result may be the restoration, balancing, and tuning of resonant vibratory circuits.”
The pelvis and the nervous system
The pelvic floor fascia that surrounds the uterus communicates with the autonomic nervous system. Pelvic floor dysfunction following a hysterectomy could be the result of damage to the pelvic floor’s musculofascial support and the interlocking autonomic nervous system.
The pelvic floor fascia likely plays an important role in serving as an information highway between the uterus and the brain by serving as a “liquid crystalline matrix” that enables cellular and possibly holographic communication within the body.
So in conclusion, when you remove an important energetic organ like the womb, the physical body will invariably suffer negative consequences. All is not lost however for women who’ve had their uterus removed. The good news is the energetic anatomy remains, and that’s where the healing work needs to begin for the physical body to fully heal from a hysterectomy. And just because an organ is removed, doesn’t mean its subtle energy doesn’t affect physical health.
Lastly, when will women stop being looked at as expired as soon as their fertility drops? When will we start looking at the womb as so much more than just an organ of procreation? When will conventional medical practitioners start to view the body as an organism that’s quantumly entangled with its environment?
Womb trauma
We can start to put the pieces together when we start to question why certain types of trauma last such a long time in some women, such as traumatic birth experiences, obstetric violence, sexual abuse, certain medical procedures besides hysterectomies like IUD insertion (if you’ve had an IUD you know what I’m talking about) or uterine ablation, or even emotional abuse.
The energetic imprint of the trauma sticks within the fascia of the pelvic floor and leaves a memory on an energetic AND cellular level within the molecules and even the atoms of our womb space (think back to the proton wires within structured water). This memory(ies) consequently affects our physiology such as our autonomic nervous system, which is intricately tied to our pelvic floor, and our sex hormone production (think back to the rat studies).
How can womb trauma be released?
As much as I like talk therapy, womb trauma is one of those things that often requires physical healing. Somatic release practices like bodywork, acupuncture, and osteopathy help release the memories held within the fascial tissues so that the molecular structures change their morphology which will shift the cellular communication throughout the organ system and whole organism.
Integrative womb energy healing is also an important piece of the puzzle to release the trauma that’s stuck in the energetic anatomy, which will affect the flow of qi. Integration between the body, spirit, and soul is often required, and depending on the trauma, soul retrieval might also be necessary. More often than not, I see that many women are unconscious of the unhealthy energetic patterns they hold within their wombs, partly because the womb is energetically designed to hold onto things. Either way, a holistic approach is often needed to fully release womb trauma and due to the invalidating conventional medical system, more and more women are being traumatized by doctors, medical procedures, and even birth when women are most vulnerable.
The more awareness we can bring to these patterns the more we can collectively release these unhealthy memories from the female morphogenic field to heal women worldwide.
