Chaya’s Pelvic Story

-I take my work seriously. And I laugh a lot at the absurdity of life.

Given the depth and intimacy of what I do, I want to share my own journey — because this work didn't come from a textbook. It came from living inside a body that hurt, and slowly, painstakingly, learning how to listen to it.

When I was five years old, I began having recurrent urinary tract infections. The testing that followed was extensive — some of it involving catheters. No one explained the procedures to me beforehand. On multiple occasions, I was sent into a room without my parents and had a tube inserted into my urethra, alone, with strangers.

I've come to understand that medical trauma and sexual trauma are interpreted by the body in remarkably similar ways. We honor that the intent of a doctor is generally different from the intent of someone who causes intentional harm — and we tenderly acknowledge that the impact on the body and nervous system can be quite the same.

After many tests and many rounds of antibiotics, I was put on a low prophylactic dose for seven years — from age five to twelve. (This becomes a story about gut health for another day. Also a story about all the questions no one thought to ask: Is she drinking enough water? How much sugar is she eating? How is your home life?)

Around age twelve, someone decided it was time to stop the antibiotics. The infections quieted — until I became sexually active at seventeen.

My first sexual experience landed me in the emergency room.

When I lost my virginity, I got a urinary tract infection that spread to my kidney. I became feverish and delirious. I was hospitalized. My boyfriend at the time pressured me to have sex again almost immediately after. I was still in tremendous pain.

My early sexual years fell into a grinding cycle: drunk college sex, bladder infection, antibiotics, yeast infection, repeat. It was miserable. (My mother's term for yeast infections was "crotch rot," which, as you might imagine, did not help me feel at home in my own body.)

I could tolerate that cycle, barely — until the day everything changed. I'd just ended a toxic and abusive relationship. I sent in a urine sample expecting a prescription, and instead got a phone call: the culture came back negative for bacteria. No infection they could treat. No solution they could offer.

Eventually, after more painful and invasive testing, a clinician gave it a name: Interstitial Cystitis. Loosely translated: unexplained inflammation of the bladder wall. They offered medications. One turned my urine bright orange. I thought: that cannot be safe. I didn't take it again. The long-term side effects of the other options were equally uninviting.

And so I found myself alone, wandering into the unfamiliar terrain of "holistic healing" — a phrase I had encountered in a book at a large medical institution. This was the late nineties. Kale was not a thing yet. I grew up on mac and cheese and Spaghetti-O's.

I looked up "urinary tract infection" in the index and read about cranberry extract. It was a small thing. But something in me woke up. An ancient knowing — something that lived in the bones, deeper than memory. Ancestral wisdom. A homecoming.

What followed was years of dietary changes, herbal remedies, meditation, and the slow, nonlinear work of healing from childhood and early adult trauma. I studied Maya Abdominal Massage with Rosita Arvigo. I studied Holistic Pelvic Care with Tami Kent. I began working with my own physical body and energy body in real time — not managing symptoms, but listening underneath them.

I had good days and bad days. And then, gradually, I had more good days than bad. I started to find pleasure in my body again — not despite everything, but somehow because of it.

And then one day I realized: it had been weeks since I'd had pelvic pain. Then months. Then years.

Pain stopped running my life.

That realization became my mission. If I could find my way through this — with no roadmap, no practitioner to guide me, just curiosity and will and a deep refusal to stop — then I knew I could help others do the same, with far more support than I ever had.

That's the heart of what I offer in my immersion work — a guided, held, informed path through the exact terrain I once navigated alone. You don't have to figure it out by yourself.

So yes — I take this work seriously. And I laugh a lot at the absurdity of life.