Everything I know about the pelvic floor, my own body taught me first.

I'm a licensed physical therapist, MSPT and CSCS, and integrative pelvic floor therapy is my field. Over 21 years I've worked with more than 22,000 women in my healing center and through my programs, and everything I know about diagnosing and treating pelvic pain, I learned with my hands, one woman and then the next.

The healing center was Renew Physical Therapy in New York. I opened it in 2005 and ran it for years. Me and my team of 6 therapists pioneered the whole woman approach to pelvic health, in the mid 2000's, when the topic of pelvic health was never even mentioned and women suffered in silence and shame.

Here's what I was doing inside it.

I brought Maya abdominal massage into a New York physical therapy practice. Andean energy techniques. Sound healing. Low level laser therapy. I put them beside evidence-based physical therapy and used them together, on real women, in a real clinic. For a long time I was told that was fringe. I've watched the conversation move a long way since then, and I'll say this plainly, because I earned it: I was in those trenches years before anyone thought to give it a name.

I taught it, too. Hunter College, New York, adjunct professor for years, in front of third-year doctoral physical therapy students.

It always frustrated me how little of this was taught anywhere. My friends who are MDs, doulas, midwives, nurses and fitness professionals said the same thing. No formal training. Not one of them.

That gap isn't a person. It's a curriculum. And that's why I decided to build my online school, www.PelvicPainRelief.com.

Five books. Female Pelvic Alchemy. Ending Female Pain. Ending Pain in Pregnancy. Ending Male Pelvic Pain. The Pregnant Couple's Guide to Working Out Together.

I wrote them because I got tired of saying the same sentences over and over in a room in New York, while a woman in another state, in another country, needed those same sentences and had nobody to say them to her.

I've lectured across this country on pelvic health and on women's health. Half of my work is teaching women. The other half is teaching the professionals who see them, because that's where the gap actually sits.

See all five books

Before I was a physical therapist I was a fitness trainer, running partner pregnancy training. That's where the CSCS after my name comes from, and it's the reason my work has always been about building strength rather than managing decline. I met women's bodies first as something to make stronger. I've never stopped seeing them that way.

What surprised me when I crossed over into physical therapy was how little was reaching anybody. Not the professionals, who wanted it. Not the women, who wanted it more.

And I'll be straight with you, because there's no dignity in pretending otherwise. I didn't get that training in physical therapy school either. Nobody handed me this. I went and got it.

Then there's my family, which is the part of my life I guard hardest. My husband David. My daughter Ella. We're people who like being in the same room, and in a world built to pull you out of it, that takes actual effort. So we carve out hours with no screens in them. Some nights it holds. Some nights we surrender to the television and call it togetherness.