Our Exclusive Interview With The Womb Healer; Diana Kriedeh
Diana Kriedeh is a Sacred Space Facilitator with a deep passion for holding healing space for women through women’s circles, womb yoga, and various womb healing practices.
How did you start getting into the practice of Yoga?
Back in 2010, Yoga was my healer. I know you’ve probably heard this phrase countless times before that it became kind of a cliché, but it really was. I was going through a challenging phase where anxiety and severe panic attacks became a massive part of my daily life. And while supportive people surrounded me, no one really knew how to help or how hard it was for me to live with the horror of anxiety, not even doctors or therapists in my case. So, I started researching to try to help myself and found that working out might be good for me, so I started going to the gym every day. Yes, I felt better while I was there, but whenever I would go back home, I’d slip back into the same fearful and stressful state until a day came when I decided to join a yoga class at the gym. I had heard of Yoga before but never tried it or knew what it was. All I can say about that first session is that something shifted inside of me at the end of it. For the first time in a long time, my whole body and nervous system could just settle. And those few moments of deep settling became something that I started craving more and more, so I left the gym, hunted every yoga studio in Amman, and focused only on my yoga practice. But that first session marked the start of my healing journey through Yoga.
How long have you been doing it?
I have been a yoga practitioner for 12 years.
What is womb yoga?
Womb yoga is yoga practices developed for women’s bodies, meaning it honors the structure of a woman’s body and the cyclical nature of the female where we have different techniques and flows for the different phases of our monthly cycle such as menstruation, ovulation, etc. And the phases of our feminine life cycles, such as pregnancy or menopause, etc.
Where is the feminine in Yoga?
In how Yoga is practiced these days, unfortunately, the feminine is not very prominent. Most of the Yoga that came to us 5000 years ago was initially designed for the bodies of pre-pubescent boys, as men and boys were the vast majority of yoga practitioners. And this is not to say that these postures are bad for women. We do them and benefit from them in various ways, but this cannot always make sense. A woman’s body is obviously different from a man’s or a boy’s. She goes through several changes every month, and due to our cycle and its hormones, we don’t function the same or even feel the same every day, so how does it make sense that our yoga practice stays the same? This is where a feminine practice like womb yoga is needed.
What attracted you to the healing and support of woman’s health through Yoga in particular?
Throughout my journey, I was blessed by meeting several beautiful teachers that worked for and with the divine feminine, and I always felt an attraction to that path. Whenever I would study or work with any of them, it would feel like coming home. Whether studying with my Tantra teacher, my womb yoga teachers, joining women’s circles, or doing the womb work, this work has always come naturally to me and felt like something I need to be doing in this life for myself and others. Womb healing requires a great deal of openness on many levels. Since Yoga is a fantastic way to open up physically, emotionally, and mentally, it is an excellent tool to merge with other practices of womb healing for that particular purpose.
Why do you think it’s important for women to reconnect with the feminine?
It is essential to understand that womb work is personal and collective simultaneously. A woman connecting to her divinity is a woman connecting back to nature and mother earth, the universal womb.
Because of the ancient oppression of feminine power and our patriarchal societies, we have lost the proper way of the feminine. And that leads us, women, into frustration and leads the whole world into imbalance. The feminine way is rooted in love, tenderness, patience, and union. Qualities that our world needs so much more of today. Feminine consciousness is weaving a new way into being; as we learn how to love and work with our bodies as women, we are creating the most remarkable revolution on the planet at this time.
What is your definition of womb wisdom?
If we just take a moment to realize that the womb is where life comes from, that she is the source of all creation, and that she connects us as we all came from her, we can then begin to understand the power and the sacredness of this space. To me, womb wisdom is the amalgamation of old and deep ancestral knowing and an innate raw connection to the earth and nature, all residing in a woman’s womb. When this wisdom is remembered and felt, healing starts to occur on all levels of a woman’s being. Not all women have had the chance to awaken these energies, but every woman can.
How does one heal the womb through yogic poses?
The womb is an organ that can move in and out of alignment due to what she can go through from the menstrual cycle to sometimes pregnancy or birth or even trauma and disease. According to eastern teachings, the human body consists of different sheaths, the physical, the emotional, the energetic, etc., and the womb is something that exists on all different sheaths of the body, so when we work on the physical and align the pelvic structure from bone to muscles to soft tissues through the poses, we can then bring the womb as an organ back into optimal alignment and at the same time activate her as the powerful energy center that she is.
What are the effects of womb healing on a woman’s general well-being?
A woman doing the womb work is a woman who is awakening to the sacredness of her own body and the sacredness of life. She is ready to connect with her female body and her creative life force and sexual energy. She is ready to harness these energies and learn how to direct them and allow them to guide her to live with less resistance of the functions of her body, change her whole perspective of her cycle and how powerful it is, and live in more harmony with her own nature and the nature around her which brings so much settling and healing on physical, emotional and spiritual levels.
How does it differ from other healing practices?
Besides the fact that womb healing is centered around the womb as an organ, as an energy center, and as the center of a woman’s overall vitality, I would definitely say it’s the feminine nature of these practices. The way we do this work is the way of the divine feminine, which is not linear. It steers us away from the rigid and the more masculine way of living and encourages us to embrace the flow that is literally who we are.
Does the healing practice adapt to women of different ages and life stages?
Womb healing is a woman’s or a girl’s birthright. It is for every womb, regardless of age, background, or life stage. Even if you are a woman who doesn’t have the physical womb anymore, your womb is multi-dimensional. The energetic space and power of your womb are still there. This pilgrimage is still yours. And what’s even more beautiful is that this womb consciousness can be tapped into even by men who choose to understand and reclaim their connection to the womb they came from and to honor the females in their lives.
How does the practice cater to the changing needs of the womb cycles?
The practice, in its nature, resembles the heart of the female, which is ever-changing, and so we have practices that vary in speed and fire and intensity or softness depending on how a woman feels in the moment. So, when we’re doing womb yoga, for instance, it’s essential to get out of the rigid structure of the traditional Yoga practice, which entails specific alignments similar for both men and women, which can be very restricting for women in certain phases of their cycle. A woman ovulating might feel more flexible and open for movement, and that is due to the presence of a hormone called Relaxin that causes the ligaments and tendons to loosen up, whereas a woman who’s in her luteal phase experiencing a drop in estrogen might feel the need for deep rest and calibration. These two women need two completely different practices, and that’s what womb Yoga offers.
Is there a certain criterion for becoming a womb yogi?
Not at all. And we don’t even have to call ourselves womb yogis. Yoga is just one of the great tools that can bring health and vitality to our life as women. Womb work is much more than Yoga; it is a remembering of who we are. It is like an internal pilgrimage that women take into their being to reclaim their power and their magic. So, if you have a female body, you
are a womb pilgrim. That is, of course, if you choose to be.
What does your womb healing program entail?
My womb healing program is a 6-week program that takes us on a journey of reclamation of the divine feminine and empowerment through understanding and sometimes relearning our feminine ways and bodies. Every week focuses on a different level of this pilgrimage: we start with awakening the connection to our bodies through practices that bring awareness to the womb space, and then we dive into it through understanding what womb wisdom is, our ancestral connections, our energy system, our sensual and sexual bodies, our female physical anatomy and of course the sacred cycles of the womb that are our portals into life. I do this with the help of several tools and practices like breath work, meditation and journeying, womb yoga, tantra yoga, writing, voice activation, ceremony and ritual, and more. My desire for every woman who takes on this journey is that by the end of the six weeks,
She would have received enough tools and knowledge to help her heal and transform her relationship with her body and reclaim her innate feminine wisdom as I would provide her with the safe and sacred space to do so.
Three words that describe you as a womb healer.
I believe the three words that can really describe the way I love to do this work would be: Gentle, rooted, and embodied.
