The following podcast is a dear media production.

Hi friends and welcome to the papaya podcast.

I'm your hostess, Try and Hermostis, Sarah Nicole.

And each week I'm going to be dishing out some sweetness mixed in with some seeds of wisdom or something like that.

So get ready to get inspired, get candid,

get real, because we are all in this digital space together. All right, everyone, welcome back.

I am sitting in a hotel. I've lured another guest into a hotel room. This is like my classic move now.

But I am in kind of dreary Vancouver, but it was a little bit sunny today. And I'm really, really excited about this next guest.

We kind of connected because we're both going to the same conference tomorrow, which is the mompreneur's conference. And she is a mompreneur

that I think you are going to love to get to know. I am stupidly excited for you to meet.

Please meet Kim, the vagina coach. Well, I guess you're just vagina coach. It's not the, but still.

Ah, the doesn't matter. You're a vagina coach. Yeah. Like, I'm sorry, but that's like the coolest title I think anybody's ever gotten to walk around and claim. Yeah, it actually started because of the mompreneur conference actually now that I think about it. Really? Yeah. Okay, like tell that. Like, tell how this, how does one become a vagina coach? I'm, I'm a little jealous. If I could have an excuse to talk about vaginas all day. It's not something I grew up thinking that I was going to become a vagina coach. In your high school, in your high school thing, what do you aspire to be? I'm going to be, no. It was accidentally on purpose, as I say. And so it started because I was afraid of tearing in childbirth. That's

really what started at all. My mom had issues. So growing up, I was fascinated with childbirth. I saw a

birth video in grade six and I thought, oh my God, I'm never doing that. And then I thought, well,

my mom did it and other women did it and people are carrying on. So it must not be that bad.

And when I was talking to my mom, she did have challenges. So she had chronic back pain. She had a tummy that she was never happy with. She had a leaky bladder. So I noticed that gradually she stopped doing some of her activities. She used to run every morning. She was always very active and then started to kind to phase that out. She had surgery in her 50s. And so growing up, I kind of felt like I'm not going to do this. I like my body as it is. I don't want it to get ruined. And so that was my life. And then when I decided I did want to have children, what changed that was I watched my sister-in-law give birth. And that was, you know, for me to where we're sitting like like, you were my sister-in-law, and I'm watching this. And I remember walking in the room going, oh, my God, that's a big vagina. Like, I'd never seen birth that way before. And it was inspiring. And she was midwives, and she had no tearing. And so she had a completely different story than what my mom had and what I kind of

pictured birth to be. And then I thought, okay, I think I, I'd met my husband. We wanted a family, so I said, I can do this. So the next year I was pregnant. And I remember asking my midwives, you know, I really want to have a different story than my mom. What can I do? And they had told me about perineal massage, which is something my sister-in-law had done as well.

When I first heard about perineal massage, which is something my sister-in-law had done as well. When I first heard about perennial massage, I was 19, or no, I was 20. And I remember telling people about it, but I kept calling it perennial massage. And they're like, that's a garden, Sarah. That's not your vagina. And I was like, I've repeated this to probably 20 people who have not corrected me. Yeah. I hear that all the time. Can you explain what that is for those who don't know?

Yeah. that's not your vagina. And I was like, I've repeated this to probably 20 people who have not

corrected me. Yeah. Yeah. Can you explain what that is for those who don't know? Yeah. So the perineum is

the area between, it's skin. It's an area between the vagina and the anus. And it's very, very prone,

very, very common to have tearing. It used to be common that they would actually cut that tissue and it was called an episiotomy or it still is. Yes, okay. Lots of people still do. But mine was to the side. Most now, most of them are. Okay. It used to be standard. You know, in my mom's day, everybody had one because they thought that it would make it easier. They thought, well, if we just create more space for the baby, it would be easier for mom and babe. But it was creating almost like it started the path for tearing. So people were having more severe injuries. And it was more painful to heal from. And so, yeah, so it's challenging. And so they told me about that. And then I was doing more investigation and they had said and, and I've also heard about this product called the epino. And the epineau is a biofeedback device. It's like a balloon that you put in your vagina. And it gradually inflates and it creates sensations of stretch and pressure and discomfort. So trying to mimic what you're going to feel in birth. Oh, cool. And then you have to learn how to relax,

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