How Losing my Daughter helped me find my Life’s Purpose

“I’m afraid there’s no heartbeat, your baby has died.” 

Those words haunted me for almost a decade. They were the words the midwife said to me as I lay in the birthing room at Nyon Hospital. I was 37 weeks pregnant, had had an uneventful pregnancy, was 32 years-old, fit, healthy and already a mother to a boisterous two- year -old. This was a lightning bolt in a clear, blue sky. 

I had come in for a check as I’d been feeling unwell, and instead of being told that my labour had started and that I could expect to meet the baby that I carried carefully for over nine months, I was told to prepare to deliver a still born. I went into complete shock, started to lose enormous amounts of blood, and thankfully lost consciousness. 

When I woke up, I’d had an emergency C-section. My devastated husband was at my side and he was soon joined by what felt like an army of therapists and psychiatrists. Everything felt void of meaning, joy and hope. I walked out of that hospital with a belly-full of stitches and a broken heart. I just couldn’t imagine how to keep going, and how to move on from this unspeakable tragedy. 

I remember clearly, one day in mid December, just six short months later, I was driving along a fairly snowy road having just dropped my daughter off at crèche. I imagined letting go of the steering wheel and just letting the car go where it wanted to; into another oncoming vehicle, for example, or into the steep verge on either side of the road, or straight into a lamp post. What speed is deadly again? I remember thinking. Do I have my ID with me so that they’ll know I am and my husband won’t have to worry too long when I don’t come home this evening? I was that close to pulling the plug on my life. Death felt close and comforting – a final release from my never-ending pain! 

I drove home and phoned my doctor. His very kind, very gentle assistant answered. I told her what was happening to me, and she gently and kindly told me that it was normal, that it was to be expected, and asked when my next appointment with my therapist was! It was a humane response looking back on it now, but, in that moment, I realised that I was alone, and if I didn’t help me, nobody else could. 

And that’s when I became a true seeker. I’d always been a good student, did well in school and at university, and was driven by an innate curiosity to know and learn. But, in 2011, that thirst for knowledge turned into a relentless activism to save my life so that my only child wouldn’t grow up without her mum. So I began to read and experiment with all sorts of mind-blowing methodologies and techniques from Mindfulness to Hypnosis, and from power walking to Pilates. 

That new-found agency and courage led to my opening my Pilates studio in 2014, which grew steadily. But watching that business grow and reach the lives of so many people made me realise that a great many women, like I had been, were waiting to be saved, instead of understanding how they could save themselves. They were almost at ease with being held back, by pain or fear, or un-processed grief. And this realisation came up at a time when I, too, was on the hunt for a better way to treat my own physical ailments. My body was still in pain, despite all the stretching, Pilates and Physio I was doing, and yet, no matter which Physio, or Osteopath or Chiropractor I saw, I kept coming up short and could look forward to feeling only slightly better for only a limited time, until the pain was back, and I’d exhausted the variety of options available to me in the region. 

So, I decided to go right back to the drawing board and learn as much as I could about human anatomy and, biomechanics, That quest took me to London, Barcelona, Lisbon and Zagreb, and has essentially equipped me with X-ray vision and an almost witch-like ability to see what is happening deep within the muscles and ligaments that is causing dysfunction on the surface. I then began layering in the healing protocols that I used to relieve my own mental anguish and anxiety. This all makes for a unique and multi-facetted toolkit that I use in a multidisciplinary way so that the women and gender expansive people who seek me out not only benefit from their pain disappearing as we finally get to the root cause of their dysfunction, they also, through the process, rediscover how their unique body is built to move, and so learn how to keep pain away, and prevent pain in the future too. 

 

About the author:

Johdi Woodford is a British Restorative Movement Specialist based in Gland, VD.  Johdi is on a mission to challenge the way that you as a person who’s over 40 looks, feels and behaves.  For over a decade Johdi has helped people to stop feeling fat, frumpy and frustrated, and to start regaining their mobility, their mojo and their mind!

Johdi’s clients enjoy lasting, unparalleled results because she takes a revolutionary and rebellious route to the otherwise very boring, very ineffective methods that you’ll find elsewhere in the Health & Fitness World. You can read more here www.johdiwoodford.com