EP77: Jennifer Lang on Sexual and Embodied Awakening Through Birth, Holding your Power in a Medical Setting, and Preventing Cervical Cancer.

Jennifer Lang recently published an open letter as an OB-GYN who supports women who seek alternative, holistic, and awakened care. She has authored two books, “Consent: The New Rules for Sex Education” and “The Whole 9 Months: A Week-by-week Pregnancy Nutrition Guide.” Jennifer Today she speaks on her journey from ‘surgical cowboy’ to an advocate for bodily autonomy, discovering embodiment through birth, empowering low income communities to screen for and treat cervical cancer, and supporting women in building personal agency within a medical system.

Bio:  Jennifer Lang is a gynecological oncologist, the author of two books, the mother of three children, and a passionate force for women’s health and wellbeing. She has served women in a hospital setting, founded a non-profit to reduce cervical cancer rates, and is creating a tech start-up to assist young people in recognizing when they are too incapacitated to consent.

“We don’t have to turn over our bodily autonomy every time we walk into a doctor’s office and get up on an exam table. In fact, we should not, ever.”

 “We have to remember that doctors are just people, with all their perversions, fallacies, all of it. They’re just people. We can never just put our bodies and our lives, blindly and unquestioningly, into someone else’s hands.” 

Resources: https://consentthebook.com and @drjenniferlang on IG

What She Shares:

    Her pathway through medical school and into a more connected, embodied form of care eventually leaving her surgery practice     How her nonprofit, Cure Cervical Cancer, empowers low-income communities to prevent cervical cancer   Her path as a wife, mother, and now through an expansion in her family and coming out to her family  

What You’ll Hear:

    Becoming intimately educated in birth through living it     Choosing homebirth after working as a hospital OB-GYN     The challenges of maintaining your own health as a med student and practicing doctor     Finding ways to bring embodied learning and reverence into anatomy education     Experiencing paradigm shift through daily HypnoBirthing meditations     From planning for a hospital birth to having a blissed-out water birth     Recognizing the need for quiet, dark, supported birth and offering this in a surgical setting     Understanding the developmental timeline of HPV to cervical cancer     Preventing cervical cancer through extremely low cost means, without surgery     Finding comfort and power while finding your cervix     Knowing that you are the expert on your own body     Working with other practitioners to offer patients a full spectrum of care     Supporting patients in their empowered medical choices     Working towards a single payer medical system in order to offer patients true comprehensive care     Choosing to leave a medical practice because of the environmental toxins it produces     Addressing the root cause of disease rather than treating personal symptoms     Recognizing personal experiences within a medical opinion     The transition from being re-awakened and exiting the old paradigm     Moving through fear of change in order to live fully in your awakening     Being a fully embodied parent as a way to support your children     Developing a tech tool to assist teens in recognizing when they may be too incapacitated to consent     Knowing your desires, limits, and boundaries, and being able to honor those during intimate encounters