Introducing Sheela

Pelvic floor issues like pain, incontinence and prolapse affect huge numbers of women. According to some estimates, up to 1 billion women globally could be living with these issues at any one time [source: perifit.co]. 

I decided to create Sheela to empower women to prevent, manage and treat these issues at every stage of their lives.

My name is Daire Halpin and I am an Irish opera singer, teacher and mammy of two who came to the world of pelvic floor health after a difficult birth which resulted in a third degree tear (that’s a tear from the vagina, through the perineum to the anus which requires surgery to repair).

I was in my early thirties and had to deal with incontinence while trying to learn how to be a new mum. I was so ashamed of my symptoms and frustrated with my lack of progress that at times it was easier to manage my symptoms by staying close to the toilet than it was to engage with the medical help on offer.  

What followed was a number of years of frustration and fear but I never stopped looking for solutions.

I was lucky enough to have access to free, unlimited medical care (thank you NHS), a very supportive partner and a predisposition to learn my way out of tricky situations but I just couldn’t understand why it was so difficult to ease the pain, improve my symptoms and get my body confidence back. 

Most of all, I wondered why I didn’t really know about these incredibly common injuries and why everyone just seemed to accept these symptoms as ‘hard luck’ after childbirth.

I’m happy to report that I did manage to find the solutions that work for me and I am now aware that pelvic floor health care is something that should have been top of my agenda from a young age - regardless of whether I decided to have a baby or not.

Our medical system is historically male driven and pelvic floor issues disproportionately affect women. We are only beginning to address the inequalities ingrained in our medical system - from the lack of well funded research into women’s health to predominantly male-led obstetric care. Pelvic floor issues like incontinence and prolapse simply haven’t had the same research and attention as other medical issues in the past. 

Women deserve better and I believe that if we can educate people about pelvic floor health from a young age, we can improve quality of life, at every stage of our lives.

This is Sheela’s vital social mission - to empower women to take care of their pelvic floor health. 

We place education and empowerment above all commercial endeavours and would like to see a world in which everyone has access to pelvic floor health care, with pelvic floor health care being taught in many social settings from schools to community centres. I find it shocking that female anatomy isn’t correctly taught in many schools to this day (the clitoris is represented as a tiny dot at the top of the vulva rather than the complex three dimensional organ it is). 

Sheela takes her name from the Sheela-na-Gig - an ancient fertility goddess who can be found on buildings throughout Ireland and Europe proudly displaying her vulva. 

She represents a guide, a trusted friend and a safe feminine space. 

Sheela wants to encourage you to connect to your own deep feminine wisdom and have the courage to know your own body, what is normal for you and how to look after yourself. 

At Sheela, we create free, evidence based, practical and approachable weekly content to empower women to build their own unique road map to pelvic floor health.

We want women to know, although pelvic floor issues are incredibly common, they are not normal and there is help available at any age.

Sheela is building a library of free tools to support all people with vaginas to build their own unique roadmap for pelvic floor health. We have a holistic approach and believe that pelvic floor health is vital for your overall health. 

We use three main modalities to help you explore what pelvic floor health means to you.

Breath: We use the breath to strengthen the mind-body connection and help you feel at home in your own body. 

Posture: We explore posture and alignment to give you a strong and flexible foundation.

Movement: We look at how you can support pelvic floor function in your everyday activities after all, it’s no good executing a perfect kegel exercise if you don’t know how to hold in a wee (the two are not the same thing!). 

The combination of stresses and strains that affect a woman's pelvic floor are as unique as she is.

If you are suffering with pelvic floor issues, there are many reasons this could be so - pregnancy and childbirth are big risk factors, but menopause, obesity, chronic coughing, some surgeries and constipation all play a role.

This means that what works for one individual might not work for you. There is no magic bullet for these issues and your personal solutions are likely to be a combination of different things.

The good news is that, no matter what your stage of life, there is help available and you can prevent, manage and treat your pelvic floor issues.

Sheela is just getting started and we would like to help you get started on your pelvic floor health journey today. 

We’ve created a free guide which is available to all our email subscribers (we won’t spam and you can unsubscribe anytime) - 5 Habits for a Happy Pelvic Floor. Download it here.  

In this guide you’ll uncover 5 simple habits you can easily integrate into your lifestyle without having to adopt any complex exercise programs or even figure out how to do a kegel (turns out kegels aren’t actually that simple and aren’t the answer for everybody - more on that later).

For more accessible content like this, follow us on Instagram (@sheela.ie) and YouTube (@sheelawomen). 

Lastly, if there is a woman out there you think might need to hear any of this, please share. Talking about these issues is essential if we're going to help women move past them.