The Foundations of Talking About Our Bodies, with Sarah Sproule

Sarah Sproule is an occupational therapist with a masters in sexuality studies and host of the fabulous podcast, “Sitting in a Car” where she helps parents stay connected with their kids while having conversations about puberty, bodies and sex.

I don’t really think that we can truly get in tune with our body, to understand how it never lies, until we can get comfortable with talking about it.  All the parts of our body, relay messages to us about the state of our physiology.  Our nervous system, our digestive system, our musculoskeletal system AND so does our reproductive system.  For instance a man might have problems with erections or ejaculation because of a spinal disc injury or nerve compression or because of inadequate calories or glucose dysregulation, thyroid hormone conversion or emotional and financial stress.  A woman’s vaginal mucus and it’s changes, can tell her if she has adequate progesterone which is an anti anxiety, anti inflammatory, immune enhancing, recovery hormone.  And as a coach, I can use all this information to know whether my exercise and nutrition program is enhancing or decreasing physiology for performance.

So, how do we get comfortable with talking about these parts of our body.  How do we get comfortable with seeing them as more than the cultural labels and functional labels of sex and how do we move past the connotations behind that?

Well, I love Sarah’s work because she is an influencer and an experienced practitioner in this space of changing our thoughts, our programming our beliefs and getting in touch with why it is so important to have these conversations about our bodies, not only with our kids, but ourselves.

In this episode, we talk about

• Where our thoughts about sex come from and our negative associations of shame, sin, dirty 
• How culture affects our thoughts about our bodies
• Our sexual system is just another body system
• How we can live in a culture of openness and liberation, but how we might and can love and care ourselves through our own past experiences and beliefs about sex
• The narrative around sex and bodily functions that I was brought up with and how I got over them
• Sarah’s tips for changing our narrative 
• The problem of viewing ourselves as broken or needing to do lots of work
• How do we talk to our kids about bodies and sex
• How we do it over years, laying foundations
• What to do if our kids our older and we’ve never spoken to them about sex
• What words to use with our kids and when
• How even as a sexuality educator, Sarah had to have some love and care for where her thoughts and beliefs came from
• How getting comfortable with these topics empowers us in many areas of our lives

You can find Sarah Sproule’s website https://sarahsproule.com

Her podcast “Sitting in a Car” is on your favourite podcast app

https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/sitting-in-a-car/id1498980106

https://open.spotify.com/show/1vTpCxZkG18O7fdLEGQHCG?si=_z8S8lZ2QDKapw9O83j3sA

And her youtube channel - “Sitting in a Car”

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2WU7DnczQPPAEzq47jDwFA

And her favourite place to hang out with her tribe is instagram

https://www.instagram.com/iamsarahsproule/

See