Women in Wellness: Alexandra Durigan

Alexandra Durigan is a registered nurse who specializes in yoni and womb medicine and massage. She is a sacred breathwork practitioner and is deeply passionate about connecting women to the divinity within.  

I’d been following Durigan on instagram for a while, inspired by the content she shares. Her energy is absolutely enchanting, authentic--the type of person you feel you can trust. 

I am not new to meditation or the concept of reconnecting with my body, but the idea of learning about my womb space felt new. Like so many women, I have dealt with painful PMS and period symptoms, believing some hormonal imbalance was to blame. But whenever I sought a more holistic approach to my healthcare, my doctor would just write another script for another birth control pill I would never fill. I’ve been teaching myself --slowly, over time--about alternative ways to tend my hormones. I picked up the book “Woman Code” by Alisa Vitti, began listening to podcasts like “Healthy Hormones for Women,” and started following instagram pages like Alexandra’s. 

When Alexandra agreed to speak with me for the blog, I was lit-up excited, and I hope you find as much medicine in her words as I did. If you’d like to work with her directly, her contact information is linked below.

her story

As we’re getting our periods and we’re having these huge fluctuations of hormones, we don’t have the tools and resources or safe spaces to discuss what’s going on, and then we’re not given an external environment of acceptance, so that’s a lot of dissonance for us to have, and for me, it ended up being an eating disorder that lasted until my senior year of high school. 

I ultimately lost my period, and was put on birth control at an early age. There was a lot of internal disconnection and disassociation. I was given the choice, when I was a senior, to go to treatment and have the potentiality to go to college--at the time I wanted to be a writer--or the eating disorder would continue, and it was becoming a life or death situation.

There was this glimmer of something inside of me. You know it’s that thing that keeps us going, that we hold onto, and so I went to treatment and it changed my life. 

That was transformational. There is a spirit, and there is this divinity that exists within, and I ultimately became so devoted to creating spaces for women to come back to themselves, to know their totality, and to feel that inner life force, that intimate connection and vibrancy. So I went into nursing school. 

I fell in love with the women’s child-bearing [process] and learning more about the menstrual cycle, and it was just like home, it was like a light turning on. I started studying energy work in college and became really connected to my womb space for the first time. And then after, when I  graduated, I moved out to Colorado, and worked on a women’s and children’s unit in the  postpartum area. The womb just kept calling me deeper and the women’s work just kept calling me deeper. 

I was then led through my energy work to the more holistic services of womb massage and yoni massage, or holistic pelvic care and arvigo, and have since continued to deepen in that work and to create spaces of inner embodiment. A large part of that for me is body literacy and teaching women about their bodies because if we know that divinity of our landscape, we’ll feel more connected and at home within our body temples.

reclaiming our shadow

It’s a lot easier to walk around [our dark spaces within], but those parts that are in the dark, those rejections, that’s what’s keeping us from awakening to our wholeness. I don’t believe that any of us are broken. I believe, personally, that there are things that have happened in our lives that have caused us to disassociate from certain places and put them in dark corners. [There is a] fractal perception of brokenness but we’re not. We’re whole, we are so belonging, so enough.

It is journeying into the dark to re-meet that what’s living there, to bring love into those spaces. When we meet that hurt, when we meet that grief, we give it the permission of being seen. Those parts of ourselves that have been aching, we become their witness, and in that the dark transforms to light. 

how does one begin?

It’s this layer-by-layer inward journey, but that first piece is just spending time in stillness and maybe bringing your hands over your womb space and just consciously connecting and breathing into that core of your body temple. It brings us out of the mind and into our true center as women.

massage can realign

The core of our body is our pelvic bowl, so when things are too much we shove the energy down into that space and create holding patterns. There is a psychological fear-based response that makes us clench and hold those muscles down there.  

Just like I would do yoga, or get a massage for my shoulders and my back, the musculature of our pelvic bowl is so complex and divine and carrying so many ligaments, that we need care there, too. That’s our reproductive health. We just have never thought to open up the conversation.

yoni steaming

Yoni steaming is really amazing, and it’s a lost art. It’s always been upheld in feminine lineage and cultures throughout time. One thing that I do is menstrual readings so I’ll have a woman fill out an intake form that lets me find out all the details of her menstrual cycle and then I choose herbs that are in support of healing and aligning her menstrual cycle. Yoni steaming is an infusion process, where the herbs are boiled and infused into water and then you actually will kneel over this pot and the steam warms the tissues and the mucosal membranes of our yoni, and so the increased circulation meets the steam that has the medicinal oil infusion, and it brings these medicinal properties of the herbs through the bloodstream, into our womb space, into the tissues of our yoni and throughout our reproductive organs for balancing and healing. I teach women how to do it at home and I also do it in my in-person practice, after massage as a really nurturing and sealing experience.

on divine inner knowing

We hear these inner currents in our body temple, and it’s unlocking our true and authentic essence. Spirit moves magic, and our body and our womb is ultimately only going to lead us in our highest alignment. As we come home, we can really surrender to this inner faith and trust that we are being guided, and the energy of your womb knows. She knows her sacred yes, and she knows her sacred no, and we can live in that flow.