What Your Breast Tenderness is Telling You
How often do you touch your own breasts?
Outside of sex and breastfeeding, this sacred center of our bodies rarely gets loving attention.
Women are often conditioned to have a fear-based relationship with their bodies — especially breasts.
Fear of unwanted attention. Fear of abuse. Fear of cancer.
From this place of fear, we tend to avoid -- stuff them into bras, avoid eye contact and touch, and anticipate a lump that sends us to a doctor.
But what if our relationship with this intuitive center and life-giving force was one of health, intuition, connection, and pleasure?
If you have lumpy, sore, bumpy, or tender breast tissue, especially cyclically (often the week before menstruation)… you’re not alone.
And while some would say this is “normal,” it’s really a wise communication from your lymphatic system saying “pay attention to me!”
Lymphatic Health and Estrogen Dominance
Breast tenderness, especially before menstruation, is a common sign of estrogen dominance, which is also associated with heavy or painful periods and PMS symptoms.
While these symptoms are often called “normal” by our medical providers, they can also escalate over time to contribute to common female health issues like ovarian cysts, fibrocystic breast tissue, fibroids, endometriosis, and cervical dysplasia.
For more on estrogen dominance, check out my info-packed podcast episode!
Our breast tissue is also full of lymph, which are the rivers of our immune system. Lymph carries fluid throughout our body, both to deliver nutrients and to remove cellular waste and accumulated toxins, preventing infection.
So what does the lymph system have to do with our breast health? While the lymph circulates throughout the whole body, there are a few areas where lymph nodes, these filtering structures, are concentrated, such as the neck, groin, and armpits and chest.
Unlike our blood, which gets pumped by the heart, the lymphatic system needs our physical movement in order to function. Lack of movement can create stagnation in the lymph, causing congestion which takes a toll on our organs, and can cause toxins to build up and dampen our immune health.
This stagnation can also happen through emotional stagnation: stress that causes us to hold our breath or chronically tensing our body.
This means we have to physically MOVE our lymph for it to function well— though movement, massage, and heat.
Through breast massage, we can support our lymphatic drainage which is critical for overall health.
Breast Health Beyond Self Exams
While self-exams can play a useful role in preventative health, even this is often framed as a fear and anxiety-based practice where we are trained to look for something “wrong” with our bodies.
Rather than coming to breasts with fear, we can come to a regular practice of touch, intimacy, and connection – as a way to deeply know the terrain of our bodies.
Especially for Black women, this connection is critical: mortality rate for Black women diagnosed with breast cancer is 42% higher than for white women.
In part, this is due to racial disparities in health care and treatment, as well as the endocrine disrupting chemicals in products especially marketed to Black women, including hair relaxers and products, acrylic nails, and skin lightening cream.
All of these products contain endocrine disrupting chemicals, also known as “xenoestrogens,” which mimic the effects of estrogen in the body, contributing to estrogen dominance.
Rather than contributing to a fear-based relationship with our breasts, which often breeds avoidance, we can support a loving relationship with our bodies with practices like:
✨Knowing the terrain of your tissues through daily lymphatic massage
✨Avoiding antiperspirants, essential oil deodorants, endocrine disrupting chemicals, and too-tight or underwire bras
✨Tending to the root cause of estrogen dominance through nutrition, liver and gut health
✨Cultivating a loving relationship with your breasts and expressing held emotions — especially grief
✨If seeking medical care, know your options, risks and benefits
Honoring Emerging Emotions
Sometimes (most of the time) when we are present with our bodies, when we touch our own tissues with loving awareness, big stuff comes up.
Grief. Rage. Tenderness. A spilling over of everything we are taught to hold deep inside ourselves.
And when we create space to feel it all… ahh. We can quite literally breathe so much easier.
This is why in The Womb Room, we hold space for deep body literacy and embodied ceremony around our breasts.
We learn how to decode our tissues, how to heal with our own hands, and how to be with all that is here.
This is the power of embodied knowledge of our own bodies: when we deeply know and are in relationship with our tissues, we know when things change, and we no longer have to outsource all of our understanding to an external authority.
Where do we go from here?
If you’re feeling the call to dig deeper, here are some next steps:
To hear more about breast health, check out my IGTV video where I talk about:
why & how do breasts change with our cycle?
what’s the difference between normal and concerning lumps?
how do we support fibrocystic breasts?
If you experience cyclical breast tenderness or other PMS symptoms, I highly recommend checking out my actionable steps in this estrogen dominance podcast episode.
And if you’re ready to take a sovereign approach to your female health in body and spirit, and unwind the patterns of fear and avoidance that keep you from living as your most embodied self, apply to work with me in The Womb Room, my foundational program for women’s sovereignty.