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Meet Your Neighbors. Support Local. ™
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Vero Beach Podcast - Meet Your Neighbors. Support Local. ™
Breeze Pelvic Health - Part 1: Real Talk on “Down There”
Taboo topics and awkward silences have no place in healthcare, especially when they prevent us from addressing issues that affect our daily lives and wellbeing. That's what makes this conversation with Ashley Murray, founder of Breeze Pelvic Health, so refreshingly important.
Ashley demystifies pelvic floor therapy with clarity and compassion, explaining that her work goes far beyond the simplified "just do Kegels" advice many people receive. She treats urinary and bowel issues, sexual dysfunction, pelvic pain, and helps people through pregnancy and postpartum recovery. Most importantly, she normalizes these conversations, making it clear that pelvic floor dysfunction affects people of all genders and ages.
The discussion takes a fascinating turn when Ashley shares her personal journey. As a college athlete who experienced urinary issues in her late teens, she initially had no idea pelvic floor therapy existed. This firsthand experience now allows her to connect authentically with clients who feel isolated by their symptoms. Her mobile practice brings specialized care directly to people's homes, removing barriers to treatment while allowing her newly established business to grow organically.
If you've ever experienced "leaking" during exercise, felt constant urgency, or dealt with pelvic discomfort, this episode offers validation and hope. Pelvic floor issues aren't just "something to live with"—they're treatable conditions that respond to specialized physical therapy. Join us as we break the silence surrounding this crucial aspect of health and explore why proper pelvic floor function is essential for everyone. Find Ashley at breezepelvichealth.com or on Instagram @breezepelvichealth to continue this essential conversation.
Presented by Killer Bee Marketing
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All right, well, welcome back to the Vero Beach podcast. I'm Brian and.
Speaker 2:I'm Shauna.
Speaker 1:And today we are sitting here with Ashley Murray from the Pelvic Floor Physical Therapy Clinic. Is that correct? Is that the name of the business?
Speaker 3:It's called Breeze Pelvic Health. Well, that was a lot easier to say there.
Speaker 1:Ashley, we're super excited to have you here on the Vero Beach podcast. Love to just go and get started off and have you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about you.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so thank you so much. I was really intrigued by seeing your guys's Instagram posts and I'm happy that you guys accepted my plea to be on your podcast. But yeah, so my name's Ashley and I am a physical therapist that specializes in pelvic floor physical therapy. So what that means is I treat people for urinary bowel sexual dysfunction. I also treat people for pelvic pain or any sort of like pelvic heaviness anything that could be dysfunctional with a pelvis-related organ or muscle tissue. I help people with postpartum and pregnancy recovery and teaching them how to have a baby.
Speaker 3:That's probably too simplistic to say, but you know there's so much that goes into it that I think modern medicine does not teach us. We don't even know much about our bodies as, let alone like, our genital regions. Really, this is this is just me trying to raise awareness, get people to talk about these things first and foremost and Breeze is kind of my child and my offering to the world to help people through the tough times of having a baby, having a C-section, having a prolapse, repair surgery, which we can get into all of that but yeah, some of these things are really hard to talk about for people and this is a really cool platform to be able to talk about it. So thank you guys again for this platform.
Speaker 1:Well, I definitely have to say, I have to agree, it probably is definitely going to be hard for me to talk about because, I've never experienced pregnancy myself. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You do have a pelvic floor.
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 3:That's right so.
Speaker 1:I am going to like I'm super excited that Shauna is here to kind of lead up this conversation, but I'm excited to to learn more as well. Yeah, kind of be that I was going to say the oddball person out, but you probably I saw on your Instagram you actually work with men too.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I actually passed life. I worked in Colorado Springs for a while and I treated a lot of Air Force and Army population there and I saw so many males with pelvic floor dysfunction and that was a really cool area to treat in. I loved living in Colorado and there's a lot of guys that need help, and I think guys even more so than women. Just don't talk about these things.
Speaker 1:Well, we're excited that you're here. We're excited you're here, ashley, and I'm going to turn it over to Shauna and we can just go and get started.
Speaker 2:Let's do it, yeah. So I'm really excited to talk about this because, like you said, it's hard to talk about things like this, and it does become easier, I think, after you have a baby, because then you know you've had people all over the place on you, so it's like modesty is out the window. Exactly, that's exactly.
Speaker 1:It wasn't like that for me.
Speaker 2:You didn't have a baby.
Speaker 1:I was there. No, all right, I'm going to back off a little bit.
Speaker 2:No, don't back off. I'm just glad that you're doing this and you're making it accessible to talk about, and a podcast is a great format for it, because someone can listen without really any accountability. To start with, they don't have to look at someone in the eyes, right, they can just be in their car listening while they're driving, yeah, and they can learn what's normal and what's not normal and that there's something that can be done about it, which I think is really exciting. Will you explain to us what pelvic floor therapy?
Speaker 3:is, yes, so kind of the things that I mentioned earlier, the things that could be dysfunctional with your pelvic floor. So, for example, a big thing that I treat is urinary incontinence and that just means leaking urine when you don't want to be leaking urine right Any. Any time where you're not sitting on the toilet and you're leaking urine is incontinence. So pelvic floor physical therapy can help with that and there's so many things that that pelvic floor physical therapies or physical therapists can help with. And I think one of the biggest misconceptions is do your Kegels. Come to PT and do your Kegels and it's all about the Kegels. It's. It is so funny because I hear that in conversation a lot. I'm like, oh, what do you do for work? I'm a pelvic floor physical therapist. Oh, you teach people how to do Kegels. Um, yes, but so much more than that.
Speaker 1:I was just going know what you're talking about. I was just going to explain it to you. Okay, what a Kegel is Okay.
Speaker 3:So a Kegel is a pelvic floor muscle contraction. It's like a squeeze and a lift of your pelvic floor muscles and actually backing up even more than that. Some people don't even know what the pelvic floor is. So let's.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was going to ask that too.
Speaker 3:Yeah, let way up, we'll do a little thing. Um, take your hands and go underneath your sit bones and kind of take your fingers and, like, curl up into that um soft space. Um, so if your fingers could kind of poke through that skin you would be on your pelvic floor. The pelvic floor is also the muscles around the vagina, underneath the base of the penis, a base of the scrotum controls bowel function.
Speaker 1:So if you're squeezing like this is definitely awkward to talk about. So everybody's like how's he sitting here?
Speaker 2:okay, I'm just, it's okay we'll move on from this eventually we'll talk about hang in there, guys, hang in there I think it's great that you're explaining it very clearly like that yes, okay, everyone needs to talk about this stuff.
Speaker 3:Everyone needs, yeah, that's right, yeah.
Speaker 2:and like, if you don explain it clearly, then if there's ambiguity around it, and then someone's still going to be thinking well, I still don't know what that means. Right, right.
Speaker 3:And the one other thing I wanted to say there was, you know, yes, the misconception is we just do kegels, but a lot of times people come in with their pelvic floor that is squeezing too much, yeah, and, and sometimes that can lead to pelvic pain, um, pain with intercourse. Sometimes that can lead to constipation. So there's a lot of things that can come with pelvic floor muscles being too engaged to turn on all the time. Um, yeah, so, so it's really important to be able to have both functions being able to squeeze when you need to and also being able to rest when you need to. Oh, that's so interesting, and so that's that in, in a nutshell, is kind of more of no pun intended. Um, is more of my job.
Speaker 1:I'm staying away from the jokes myself on this one. You girls can do all the jokes you want.
Speaker 2:Do you get to say that occasionally? Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 3:Public health is like a sensitive topic, so you have to be able to laugh about it sometimes.
Speaker 2:I love that. That was so funny. So where did the name Breeze come from?
Speaker 3:Yes, I love that question. So Breeze started officially in November of last year. So it's it's still my, my new baby, um, but in November I had just gotten back from a trip to see some family in Seattle and you know they're very encouraging and inspiring to me and you know they, they inspire me to, you know, chase my dreams and live life to the fullest no day but today. And so I chased after Breeze and I opened my LLC in November.
Speaker 3:I was talking to my boyfriend and I was like, okay, this is awesome, this is what I want to do. I've been thinking about it for a while, but what am I going to call it? We were, we were thinking of some names and you know other pelvic floor physical therapy practices, like some of them are called like core restore, and I didn't really want it to seem so like, you know, like aggressive, like we're going to restore your core, you know, um, and then I also didn't want it to be like female focused. So I didn't want it like mama and baby pelvic, for you know, I didn't want it to be female only so I was talking to him about it.
Speaker 3:I'm like I want it to feel very like easy, and you know, I mean I'm going to be in Vero beach and it it has to kind of match the area too, and I just wanted to feel like easy, approachable. We're listening to like some beachy type music and he's like, well, what about Breeze? And I'm like actually I love that. And I was like, okay, well, we'll leave that and we'll keep thinking of other things. But literally nothing else came to me. That was as good as Bree's pelvic health. I love it. Yeah, so I think it fits exactly what I wanted. And so what?
Speaker 2:led you to pelvic health as a focus.
Speaker 3:So I wanted to be a physical therapist when I was in 11th grade in high school and kind of my backstory to that is I'll try to keep this super brief, but I ran cross country and track. I ran in college and I'm still a runner now, and so I was running in high school and I also had an eating disorder. I had a stress fracture and I ended up not having a period anymore and all of that is called the female athlete triad or there's another name for it, called red S. I had all of these things going on. A lot of it, I think, was very like anxiety fueled because I was also in like a more like advanced high school educational program too. So there was just a lot of factors, I think, playing a role into that. But I went to physical therapy for the stress factor side of things and my physical therapist was like oh well, what are you eating? Are you sure you're eating enough? Are you still having your menstrual cycle? That was a really cool conversation that I could have with my physical therapist and from that I had a good relationship with my PT.
Speaker 3:But I still had no idea that pelvic floor physical therapy was a thing and so, fast forwarding. I'm running in college, I am also having urinary incontinence and urgency, and so basically, what urgency means is like I have to be really bad right now and sometimes I would like have some leakage on a run or have some leakage on the way to the bathroom, and, you know, this is all around the time where I'm like 18 to 20 years old, you know no babies. There's no you know glaring reason why this should be happening. Um, now, looking back, it definitely was very like anxiety driven, but I know these things now and we're doing good. That's, I think, was sort of just divine intervention, honestly like leading me to this path. Still did not know pelvic floor physical therapy was a thing, but I still wanted to be a physical therapist.
Speaker 3:Later down the road, I was actually shadowing with my physical therapist who was helping me with the stress fracture from a few years ago and she was treating pelvic floor and she described it to me as okay, this is to help help women who leak urine and that was literally all I knew about it. I was like, oh, interesting, I might could use that, you know. But at the time I didn't say anything about it because this is an embarrassing topic and I'm 18, 19, 20 years old. Why would we be talking about this? So I am guilty of all the things that I tell people not to do. Like let's talk about it now.
Speaker 3:So in PT school later, like 2018, 2019, we have one lecture about pelvic floor physical therapy and four hours of pelvic floor education was what I got in PT school. I had two clinicals. Two of my three clinical rotations were pelvic floor and again, that was not something that I chose. I think that was again divine intervention like leading me into this. Yeah, so I learned so much through my own story, through my clinical rotations and then after school. I did so much and I still do a lot of continuing education about pelvic floor physical therapy. It's a long story to bring me here.
Speaker 2:I love it. I think it's amazing, especially like that your PT said it's basically to help women who you know have urgency, kind of are leaking, and that's exactly what you had experienced.
Speaker 1:That's the type of people you want to work with, too, is people that have experienced it.
Speaker 3:You know, I think part of that is the whole aspect of like I can validate it for someone you know and everyone thinks okay, this is just me, they don't want to talk about it. I'm the only person that's experiencing this Like no, I literally have experienced it too, and I do a lot of the same exercises that I give my clients and my patients, and you know, I have to stay on top of my own pelvic floor.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Also, though, you experience that at such a young age, because I could imagine you know a lot of girls dealing with the same thing but then feeling like they wouldn't even know who to talk to about it, because you know it's not the type of thing you really talk about with your friends.
Speaker 3:At least I didn't when I was in high school. Well, and then even whenever I was in college running on the cross country team there, all of my teammates were like oh yeah, we all pee our pants a little bit at races and I'm like, oh okay, I guess, I guess this is just what we do.
Speaker 2:There's no reason for us to be embarrassed about things that are happening with our body when there's things we can do.
Speaker 1:Anybody that's listening to the podcast right now. This is a great avenue for them to be able to. I guess, a great medium for them to be hearing and learning about it. So thank you for reaching out to us to bring this awareness and and if anybody is listening you make sure if you want to, if you have any questions, you can use the Texas link right there in the notes and you can send us questions and what's the best way people can reach out to you as well.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I um. I'm on line at breeze pelvic healthcom. I'm also on Instagram at breeze pelvic health and my email is Ashley at Breeze Pelvic Health dot com and I have a phone number which is on all of these sites and links as well.
Speaker 1:So I would love to ask you, ashley, what made you decide to go mobile instead of just like setting up a traditional, like office?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I haven't talked about that too much on the podcast yet, but I treat from people's houses, primarily meaning I bring my backpack and a large table to people's houses in my car and I go to their houses and treat them. And it's quite an ordeal. My backpack is a 47 liter travel backpack and my table weighs 50 pounds. But it's fun, you know, there's nothing like sweating a little bit.
Speaker 3:But my main reason for treating mobile right now is really two reasons One, because I am kind of new to the area as well. I just moved here in March and I wanted to kind of scope the area out before I found a location to have, you know, my people coming to me and one that I felt good into, what felt good treating in and could kind of make it my own space and make it how I wanted to make it, which is, you know, the whole purpose of starting your own practice. And then the second reason is because I am new and this is my baby. Business is really the financial side of things and I love having the opportunity to go to people's homes and treat them.
Speaker 1:I love that. I love that. I know in the next episode we're going to get a little bit more into what the day-to-day looks like, which I'm sure is going to be probably just as interesting as how this conversation started, and I see you brought some stuff for us to check out some models or something like that.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, I have my pelvis model.
Speaker 1:We'll have to take some pictures and show them on Instagram. So that way we can have that to show, we'll probably get flagged.
Speaker 3:It's okay, listen, I have not gotten flagged on my Instagram, yet that's good enough.
Speaker 1:She's like you are safe.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I did Google. Is it okay to say vagina on Instagram? And it is.
Speaker 1:So as long as it pertains to your subject matter, there you go. I would like to ask you one more question before we wrap up this episode. You know you say you're new right now, so how long has your business been going right now?
Speaker 3:Officially since November, but November to March was more of just like the setup and I was also working a full time job in that time frame as well. But March was really when I started marketing. Getting myself out there. That's awesome.
Speaker 1:This is a pretty early question for you, though, but I'm still going to ask it because I mean, I know, as a business owner, we learn a lot every day. What have you learned about yourself since starting, since actually going all in and saying OK, I'm going to, we're going to launch the breeze and we're going to go for it?
Speaker 3:So actually I was just thinking about this the other day, like you know how people say, like I'm both introverted and extroverted. Yeah, and I am learning about myself that I am not both. I am introverted, are you serious?
Speaker 3:Are you sure? I'm sure. Yes, yeah, I was at a business thing on Friday and it was like two hours long and you know, crowded, lots of people, very fun environment. I got home afterwards and I'm like man, I just need to sit on the couch for like three hours and recover from that. Yeah, yeah, um, but all good things, like I appreciate all the opportunities.
Speaker 1:you know I don't know if you've ever heard, but I think there's like do you remember Shauna? There's like a you have introverts and extroverts, but there's an in-between yeah, remember what it's called.
Speaker 2:I don't remember which I should remember, because that's where I'm finding that I am.
Speaker 1:Chad GPT says it's an ambivert ambivert.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, ambivert, so yeah so it's ambivert.
Speaker 1:It says enjoy social interaction, but also values alone time that's me, so we're ambiverts.
Speaker 2:We're ambiverts All right, that doesn't roll off the tongue, it doesn't really Like oh, I'm an ambivert Like you should do that next time.
Speaker 1:someone says I'm an introvert, I'm an extrovert.
Speaker 3:Just throw it out there. I'm both. I'm an ambivert, yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm an omnivert Omnivert pronouncing it wrong.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's all verts, I think, I don't know.
Speaker 1:Well, this has been a great first episode so I'm excited to get into episode two, where we're going to get to know a little bit more about what it's like behind the scenes and doing that mobile as well. So with that, everybody, if you guys are enjoying the podcast, make sure you leave us a review. That'll help.
