The pelvis is everything
So let’s talk about the PELVIS. The pelvis is our centre of gravity; it’s our foundation. If you imagine children’s building blocks, the pelvis is the bottom one. If it’s on rocky ground – if it loses its stability – then everything on top of it falls over, right? This is how our body works. In order to have a fully functioning and healthy body, we need to have a pelvis that’s in alignment, is strong and is healthy. And how solid and balanced we feel physically is generally a direct reflection of how balanced we feel emotionally. One affects and creates the other. So as we heal one, the other naturally resolves too.
In Yoga for the Vagina we place our focus on our vagina, and we use the vagina as an anchor point to keep us connected to the pelvis as a whole. With our focus on our vagina, we can learn how to gather in what I like to call the ‘Pelvic Parfait’ – all the muscles, organs and fascial ligaments of the pelvic bowl – in towards the vagina to create a contraction or activation of the pelvis, to help build tone and strength and resilience. Then we release that contraction in a way that allows us to dissolve tension, to create more blood flow and circulation in the pelvic bowl and all that sits within it.
Most women have stagnation in their pelvis, and this can lead to all sorts of sexual health issues, including PMS. If you have brown or black blood in your period, if you have clots, if you experience cramping, fibroids, cysts, endometriosis; these are all signs that there’s stagnation in the pelvis, which means that the blood isn’t flowing well through the body, and in particular in the pelvic area.
We need fresh blood flowing through the body because it delivers nourishment to the organs, muscles, bones and connective tissues. Without that nourishment the body isn’t as resilient and can more easily become sick. Part of what causes this stagnation is habitual movement patterns – so how we hold and use our body throughout our day – as well as lifestyle choices, trauma and conditioning.
Most women also hold tension in the pelvis. Not only does too much tension in the pelvic cavity inhibit orgasm, it causes weakness, making a woman more prone to experiencing sexual health problems, like prolapse. It’s also really difficult to birth a baby through a super tense pelvic floor. You’re aiming for a pelvic floor that is supple, toned and elastic. Think of a trampoline – that’s the kind of movement you want in your pelvic floor, and throughout your pelvis.
A really common pelvic issue is incontinence. When a woman presents with incontinence, where she has trouble holding in her urine, she often gets told to do stacks of Kegels. Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, do Kegels all the time, while you’re sitting at traffic lights, when you’re in that boring business meeting, whenever you can… Squeeze!
There are many problems with Kegels, I won’t go into all of them now, but if you’re trying to build strength on an area that holds tension, you’re only building more tension, not healthy tone. So in any pelvic strength building you do, you need to be focusing on releasing tension, then building healthy tone. And you need to focus the squeeze on the whole of the pelvis. Not just the pelvic floor.
We’ve all heard about the pelvic floor. It’s kind of famous now with most women experiencing pelvic issues being told their pelvic floor is too tight or too weak! But what many people don’t realise, is that the pelvic floor, is a group of 16 muscles that sit at the base of the pelvis, and work in connection with the muscles, ligaments, and organs that all sit within the pelvic bowl. The pelvic floor doesn’t work in isolation. Yet, when Kegels are taught, often women are told to focus on specific, isolated muscles of the pelvic floor, which create an imbalance in the structure and functioning of the pelvis.
This is why so many women have trouble healing problems like incontinence and prolapse. We think we need to strengthen, strengthen, strengthen, but we’re not taught how to release first, so we have a tension-free environment upon which to build that strength. Yes, unfortunately, often the strength building exercises we get given are tension-causing, and don’t work with the pelvis as one connected structure.
Women tend to hold a lot of tension in the pelvis from habitual patterns, lifestyle choices and trauma and conditioning. The way I teach you how to work with your pelvis in Yoga for the Vagina, begins the process of unravelling those holding patterns, so we can free the body up to do what it does best; self-heal. And to help this process, we invite a Jade Egg into our practice. Now a Jade Egg isn’t essential, but in my experience it certainly increases the results a woman gets.
