Releasing Pelvic Floor Tension

Pelvic floor tension is not a problem to fix; it is your body speaking. This talk is for the woman who senses there is more beneath her symptoms than she has been told. Tension, disconnection, collapse, and survival patterns in the pelvic floor are feedback. They may show up as leaking, incomplete bladder emptying, pain during intimacy, or simply an absence of pleasure and vitality.

Often, women are told to do kegals, yet for a hypertonic or tense pelvic floor, this can make things significantly worse. Here we pause, acknowledge the tension, and gently invite softening. Not forcing, not fixing. Just feeling and acknowledging that maybe it’s a softening thing, not a kegal thing, to solve the ‘pelvic floor dysfunction’ you are experiencing. Nothing more is needed than that.

Transcript

Releasing Pelvic Floor Tension. This is an imitation for the woman who understands what their bodies might be expressing. This is a talk to explore that together where we're looking at how the body might be expressing through tension or disconnection, Collapse or survival patterns. And it's for the woman who knows that there's more than just what she is told, That the wisdom is there in the body. If we allow ourselves to pause, Take a moment, And just be with ourselves. So pelvic tension is essentially feedback from the body. It's a gripping, It's a tightening, It's a hypervigilance, It's not feeling fully safe. And I guide women with this understanding of what their bodies might be expressing through this tension, Disconnection, Collapse, Or survival. And the focus of a tense pelvic floor is genuinely one of my favorite topics of discussion. It's something I really love to share and talk about. I've done many talks on tension in the pelvic floor at festivals, In person, With workshops and so on and it's because so many of us actually do find ourselves with a tense pelvic floor and we're not necessarily aware that there is tension and we're also not necessarily aware of why there's tension if we have tension and sometimes it's a subject it's also a taboo subject often amongst friends or amongst family where we don't talk about how this impacts our day-to-day and society will label this this tense pelvic floor scenario as a dysfunction and it's not a term that I like to use because although it's useful for searching on Google what might be the issue for somebody so if I was creating this talk and are utilizing terms that people might be searching for as a result of what society labels a tense pelvic floor as, Then we would utilize the word dysfunction simply because that is what exists in society. But in fact, Could we talk about this as feedback from the body, As something to witness and something to be curious about versus a dysfunction? So what we want to talk about here is that there might be something physical going on. Might be a tense pelvic floor but there might not be necessarily anything physically happening which is a byproduct of this tension but sometimes there is something that happens as a result of this tension such as a little bit of wee coming out maybe even has to be as far as jumping on a trampoline for that to happen but there could be some kind of leakage that is happening. It might be that when we're going to the toilet we don't fully finish having the wee it feels like we're finished but we know that we haven't finished and then we have to sit for longer or we have to return back quite quickly. There might also be discomfort during sex, During intimacy, During pleasure and it might simply be that vitality isn't present. It also might mean that we can feel this tension at root but we're not really sure where that tension lies. So often we feel that when we have this tension that there's something to solve and that this is a problem that we must solve and then we remove this joy of exploration that actually does exist from this challenge that many women face and it might seem to somebody who's engaging with this talk who has a lot of pain that for me to utilize that term joy would be flippant of me and would ignore the challenges that they are dealing with. To be clear I'm not at all numbing out to the challenge of this and in fact I wish people would speak to more of how much of a challenge this is for them in their day to day. What it means and what I speak to and how we explore this with the women that have been in these spaces with me before. Is that there's a real joy to discover ourselves through a new lens and without that pain, Without that what we would label as dysfunction, We might not ever go on that journey. So I always say that women land in the spaces that I create when there's something that is a tipping point for them physically and without that they might not ever explore the space and the space is a gift. So what we want to look at is what do we do? Well often we try to solve it with key girls because we think key girls are the answer and actually that's the only thing often presented to us as a solution and that's really upsetting and frustrating for many women especially when key girls when there is a tightness here actually can make the situation worse. So nobody can tell you what to do in this situation and we can go to and we can go to pelvic floor specialists and even they sometimes promote a key girl to replace what actually is needed for that woman because it's a blanket offering. I've seen it where A woman was told to do their key goals multiple times a day, And when we worked together, There was actually tension and tightness, And what she actually needed was the opposite of a key goal. What she needed was to feel that there was a softer approach. And when we said, Well, Your option here is to, As somebody who is holistically trained, As opposed to a gynecologist, As opposed to a chiropractor, Osteopath, Or wherever else, Can go well I'm saying you could choose whether you continue with Kegels or whether you don't and be curious about this and curious about the journey and at the end of the day she'd been doing Kegels and working with the same practitioner for two years and the pelvic floor remained the same so what did she have to lose if she chose not to was something that she explored So she stopped doing the Kegels, She stopped tensing, And her pelvic floor was actually the best it had ever been for as long as she could remember. And that was her because she could feel the tension and that the Kegels were actually making it worse for her, Which is why the discussion around Kegels should be done gently and should be explored for each woman, And you can explore that for yourself. So what we want to look at is that women need to be listened to and what we must notice is that often we're not listened to we're just given the same blanket approach which doesn't work for every single woman especially when everybody's holding person within the pelvis is different based on their own journey and their own traumas and their own challenges so first of all what is the tension a product of is what we should be looking at not there is tension but why is there tension so the tension could a product of say holding the family together or even just holding ourselves through years of challenges and this tension can then make the pain worse and the pain might be actually stemming from some kind of trauma that we can't necessarily put our finger on straight away but when we look at it and sit with it we realize that what's coming up for us when we sit with that space is the trauma of something from even our teenage years even if we're now in our 50s. That's not to be overlooked. The reason being is because the pelvic floor is this hammock. We can describe it as a hammock. We can describe it as a safety net. And when we're asking too much from ourselves, We brace ourselves from this space. And that space is a space of safety. So if we're consistently bracing ourselves, We're consistently tightening and we're consistently creating tension. And then that safe place doesn't feel safe anymore because it's a space of holding and a space of tension. And uncomfortable pain even for some women. So what we need to consider is that there is a bracing that is happening here and it could be from a whole host of things. It could also be from a specific trauma such as assault abuse and that assault abuse doesn't have to have been recent is what I'm trying to speak to here. Everybody is so different. I've worked with so many women in this space with so many stories to tell. And they're all women who have a story to tell that exists in our society. And I'm always fascinated by a woman who goes on the journey to explore where that root cause is, Because this is the root of the body. So there's a root cause for this tension in the first place. And of course, Why do we have this tension? Well, This tension obviously exists to protect ourselves, To protect us and hold us and it stems from our rooted self, Our rooted body pulls here to notice that that is what is happening. It's protecting you from what? What is it protecting you from? And what is arising when we notice the pelvic floor is protecting us in this way? So what we have to do is a simple curious journey to return to our knowing and return to the fact that the tension exists and we can notice it. And can you actually soften into that tension by noticing and being with the breath and noticing that the pelvic floor exists to protect you and that the feather bed that is your pelvic floor, Your ground floor, Is there so that you can land into it and do so gently. And when you keep allowing yourself to land into any thoughts, Feelings, Sensations that can arise from that space, Can you then soften into that space even more? And the more you soften into it and find that safety, The more thoughts, Feelings, And sensations that may arise, And the more safety that might arise from that, And the less tension that might come. So the invitation is to do nothing. Right now. Nothing until you feel you can just be, To acknowledge the tension is the first part of this journey and just to acknowledge it is absolutely plenty. To acknowledge it, To soften into it even, To feel it, That's enough right now because what you're doing is you're allowing for the acknowledgement and that's all the body has been asking for all this time. I'm sending so much love.