How to transform your pelvic floor

If you have a healthy, functioning pelvic floor. You really need to be thankful for your pelvic floor working well.

For most women motherhood is our introduction to pelvic floor issues. You can have a baby via a caesarean and still experience issues, as just from carrying the baby you can still have pressure on your pelvic floor muscles. But the pelvic floor can experience bigger impacts following a vaginal delivery, or an episiotomy.

Even just aging can impact the pelvic floor function. As the oestrogen levels drop in the body you lose the tightness and regulation in the muscles.

The good news is if you have experienced pelvic floor issues you can get it back. You really must work at it.

Common signs and symptoms of pelvic floor dysfunction.

Obviously prolapse is an extreme sign and symptom that your pelvic floor is kind of not working so well.

Other less extreme signs are if you're wetting yourself, or leaking, experiencing a sensation of heaviness. So that could be heaviness with the bowel, or heaviness with the bladder, or a sort of a heaviness with the vagina. that's when the internal organs are dropping down. So it's like a sense of dragging, or heaviness. Other things could be just that feeling that, "Oh, I need to go to the toilet, but I'm not sure if I can last that long.” Or passing wind when you didn't really mean to.

But your pelvic floor does not only affect your bladder function. It's also can affect the bowel function.

There have been stories of, who the anxiety becomes so much regarding their ability to maintain bladder or bowel control that they won't leave the house anymore. Or won’t drive for an hour, as they don't think that they'll be able to hold on.

But there are things that we can do to kind of prevent pelvic floor issues.

And even kind of, if you do get to that stage if you were to do some exercise of those muscles, you could bring yourself into a better place.

With any muscle in our body. If we don't kind of use it, it doesn't maintain its strength. And so, if you use your pelvic floor muscles, then you are going to either keep the strength, or make them stronger.

And the pelvic floor is the base of the core structure. You have got your cylindrical core – made of your diaphragm, abdominal muscles, back muscles and then the pelvic floor is the base of that cylindrical core. It's important to have all of them working together, and strength in all of them. If one of them gets weaker, you're going to offset the balance of them all.

That’s why it's important to breathe. Doing a daily breathing practice is really good to keep your core strengths strong, and we're talking the deeper muscles, and then doing your pelvic floor muscles as well.

I always thought when we were toning the pelvic floor, it was just doing the old Kegel exercise, right?

But it is also about engaging the transverse abdominis, which is the first layer of your abdominal muscles. It is a really a key muscle. To engage the pelvic floor muscles, want to squeeze the pelvic bone muscles towards one another. And at the same time, you want to take the back passage towards the pubic bones. So you're doing those actions together.

What’s interesting, is so much of the advice, like the lifting of the vagina and the anus, and drawing that belly back, is about strengthening and tightening. But there's also the other side, which is people who have pelvic floor issues because they are too tight. Tightness can come from too much strengthening, but also it can come from emotional trauma as well. It could come from human intervention.

With that, it's about spending time, trying to feel your pelvic floor, and get some softness back in there, so you feel like you've got some control. To soften and relax. You could just sit in your chair and do a belly breath, so you're feeling the movement of the diaphragm. And then as that softens you'll then be able to feel how the respiratory diaphragm mimics the pelvic floor diaphragm. And they work in harmony. But if your pelvic floor is really tight or really loose, you won't feel that as much. The work is to bring those two in balance.

That might be a good practice to do, because it's not an area we spend a lot of time bringing our awareness to, because there's a lot of shame in the pelvic region. We make our pelvic parts of the body, male and female, ‘dirty’ places. People unconsciously are carrying shame in that place, so can disconnect a little bit from it. The first part of the journey is about learning to connect to just even being able to feel that. It really is a loaded part of the body. Which is probably why pelvic floor issues being so big now.

There's a lady called Anodea Judith, she talks about the pelvic floor as being the foundation of your temple. That’s why you want to have it in a healthy state, because if your foundation isn't in a healthy state, then how are you walking through life?

Both physically and spiritually, mentally. It's the place of empowerment as well. And if you think of how many of us are trying to kind of empower ourselves with who we are, and just standing in ourselves. It’s another good reason to have a good pelvic floor practice, because you're helping to be who you want to be. That's the essential first step, before you can get into really, opening your heart, or speaking your truth, and all those other cliches that people have.

It’s like the roots of a tree. If you think of how much is below the earth, and how strong they are. They move and they flow with whatever comes at them, most of the time. If you just watch a tree, it's so anchored, and rooted, and then it's able to express, and grow, and change with the seasons.

That's life. We are expressing, and growing, and changing with the seasons of our own life. But this part of who we are, this deep internal anchor, needs to be functioning well. It needs to be alive.

One key thing you can do for yourself, is keep your S shape in your spine. So, if you think about how we're sitting at desks, or we're driving a car, and then even texting, everyone's getting more and more rounded, and closing in. And when we round the pelvic floor muscles, they're pushed towards the front of the body and become weak. A simple thing that everybody can do, is just concentrate on having a good posture.

Coming back to the seasons of the tree, and the seasons of life, and what we go through. We change with the seasons, and we practice according to those seasons, as well. Motherhood changed our practice, and aging's changing our practice. It's just a journey, isn't it? We just keep learning more about who we are. And I think that's the gift of the yoga practice, is it's so focused on your own self-exploration, and knowing yourself. Simple, but not easy to remember to practice. Those things, that are just going to change how you breathe, and sit, and feel into your body.