Is your pelvic floor causing your anxiety?
Many are unaware that our pelvic floor muscles even exist, let alone how profoundly important they are. Not only can they contribute to a healthy sex life, but they also help support your entire core musculature that keeps posture upright and strong, and our organs in their optimal positions!
If you are into disciplines like yoga, you are likely more familiar with this hidden musculature than most and may have even felt the benefits of toning the base of the body through the "Root Lock".
In addition to the benefits of toning up the root, things can sometimes go the other way, these muscles can get too tight, and this can cause a number of challenges. Like any muscle in the body, you can get trigger points in the pelvic floor that can cause local or referred pain.
Similarly, the resting tone of these muscles can become excessive and even cause conditions like vaginissmus and other challenging issues in the genitals. On the subtle level, according to Tibetan "Inner Fire" practice, excessive engagement of the root lock can cause the fire to blaze up to strongly or roughly and cause mania or anxiety.
While this last symptom explanation is based on esoteric tradition, it matches what bodyworkers have found for many decades, that patterns of tension in the physical body influence our emotions very strongly.
In a complete yogic tradition, in addition to the root lock, kegels, or other pelvic floor strengtheners, the student would always be instructed in practices to release tension in the pelvic floor so that they could create balance or fix any problems that can arise through practice.
My own Daoist tradition includes very intense regimes of practice for these muscles including the now-famous "Jade Egg" exercises. It is felt that these muscles are part of a system of energetic hydraulics by which one can pump spiritual forces up to the higher centers of the subtle body, and so a great deal of attention is sometimes placed on this type of exercise.
We also include a number of practices to undo excess tension. Here is a brief selection you might add to your practice:
- Sitting on the heel or a tennis ball to release trigger points
- Silk cloth massage of the entire pelvic floor area to reduce "heat" from the meridians
- Ashwini mudra from the yoga tradition
- Practice complete relaxation while urinating (called the "hourglass" technique)
- Distal acupoints to remove stagnation from the meridian channels, particularly the Liver meridian
If you've engaged in any of the advanced yogas like performing the Mula Bandha ("root lock") or even more specialized training like the Jade Egg practice from Daoist tradition, it's time for you to enjoy learning the Yin side of the picture. If you've experienced any of the painful or challenging symptoms then you especially should make it a point to try the above techniques and see if they bring you relief!
To learn about these techniques and traditions in greater depth, we'll go into detail about them in the upcoming workshop, 'The Dao of Bliss: Yogic Sex-Ed for Modern People'. The point of this half-day course is to expand access to the deeper understandings our sex-lives contained in Yogic tradition. These understandings range from the spiritual all the way down to nitty gritty details of how our anatomy works, like those shared above. I hope you can join us on May 27 for the class, or catch up with the archived video at any time for one year following!
