I want to write about a small breath that has done more work in my body, and in the bodies of the women I teach, than any ten postures combined. I have not given it a name. The osteopath I learned it from did not give it a name either. She said it was just a breath into the floor of the bowl, and that women understood what she meant the moment she said it.
I will try to describe it as gently as I can. It is not complicated. It does require slowness.
The shape of the bowl
The pelvis is a bowl. Most of the time we treat it like a structural element — the hips — and we forget that the inside of the bowl is alive. The bottom of the bowl is the pelvic floor, a hammock of muscle slung between the pubic bone in front, the tailbone in the back, and the two sit bones at the sides. It holds the womb, the bladder, the lower digestive tract. It also holds, in most of us, decades of small unspoken tensions.
Most women I work with — even very athletic women, even very experienced yogis — do not know this hammock as a sensation. They know it as an idea. The breath I am about to describe is a way of making it a sensation again.
How I teach it
Lie on your back. Knees bent. Feet flat, hip-width apart. A folded blanket under your hips if it feels right.
Place one hand on your lower belly, just below the navel. Place the other hand on your chest.
Take three slow breaths through the nose. Let the belly hand rise on the inhale and fall on the exhale. The chest hand should move very little. If it is moving a lot, the breath is still in the chest, and the practice is to keep softening until the breath finds the lower body.
Now, for the next ten breaths, stop tracking the belly. Instead, on each inhale, imagine the floor of the bowl — the hammock between the pubic bone and the tailbone — quietly receiving the breath. As if someone were pouring warm water down into the bowl from above. The pelvic floor does not lift. It does not contract. It only softens downward, very slightly, on the inhale.
On the exhale, the floor of the bowl returns to neutral. Not lifted. Just home.
The pelvic floor in most modern women is too tight, not too weak. The breath asks it to release, not to perform.
What this is for
I teach this breath to women who are preparing for fertility, women who are recovering from birth, women who have been holding chronic pelvic tension for decades, women who have endometriosis or interstitial cystitis or unnamed pain, and women who are perfectly fine but have noticed that they cannot feel anything below the waist except as architecture.
It is not a quick fix. It is a practice. The first time you try it, you may not feel anything. The tenth time, you may feel a slight warmth. The thirtieth time, you may notice, with some surprise, that you are crying. None of these are the wrong response.
A note on Kegels
I do not teach Kegels. The exercise — repeated voluntary contractions of the pelvic floor — has its place, particularly in postpartum recovery, and I will not say it is wrong. But for the women I work with, who are mostly too contracted in the pelvic floor and not too loose, Kegels make the underlying problem worse.
If you have been doing Kegels because you read somewhere that you should, please consider stopping for a month, and trying this breath instead. See what happens.
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The body is wiser than the manual. The pelvic floor knows what it needs. Our job, mostly, is to slow down enough to listen.
— Ghizlan