If you’re brand new to Feldenkrais pelvic floor lessons, start with Pelvic Floor Connections (37 min, Patrons) or Two Sitbones, Two Sides of the Pelvic Floor (31 min, Patrons) instead.
You’ll need a firm, level chair or stool for the first two minutes of this lesson.
The pelvic floor contractions resemble a Kegel exercise, but in Feldenkrais study these movements are much gentler and slower than how Kegels are usually taught.
Think LESSS is more: Light, Easy, Soft, Slow, Smooth movements of your pelvic floor give your brain sensory data it can learn and improve with, so you can refine your control. In addition to raising your sensitivity, doing continually LESSS will also help you avoid getting tired, since you’ll be doing this movement a lot.
Many people find pelvic floor lessons particularly emotionally or culturally challenging. We invite you to pause and take breaks as needed. It’s also not uncommon to need to pause for a bathroom break.
When you develop the “bell hand” and lips movements, I could have said more explicitly that you can experiment with gently drawing up the pelvic floor as you close your fingertips together and purse your lips, and letting it down gradually as you let your fingers and lips open and soften. You might pause the recording to play with this.
After pelvic floor Feldenkrais lessons you may begin to notice in your regular life that your pelvic floor is often more contracted than you find necessary or desirable. Noticing these moments is normal and useful: it’s a necessary step toward reducing excess effort and learning better function of the pelvic floor in all your activities.
When you do notice unnecessary pelvic floor tension, don’t immediately let it go. Instead take a moment to sense it, and then experiment with gradually relaxing the tension, while noticing changes throughout yourself.
About the pelvic floor, and Kegels
In addition to being related to issues of continence, digestion and elimination, and sexual function, the pelvic floor is connected to all other actions. Ideally it is dynamically changing every moment, adapting to and assisting everything we do, just like breathing and balancing.
Often when we think our pelvic floor is “weak” it actually just lacks variability in muscle tone. If we’re always holding it at a 9 out of 10, then there’s not much room to tighten it more when we need to!
And “strength training,” like traditional Kegels, is usually not very fruitful because brute force doesn’t get applied accurately or efficiently if we can’t sense and feel the details. When the efforts are intense, and/or we’re already chronically tight, we can’t sense and control our muscles clearly.
So one intention in these lessons is to learn to sense and use the minimum necessary tone for the moment. We’re more interested in lowering the bottom of the variability of your pelvic floor tone than raising the top.
This actually gives us a faster, stronger, and more thorough ability to increase pelvic floor tone precisely as needed, where needed, and only when needed.
After a break, continue on with Part 2. We recommend a break of at least 10 minutes, maximum of 24 hours, so that you can continue while the movements and sensations are fresh in your mind.
This lesson is found in Patrons Monthly, our collection of lessons exclusively for Feldenkrais Project Patron-level donors.
It also appears in our Pelvic Floor: Less Is More course.
It was recorded in a FP Weekly Zoom class on May 17, 2022, then split into Part 1 and Part 2, and edited to improve flow, clarity, and audio quality.
Members and Patrons. Learn more or login:
Members and Patrons. Learn more or login:
The original hour-long class recording is in our Legacy and Alternate Lessons collection, under the title Improving Pelvic Floor Control and Ease (Patrons).
Splitting it into Part 1 and Part 2, and taking a break between them, is a better way for most people to study this lesson.
Comments from the original full-length version that was split into Part 1 and Part 2:
Gertrude Schmidt on March 21, 2023 at 4:11 am:
I do this lesson very carefully – with movements just between thinking and action – so I get a lot out of it without fatigue.
This morning walking around – enjoying my relaxed feet touching the ground – thinking how this diamond shaped pelvic floor influences my breathing and connects my whole body – I found myself singing the lines of the song
‘Love Is All Around’ by Wet Wet Wet
I feel it in my fingers
I feel it in my toes
Love that’s all around me
And so the feeling grows
Thanks Nick for your wonderful Feldenkrais project
joan davis on March 27, 2023 at 1:15 am:
More of the pelvic floor work please! It’s so intimately connected to my feelings of well being and confidence in the world. Thank you
Amazingly enough, I improvised my way into exactly the final movement some months ago when I was trying to find something to relieve the cramps that accompany gastric distress. At that point I didn’t think about the pelvic floor but rather tightening and releasing the sphincters and the lower abdominals as I rocked slowly between 6 and 12 on the pelvic clock. I’ve found it very effective. I may burp or fart when I’m done, but the pain is greatly diminished.
Also, an extremely nice resting position for this practice is the Yoga position “happy baby”. And who doesn’t want to be a happy baby?
In the very beginning of the lesson during the body scan, my entire right side felt like raw nerves (difficult to explain…”physical”anxiety?) I have had a severe injury on that side…in the process of healing. At the end of this lesson, my right side experienced “physical” peace. Go figure!!
Thanks, Nick!!
I experienced a deep sense of calm and well being after this lesson.
Something to do with breathing and moving, the breath moving the whole self, particularly the ribs and pelvic floor.
Making these connections gives an access to something profound.
I appreciate the way you separated the lesson into to parts as there is a complex simplicity to the first part that benefits from the space you have given it.