It’s ok to rest with your knees bent at the beginning of the lesson if that’s more comfortable for you.
Many people find pelvic floor lessons particularly emotionally or culturally challenging. We invite you to pause and take breaks as needed. For wisdom from the students who were present on Zoom when this was recorded, Patrons can check out the ATM discussion.
It’s also not uncommon to need to pause for a bathroom break.
Many movements of this lesson resemble a Kegel exercise, but they are intended to be far gentler and more gradual than how Kegels are usually taught. The movement is gentle and gradual both when you’re gathering up the pelvic floor and when you’re releasing it.
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.
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 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.
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 during a Patrons Quarterly call on May 18, 2023, then edited to improve flow, clarity, and audio quality.
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Members and Patrons. Learn more or login:
Here’s a helpful study tip from Joan Davis, who left this comment on the Patrons Quarterly event page from when this lesson was recorded.
Hi Nick this is a great deep dive and a really important one it seems! I have a question if I may. When I am lying with my knees up and taking them to alternate sides to then draw them back using the PF I experience a little cramp starting in my adductors. Do you have any thoughts as to why that may be? I’ve simplified the movement by only imagining it however I was keen to understand why I would experience cramping 😉 Thank you so much.
Hard to say from a distance, but often when we’re exploring quieter-than-usual muscle control there can be a kind of “confusion” in the nervous system until you learn a more refined control. Sometimes a sharp contraction like a cramp is a way for the nervous system to feel more familiar to itself when we’re exploring outside of habits. Nothing to worry about. It’s ok to pause, stretch (very gently!), breathe, change positions, etc. as the cramp passes. It’s great that you’ve backed off all the way to imagined movement. You could also pause and rest your legs long, then try again when things quiet down.
When I came to standing I felt more upright, almost bent backwards (it felt great) with an increased sense of ownership. Your words regarding letting go to have control resounded with me, and freedom and its limits came to mind for some reason. I felt my breathing was more expansive throughout the lesson. Thank you for you unparalleled guidance.