Two Sitbones, Two Sides of the Pelvic Floor (31m, Patrons)

You’ll need a hand towel and a firm, level, non-rolling chair. Kitchen or dining room chairs often fit the bill. If your chair is solid wood you may want to cover it with a bath towel folded once or twice, to make it more comfortable to press your sitbones into.

Many movements of this lesson resemble a Kegel exercise, but they are intended to be far gentler and slower than how Kegels are usually taught.

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.

Check the Curiosities tab for illustrations of sitbones and the breathing diaphragm, and to learn more about healthy pelvic floor function.

Sometimes people are surprised by how relatively close to their midline the sitbones are:

Here’s an illustration from Alexander Technique London to help you find your sitbones.

Regarding the “two diaphragms” mentioned early on, check out this gif animation of the breathing diaphragm. It’s vaulted when relaxed, then flattens down as it contracts when we inhale. This increases the pressure inside your abdomen, that in turn can create sense that the pelvic floor swells downward as you inhale, if we’re soft and sensitive enough to feel it.

After doing Feldenkrais pelvic floor 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.

As discussed in the lesson, 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.

This lesson is found in Patron Treasures, 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 on May 9, 2022.

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