There is a part of the body many women have learned not to listen to…
The pelvis.
It’s an area that can hold so much, in the form of tension, emotion and protective patterns. Over time it can become somewhere we feel distant from, or even numb to.
This was my experience too.
In my late thirties, as I began exploring yoga more deeply, I noticed something that didn’t quite make sense. My hips moved well, but they often felt uncomfortable. I could feel sensation externally with tightness, aches and sometimes even pain, yet when I brought my awareness deeper into my pelvis, there was very little there.
At the same time, I was experiencing quite painful periods but beyond that discomfort there wasn’t much sensation available to me. It felt like a part of my body I could function through but not really feel.
Looking back, I can see there were many reasons for this. I had never been taught anything about the significance or sensitivity of this area of the body. There was no language around how much we can hold here, or how deeply our experiences, physical, emotional, relational, can live in the pelvis.
My nervous system, shaped by early experiences, had learned to stay on high alert. That showed up as anxiety for much of my childhood and early adulthood. And culturally, like so many women, I had absorbed the message to push through, especially when it came to my cycle, to carry on and override what my body needed, which was often stillness and quiet.
There was also a lack of real education around sex, consent, and what it means for the body to feel safe. Not just emotionally, but physically, during intimate encounters, in medical spaces and generally in being touched or entered. All of this lives somewhere in the body, and often right in our most central and sacred space.
Over time, I’ve come to see how common this is. That underlying belief so many women carry, that we are meant to endure, to tolerate, to ‘put up and shut up’. None of this stays just in the mind, it seeps into the body, into how we relate to sensation and what we allow ourselves to feel.
For me, the shift began with curiosity.
I started asking questions about my own experience, the painful periods, the discomfort in my hips, the numbness during intimacy, the lack of deeper sensation. One of my deepest desires is to understand myself fully and when I began to bring awareness back to my pelvis, it wasn’t some big, profound opening. At first, there was very little, a kind of quiet subtle holding and if I’m honest, a sense of discomfort in realising how long I had been disconnected from this part of myself. There was even a layer of shame in that, a feeling of ‘how did I not see this sooner?’ Alongside a deeper recognition of how much the world we live in shapes that disconnection, both externally and internally.
By staying with myself gently and consistently something began to shift. I started to feel more, not in a big way, but in subtle, quiet ways at first. Sensations that felt easeful, sometimes even pleasurable. My hips began to not only move well, but feel more stable and supported. My relationship with my body started to change, and, perhaps most importantly, I felt more in myself. More grounded, connected and able to listen.
The pelvis, to me, feels like a significant holder of our stories, and when we begin to experience this area in new ways, we begin to experience ourselves in new ways too. Not just releasing tension, but releasing what has been held physically, emotionally, and energetically. There is space for something new to emerge.
If you’re reading this and recognising some of yourself in these words, the disconnection, the numbness, the sense of being slightly outside of your body, you’re not alone, or behind, this kind of reconnection takes time.
It can feel like nothing is happening when you first begin, feelings of frustration or boredom can arise. It might feel that there is nothing much to feel, nothing to connect to and it can also be confronting. But something is happening, each time you bring your awareness back, you are building a new relationship with your body.
With time that relationship deepens, not necessarily in bigger or more intense sensations (although that is very possible), but in self-trust, familiarity and presence.
It is a process of forgetting and remembering and this is why I created a simple pelvic breathing meditation. Because breath is a gentle and powerful place to begin. It gives the mind something to rest on, and it brings energy and awareness into the body at the same time. To breathe is to notice.
If you’d like to explore this for yourself, you can listen to the meditation here:
