The Power Center In Your Body You Might Not Know About & How It Can Affect Your Gut Health

It's no secret that gut health is crucial when it comes to our overall wellness and vitality. The health of our bellies is affected by many things: the food we eat, the thoughts we have, the emotions we feel, and even the environment we live in. But one of the things that can take a major toll on the gut is stress. So finding ways to reduce the stress and tension we hold on to in our bodies is crucial for both the health of our guts and our overall well-being.

The role the pelvic floor plays—particularly with relation to stress and stuck emotional energy—is a concept that is central to my latest book The Power Source: The Hidden Key To Ignite Your Core, Empower Your Body, Release Stress, and Realign Your Life, and my mindbodygreen class.

There's a neuromuscular and energetic connection between the pelvic floor and stress, which means that the state of our pelvic floor (in other words, whether our pelvic floor is resilient and healthy or tight, clutched, and tense) is directly connected to how our bodies respond to fear and stress. From my experience working with clients for the last 15 years, I discovered that many of us hold on to subconscious stress in the pelvic floor. 

This can become a problem over time since our bodies become "wired" to react to stress in a certain way. The pelvic floor tends to be where we bear down and cling to stress, "white knuckling" our way through life through a reactive pattern. It's as if we're getting stuck in "fight or flight" mode, and it keeps happening over and over again. For many people, an angry email or a comment on a social media post can trigger reactive stress and clutching. And once we get into this "clutch," the whole area around the pelvic floor and gut can become locked up and blocked, and those “fight or flight” signals (also known as the sympathetic nervous system) can cause adrenal fatigue. This is not only exhausting, but it can also wreak havoc on the vitality and health of your gut by causing issues like excess belly fat, IBS, bloating, and constipation—not to mention a loss of connection to your sensuality and gut instincts.

This makes sense if you're a student of Eastern medicine. In Eastern traditions, the pelvic floor is known as the root chakra. It’s where we hold our fears; specifically fears around primary instincts, such as our health, our family's safety, and our financial security. It's where we process emotion and house our fight-or-flight reactions.

The good news is there's a lot we can do to release stress and improve the health of our pelvic floor, which, in turn, improves both the health of our gut and our overall well-being. First, once we realize that stress is actually a reaction to external stimuli, by cultivating a self-awareness of how we react to stress, we can begin to reduce this reaction. Notice where you tend to get tense, tight, or ache after a stressful situation and try to visualize letting go of this tension. 

In addition, there are also several target "movement medicine" practices that will cultivate awareness of where you hold stress in your body and help you work on releasing this stress and tension, particularly from the pelvic floor area.

One key reason the Body Sphere works so well is that the vagus nerve actually connects the gut to the brain—so by self-massaging the pelvic floor and belly on the Body Sphere, this sends a message to your brain to shift into the parasympathetic state of the nervous system. This is when your body is able to rest, digest, heal, restore, and actually rejuvenate itself.

Here are a few moves from my book that I love:

Mid-Belly Melt With Twist

So, in conclusion, being aware of the role of reactive stress and the importance of the pelvic floor when it comes to the health of your gut is a crucial aspect of living a life of true well-being. To learn more movement medicine, check out my mindbodygreen class and my studio.