From the ground up: Drawing energy and nutrients up from your roots

Last week, in the third article in the series of looking at our roots, we focussed on some of the physiology around the top of our root structure – where our roots turn into our trunk. We zoomed in on the pelvic floor, with all its layers of muscle and fascia, looking at their physiological function and some exercises to help us discern which muscles are which.

Have you been getting on? Have you been practising finding those three areas of your pelvic floor area that you can contract/lift? – the muscles around your genitals (stopping yourself urinating), around your anal sphincter, and that area in between (the perineal body/perineum and the central portion of the pelvic diaphragm/levator ani). Have you been able to isolate the lift in just that central area, your perineum?

If you have, then you're on the way to opening up the physical component of one of the most important subtle energetic practices in yoga. My teacher Jonathan Monks always talks of us having five bodies (or koshas): the physical, the mental, emotional, energetic, and spiritual. Everything that we do – every action, thought or feeling – is motivated by, and has a corresponding effect on, each of the five bodies. So by concentrating on the physical (the easiest level to work on), we can begin affecting the others and exploring their relationships.

Energetically, the pelvic floor is very important. In yoga, this area is associated with your Muladhara or base/root chakra – the first in the series of seven major chakras (or energy centres) located along the centre-line of your trunk. This point is also very important in the Chinese energy system, where it forms the base of the belly energy area (tanden in Japanese, or dantien in Chinese) and is called the Hui Yin. It's the first point on the Ren Mai (Conception Vessel) meridian that runs down the middle of the front of your body; the name Hui Yin means something like "meeting/convergence of yin" (sometimes translated as "seabed"). If you're interested see this nice article.

Back to the more yogic side of things... The pelvic floor muscles themselves are associated with your Mula Bandha. Bandha is variously translated as lock, or gate, doorway, and in yoga practice, engaging mulabandha is often taught as simply lifting your pelvic floor (as we discussed in the previous article). However, as the Yoga Journal puts it "Mula Bandha may be the most befuddling, underinstructed technique in the world of yoga"...

So what exactly is mulabandha? On a physical level, the Hatha Yoga Pradipika (one of the key historic yoga texts) clearly states that "the anus should be forcefully contracted when performing mulabandha", whereas there are other texts (like Moola Bandha by Swami Buddhananda) that say that "when engaging mulabandha there should be no movement of the anus" (or penis for a man).

What makes the most sense to me is that when you first start practising mulabandha you begin on the gross physical level (i.e. the most obvious thing you can do with your physical body – the easiest to feel), and from there gradually refine your senses to something more and more subtle. So, to begin with all we can do is simply (brutishly!) lift the entire pelvic floor area (i.e. do a Kegel exercise). This is great as it starts to strengthen and define the muscles for all the physiological reasons described in my previous article, and we can gradually begin to tune in to the different muscle areas until we can move them individually. Eventually we may just be able to engage the central portion of the pubococcygeus muscle to lift only the perineum, without contracting the other muscles around the anus and rectum (technically called Aswini mudra), and urethra (Vajroli mudra).

As Dr. Summers says in her book "Mulabanda", "according to Tantric theory, this [perineum lift] initiates mulabandha’s effects on the energy body... As one isolates the central portion of the pelvic floor, an awareness of muladhara chakra develops." So we move from the physical to the energetic, and I think this is where all the befuddlement arises.

You can think of energy following awareness and intention – awareness draws energy to that point, and intention makes it move. Dr. Summers goes on to say: "Eventually, this energy [in the muladhara/hui yin] can be directed without any muscle activity." As our practice becomes more refined, we begin to learn how to activate the energetic component of mulabandha using our intention, without needing the physical (muscular) component.

However, as Jonathan says "you cannot do Bandha, Bandha does you". The more we try, the more we tense up and the harder it becomes – like all of life, we have to find that balance between effort and letting go. All we can do is put ourselves in the place where it naturally occurs and let it happen (if it does).

So what's the point, I hear you ask, in doing this at all...? Well, besides all the physiological benefits, once we can learn to tune into and sense the flow of our energy, then we can learn how to direct it, and here's where things get interesting... It depends a little on your tradition: we can learn how to really root ourselves in the earth, direct energy up the chakras to stimulate higher spiritual states, draw in energy to charge up the tanden area (developing power and presence), etc. In traditional yoga, this upwards direction is the main aim (connecting to the heaven, raising the kundalini, etc.), but in the Chinese and Zen systems, we practice moving this energy up the back, over the head, and down the front, forming a circulating connection (the so-called microcosmic orbit).

It's all about softness, awareness, intention, and sensitivity.

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