The pelvic floor in detail

In this article I'm going to turn my attention to an area of the body I've been trying to develop more of an awareness of for quite some years – the pelvic floor (which I have written about before).

The pelvic floor is a multi-layered sheet of muscle and fascia that functions like a hammock at the bottom of your torso. The weight of your organs rest on it and in doing so it helps to maintain optimal intra-abdominal pressure. The muscles work to help maintain continence, and stabilise the hips and the whole spine-leg connection. Once it would've also lifted and wagged your tail! It's also the location of your muladhara chakra.

Over the last year I've been reading and digesting the book "Pelvic Power" by Eric Franklin. It's a very good little book. Franklin specialises in using visualisation to help your awareness and functional coordination of your body, which is great and makes it kinda fun! But as far as I can work out there are a couple of mistakes in his diagrams and I've been left feeling a little confused as to exactly what's what.

No surprise really since the pelvic floor is actually a very complex area!

Bones

Let's start with the bones to get our bearings. Here's an image of your pelvis from the front. If you can feel your hips sticking just underneath your waist, they're your Iliac Crests. The two protrusions sticking down underneath your bum are your Ischial Tuberosities (commonly known as your sitting bones). The two halves of your Ilium come together at the front at the Pubic Symphysis – commonly known as your pubic bone.

Credit: Pearson Education, Inc (2015)

That seems relatively straightforward...

Take a moment to identify the four "corners" of your pelvic floor with your fingers: your pubic bone at the front and your tail bone (coccyx) at the back, and the two sitting bones (ischial tuberosities) underneath. Actually touching these points really helps in getting a sense of where we're at in the body.

Muscles

From now on we have to be careful as there are some differences between the male and female anatomy. I think this is what has confused me for so long, as the books and sources I've read often show what it's like for a woman and don't say how it's different for a man...

(1) The deep layer

So let's start by looking down on the pelvic floor (as per this beautiful image of the female anatomy from BandhaYoga.com). There are three main muscles here: the pubococcygeus and the iliococcygeus (which, together with the puborectalis are collectively called the levator ani – literally "anus-lifter") and the coccygeus.

Credit: BandhaYoga.com

The Pubococcygeus forms the the top layer and connects front to back – tail to pubic bone. To engage this one, visualise drawing your coccyx and pubic bones towards each other. You might even feel some movement in your coccyx as you do this (you're wagging your tail!).

In men, contracting the Pubococcygeus muscle (and/or the abdominal muscles) can voluntarily engage the Cremaster muscle to lift the testicles. Normally the Cremaster is under involuntary control.

The Iliococcygeus and Coccygeus sit underneath and connect the tail bone to the sides of the ilium (a touch back from the pubic bone). The fibres of these muscles form a triangle (or fan) with the apex at the tail bone.

The levator ani muscles can be thought of as a fan radiating out from the coccyx. Engaging and releasing these muscles shorten or lengthen the distance between the hips and the coccyx (putting your tail between your legs). Credit: Eric Franklin

The puborectalis forms a sling around the rectum helping you hold things in when you need to... Squatting when you poo helps relax this muscle and eases the exit channel.

(2) The mid layer

Moving outwards, the next layer is the Urogenital Diaphragm. This is composed of the Deep Transverse Perineal muscle and the Urethral Sphincter (a ring muscle around the urethra – what you wee through).

The word perineum usually refers to the part of the pelvic floor between the anus and vagina/scrotum. The deep transverse perineal muscle sits under the levator ani muscle group and connects side-to-side (sitting bone to sitting bone). It's function is to help support the perineal body (central tendon running north-south along the perineum), the expulsion of semen in males, and squeezing the last drops of urine out for both sexes. To engage it, visualise pulling your sitting bones towards each other. This might take a bit of practice (you can tell when someone is trying by the look on their face...)

This image shows this mid-layer for both the male and female anatomy and how they correspond.

Credit: Antranik

(3) The superficial layer

For this layer it's helpful to look from underneath. As I'm sure you realise, the pelvic diaphragm has a number of holes in it... At the back we have the anus (surrounded by the deep levator ani muscles). At the front we have the urethra (and vagina for women) surrounded by the ischiocavernosus and bulbospongiosus muscles. In men, the bulbospongiosus surrounds the base of the penis and is the big spongy muscle you can feel running front-to-back along your undercarriage. It helps hold an erection and also helps ejaculation. In women, it contributes to clitoral erection, and closes the vagina. For both sexes it contributes to the contractions of orgasm, and also squeezing those last drops of urine out.

Credit: Wikimedia Commons

There's also the Superficial Transverse Perineal muscles which are narrow muscular strips connecting sitting bone to the central tendon on either side. In some people they may be absent or connect slightly differently.

Here's another diagram from Fraklin's book showing the geometry of these muscles on the bottom surface of your pelvic floor (note: diagram is of a female anatomy). There's the triangle at the front formed of the Ischiocavernosus and Transverse Perineal muscles, then the figure of 8 formed by the Bulbospongiosus and anal sphincter. With these shapes, Franklin does a good job in simplifying things to help you work out what's what.

Credit: Eric Franklin

I'd like to finish by noting that these layers of muscle are (of course) all wrapped in fascia, forming the whole connected integrated (and complicated) pelvic diaphragm.

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I am a member of the Zenways sangha led by Zen master Daizan Skinner Roshi, and I teach meditation, mindfulness and yoga at the ZenYoga studio in Camberwell, London. See my website for further details.

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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.

Image credit