The 8 Easy Steps are self-help tricks crowd-sourced from dozens of women, medical practitioners, therapists, and sexual health doctors we interviewed. They are not meant to be a medical advice, but they helped dozens of women to connect to their body. Let us know how it went for you!
Yes, there are things you can do by yourself at home. Depending on your condition, the self-help practices, together with the couples’ adjustments may solve your issue completely, slightly improve wellbeing, or support other therapy you may find. We cannot promise everything will be gone after a few yoga poses, but the excises below have helped dozens of women improve their sexual wellbeing. They are also approved by world-class experts in pelvic pain. Below we include a few exercises to start with. Want more? Sign up for our upcoming “Connect to Your Body” exercises.
- Relax. Breathing exercises. If your pain is muscular, there is a high chance that specific relaxation and breathing techniques can substantially help. The main objective of those is to relax the muscles, so it is important that you focus on relaxation during the exercises below. Even if the exercise asks you to squeeze your PC muscles the end goal is to relax them afterwards. An example of an exercise that helped us in our therapy:
Relax 1. Square Breathing. Sit on a chair on in the cross-legged position. Start with a few breaths and try to connect to your body. How does it feel? How does the point of contact with the ground or chair feels like? Now imagine that your pelvis is a square parallel to the ground. The next step is to breath in every of the four corners of your pelvis. Breathe in the top right corner and imagine that your pelvis expands with the inbreath and relaxes with the outbreath. Now breathe in the top left corner, the bottom right and the bottom left. With each inbreath expanding and stretching the pelvis. You can do this exercise many times a day, even at work or while commuting to work on a bus or in a car.
Watch out for Kegels! Despite its hype, Kegel exercises can actually harm you. Too many Kegel exercises is not healthy for anyone as you can read here, but can be especially harmful for women with tightened pelvic floor. Tightened pelvic floor can be weak, but needs to be relaxed and stretched before the strength can be build.
- Expand. Stretch poses.
Our pelvic floor needs to be stretched. Below are two sources with some yoga poses that can help. These stretches are designed to loosen the muscles inside and around the pelvis.
- Basic Stretches for free can be found here
- More exercises can be found in a video and a book by Amy Stein
- Massage & Trigger Point Release
Physical therapy (PT) may include internal massage and trigger point release. If you are part of one, you may ask your physical therapist to teach you some simple and safe techniques that can be done under the shower or in your bed. These techniques can help you achieve several objectives, including: reprogramming and teaching your body that touch in your intimate areas is safe and can be trusted, slow and mindful stretching of a vaginal entrance, trigger point release reducing muscular internal pain. We plan to include some of those in our “Connect to Your Body” guide.
- Dilators
Some women found dilators helpful in reprogramming their bodies that penetration can be safe. Although dilators are usually used as a home-based assistance in a well-designed physical therapy, some women try them without PT. Dilators are usually used every day for a few minutes. A women would start with the smallest size of a dilator, inserting it and leaving inside (initially without any movement) for 5-10 minutes to build trust in the muscles. If there is no pain, she would use the dilator for a delicate stretching of all sides of the vaginal opening and further progress to larger sizes of the dilators. If you decide to go for dilators, remember to be very gentle and patient with your body and go slow. Dilators can work very well but they need time and consistency. PTs often suggest taking a break from an intercourse during the time of that therapy, as a rapid movement of the intercourse can directly reduce the benefits of the dilators. There are many dilators on the market and we do not have a preference. The book Completely Overcome Vaginismus gives a very basic explanation on how to use dilators.
