It means we have to ditch the voice grip, vice grip. If you have tension around the vocal diaphragm, you are going to have likely a vice grip.

An amount of tension that extends down to the respiratory diaphragm and the pelvic floor. And trust me, ain’t nobody got time for that.

So what does that mean? There is a relationship between the voice and the pelvic floor. And you can go back to the previous episodes and listen to some of the science of that and also some of the psychosocial science of how if you identify as female, you probably are guaranteed to have an orofacial or laryngeal or vocal diaphragm issue because of the stressors that you live under in our culture and our social structure.

And don’t forget that that is epigenetic, which means we carry the trauma of our female ancestors. So think about that based on your race, like what color we are, if we’re white or black or brown or otherwise, we’re going to have saddled different traumas, right? So being honest about the systemic racism that exists and puts women of color in an even greater disadvantage when it comes to that voice grip, vice grip piece. 

It becomes even more crucial for women to claim the power of their voice. So once you start to understand that there’s a biological connection between the voice and pelvic floor and a psychosocial…So we’ve got a bio -psycho -social. And if you look at all, if you’re sciency and nerdy, you’ll understand the bio-psycho-social model is the way that you should be treated in healthcare. No other way. It is superior. 

So if you think about the bio, the biological way that the voice to pelvic floor is connected, and then the psycho -social way in which the voice to pelvic floor is connected, it’s mind -blowing. It’s so incredibly important.

Everyone is increasingly hearing about the vagus nerve and polyvagal theory and I am so grateful to have learned about that over a decade ago now and had the good fortune of being able to talk to Dr. Steven Porges about the science behind it and really embracing that myself personally, changing the way that I responded to stress. 

Some of the vocal issues, that I had vanished as soon as I changed not so much the biological aspect of what I was doing because I’m a physical therapist. I was already doing that stuff. But from a psychosocial standpoint, I began to realize that for my own mental health, I needed to speak up, use my voice in a way that I hadn’t before, which was really vulnerable and really hard. It made me do things way outside my comfort zone that I’ll save for another time to talk about. 

But the point is when you begin to speak up and really normalize the relationship between your voice and pelvic floor, it’s not going to be all sunshine and rainbows. You’re going to come up against some things that you might need to book a session with your mental health therapist about. You might need to work some of these trauma pieces that come up. 

So..what I’m trying to say is before I lead you through a guided meditation, it’s that if something comes up, that’s a yellow or red flag, right? Maybe you do need to see a voice to pelvic floor therapist. Maybe you do need to reach out. I have all kinds of resources, including the podcast as a free resource. But if you’re looking for more than that, that might be the time to reach out. 

And or…it might also be the time to reach out to your mental health therapist or to find a good one that can help you process trauma. There are a couple of ways you can process trauma. Well, there’s more than a couple. A couple means more than just two. But two of the ones that I found to be incredibly helpful professionally as I work with other people and also personally. So, you know, being vulnerable myself now in this moment on the podcast.

A couple of those ways is EMDR. Looking up EMDR therapists, certified therapists can be life changing and life shifting and really good even if you don’t think there’s anything you need to work through, there probably is and EMDR will bring that up. Internal Family Systems or IFS is another way. And I didn’t mention the EMDR acronym, but I’ll go back and do that. I mentioned it in other podcasts, but if you haven’t listened to the other ones. EMDR, is Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing.

So it is a reprocessing of how we think about things, how we move through our lives without the shame or the guilt that we may have unnecessarily saddled ourselves with. And guess what? That stuff shows up in the voice to pelvic floor connection. As a pelvic and orthopedic therapist, it shows up. It shows up in low back pain, sacroiliac joint pain, snarky psoas, right? Tight hip flexors, hip pain, pelvic pain, painful intercourse.

All kinds of, you know, all things pelvic girdle, right? But it can also show up with an abnormal response to stress, breathing issues, you find yourself breath holding, right? Or the stuff that you can easily see, tightness and pain in the neck, headaches, hoarseness, laryngitis, vogal problems, okay? All that is indicative of a voice to pelvic floor connection problem that could be biological, but it also could be psychosocial.

That does not mean it’s psychosomatic, that it’s in your head, okay? It means that there are external influences that you cannot blame yourself for that need to be addressed. And of course, as always, culture in society rarely changes or changes quickly enough, but we can change. We can set boundaries. We can decide who we want to spend our time with and who we want to be connected to or work with or married to or et cetera.

So let’s talk about how to do a meditation for releasing it. This is not the end all be all, okay? I just wanna take you through a short guided meditation that allows you to drop into yourself, drop into being a step closer to your true voice.

Smiling about it, feeling good about yourself, and putting that shame to rest to bed, away, bury it, whatever, contain it, so that it’s not how you move through your life, making decisions, right? It’s based on fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. Some people call them, you know, fear-based decision-making, right? Or call it. 

So I want you to get in a comfortable place, chair, floor, rest, go lay down, lie down on the couch or in your bed, whatever. Or if you’re taking a walk and listening to this, continue that. If you’re driving, I would say press pause. And when you get home and you’re settled, then listen to this.

So close your eyes. Now, one disclaimer statement for closing your eyes. If you close your eyes and it increases fear, then leave them open and focus on something beautiful and serene and calm. That’s where you create your sacred space and that’s where I’m asking you to go. Okay? So closing your eyes is not the only way to meditate.

I will close my eyes now because I can access helping other people better when I close my eyes when I’m teaching. So I’m going to close my eyes, but you don’t have to.

I want you to feel the base of your spine.

So if you’re sitting, it’s easy to do that. You can feel the tailbone, the sitting bones, and all the skin between the sitting bones, and the skin between your tailbone and your pubic bone. You can even go into like a little pelvic clock and kind of roll around, feel that.

That is, if you’re a yogi, a yoga person, you could call it root chakra. We call it the perineum in pelvic health. It is all the skin that lies over the pelvic floor.

I want you to feel that as you inhale.

Can you feel that skin between the bones, the front bones and the side bones, right? It almost makes two little triangles that go together, right? The pubic bone and the sit bones are a triangle and then the sit bones and the tailbone are an upside down triangle. Feel that expand as you inhale.

That means your belly should go out, the rib cage should spread like bucket handles lifting, the back ribs should expand, but your chest should not lift.

That’s because your diaphragm pushes everything down. It stretches the pelvic floor.

It moves all your internal organs. It’s like a sump pump actually. So it’s really super helpful to get this deep breath going.

Now, if you’re standing or taking a walk, it could be more difficult to feel, but I want you to slow your pace. Slow your pace of walking. Feel your heel strike to mid -foot, to toe off. And begin to feel the skin between those, the bones, the triangles there. Move in response to your breathing.

If you feel like you need to, put a hand over the heart and a hand over the throat.

Some of you may prefer to put a hand over the belly.

But as you exhale out next time, I want you to slow it down and exhale for a count of, get ready and go. Two, three, four, five, six, and inhale slowly. Two, three, four, five, six, and empty the breath out. Two, three, four, five, six, and inhale.

Get ready and exhale.

Two more on your own.

Finishing up the last one.

Now, continue to stay in this state of awareness where you may hear other things around you, other sounds, other feelings, but you’re not distracted. And I want you to put your attention in a few different places. First, rest the tongue. Let it drop to the bottom of the mouth and the tip of the tongue rest behind the bottom teeth.

As you do that, see if you can feel pressure release through the ears, like the interior of the head.

You’ll have some space between your back teeth.

Now can you release the corners of your eyes? You may want to touch the corners of your eyes, maybe rest the hand over the throat and see if you feel any resting tension there. See if you can allow that to dissolve.

Two more breaths.

Finishing the last one.

And you may notice as you allow the eyes to open if they were closed, if you allow yourself to. If you were seated to get up and walk around. If you were walking, you pick your walking pace back up. Allow yourself to see what you felt. Because a lot of what processing voice grip, vice grip is about is just recognizing like somatically experiencing what your body was feeling.

It definitely doesn’t mean that you’ll come away with this with full relaxation. A lot of times we will have discovered a new point of tension. So if you did, you actually succeeded. You didn’t fail at the meditation. Congratulations, you succeeded. You discovered another new point, another point of tension that is part of the puzzle in releasing that tension. You’re improving the voice to pelvic floor connection.

And in doing that, you begin to release that vice grip. You begin to release tension through all three diaphragms, the vocal, the actual respiratory diaphragm, and the pelvic floor. So I invite you to return to that deep breath. In review, what we did was a six count inhale and a six count exhale. Feeling the skin of the perineum between the bones of the pelvis, stretch on the inhale and relax on the exhale.

Feeling the belly expand on the inhale, relax on the exhale. Feeling the ribs expand on the inhale out to the side and go back on the exhale. And then feeling no tension through the inner mouth or the throat.

I hope this has been helpful and please tune in to my next episode which is going to be part two of meditation for stress management.