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“Everyone wants a great sex life and no back pain, right? Did you know they’re related? How is that possible? Through sound.”

In this episode, Dr. Ginger Garner shows us the importance of the voice to pelvic floor connection for improving sexual health and back pain. This is the 3rd installment of the N.A.P. meditation series, with all the focus on “P”. “P” stands for pitching or sound production.

You’ll learn all about the emotional motor system and why in many of us, this may be more important to treat than the physical motor system. You’ll also get a special treat in this episode, as you’ll be guided through both vocal toning exercises with Dr. Garner.

The exercises covered in this episode will begin to help you connect with your body and improve the voice to pelvic floor connection.

Watch the full video below.

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Resources

1. Episode 1 (The N in NAP) – Are you pushing your voice too hard?
2. Episode 2 (The A in NAP) – Want to be heard? Why starting at the pelvic floor is KEY.
3. Ready for More Voice to Pelvic Floor Connection?  Join the Waitlist for our Upcoming YouTube Membership.

Transcript for Sexual Health and Back Pain

0:00 V2PF, Sexual Health, and Back Pain

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Living Well podcast. I am your host, Ginger Garner.

All right, let’s just get to the point here. Everybody wants good sexual health and no one wants back pain. Did you know they’re related? And how is that possible? It is through sound. So here’s how.

Today, we’re going to be learning about the P in NAP. So really, this is part three of a three -part series, starting with N, neutral larynx, A, apposition, and P, pitching. You don’t have to listen to the first two before you listen to this one. You can straight up just do this one first if you want, but if you are a stickler for doing things in order, I would say pause this, go back and listen to the first episode and the second episode and then you’ll be ready for this one. 

All right, so everyone wants to be healthy sexually, right? So let’s get down to how to do that. Plus also avoid or treat your back pain at the same time. So first to be sexually healthy, you need a good strong back, AKA core. That’s not just thinking of literally, you know what happens when you’re in the mood, it is everything that’s connected with it. 

And that’s really what I’m talking about is all the connecting pieces. Back pain impacts over 86% of us. We’ve all had it, I’ve had it, and wow, it’s a sexual health killer. So in part one and two, I discussed the N and the A of the NAP meditation. And so now it’s time to shore this up and talk about the P. So what’s the NAP?

It’s the way to build a healthier voice to pelvic floor connection. But you can definitely pick up on the P and then go back and get the N and the A.

Why is the NAP important? Well, it’s because the voice to pelvic floor connection is important. And why is that important? Well, it’s because your voice, the voice or your voice is a vital sign. Just like blood pressure or heart rate, your voice interacts directly with your vagus nerve, or rather your vagus nerve interacts with it by innervating your vocal cords and surrounding area. 

2:30 P is for Pitch or Phonation

So let’s get started.

The P stands for pitch, meaning if you are going to sing. Sing something like, summertime and the livin’ is easy. Because it’s summer and you know, that’s one of the quintessential songs that I think about. So that’s what I mean by pitch. I mean creating sound, literally.

you can also start out with a sub-phonation. So if you’re not a singer, if you’re not an instrumentalist, if you’re not a public speaker, a teacher, if you don’t really depend on your voice and it’s just an afterthought, that’s fine too. You don’t really have to create pitch. You can go below it. So I’ll explain what that is as we go along.

3:33 Sexual Health is Related to Your Voice?

So yeah, sexual health is directly related to how you can pitch your voice and create sound. Isn’t that crazy?

But there are multiple papers on it and I won’t get too geeky, but I will cite one paper written nearly 10 years ago in 2016 in the Sexual Medicine Review (I believe it was) and the author talked about two motor systems, essentially. And what I mean by motor system is the way that you volitionally move forward through space, right? If you run, that is a motor system activity. You are moving, you’re recruiting that motor system voluntarily, right? That’s the system we think about as the motor system. That’s the system that y’all, that’s what I learned about when I went to sports medicine and got my athletic training license.

Before that, I was a personal trainer, a yoga teacher, Pilates instructor, and then I got my license in PT. So I have been movement oriented my entire life, and that is the only thing we were ever taught, was the voluntary movement system, the quads, the biceps, the hamstrings, all the stuff, right? The core. 

Well, it blew my mind when I began to understand the voice to pelvic floor connection or make that connection rather through my own review of anatomy and physiology, and my own experience as a clinician and personally as a singer. And I realized that, gosh, the motor system that I can think about and control is not the most important one. It’s the emotional motor system. And that’s what that 2016 article discusses, is if we don’t have the emotional motor system tuned up, there’s no way the voluntary motor system is gonna be in tune. 

That blows my mind. And it means that essentially if you’re not receiving someone who’s very trauma informed, you know, in their care, if you’re not receiving that type of care, if it’s not psychologically informed, it’s not that you have a mental health issue necessarily, it’s just that all care should be trauma informed and, you know, mental health literate.

5:55 Vocal Toning: Connecting with the Body for Healing

If you’re not receiving that kind of care, then you’re probably not getting the emotional support that you need to be able to actually work through your therapy issues. Meaning, like your back pain or pelvic pain or sexual, you know, pain, dysfunction, whatever that is, right? It could be vocal issues too or breathing problems. You have to address the emotional motor system first. So I want you to make a sound and we’re going to start doing both. We’re going to address the emotional motor system.

in the physical motor system, what we think of typically as the physical motor system. Our core and pelvic floor, for example, and our voice that creates sound, which is voluntary. And I want you to just sing with me here or hum with me.

You don’t have to be fancy like I’m being, just… It can be straight up… or…

Hmm.

I just want you to hum and then ask yourself, where did I feel it in my body? Where do you feel it?

Where do you feel that sound? Now as you’re humming…

Okay, take a break for a second as you’re humming next time. Can you feel it in your skull? Or do you feel that?

Or do you feel it in your heart? Do you feel it in your feelings? Or do you feel it physically? Or do you feel both? That’s where you want to go first with this entire connection between the physical pain that you might feel and some of the emotional pain that you may feel. And that’s the magic of sound. We know music is medicine, but sound is medicine too. That means your voice is healing.

7:57 The Therapeutic Power of Sound and the Voice

Your voice is a therapeutic agent to heal yourself. Now I want you to switch your sound and go…really light.

I don’t care if it sounds pretty, I don’t care if it sounds breathy, or out of pitch, or you ran out of air, doesn’t matter. Now I want you to put it all together. And I want you to feel it, if you can, in these places. I want you to feel the to root. All the way down in the seat, where you think the pelvic floor is and all that sexual function stuff. I want you to feel it down there first. 

And then when you do, “ooh,” which may not be the same note, maybe it’s, ooh.

Maybe it’s there. I want you to feel it in your chest. Feel it in your chest. And then when you get to mm, the last one, the “mm,” it might be “mm,” or it just might be.

I would really encourage you to do this in the shower because your voice is hydrated by the humidity, by the water, by the steam in the shower. It is much kinder on a voice when, and a core, when you have back pain, when you have vocal issues. Maybe you’re feeling self-conscious and vulnerable about creating sound. If that, you feel that level of self-consciousness with creating sound, that’s probably true.

Sexually too, right? That ability to be just fully vulnerable in yourself and just put yourself out there is hard. And with the amount of trauma that we have in pelvic health, women’s health, and this includes all genders, we’re not just talking about women here, but particularly, you know, it can apply to women since so many women have experienced trauma from childbirth or sexual trauma, whatever that may be, but men can experience that too.

and you know, all genders can. So I want you to ask yourself, what feelings am I feeling when I go, and we’re going to do it together, the the OO, and the MMM. What am I feeling when that happens? 

10:40 Energy Anatomy of Vocal Toning

Do I feel a block in the flow of that energy to go from to OO to MMM as it resonates all the way down into the pelvis, deep down, we call that root chakra, right? If you’re a chakra person.

up into the heart, the solar plexus, the root and the kind of the birthplace of the voice, right? And then up into the crown of your consciousness, right? The crown chakra if you are again a chakra person, but you don’t have to believe in energy anatomy to really feel this.

And so while you’re being sensitive to what’s going on.

I also want you to embody the feelings of it and realize that this is vocal toning. And when you’re vocal toning, a lot of emotions can come up. It might be tears, it might be angry, anger. It could be boredom. Like, I don’t know, this isn’t doing anything. Allow yourself to sit with it, just embody it. You don’t have to even understand it, but the more that you do it, the more you would drop into a deeper place that actually does begin to free up.

literal tissues in that area. It does begin to free up the pelvic floor to the voice connection. And in between that is your sexual health and that back pain that’s been nagging you. So we’re going to do this three times before we and put it all together before we shore up. 

12:11 Practicing the Pitch

All right, here we go. Exhale with me.

Inhale, loose through the neck, no chest rise, only that kind of bucket handle expansion out of the rib cage.

It does not have to last a certain amount. You might be still going while I’m talking. It’s fine. Let’s do two more. Know that you don’t have to match my pitch or my duration. Okay? You don’t have to do anything that I’m doing right now. I just want you to feel it in your body with the the ooh, the mm. Here we go, two more times. Exhale out, let go of everything. Inhale in.

Ohhhh

Last one.

Feel it deep in the pelvis.

Transition into the chest.

Skull and the crown.

All right, y ‘all, this is step one. There are many places to grow from here, but eradicating, managing back pain and improving sexual health, you know, maximizing your good time in the bedroom is all about mastery of the breath first. So I want you to take some time out every day. Set a timer, three minutes, not even that much.

You can begin to change your stress response, your pain response, improve all of the functions that we’ve talked about for just essentially happy, healthy back and pelvic floor.