Your throat and your pelvis were built to move together. With every breath you take, the diaphragm above and the pelvic floor below rise and fall as one rhythm. Which is why, when anything silences your voice, it usually leads to some holding in the pelvis.
This one insight alone will help so many women struggling with vaginismus/ vaginal shutdown/ vaginal contraction/ vaginal tightness/ vaginal dryness which makes intercourse painful or impossible to experience!
I get regularly approached by so many women who are suffering from tight vagina, non-cooperative vagina when they want to have intercourse with their partner. Their story looks something like this:
“I am struggling with intimacy with my husband. I have been married for just over a year but I have been with my partner for about 2-2.5 years. I have never had penetrative sex. It always makes me anxious when it comes to penetration. My husband is very understanding and doesn’t do anything that makes me uncomfortable. The one time we tried to penetrate, it really hurt me that it was difficult for me to pee. I tried to go to a physiotherapist here. It did not go well.”
Vagina Tight
Vagina Non-Cooperative
Vagina shuts down
Vagina Contracts and does not open
Vagina does not relaxes
And so on…
The entire focus in these sexual issues is how do I get my vagina to open up. Whereas actual problem lies somewhere else: Your voice, dear woman.
The Vagina-Vocal Cord Connection
Do you know that there is an intimate connection between multiple parts of the female reproductive system and the larynx of the throat? To be specific, there are a variety of different connections between the female vagina and her vocal cords. What’s interesting is that these correlations are not just physical in nature, but also structural, visual, emotional, and energetic. So, a woman’s vocal health, vocal expression, vocal empowerment is correlated to her vaginal health, vaginal expression, vaginal empowerment.
And hence when one opens, it usually begins to free up the other and vice versa.
How Learnt Voicelessness in Childhood Affects Vaginal Relaxation in Adulthood
I will talk about vocal patterning that is set in our developmental years and how this affects our voice as a woman, and therefore our throat-pelvis connection.
In Neuroffective Touch, Dr. Aileen LaPierre talks about learned voicelessness. When there’s emotional or relational trauma in the family. When it felt dangerous to express your emotions, the vocal cords go into a freeze response, and this can become chronic. She talks about oppressive parenting. When you must obey your parents without question, no talking back is allowed.
Think about it.
If you’re raised where talking back is not allowed, there’s going to be an unconscious, subtle constraining of the voice and the throat muscularly. What makes it worse is when there’s punishment, shaming, violence. The child experiences this as a withdrawal of love. And a withdrawal of love is threatening to their survival. And, Aileen speaks about how children feel responsible for their parents’ anger towards them, because they feel like it’s their fault.
So, the vocal cords can go into a freeze, becomes dangerous to speak up.
I remember, as a kid I learnt to avert my father’s anger by measuring my words.
- Pick and choose words carefully
- How much volume to be used
- Use as less words as possible; short sentences
- Stay silent most of the times
- I never spoke about my inner emotional world with my father, did not even know there is a way to do that.
Other ways this kind of throat area can lead to contraction is swallowing emotions. Forced food feeding, which a lot of children experience, or like, I’ve had clients who said their mouth was washed out with soap, if they said bad words. So, this is all kind of constricting and repressing the throat.
So, Aileen talks about how the 3 diaphragms are connected:
- the thoracic diaphragm,
- the solar plexus diaphragm,
- the pelvic diaphragm
Again a powerful reference of how our voice and vagina are inter-connected and impact each other.
So, something you can ask yourself is what was not safe to be spoken growing up, especially around sexuality. And give yourself the space to speak that or encouraging them to talk about that can complete that defensive repressed response.
How our throat and vagina are anatomically similar and related
I am sharing this graph, which I love to talk about; this correlation between our throat and vocal cords and the female reproductive anatomy. Here on the top left, you see an image of the vocal cords, and then to the left of that, the image of the vulva. On the right side are vocal cords and the pelvic floor.
Uncanny how similar all 4 of them look right!
Look at this, and then the larynx and the uterus. It’s amazing right!
The word cervix comes from the Latin word for neck, right? Like the image, they both look like necks. And both the vagina and the throat are supported by a hammock-like set of diaphragmatic muscles, which move in tandem with respiration. So, when we breathe, when female bodies breathe, they move in tandem.
The vagina and throat are energetically linked as well
Not only are the yoni and throat very similar from an anatomical perspective, but they are also energetically linked. Opening the throat, vocalizing your pleasure, and relaxing your throat relaxes your vagina. Then, the vagina expresses Divinity through the creation of babies, sexual energy, and menstruation. And the vocal cords express Divinity through the creation of sound, speech, singing, poetry, breath, and all different types of vocalisation.
Why understanding voice-vagina connection is important for women?
The reason why it’s so important for women to become aware of their voice-vagina connection is for their body to have this loop of:
- I can attune to what my body wants,
- give voice to it, and
- when I give voice to it, I’m going to receive it.
I have lost count of no. of women I meet, who override their internal impulse, instinct of what their body wants and instead PUSH their bodies to MATCH male arousal, and pornified pleasure pattern, overriding theirs.
That early experience lived or listened to gives the reason and evidence for the body to have an armor. The reason genital armor or body armor is there is for self-protection. Genital armor or vaginal armor is like a shell (stiffness, tightness, contracted-ness) which is an involuntary bodily response to protect the vagina.
But once a woman start demonstrating that oh, my voice matters, I can say what I want, I can honor my boundaries, then the reason for the armor starts to dissolve, right? And it creates this pleasure loop, or this positive feedback loop. It gives more reason to ask for what I want, because I’m going to get what I want.
The sounds vooo or ooh are associated with opening up the pelvis.
So, like, Peter Levine in Somatic Experiencing uses vu. In different Tantra circles, they use ooh. So, if you just say ooh, you can feel the resonance in the pelvis, as opposed to ah, which you can feel in your heart. So, as you are exploring self-dearmoring you can engage in that sound, ooh or voo.
So, yeah, if your vagina feels timid or restricted or obstructed, consider that opening up the voice or throat can open up the vagina.
In my upcoming women only sexuality retreat, I teach women how to unlock their voice, leading to a deeper expression of sexuality both vocally and vaginally, plus a complete transformation and healing of her sexuality, your sexuality.
Join now, tickets available here.
