Your Pelvic Floor Was Never Asking to Be Fixed.
A tight pelvic floor is often treated as something to strengthen or fix. Yoga therapist Carina Raisman offers a different lens: the pelvic floor braces when the body feels unsafe, and it releases through breath, pressure and a sense of security — not force.
The pelvic floor is a stabilizer — and a breather
The pelvic floor sits just below the uterus and does two jobs at once: it stabilizes, holding the pelvis to the spine, and it moves, responding to every breath. Ideally you get both. But when the body is in a stress state, the pelvic floor stays locked in stabilizing mode — braced, toned, tense — and the breathing role gets lost. A "tight" pelvic floor often isn't weak. It's bracing.
High pressure, low pressure, and the stuck breath
Movement in the body follows pressure — things travel from high pressure toward low. When the pelvic floor is held tight, that region becomes a high-pressure zone, and the breath can't move down into it. So the breath stays high in the chest — which is itself a stress-pattern of breathing. Carina describes the pelvic floor like the plug in a sink: release the plug, and the pressure can finally equalize.
How to actually let the pelvic floor release
Because the pelvic floor is a stabilizer, the way to release it is to put the body in a position where it doesn't need to stabilize — fully supported, lying down, knees bent or legs raised, nothing working to hold you up. From there, abdominal breathing links the diaphragm to the pelvic floor and lets the pressures equalize. Hip openers, supported postures, and easing a tense mind all help: when the mind softens, the muscles soften.
The throat and the pelvic floor are connected
The body is, in one sense, a single continuous tube — and the tone in your throat mirrors the tone in your pelvic floor. Clench, scream or hold your tongue with tension, and the pelvic floor tightens with it. Carina connects this to something deeper: many women were taught to hold the belly in and to "hold the tongue," and that learned tension settles into the tissues. Softening one opening can help soften the other.
About Carina Raisman
Carina Raisman is a yoga therapist and nervous system specialist, and the founder of Resource Yoga. Her work focuses on how anatomy shapes physiology — how breath, structure and the nervous system together restore rhythm, safety and ease in the body. You can find her work at resourceyoga.com.
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