Building a Relationship With Your Pelvic Floor
Well, Then Podcast – Transcript
Building a Relationship With Your Pelvic Floor with Lauren Ohayon
Introduction to The Well Then Podcast
Megan Sharer: Hi friends, and welcome back to another episode of The Well Then Podcast, a show where we take a mind body spirit approach to living your most vibrant and love filled life. I’m your host, Megan Sharer. I’m a holistic therapist and trauma informed somatic practitioner who’s pretty much obsessed with helping people return home to themselves. Today’s episode is one that I am so excited about.
As always, I love the topics we explore on the show, but this one in particular, because it’s a topic that I think is incredibly under addressed and is really pivotal to how we feel in our bodies on a daily basis. And that is the topic of the pelvic floor or pelvic floor and pelvic area in general, especially as women, is an area of our body that can carry this sense of shame and stigma, especially when it feels like there’s something wrong with it.
When we’re experiencing pain there or dysfunction there, it can be, first of all, hard to talk about. Second of all, hard to get the support and healing that you need. And I think a lot of us, especially if you have a history of trauma, are living really disconnected from our pelvic floor muscles. And this leaves us disconnected from our bodies as a whole.
Because as you’ll learn in this episode, your pelvic floor is connected to the rest of your body and impacts how you feel in your body. And today’s guest is an incredible expert in this arena who takes a very holistic approach to helping people understand what’s going on in their pelvic floor, how to get to a place where you’re experiencing less pain or no pain, and being in a better, stronger relationship with this part of your body.
Meet Lauren Ohayon: Creator of Restore Your Core®
Megan Sharer: My guest today is Lauren Ohayon. She is the creator of Restore Your Core®. She also has more than two decades experience as an internationally renowned yoga and Pilates instructor. And Lauren really focuses on resolving core and pelvic floor issues without that like burn and shred mentality, without feeling like you have to do a workout. It’s really just about connecting to this part of your body.
Lauren helps women across the globe gain core strength, achieve ideal pelvic floor function, and learn how to move efficiently and exercise optimally. I’ve personally been on my own pelvic healing journey over several years now, and having experienced pelvic pain in the past, this is a topic that really hits close to home for me. And we do talk about some of my own personal journey in this episode, and Lauren gives some really great practical tips and takeaways for you.
So I’m so excited for you to dive deeper into this topic and learn more about your pelvic floor. All right. Hi Lauren, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here. I’m really excited to dive into this conversation with you today.
Lauren Ohayon: Thank you. I’m excited as well.
Why Pelvic Floor Health Matters for Women
Megan Sharer: Yeah, absolutely. I think that the work you do in pelvic floor education is so, so important, especially for women. I think so many of us are moving about the world, so disconnected from our bodies as a whole. Right. That’s kind of the realm of the work I do as a somatic therapist. But especially our pelvic space, which again, for a lot of women can be a part of our body that stores a lot of trauma, that is holding on to a lot of experiences from our past.
And there can be all kinds of of reasons we disconnect from that part of our body. And I’m so glad that you are sharing such accessible tools and resources to help people reconnect to that part of their body and feel good again.
Lauren Ohayon: Thank you I appreciate that.
Lauren’s Journey: From Back Injury to Pelvic Floor Expert
Megan Sharer: Yeah that’s okay. Yeah. So important. So before we get into kind of more specifics of the pelvic floor and understanding it a little bit better, I would love to hear what led you to this work. I know that you’ve shared on your Instagram. You have a history of, injury that might have led you to to working with the pelvic floor, but I’m curious to learn a little bit more.
Lauren Ohayon: Yeah, actually, I, I do have a history of a back injury history. But that was that that injury happened in my early 20s. I’m now 48. That injury happened in my early 20s, and I, like I it, it propelled me into diving deep into understanding the body from a very anatomic biomechanics lens. I was already a yoga teacher, and I was like, I want to understand everything about the body.
I want to be able to understand, like how this injury happened. I was recommended for surgery. I refused to have the surgery. It took me a year to rehab. I was very, very disabled by the discrimination. I had a lot of nerve damage. It was a very, very long, painful rehab. But I did it, and during that period, again, I was like, why did this injury happen?
So I was very, very interested in kind of like finding out the root causes of my own injury. And then, so I overcame that. I also became a teacher. I also became a somatic, more somatic lead driven in my movement practice. I had three children in three years and started very much working with people who were having babies a lot more.
I was, living in I had opened up a yoga studio and then moved to New York City. So I was not living in New York. Then I moved to New York City, and I just kind of became known in my teaching practices for somebody who, like people would come to me and say, I have a core pelvic floor issue.
And I would say, what are you doing for that? And they’d be like, I’m doing Kegels. And it just never made sense to me. As a very kind of holistic practitioner and holistic. Not in a weird way, but just kind of putting together the pieces of our amazing, intricate body. I was always like, that’s like, why are we?
Why Kegels Aren’t Enough
Lauren Ohayon: Why are we just squeezing? Like, we don’t do that for any other part of the body? It made no sense to me, as like a movement thinker. And I had been a movement thinker. My whole life. Like, my earliest memory is like my daily movement journal that I’ve kept to my whole life, where instead of writing things out, I move through my day like I do a little five minute movement kind of metabolize the day kind of thing.
I’ve always done it my whole life, so I was very kind of confused by that context. And so just dove deeper and deeper and deeper. And I just started utilizing it just made a lot more sense to me that if there’s a pelvic floor issue, there’s probably something happening in the core and there’s probably something happening in the breath.
The Pelvic Floor as Part of a Whole Body System
Lauren Ohayon: And then talking about core and breath as a whole canister with the pelvic floor. Well, what affects the core and breath? Pelvic floor. The core kind of the breathing core. Well, now we’re talking about ribs and we’re talking about hips. But what affects the hips? Oh, we’re talking about like hips and feet. The feet are a huge part of the hips.
So then it was like the pelvic floor is really an expression of the whole body. And I think that for so many years and generations, people didn’t know what to say. First of all, women’s health care was not even just paid attention to. And then when women do go to see doctors for issues, quote unquote, down there, I mean, even the term down there is a problem, right?
There is an issue in my vagina. There is an issue in my vulva. Like, that’s the language we should be using, but we don’t because we’re afraid to talk about our bodies that way. So I think the Novack floor for a variety of reasons, like cultural and whatnot, has gotten this like, we’ll just shove it in a dark corner and allow people to be disconnected from it because it’s so shameful.
Megan Sharer: Anyway, kind of paradigm.
The Birth of Restore Your Core®
Lauren Ohayon: And I was like, no, we won’t. We’re gonna just like, talk about it and get it out there and figure out what’s happening. And so I and my method worked. I mean, I was working with at this point, I have over 15,000 people subscribe to my online program, and we have thousands of positive testimonials. And just like a very strong community of very happy people who’ve found healing, by working with the system of the whole body to create function in the pelvic floor.
So yes, I’ve had my own. Back to your question. Yes, I’ve had my own injuries in my body. And yes, that kind of sparked my curiosity. But what really sparked my work in the pelvic floor was I also read this blog by this guy many years ago where he was like, the issue in your vagina is that it’s loose.
And I was like, wait, no, to show you can actually be loose in the body like nothing in your body is ever loose except for your teeth, which fall out. Nothing is loose in the body. Tissue is tensioned all the time, no matter what tissue is tensioning. So it’s like, that’s weird. And then his answer to your loose vagina problem was to learn to jump into a handstand with both feet at once, like engage your deep core.
And the expression of that was this. And I was enraged, and I wrote this kind of response on Facebook that went viral. This is years ago. We’re talking like over ten years ago. And that’s where I was like, oh, people want to hear the truth about the pelvic floor. I’ll just I don’t have qualms. I’m not rickety, rickety about it. I’ll just talk about the pelvic floor the way it is. So it was like a combination of things that pushed me out into that world.
The Myth of the “Loose Vagina”
Megan Sharer: I completely understand that moment where you’re like, all of your lived experience and your knowledge and your history leads to that one point where you’re like, note this. Like, that’s it. I can’t stay in this narrative anymore. Especially words like you mentioned, like loose vagina. It’s it’s it’s a, it’s sort of like this label or narrative that is used to like, weaponize women’s sexuality and to really create this insecurity and harm towards how we view our bodies and such, an important part of our bodies.
And I’m glad that you spoke up, and I’m glad that so many people read that post and resonated, because we should be talking about it in a very different way.
Cultural Pressures Around “Tightness”
Lauren Ohayon: So I think us women are always made to feel like our vaginas need to be tight, right? And our waists need to be snatched. I mean, there’s a variety of words that we use to we need to be toned. Yeah, with the exactly like my lips, my, you know, my labia need to be perfect. And there’s also all sorts of misconception about orgasm and how pleasure should, could and would happen.
I mean, there’s just a lot of, like, very strong dogma around what we should be having in our would that what we should be experiencing and how it should look and yes, problematic.
Understanding Pelvic Pain: The Hypertonic Pelvic Floor
Megan Sharer: Yes. I love that you went there because I wanted to go there in this conversation. Anyways, that for me was like the big awakening because there is all this, dialog in like pop culture and in just the society that we live in about how we’re supposed to be tight, like you said, our waist, our bodies or vaginas should just be tight all the time.
And when I got into kind of my mid to late 20s, I was starting to experience pelvic pain for the first time in a way that I really didn’t understand, because similar to to how you described it, like I had heard about like Kegels and you’re supposed to tighten and you’re supposed to contract those muscles and just like squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, the tighter the better.
And I couldn’t understand why I felt a lot of tightness there and was having all this pain. And I was led to believe, like, tight is good. So what’s the problem? I’m not understanding why is this happening? And that’s really what led me to start to learn more about my my pelvic floor and really to understand like how much shame and stigma there is around connecting to that part of your body.
But I would love to just hear you explain a little bit more about, how probably a lot of people, not just women, are living with that hypertonic pelvic floor and like too much tightness there. And how doing those contractions, those Kegel exercises is just exacerbating whatever symptoms they’re already living with.
99% of Pelvic Floor Issues Are Hypertonic
Lauren Ohayon: Yeah, it’s a great question. I mean, I would say 99.99% of my clients and people who’ve reached out to me on Instagram say I have a hypertonic pelvic floor. So in layman’s terms, my pelvic floor is too tight. I very, very, very rarely have someone say my pelvic floor is not tight enough. And, and I have a lot of colleagues in the pelvic floor world, like pelvic floor occupational and physical therapists, and they’re all like, yeah, 99% of our clients with issues are hypertonic, overly tight and yet and yet, there is this lens that a lot of us believe or like this myth that a lot of us are buying into, that if there is an issue in the in, in our vulva vaginal area, it must be because it’s not tight enough. And I think that part of that is because people equate tight with strong. So I’ll get a lot of people who come to me and say, I have a really tight pelvic floor, but I see that a lot of your exercises are for a weak pelvic floor.
Do you have anything for a tight pelvic floor? And then I have to kind of, you know, reframe them. I’m like, well, I don’t love the word weak, but let’s just stick with that word. If your pelvic floor is too tight, we’re going to call that a weak pelvic floor. Also. And again, I don’t love the word weak.
Reframing “Weak” as “Unconditioned”
Lauren Ohayon: I prefer the word unconditioned. Like it’s just not adapted. Right? Like we are just beings of adaptation. We are expressions of adaptation. So if your pelvic floor is too tight, it’s adapted to just that, right? But in being too tight, it is not functional, therefore it is not strong. Therefore, we could say it is weak. So weak doesn’t imply that you don’t have tone, right?
Weak doesn’t imply sloppy. And I think that’s the problem. People think tight is strong, weak is loose. So if I have a pelvic floor that’s too tight, it’s the opposite of weak. We have to like those two words don’t belong together at the same sentence because they’re not equal partners. Right. If your pelvic floor is too tight, it, it means that it doesn’t know how to come back to a state of homeostasis.
Why Pelvic Floors Become Hypertonic
Lauren Ohayon: Right. So a lot of people are very, very tight in their pelvic floor. And I believe that it’s for a variety of reasons. One reason is the minute you if you just clench your abs and tighten them in you, you’ve been taught that like the better abs or the flatter abs, or you had a parent who shamed you all the time about the shape of your body, or you had, you know, anxiety, for whatever reasons you were were taught that it was good to keep your abdominal wall tight and pulled in all the time.
That will automatically take your pelvic floor with it for the ride. Those tissues are and mesh. They are married together. They they they are just the same tissue. So you tighten your abdominals in. Let’s say you are wearing pants that are too tight on you, but you don’t mind. You’re used to wearing compression stockings, compression leggings, compression jeans, mom jeans.
Right. Pulling it all in. That’s going to take the pelvic floor with it. So, you know, the pelvic floor is also very reactive to the core. Now we’ve got also I’m holding your breath. If you walk into a porta potty and it smells bad, the automatic thing you’re going to do, which it will probably unless it’s brand new, the automatic thing you’re going to do is hold your breath.
You’re just going to without even your brain doesn’t consult you. It’s not like, hey, Meghan, what do you think? Do you want to hold your breath there? Is it, does it.
Megan Sharer: Yeah. You’re not like, let me smell it a little more and decide.
The Body’s Survival Mechanisms
Lauren Ohayon: That’s right. And that’s actually a survival technique. There are a million things we do throughout the day that are not consulted, like it’s not a consultation process. We would actually not be able to survive as a human, as a human race, if we kept consulting ourselves on every bodily function. So the body has all these coping mechanisms. But now you walk into a porta potty and it smells like crap and you hold your breath.
But what if your life smelled like crap you don’t hold your breath to so people hold their breath all the time without they’re not bad. They’re not trying to harm themselves. But when you do that, you send signals to your multiple systems in your body that work together as one unit to keep you alive. And again, homeostasis, your body’s number one desires to survive the day.
That’s all it cares about. It doesn’t care if it doesn’t well or optimized. Right. So now you’re kind of holding your breath. That’s going to affect your pelvic floor. Because the minute you hold your breath you tighten and clench your abs. You tighten and clench your pelvic floor. So there are a variety I could go on and on and on with all the scenarios that could have happened to make somebody tight in their pelvic floor yoga.
Yoga and the “Engage Your Bandhas” Problem
Lauren Ohayon: I’ve been doing yoga since I’m like 19. One of the first cues you hear in the yoga classes Engager the word they use is bonda. Engage your Bundys, engage your buddies. So a lot of yoga people are walking around thinking that the right way to be is pulled in, pulled up, pulled tight. So yeah, a lot of people are overly tight.
The tissue, the tissue is stuck in this shortened position and it doesn’t know how to release and relax into a responsive position. I think there’s this idea that the body is always supposed to be relaxed. The body is actually not supposed to be very relaxed unless you’re lying down. It’s supposed to be ready, responsive, ready to go, you know, not not not here, not startled, not like a puddle of of jello on the floor, but ready.
Like alert. Right? Ready. And so the pelvic floor, when it’s really tight, is not able to be ready. It’s just stuck in its overly tight position. Yeah. I don’t know if that answered your question, but yeah, a lot of people are walking around with a tight pelvic floor. Yeah. And they are not aware of that because it can manifest as hip pain or low back pain.
How Hypertonic Pelvic Floor Manifests
Lauren Ohayon: It can manifest as leaking pee when you run or cough or sneeze. It can manifest as pain with orgasm, inability to orgasm, pain, post orgasm. And a lot of times it does manifest. First is like back pain.
Megan Sharer: Yeah. So you might not even be thinking pelvic floor right away. You’re thinking like, oh, what did I do to my back?
Lauren Ohayon: Yeah, yeah. You know, if you walk into a room and it smells like banana bread, five minutes later, it still smells like banana bread, but you’re not aware of that. The smell is still there, but you’re not aware of that when you’re clenched in your pelvic floor, your body numbs you. It’s not so much. It numbs it, but it’s no longer ringing alerts to you about that.
But other areas might start being like, hello again. Like something, you know, other systems get affected by that because we live in a domino effect system. That’s our body. The human body is a domino effect system, right?
Megan Sharer: Yeah. And I love that you mentioned earlier on that you take this whole body, holistic approach to the work that you do, because it’s all interconnected and and just isolating one muscle or one muscle group. Probably not going to create much helpful change in the body.
Lauren Ohayon: Totally.
Understanding Numbness and Lack of Sensation
Megan Sharer: Can you also, since we’re talking about kind of that over activation of the pelvic floor and people who are experiencing symptoms around that, tightness or hypertonic city, can you talk a little bit about numbness in the pelvic floor, like you mentioned, inability to orgasm or difficulty with orgasm, maybe lack of sensation and pleasure.
Lauren Ohayon: Yeah. So the the term numb I’m just going to bring this up quickly. The term numb means nothing, just like the term pleasure means not very much because pain is subjective. So there’s like no, if you go to get a tattoo and I go to get a tattoo, you could experience it. The same needle, the same tattoo artist, the same tattoo you could experience.
It is like, yeah, no big deal. Whereas I’m jumping out of my skin because of bio psychosocial reasons that I’ve been conditioned never to get a tattoo right. So. So yeah, the term numb is an interesting term. I just wanted like not everybody will experience, what you’re describing as numb or what you mean when you say numb might not connect to somebody else, but.
But, in the pelvic floor, what ends up happening is in order to achieve like for talking about what, what might disable somebody from having pleasure. Is that what you’re asking? Like an orgasm reaching orgasm state?
Megan Sharer: Yeah. So it might actually be two separate questions, like lack of sensation in certain parts of the pelvic floor, like when I, I guess I’m using my own personal example. When I first started doing internal pelvic floor work, I, I discovered that like, oh, there are parts of my vagina, parts of like pelvic floor muscles that when I’m like physically touching them, I can’t feel anything.
And then there’s other parts where I feel sensation. There. And then maybe that is or isn’t linked to lack of ability to orgasm or difficulty with experiencing pleasure because you’re not feeling any sensation at all. Yeah. Is is that a better way to.
Why We Feel Numb: Brain Mapping and Safety
Lauren Ohayon: Say those are probably. Well, thank you for sharing that personal antidote. I would say that it’s probably two different things, but they can they can inform each other and have a relationship and be in connection with each other. Why a body part is numb if there’s no nerve damage, right? Like there’s no nerve damage. Which have you, have you given vaginal childbirth?
Megan Sharer: No, I haven’t, okay. And, yeah. No. No nerve damage.
Lauren Ohayon: Yeah. So, like, sometimes with vaginal childbirth, there’s scar tissue. Yeah. Exactly. And then it can be not you know, people are like, I don’t have nerve damage. And I’m like, well, scar tissue is kind of interesting in that way. Yeah. So sometimes people are numb in their pelvic floor because their brain is not letting them feel into it.
For whatever safety reason. Yeah. But then when they go back like if they continue, when they go back like I have this audio file that’s for you actually. Like you don’t have to pay to get it. But it’s like this pelvic floor experience. And a lot of people come back to me and all you’re doing is like trying to like slowly draw up like a keyhole and then slowly release down.
And I kind of encourage you, like, can you engage the top and release the bottom, then release the top and release that, like it’s still this exploration? Yeah, a lot of people come back and they’re like, I wanted to find you, rip your head off and jump on that 100 times during that.
Megan Sharer: Yep. Like the level.
The Frustration of Not Feeling Your Pelvic Floor
Lauren Ohayon: Of frustration was extreme. You couldn’t feel anything you were saying I should be feeling. You’re talking about engaging the top while releasing the bottom. I have no.
Megan Sharer: Like, top of what? Bottom of what? Yeah.
Lauren Ohayon: What are you referring to? Yeah. And so, I talk about this a lot. It’s like if somebody were to drop you into the middle of the ocean and be like, okay, Meghan, now find Tanzania. And you’d be like, I don’t even know where I am. And now you want me to navigate to some other place, in order to first begin to, do something with your body, your brain needs to recognize it as a thing, like it needs to literally map to it.
Body Mapping: Why We Can Feel Our Hands But Not Our Pelvic Floor
Lauren Ohayon: We can. We’re super well mapped to our hands and fingers, right? We use like super. You can close your eyes and like, embody the shape of your finger and do things with it and reach and grasp and pull and push like you can do so much with your not even looking at your hand. You can bring it behind your back and like right, like manipulation.
Right. Most of us can’t do that with our pelvic floor. Well it’s not shaped like a hand anyway. But most of us are very disconnected from the three dimensionality of the pelvic floor. And that it does have connections to the tailbone. And it has connections to the, to the front and there’s connections around the clitoris. And we could move the clitoris so we can wag the tailbone.
Like these are things I teach. We can pull our sitting bones towards each other. We can anyway. People. Yeah. What? But I can’t ask someone to wag their tailbone. I mean, I do on my Instagram all the time, but the reality is, like most people, before they wag their tailbone, they need to know where their tailbone is. Like, if I say tailbone, most people are like, I know I have one maybe.
And I asked people all the time, how many times have you ever actually used your finger and rubbed your tampon from the outside? Like, reach back, find your tailbone. It’s right there at the top of your buttcrack so most people are like, I don’t do anything with my butt. I feel quite myself, which is fascinating to me. I’m like, yeah, but there’s all this fun tissue to explore.
Don’t you explore the tissue? No. So people don’t even know, like they don’t know where their tailbone is. They’ve never touched it with their hand. They don’t have a three dimensional sense of it in their mind. They’re like, it’s the place in my butt, right? So when we start asking people to do things with body regions that they don’t have any mapping to, it’s really frustrating.
The Body’s Coping Mechanism: Numbing Out
Lauren Ohayon: And the brain as a coping mechanism can be like, I’m just going to numb out. I’m just going to like hit the high road X’s exit this party. So what happens in the body? So my role as like a somatic embodied movement teachers I first try to get people to like my first question. Had you been a client let’s say I might say like, what do you feel in your pelvic floor?
Like what do you feel about your pelvic floor? Like what kind of signals do you get from your pelvic floor? Like, what is your what kind of relationship would you say you have? And it’s a great point to start off with because people are often like, oh, those. I don’t even know what those questions mean. And I’m like, that’s great.
Let’s think, let’s think about that. Right? So it’s hard to kind of do something with somebody like and again, people are given these wands, which I’m a fan of. The pelvic floor wants to go in and start massaging, but like that is their first foray into their pelvic floor. Right. There’s like yeah, which is a great way to do it.
Is this external object creating palpation? It’s great to do that because you’ve got like this object that’s doing it. So it creates like a different relationship. You’re not asking your body to feel your body from your body. Like there’s this other object that’s having a relationship with your tissues. But even with that, people are often like, I am like, poking around the dark and just like sticking this one in there.
And I wasn’t quite sure what I was getting at. So numbness is it is possible to like, have very little feeling in your pelvic floor, because when was the last time somebody put you into an an embodied experience with your pelvic floor? Most of us don’t ever have that. We’re not given. We’re taught sex ed prevention. We’re taught like all of that.
What We’re NOT Taught About Our Pelvic Floor
Lauren Ohayon: We’re taught, you know, disease prevention and pregnancy prevention. Yeah. I don’t really like very much else about the wonders and the amazement and the pelvic floor. So it makes sense to me that people there experience in their pelvic floor might be like it feels numb to me when somebody says that to me, I don’t panic. I’m not like, oh my God, something’s wrong in their pelvic floor.
I’m like, oh, they’re having a disembodied experience of their pelvic floor. That’s quite normal considering the society we live in.
Megan Sharer: Yeah, and I love that you gave the example two of like, if I asked you to touch your tailbone, like, first of all, would you know where? And then second of all, like, why would I touch that part of my body? I think there’s this, again, going back to that idea of like shame or stigma, we learn what we learn about sex is often what’s what to avoid what’s bad.
Like you said, prevention. Like avoid these. These, diseases. If you grew up in, in, like a religious, community, there’s often a lot of shame about sex and that part of your body. So most people probably haven’t spent much time using their own hands to explore their own body. Even even like putting your hand on your heart, I think, can be a foreign sensation for a lot of people.
Permission to Touch Your Own Body
Lauren Ohayon: Totally. Yeah. I was having dinner with my partner a few weeks ago, and I drove my hands right down my pants, just like to feel my belly.
Megan Sharer: It’s like holds. Yeah, yeah.
Lauren Ohayon: And then I looked down and I could see my hands, like, down my pants. And I was like, oh, that’s probably weird for other people. I just didn’t take my, you know, but it was so not weird, you know? But yeah, we’re so designed. Don’t forget. Also like we are, we are designed from a very young age, to weaponize art.
Don’t pick your nose. Don’t, you know, don’t don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t wipe your hand on the back of your thing. Eat. Don’t put your elbows on the table. Don’t climb that tree. We’re we’re really taught to silence our bodies and our body functions. We’re not. We’re not taught in celebration of the body. And, like a lot of kids masturbate, naturally.
Very young, very, very young. They’ll start just rubbing themselves up against trees and poles and pillows and objects. And a lot of times those parent, those kids, like parents will come to me and be like, what’s wrong with my child? I’m like, oh, nothing. Development human. They’re just human.
Pleasure, Sensuality, and the Body
Megan Sharer: Yeah. Like the human body is designed to experience all these different sensations, a lot of which are pleasurable. But when you inherited those stories of shame that like, it’s bad to do those things or feel those things, then of course there’s a disconnect. Of course there might be numbness. Of course it might feel really weird and foreign.
Lauren Ohayon: Or that I have to constantly like, perfect my body for the gaze of others. I have to sit still and be still. And you know, don’t do that with my hand and make sure my foot’s not doing this. You know, there’s a lot of body containment that we’re taught from a very young age. We’re not. So we’re not taught to like, touch and feel and explore and get mushy within and for it to be pleasurable, because pleasure is a sin unless you’re doing it to have a baby, right?
Like you even know you don’t enjoy it. So, you know, I will take this blue inflatable ball. I have, and I’ll often just roll it around different parts of my body and I’m like, oh, this feels so good, and it’s so pleasurable. But it’s not like I’m about to have an orgasm, but. Right. But yeah, someone looking at me might be like, oh, look at her.
She’s like about to have an orgasm on her ball. And it’s like, no, actually, I’m just in the pleasure, the sensuality of our like, our bodies are so sensual, like there’s so much to sense, feel, touch, smell, be with. And yet it’s not encouraged or invited. Which is a shame, because there’s a lot of pleasure we can get.
That doesn’t have to be sexual pleasure.
Separating Sensuality From Sexuality
Megan Sharer: Yes. Oh my gosh, thank you for sharing that. Like that distinction, unraveling sexuality from sensuality and pleasure, like pleasure can be, of course, experienced in sexual experiences as well. But pleasure can be like the way that you eat a piece of fruit on a hot summer day. Or, like you said, the way that you’re like rolling around on your yoga mat.
And so, so many of us don’t feel that we can give ourselves permission to do that and that in intimate alone.
Lauren Ohayon: Right?
Megan Sharer: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Even when no one’s watching or no one’s judging, it’s just you. There’s still something there that for a lot of people, that feels kind of like a barrier to it.
Lauren Ohayon: Yeah. I was like, I don’t know what I did the other day, but I was like, And my daughter was in the room and she’s 15 and she was like, mom, it’s kind of cringe. You when you make toys like that, which I thought was fascinating. If anything, I encourage my kids to moan and groan and pleasure all the way.
Yeah. I was like, oh, that’s like definitely picked up. Like she’s picked up. She’s obviously she’s in high school. I mean she’s picked it up that like groaning like that is weird.
Megan Sharer: Yeah.
Lauren Ohayon: Groans I do everything and I’m like oh.
Megan Sharer: It’s like you should too. Yeah yeah totally.
Lauren Ohayon: But I just said to her I was like okay sorry. You know I’m not going to I’m not going to shame my daughter for shaming me. She wasn’t trying to shame me. She was just expressing like, I’d rather you not grown, right?
Megan Sharer: Yeah. I mean, that’s a very teenage thing to do.
Lauren Ohayon: Oh, no. It’s fine. Yeah.
What Really Brings People to Pelvic Floor Work
Megan Sharer: So I feel like for for a lot of people, what probably brings them into this work isn’t like, oh, I’m not experiencing, like, pleasure and goofiness in my body on a daily basis. It’s usually when they’ve gotten to the point where there’s a bigger problem, like there’s pain, there’s incontinence, there’s something happening that they’re like this I need to fix.
Or maybe it is. It is something surrounding, pleasure with sex, like whether vaginismus, like painful penetration or, you know, we’ve talked a little bit about, difficulties with orgasm. So can you talk a little bit about what’s going on there when you’re experiencing, sexual dysfunction, like how that’s related to the muscles of your pelvic floor and kind of like what’s going on.
Common Pelvic Floor Presentations: Prolapse, Incontinence, Pain
Lauren Ohayon: Yeah, it’s a great question. I mean, there are many, many different presentations of injury to the pelvic floor. So, like, you can have, like you said something like super painful penetration or incontinence, those are two different things. And then you can also have what’s called prolapse. What a lot of people post childbirth. But I know many, many men with it.
And I also know people who have never had a baby, females who have it, and a prolapse is where one of the organs of your pelvic floor. So the pelvic floor has a variety of organs that live in it the bladder, the rectum, the, you know, urethra, like, and the uterus. Right. So there’s a variety of organs that are all hammocks connected together, I would say.
Right. Lots of ligaments, connection. They share all sorts of tissue. They share blood and nerve supply. And those organs can drop lower into your pelvic canal, into your vagina. So I do have clients who literally look down between their legs, and they have a massive bulge of their uterus right there. It’s terrifying. It’s very upsetting. Not a not a fun injury to have.
People with hypermobility often can have prolapse. So with every pelvic floor issue, what I try to optimize with my clients is, first of all, to create a balance in the pressures of the entire core canister because the pelvic floor is not acting alone. If we talk about like the pelvic floor in movement mechanics, it is the site that forces from the ground.
The Pelvic Floor as Shock Absorber and Force Transmitter
Lauren Ohayon: The minute your foot strikes the ground and you start to move like those forces don’t just go into your foot, they actually reverberate through your whole system and the place that kind of is designed to really absorb and then transmit them and offset them. Is your pelvic store. So your pelvic floor, is it this conduit of like energy coming up, like mechanically not woo, but like energy force from the ground that comes all the way up through the body.
And then and then it’s designed to like, you know, again, absorb it and transmit it and, send it off again. So the pelvic floor, like mechanically, is this amazing center of shock absorption, but it’s also receiving from above all sorts of pressure downward. And the, like the reason, one of the reasons why your organs like, why have you ever thought about why your heart isn’t down in your pelvic floor right now, like, what’s keeping your heart up in your heart?
Megan Sharer: I never thought about that right? Yeah.
Lauren Ohayon: Just like.
Megan Sharer: That. Right? Yeah. I assume, like, connective tissue.
Understanding Intra-Abdominal Pressure
Lauren Ohayon: All sorts of tissues. Right. But. But the heart is pretty heavy and pretty big. And so there is like, an entire system that is designed to kind of keep your organs in their place. There’s systems that are designed to create levity, like upward, kind of, but it’s all due to pressure. So the reason why organs are kind of floating in your body is because there’s this thing called intra abdominal pressure, inter pelvic pressure.
And it’s this it’s the entire canister from like ribs, lungs, diaphragm, abdominals, pelvic floor, that whole cavity, that open kind of cavity that is separated by all these tissue and fashion organs. But, but ultimately all of those organs and tissues and all of that is not dropping down because there’s every time you inhale and exhale, you change the pressure of cavity.
So why do you inhale? Do you know why you inhale? I’m not the not an anatomy lesson. A lot of people don’t know this. It’s interesting you inhale to take an oxygen. But the mechanism of that is that at every minute you have 14 pounds of atmospheric pressure for every square inch pushing down on you. And if you don’t inflate your lungs and you don’t create a pressure differential inside your body, you will be crushed by that.
So our bodies I know.
Megan Sharer: So that’s so interesting because I’m just thought about that sensation you get when you, when you hold an exhale, like when you hold your breath out for a while, you feel more pressure on the body. The longer I hold that breath out, that’s so it.
Lauren Ohayon: Equalizes pressure between the outside and the inside world.
Megan Sharer: Wow.
Breath as Pressure Equalization
Lauren Ohayon: I like it so, so breath like. Your body is constantly in pressure equalization mode while constantly equalizing.
Megan Sharer: Our bodies are amazing. Our bodies are cool.
Lauren Ohayon: I like, I mean, I could just, like, talk about that. I could wax poetic. I literally I’m really into like the functions of the body and how amazing our bodies are. It makes me sad when people hate on their bodies because they’re no incredible.
Megan Sharer: They’re literally miracles like what they do for us every day. It’s crazy.
The Dance of Pressure and Volume
Lauren Ohayon: I just go on and on. So anyway, like we are literally having like, this dance of pressure and volume. So pressure and volume are always in relationship to each other. It’s how things fly. Like the mCAT, physics 101 is pressure and volume in our body. Our body is also this expression in the stance of pressure and volume. So when there is like a imbalance of pressure and volume in the body, what ends up happening is that a lot of pressure accumulates in the pelvic floor.
And then the pelvic floor is smart and doesn’t consult you or me. And what it does is it starts reacting. It’s like, whoa, organs pushing down. So if you think about like toothpaste and you squeeze toothpaste and then everything pushes down at the bottom, imagine the toothpaste was trying to prevent itself from coming out that hole. It would like, you know, it doesn’t because it’s inert in that way.
But if it was tissue that was living and thinking and breathing and feeling and our bodies are all of that, it would start to tighten in response. So part of the response that happens is like it tightens, the pelvic floor just starts to tighten in response. And again and pelvic floor that is tightening in response is not a pelvic floor that can be going through what our bodies do.
Eccentric Contraction and Lengthening Under Load
Lauren Ohayon: Our cells do actually our cells do it too, which is like this act of like condensing and contracting and expanding and condensing, depending on what we want to be, what we should be doing. Right. Like just like movement, condense movement, which is like everything in life is movement. So the reason your heart is beating right now. Movement. Right.
So like the, the, the pelvic floor is designed to go like like any muscle. Biceps are really easy to see this but like contract, contract contract. But I can also contract as I release. I can also just release it like I have all these various options available to my muscles. You do to the pelvic floor as well, but if pelvic floor is being pressured on all the time, being pushed on all the time, it’s going to contract a contract to be tight.
It’s not going to be able to react to simple functions like sneezing. And, you know, people think that when you sneeze and pee, it’s because your pelvic floor is not strong enough. It’s actually not the case at all. It’s because your pelvic floor couldn’t handle the load of the sneeze, which is very, very fast and heavy on your body.
Your pelvic floor didn’t have the ability to kind of. It’s like if you, pull down a suitcase from an airplane and it doesn’t hit you in the face because what you’re doing in your body as you pull that suitcase down off the airplane, thing is, you’re not only just pulling it towards you, but you’re also kind of preventing it from smacking you.
You like, if you think about it.
Megan Sharer: You’re kind of pushing against it. The.
Lauren Ohayon: Law is designed to do that too. So all this pressure comes down on it. It’s designed to have what’s called a lengthening, a lengthening load. Like the lengthening contraction. If you speak anatomy, it’s called an eccentric contraction of that muscle. Most people, because they’re so, so, so, so tight, are not able to eccentrically control and contract their, their muscles.
So, so what ends up happening is that they just know their pelvic floor just knows how to be one way. It’s like a few walks. You want your shoulders hunched up to your ears all the time. And your your person was like, hey, Megan, you want to relax those? And you’d be like, what?
Megan Sharer: Relax what? What do you mean? Yeah.
When “Relax” Feels Foreign
Lauren Ohayon: Yeah. What do you want me to relax? And then I was like, what do you mean, relax? Those. That would be really frustrating to if somebody was like, hey, just relax your shoulders. And you’re like, I don’t, I don’t know what you’re talking about. And I’m annoyed that you keep telling me to do this action that feels foreign to me.
So the same thing with the pelvic floor and and then and then that can just present in a like depending on then now you get, you get really, really pregnant and that moves your organs down. But you’ve been tightening so much that the organs, just like the muscles just give way and your organs. And for each of the injuries that I talked about before or issues or patterns, you know, but but at the heart of it is pressure.
Instagram as Entertainment vs. Education
Lauren Ohayon: Right. And so one of the things I really do with my clients is where is the excess pressure coming from? Like, well, what’s the pressure imbalance now if you follow me on Instagram, that’s not what I talk about a lot because Instagram is entertainment. People don’t want to be educated, they want to be entertained. They just wanted to show me.
So I’ll show and demonstrate movements that I love, that people tell me all the time, I didn’t have enough money to buy your program, but I did your Instagram and I totally like thank you for helping me heal so you can do a lot with this stuff on Instagram. But really, for the bigger issues like the vaginismus, vulvodynia super tight, all of that, you really do need to learn what is happening, like how to optimize this whole system again.
Like what is keeping your pelvic floor in that super tight tense situation?
Orgasm Requires Responsive, Functional Muscles
Megan Sharer: Yeah, and that contraction that you’re talking about. Like if we’re talking about difficulty with orgasm, that orgasm is a series of contractions and relaxation. Right. And so if you don’t have the ability to do that, that responsiveness, you’re just like in that contracted position. That would be why you’re not experiencing that sensation of pleasure or that sensation of orgasm.
Lauren Ohayon: Yeah. So people one of the things I often ask people when they say I struggle to orgasm, I say, do you struggle to get aroused. And then oftentimes they’ll say no. And it’s like okay so like so.
Megan Sharer: Libido is there. Yeah.
The Endurance Game of Orgasm
Lauren Ohayon: You’re libido is there. Which is important to distinguish. Yeah. Because then like you’re getting hot and heavy, you want to get there. But now something’s not letting you get there. Now it could be a fear, a trauma, a, you know, something else happening. But a lot of times, what happens is the pelvic floor needs to contract.
All lot really, really, really quickly. It’s an endurance game. And, I actually just got banned on Instagram for a month for teaching this.
Megan Sharer: I know I saw your email and that’s kind of what inspired this line of questioning. No, I was like, I wanted to get into this after I got that email from you because we should have access to this information like algorithms shouldn’t decide whether we see it or not.
How the Pelvic Floor Functions During Arousal
Lauren Ohayon: So yes, let’s go there. Ridiculous. So you got banned for teaching this. But yeah. So like as you start to get aroused and excited, your pelvic floor is getting ready. So your pelvic floor is getting more wet. You’re creating secretions lubrication. The and all of that is making you more excited and aroused. It becomes like it’s a it’s a it’s a it’s a conversation.
Right. It’s a, it’s an orchestra. And so but then your pelvic floor has to really go for the long endurance. And that’s where it can just be like, oh, I’m out. And people will experience that. They’ll be like, I was so close I couldn’t get there. Right? And everybody has a different experience. I was either so close or I wasn’t that close or it’s frustrating.
And it’s like, and it’s exactly that. To reach that climax, the pelvic floor has to really a lot of blood needs to come in, and a lot of this tight contracting of the muscles needs to happen. And if you are already tight, your muscles are not going to tighten more. Yeah.
Megan Sharer: And so would that be the same thing like for women who are experiencing that difficulty. Is it the same conversation about like understanding where the pressure is coming from, what’s going on in the whole system or is it just about.
Going Up the Chain to Resolve Pelvic Floor Issues
Lauren Ohayon: Yeah, because why is your pelvic floor so tight. Right. Like and what people will do, like I I often my, you know, my hand gets I don’t know about you, but like, holding a phone makes my heart entire drain. Like my.
Megan Sharer: Stomach like cramps when I’m.
Lauren Ohayon: Doing it. I find that when I feel that, I’ll often just start massaging my hand and my wrist and, like, in this way, like, the problem is really quite local. Like, I know it’s coming from like the gripping of my hand, but I actually find that when I start moving my whole shoulder and doing bigger movements up the chain, and then I’m like moving my spine, my hand pain goes like the cramping that I get at the end of the day is gone, but if I’m just pounding on my hand, it’s like I can feel it feels good to do that, but it doesn’t quite get rid of.
Like. Whereas if I just lay in bed and I do a bunch of like more just down the chain, up the chain into the fingers, the pain goes away and I’m happy and I can go to sleep and my hand stops, like vibrating. And the same thing with the pelvic floor. It’s like I can show you a bunch of people will tell me.
Also, like, my pet gave me all these exercises to relax my pelvic floor, but I still have the issues and it’s like, yeah, I mean, you can relax your pelvic floor all you want, but if the thing that’s causing your pelvic floor to react with pressure and tightness and tension is there, like again, somebody let’s talk about the person who always keeps their abdominals tight and tense and pulled in because they culturally or maybe their fitness teacher or they read it in a magazine who reads magazines anymore.
Megan Sharer: Not like sucking it in.
The “Snatched Waist” Problem
Lauren Ohayon: But yeah, like all of the you should suck it in. You know, I see, like, content on Instagram. Like, who are my girlies who want to snatched waist and I’m like, not me, No, I’m the woman who does not have an arched waist, but. And then, of course, I want to be like, who are my girlies who want pelvic floor dysfunction?
Because it’s like snatching your waist. Go for it. I’ll see you in a few years. But like. No, the truth is that, like, you know. So it’s like you got to go up the chain. Because if you’re holding your belly in tight all the time, but then you’re doing all these great stretches and you’re, you know, you’re doing the all the great movements that I give away, all the movements every day on Instagram.
Right? I do so much there. I should do so much. But if you’re not, but if you’re not getting to the root of the problem, those things feel good and they’re great. But I would say that, like, again, if you then go waking up the next morning and putting on those super tight Spanx, you’re not. It’s like digging a hole just to fill it back in with sand.
Megan Sharer: Right? So yeah, people who have that contraction of their their abdomen maybe like issues with your breathing patterns, like if you’re not doing those deep, deep diaphragmatic breaths.
Lauren Ohayon: Yeah.
Megan Sharer: Are there.
Lauren Ohayon: Any tight in their upper body shoulders hunch.
Megan Sharer: Oh. Like on our phones and computers all day?
Body Posture and the Pelvic Floor Connection
Lauren Ohayon: Yeah. Like, yeah. I have a lot of clients with large breasts who are not talking to embrace their breasts. One of my daughters has very large breasts, and I’m always like.
Megan Sharer: Hell yeah, get.
Lauren Ohayon: Them out there. Yeah. Never shamed her like me. You should wear a tighter bra. You know, your boobs are too bouncy or I see too much cleavage. Never, never, never, never. But think about all the people who have been shamed about their boobs, you know, being too much. Yeah. So they they they curl in, you know, there’s a variety of movement patterns that people do in their bodies that can affect pelvic floor integrity.
And so, yeah, just about kind of digging, you know, also like in yoga, belly breathing is a big way of breathing. Belly breathing is great, but it puts a lot of pressure on the pelvic floor. If all you’re doing all day long is belly breathing. So in Restore Your Core®, my online program, I teach a whole three dimensional rib expansion.
Why Rib Breathing Matters More Than Belly Breathing
Lauren Ohayon: We want volume and pressure. We’re talking about pressure and volume. Like in order to belly breathe. If you try it right now and you put your hands on your belly and you just breathe into your belly, inhale and really inflate. In order to do that, by default, your super smart body locks the rib cage down. It actually tightens the ribs to create belly movement.
And so again, if that canister, that upper portion of the canister that’s designed to really expand, if it’s not getting that expansion, it’s a lot of pressure downward. So a lot of people I work with are just like they’re not even used to breathing into their rib cage. So one of the first things we learn is how to take a big, expansive breath into your ribs.
Think your diaphragm is up in there, your lungs are up in there, and yet people are breathing into their belly, but your ribs and diaphragm are there. The architecture is there. The ribs are these expansive, contractile, wondrous structures of your body. We’re keeping them so dry and brittle and tight by just belly breathing. Your your belly has no your belly doesn’t have any bones that can expand and contract, like breathing into your belly doesn’t do anything to your spine.
Breathing into your ribs creates change in your spine, creates movement through your spine. Creates movement through your ribs. Gives your heart a massage. Gives the liver the stomach, a massage. Like all of that. Like that. There’s a whole dance that happens when you breathe into your ribs.
Megan Sharer: Yeah, and you mentioned.
Lauren Ohayon: Missing out on when the hold on.
Learning to Breathe Into the Ribs
Megan Sharer: Yeah, yeah. Or just like the shallow upper chest breathing. I also have a history of yoga. I started at a really young age and did lots of belly breathing, and I remember when I first learned diaphragmatic breathing, you mentioned the word fertile, and that’s what it felt like. I was like, oh my God. Like I it feels like crunchy and like I’m expanding something that has been really tight for a long time.
And now it feels wonderful and just like pleasurable. But yeah, it was uncomfortable for a while.
Lauren Ohayon: Yeah, it’s weird to start breathing into your ribs when everybody’s like, breathe into your belly. Yeah. Why are we breathing into our belly? The architecture’s up here.
Megan Sharer: Great.
Lauren Ohayon: London cider is up here. Yeah. Look at an anatomy diagram. Like this is the place of breath.
The Overlap of Somatic Work and Biomechanics
Megan Sharer: Yes, I just I love this conversation so much because it’s really sort of the overlap for me. Like you mentioned. Yes. There might be, you know, reasons that we’re holding on to some of these patterns in our body that have to do with trauma, that have to do with fear. And that’s the realm of the work that I do is like, let’s go into the trauma.
Let’s understand, like the emotionality behind it. And we need the biomechanics. We need to know, like, what positions have you been holding yourself in and what what like you said, what jeans have you been wearing? How have you been sucking your stomach in that combined approach of understanding what’s going on internally, on a psychosomatic level as well as physical physiologically?
Right on, like a tissue level is? I’ve felt like what’s helped me understand my body so much better. And like a lot of that comes from like the movements you share on your Instagram page, doing moving your body in new ways, experiencing your your body in the world and proprioception in new ways is such a great way to get curious about like, what’s there?
So I just really love everything that you share. It’s so helpful.
Moving From Disconnection to Safety in the Body
Lauren Ohayon: Yeah, yeah, I really want people to, like, feel safe in their body. I think that like like I said, I don’t use my Instagram to go down like the whole rabbit hole of here’s how to heal your pelvic floor from an otherwise like I wouldn’t be able to support my three children and they have a courier like so I have this online program that people can get.
But what I do try to do with my with my Instagram is like so many people feel so disconnected from their bodies. And then you layer on that you have an injury and now you hate yourself, or you go to the doctor and they use words like dysfunction, disable. You know, they disempower us. They they tell us like, this is just what happens when you have babies or, you know, I hear people talking about glute amnesia and like, you know, there’s just all these kind of terms that we use to pathologize the body, which people feel like it’s helpful.
They’re like, oh my God, I just wanted to have amnesia. Like, okay, but there’s a that’s not in a pattern like, so I just try to help people get feeling safe about their bodies rather than feeling like their bodies are broken. Every which way. Yeah, they just need to do like, these five exercises five times a day. And you know, when I see people, they go, they come home from like a session.
They’re like, okay, I was told to raise my arms five times, okay, I’m just five for, you know, I saw my dad doing this. I’m like, are you even like, are you sick? Did you’re just, like, ripping it out. Yeah. Like there’s no feeling. And what we do know, what we absolutely know is that there’s very little science correlating.
Pain Is About Disconnection, Not Joint Health
Lauren Ohayon: Joint health to pain and muscle health to pain. But what we do know 100% is there’s absolutely a ton of correlation between body disconnection, stress, dis embodiment and pain. Like we know that. We know that a lot of times people are in pain not because there’s something actually wrong with the knee joint, but because they are dysregulated, feeling unsafe, very, very low vagal tone like their systems are in a state of fight or flight or stress or whatever system.
Like they’re just stressed.
Megan Sharer: Yeah.
Lauren Ohayon: And when you are in a state of stress, your breathing is affected. The blood flow to your body is affected. You are sending your body messages that there is a very real threat, when maybe there isn’t. I was like in a car accident of ten years ago, and I was parking my car and a bulldozer was driving down the road and wasn’t, but he was on his phone and he’s crashed into me at full force.
Oh, and so ever since my accident, I’m like the worst backseat driver. Like, you don’t want to be driving a car when I’m in, and. But I’m only like that situationally in the car. Now imagine me like that 24 hours a day. Vigilant, afraid, scanning, looking. Who’s going to hit me? What am I saying? Am I safe? Am I saying.
Living in Chronic Vigilance
Lauren Ohayon: Am I saying people do that to me? And then they’re like, why am. And I’m in so much pain? I have chronic pain and I have IBS and I have fibromyalgia. No wonder. Of course you do. Of course, your brain perceives that everything is a threat. You are in a constant state of trying to protect yourself. There’s that is not a state to live in.
So you know what I try to do, for example, with a lot of my free content is like at the at the heart of all healing is feeling safe. So yeah, like, let’s just feel safe, right? So and one way to feel safe is, like you just said, connecting to the body. Like just having an embodied experience where you just like, maybe you’re on the floor or you’re sitting up and you’re just, like, moving, but you’re feeling what you’re doing and you’re just in the movement, even for seconds.
We know that can change the brain. We know that can put you in a different place energetically. We know it can take you out of panic. Just shifting gears. Yeah. And you can do that with your body. This a whole playground of like, getting out of the current state of hysteria. I had this moment the other day where my daughter, I was very anxious about something with her, and I was like, okay, I can continue to feel anxious here, or I can literally just step away.
The Power of 30 Seconds of Movement
Lauren Ohayon: So I just stepped an inch away and I can just drop into a movement, and I just dropped into like a 32nd movement where I was just breathing and coordinating my breath, reaching my arms up, and that’s it. Like it changed everything for this. But all I did was 30s. And then I was like, oh, I was panicking over there.
Like I said, I was like, oh, I was panicking, you know? But most people are not giving themselves that moment, that break. And then they’re also not giving themselves the reflection. So they’re so used to the banana bread. Right? They’re so used to their panicked state that they’re not even really reflective of it.
Megan Sharer: Yeah. And they haven’t realized or learned how they can access their body as a tool to shift their state. And I love even your shirt says move with intention when you have that intentionality, like, okay, I’m going to take these 30s and link my breath to movement, and then I’m going to reflect like I feel better. Okay, so that worked.
I’ll do that again next time.
Lauren Ohayon: Right? Because we’re used to using our bodies to like get smaller. Where do you still like doing look as a means of burning calories or.
Megan Sharer: Yeah looking a.
Lauren Ohayon: Certain way having that snatched away. Yeah.
Megan Sharer: That’s right. That’s perk up the glutes.
Lauren Ohayon: Oh my goodness. Yeah.
Megan Sharer: Well I’m fortunate we’re not taught to drop in. Use it. It’s for the medicine cabinet that it is.
Where to Find Lauren Ohayon
Megan Sharer: No we’re not. But I’m so glad that more people are awakening to those kinds of conversations. And I could genuinely talk to you for hours upon hours, going deeper into the pelvic floor and like, but all of the the ways that our body speaks to us. But for the sake of of wrapping this conversation, where can people find you?
I know we’ve mentioned your Instagram is a great place to go and follow some of the exercises. You’ve got a program.
Lauren Ohayon: Do I have the Restore Your Core® program? It’s a 12 week program, but it’s yours for life, and it’s, Yeah, it’s like a holistic approach. And the whole body, nervous system informed, somatic driven, anatomy based movement program that doesn’t shame you or blame you or break you or, you know, none of that. So Restore Your Core® is my program.
I do a lot of, like, the longer form videos on my YouTube where I just can explain things more educationally. So you can find me there, too.
Megan Sharer: Amazing. Well, I’ll make sure to link all of that in the show notes below. So for people who are listening, they can just go click over. And like I said, I definitely recommend everybody give you a follow. Try some of the exercises. And then if they’re curious to to learn more, they can hopefully check out your program.
Absolutely. Last question I love to ask everybody who comes on the show is, what is one of your daily practices that makes you feel most connected to yourself?
Lauren’s Daily Practice: Finding Your Heartbeat
Lauren Ohayon: Oh, I love that. One of the things, I mean, there’s so many I do.
Megan Sharer: I know I we’ve got a whole two of us. Yeah.
Lauren Ohayon: One of the things I love to do is to put my fingers on my skin and just kind of a little pinch, but not a pain. I’ll do this with you. And just, like, pulling it around, like, you know, just kind of a little pulling a little circles. I’ll do it everywhere. And then I just kind of stop and I say, can I feel my heartbeat in my fingers?
So I just look for my heartbeat, which your heartbeat is in. Your whole body is beating with your heart. So I just look for that. I you have to get really, really quiet and find your heart, which is a nice thing. An
d then I ask, can I feel my so can I feel my heartbeat on my fingers? And can my, can I feel my fingers in my heart?
So that two way relationship, like, what does it feel like to my fingers and what does it feel like to my heart? That relationship. And that’s a nice practice. I do every day. Just connecting to the heartbeat, because the heart is this organ that is everywhere in your body. The heart is in like the branches, right? The the arteries in the veins and the capillaries and all of those venules there, all of us.
Your heart is just like you have. Anywhere you touch yourself, there’s a beat. Any part of your body is beating. And the cool thing about the heart is that so it’s like your whole body is the heart, but it has this, pulse. It’s like a drum and there’s always a drum happen, and your entire inner body can hear the drum of your heart.
I just think that’s cool. Your liver is always listening to your heart. Your stomach. So, like, we’re so up in here, sometimes it’s cool to think like, oh, my liver, which is so close to my heart, is listening to my heart, or my stomach is listening to what my whole inner body is because the veins are going through.
And so I love to just kind of drop into heart everywhere. And can I find it somewhere I can I just feel it somewhere.
The Body as Orchestra: Love and Appreciation
Megan Sharer: I think that’s so cool. And I love that you shared that practice, because I know we’re talking about it again from like a physiological perspective, but my work is all about love and attachment and relationships and like just bringing us back to that love for the body and how much your body loves you and like what your heart is doing for you on a daily basis, like, so much.
Lauren Ohayon: I mean, it’s like a conductor and it’s having communication to your organs, and it’s like listening and titrating and pressing and pushing and pulsing and dragging in and pushing out, like and then creating this orchestra of beating. And it goes faster when you get faster. And it’s just so cool. I mean, just think it’s like, yeah, or like I would want to be my lungs.
I want to be like my liver for a day and just to listen to my heart. And that way. And then when you remember, like when you start to think that your body is having this entire world, that’s so cool.
Megan Sharer: It’s so cool. And what a simple daily hands on practice, especially if you’ve maybe had a really critical or judgmental relationship with your body to come at it from this angle of like, oh, that’s actually kind of cool what it’s doing for me all the time. Like, maybe I can look at it like that rather than hating the way my belly looks.
Lauren Ohayon: I feel that for me, the last thing I’ll say, I know we have to go is that embodying the magical, wondrous functions of my body has given me so much love and appreciation for my body that has helped to trump all of the negative criticism that we all naturally and conditionally have. But really understanding, like the mirror, like you said, miraculous.
Like it’s just like, and this system is incredible.
Closing Thoughts
Megan Sharer: Yeah. Oh my goodness. Thank you so much, Lauren. This is a conversation that I think everybody needs to hear. And I’m so excited for everybody listening to to hear what you took away from this. So thank you for joining us. And hopefully I can have you back on some day, because I truly feel like there’s hours more that we could delve into.
Lauren Ohayon: And I would love.
Megan Sharer: To I would love that. Amazing. Thanks, Lauren. Thanks for listening friends. If you enjoyed this episode, it would mean so much if you left a review wherever you listen to podcasts. But in particular, leaving a review in the Apple Podcast platform helps boost this show so that we can spread it far and wide and more people can hear this message.
Thank you so much for taking the time to listen. Sharing the love by passing this episode along to people who might need to hear it. You can check out more about where to follow Lauren, where to follow me, and stay up to date with what’s going on in my world, including upcoming retreats, events, programs, and all the things by checking all the links in the show notes below.
And as always, have a happy, healthy and love filled day.
Key Topics Covered in This Episode
- Lauren’s journey from back injury to pelvic floor specialist
- Why Kegels alone aren’t enough for pelvic floor health
- The pelvic floor as part of a whole body system
- Understanding hypertonic (overly tight) pelvic floor
- The myth of the “loose vagina” and cultural narratives around tightness
- How trauma, stress, and cultural conditioning affect the pelvic floor
- The connection between breath, core, and pelvic floor
- Why 99% of pelvic floor issues involve hypertension, not weakness
- Numbness and lack of sensation in the pelvic floor
- Body mapping and proprioception
- Sexual dysfunction and difficulty with orgasm
- Pelvic floor issues: prolapse, incontinence, pelvic pain
- Understanding intra-abdominal pressure
- Why belly breathing puts pressure on the pelvic floor
- The importance of rib cage breathing
- Pleasure, sensuality, and permission to feel
- The overlap of somatic healing and biomechanics
- Pain as disconnection rather than structural damage
- Using movement to shift emotional states
- Finding your heartbeat as a daily practice
About Lauren Ohayon
Lauren Ohayon is the creator of Restore Your Core®, with more than two decades of experience as an internationally renowned yoga and Pilates instructor. She focuses on resolving core and pelvic floor issues through a holistic, whole-body approach without the “burn and shred” mentality. Lauren helps women across the globe gain core strength, achieve ideal pelvic floor function, and learn how to move efficiently and exercise optimally. She has trained over 15,000 people through her online program and trains approximately 80 new professionals annually.
About The Well Then Podcast
The Well Then Podcast takes a mind-body-spirit approach to living your most vibrant and love-filled life. Hosted by Megan Sharer, a holistic therapist and trauma-informed somatic practitioner, the show explores topics related to returning home to yourself and living in connection with your body.
Resources Mentioned
- RYC® 12-Week Program: restoreyourcore.com/restore-your-core/
- Lauren’s Instagram: @thelaurenohayon
- Lauren’s YouTube channel
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