Sisters of the pelvis

We gathered in Salt Lake City from Saudi, Canada and Japan, from Alaska, New Hampshire and New York, and from the Midwest, Southwest and West. There were 24 of us, all bodyworkers, all women.

We considered the mobility of the pelvic bones and the two-storied muscular layers of the pelvic floor. We practiced distinguishing between the sensation of contracting the first floor--the perineal muscles, and the sensation of the second floor--the powerful pelvic diaphragm. We talked about sitting and squatting, peeing and pooping; about having footstools convenient to the toilet, about toys for vaginal strengthening. Girl talk.

We looked at the nerves connecting head, heart and pelvic organs, and the fascial connectivity that links the diaphragm-like structures of feet, pelvis, neck, jaw, and cranium with the diaphragm of breath. We experienced how freeing or activating any of those regions reverberates through the others. Some of us, after so much focused attention on the pelvis, began to feel our heads being scrunched. We had to emancipate our throats and tongues and eyes so our pelvises could sustain their freedom.

We explored a feminine approach to therapeutic touch.  Touch that evokes sentience rather than touch intended to correct.

We dipped into pelvic dance, the ancient feminine communion originally meant to prepare women for pregnancy and childbirth. We explored the possibility of dancing from our ovaries, from our cervices. If we could dance that way, could we not also walk that way? But where and when, in current culture, would that feel safe?

We wondered about men's pelvises, but were too enchanted with our own to linger thinking about our brothers for very long. Except to laugh that manspreading has become a meme.

At the end, twenty-four women in a circle of hands, each one a bit more in love with herself and with life than when we had come together six days earlier.

For me, whenever I've made a little shift in consciousness, there's a short precious period when reality seems ineffably more real then before. Leaves are greener, the sky, bluer. Everything is more distinct, more unique. Trees on my street have sunk their roots deep into the receptive soil. It's clear to me that roots and earth are encountering one another. I notice how stunningly unlike my own men’s bodies are. I marvel at the essential obviousness of that.