When You Breathe, Does Your Pelvis Move Along Too?

Take a big breath in. Where do you move?

There are people in whom only the chest heaves. There are people in whom the belly swells too. And in a truly relaxed breath, the lower belly, the pelvic floor, and even the area near the tailbone move faintly along.

Most of you have probably never felt this last movement. I check for it in the clinic. And in the people in whom this movement has disappeared, there are symptoms that appear again and again.

Breathing does not end at the chest

When you breathe in, the diaphragm descends. When the diaphragm descends, the pressure inside the abdomen rises. That pressure is not trapped inside the abdomen — it travels downward to the pelvic floor, and backward to the spine and the sacrum.

This pressure wave repeats more than twenty thousand times a day. It continues even while we sleep.

And this wave is used for more than just breathing.

• It helps the venous flow returning from the legs to the heart.
• It pushes up the lymph flow that the heart cannot drive.
• It becomes the background rhythm of the peristalsis by which the gut mixes and pushes its contents.
• It constantly shifts the organs within the pelvis so they slide against one another instead of sticking.

I covered in detail in an earlier article the idea that breathing is a pressure pump for the whole body. (Breathing Is Not the Act of Taking a Breath) Today's story is about the place that wave reaches farthest — the pelvis.

When the wave does not reach the pelvis

When breathing turns shallow and ends at the chest, the pelvis goes nearly motionless all day long.

From here on is my clinical observation and interpretation. In these people I hear the following complaints again and again.

• The groin pulls and feels tight.
• The deep part of the hip joint hurts, but tests show little abnormality.
• The lower belly feels heavy, with a sensation that things are about to drop out.
• Cystitis, vaginitis, and prostate discomfort seem to heal and then keep coming back.
• Sitting for a long time makes the perineum or the area around the tailbone burn or ache.
• The lower belly is always cold, and the rhythm of stool or urine is irregular.

These symptoms look unrelated to one another. Indeed, people scatter to urology, gynecology, and orthopedics for separate tests, and return from each having been told "nothing much is wrong."

I see the possibility that these symptoms may be a problem of one single place. In the space called the pelvis, the flow and the movement have stopped.

Why does it come back

Two things happen in a space that has stopped.

It pools. When the return of the veins and lymph slows, fluid stagnates within the pelvis. The heavy, weighted feeling, and the discomfort that worsens with long sitting, come from here.

It dries. This may sound strange, but stagnation and dryness come together. The pooled water is trapped between the tissues, while the blood flow and secretion that the mucosa actually needs decrease. Mucosa must be moist to defend. Dry mucosa is injured by even a small stimulus, and germs settle in more easily.

So I do not see recurring cystitis or vaginitis only as "germs keep getting in." I look together at whether that place has lost the conditions to overcome germs. The people in whom the antibiotic cleared the germs but who return a few months later are the reason I came to think this way.

What I do

For such people I set the goal as getting the pelvis to move.

First I watch the breath. Whether it is a breath that uses only the chest, whether the diaphragm actually descends, and whether that wave reaches all the way down. Then I find what is blocking that wave. It may be a hardened abdominal wall, a pelvic floor that is always tensed, or the area around a hip joint hardened from long sitting.

It is the same when I use herbal medicine. The path by which the pooled fluid drains, the conditions under which blood flow and secretion return to dry mucosa, the physical quality by which hardened tissue slides again — I compose it to act on these several branches together and restore the environment of that space. When the conditions return, the body does the recovering.

And I give back the movement. Even if medicine and treatment create the conditions, if that place is not used again, it returns to where it was within a few days.

When you should go to the hospital first

Among pelvic and lower-abdominal symptoms, there are some that must be checked first.

• Blood in the urine, high fever, flank pain — it may be pyelonephritis. Care is needed immediately.
• Urine that will not come out at all, or an unbearably urgent and painful urge.
• Foul-smelling discharge, fever, severe pelvic pain — the infection must be treated first.
• Abnormal bleeding after menopause, or bleeding after intercourse.
• Sudden severe lower-abdominal pain — it may be an emergency such as ovarian torsion or an ectopic pregnancy.
• Blood mixed in the stool, weight loss, or a sudden change in bowel habits.

This article is about the problems that remain after infection and tumor have been ruled out. Please keep the order.

Finally

The space lowest in the body is the one that receives attention last.

Yet it is a place that must receive twenty thousand waves a day to stay alive. When that wave does not reach, it pools, dries, hardens, and keeps giving back problems that return.

That is why I ask how far the breath goes. It may sound like a strange question, but to me it is the fastest question for understanding the lower abdomen.