Hello and welcome to VagQuest: The Podcast! VagQuest was created to bring support, personal insights, and levity to those on a journey with vaginismus and related pelvic floor dysfunction.
My name is Missi and this podcast partners with a program I created to support those of you struggling with moving through vaginismus through a purely physical approach of exercise and dilating. Those are the things that got me started and moved me across the finish line, but in today’s episode, I’ll be continuing to chat about the relationship between the nervous system and vaginismus.
On the last episode I shared an overview of the nervous system and my personal theory on nervous system regulation: a proactive and reactive approach. Again, I’m not a doctor or someone who actively studies this, it’s just my own classification that helps me navigate my own system, so take this theory or leave it.
A proactive approach involves things we can do on a daily basis like getting enough sleep, eating in a way that fuels us, drinking enough water, getting sunshine, moving our bodies regularly, expressing our creativity or making things, and socializing with other humans. I also mentioned that we can do things that slowly and intentionally push us out of our comfort zone and cause states of eustress, or good stress, in order to expand our ability to handle different situations that might trigger a nervous system response. Yoga asana (or postures) is a great tool for this— we’re practicing putting our bodies into weird positions that might require strength or balance, and our only job in those positions is to notice what happens within our bodies and see if we can breathe through any potential stress.
The second approach to nervous system regulation is a reactive approach. When I say reactive, I mean what to do when something happens that triggers a nervous system response— that could be a parasympathetic response like feeling helpless, confused or apathetic. It could be a sympathetic response like frustration, anger, rage, fear, worry, or a social response like people pleasing, being overly nice, feeling like an imposter, or feeling lonely or the need to isolate.
In future episodes, we’ll walk a more nuanced approach to handling these situations, in this episode, we’ll speak generally about things that we can do to change our state.
I like to think of state change as my own personal Everything, Everywhere, All At Once practice. If you aren’t familiar with that movie, it is, in my humble opinion, one of the greatest movies of all time. The protagonist is a woman named Evelyn whose life is falling apart, and much of it appears to be of her own unintentional doing. In a weird twist of fate, she learns she has to save not only herself, but the world by pulling on the abilities that different versions of her have in other dimensions of reality. In order to obtain those skills, she has to do some really weird stuff to switch up the energy in her current realm. That might include declaring love to her enemy while in battle, eating chapstick, putting hand sanitizer in her eyes, giving herself a paper cut, sticking her finger up someone’s nose, etc. It’s a delightfully weird movie and I’m not suggesting you do these specific things to regulate your nervous system, but I think it’s a great metaphor, and frankly, makes the things I’m about to suggest to you seem far less weird!
So, what can we do in our own little pocket of the universe to jump nervous system states? The first method we’ll review is called the TIMES method, which I learned from Kimberly Ann Johnson, and you can too in her book Call of the Wild.
TIMES is an acronym for the ways in which we experience and process information, like channels on TV or radio: Thought, Image, Movement, Emotion, Sensation. Our systems tend to favor one or a couple of channels like a dominant hand. No one channel is good or bad, but we can become overly reliant on a channel, and it can keep us stuck in a loop of sameness rather than making a change. But just like Evelyn, we can pull on dormant channels to change our state.
* T stands for the Thought channel. We might favor the thought channel if we nerd out over information, labels, words, or concepts, or if we think about theories but have difficultly putting things into practice. Maybe you’ve read a lot about a subject like vaginismus but haven’t applied that knowledge to your daily habits. If you are a Fourth Wing or Iron Flame fan, Violet activates her thought channel when she calms herself through difficult challenges by reciting facts. You can also play a mental game of “I spy” with yourself to identify and name things in your environment.
* I is Image: Visual, senses, archetype. If we are active daydreamers, we might favor the image channel. To activate this channel, we can look at an object in our environment that is pleasant, imagining a space we feel relaxed in or something we find pleasant. It can also help to view something in the distance like the horizon line, and softening on that distant object. The reason for this is when we are feeling activated, our eyeballs tend to focus and bulge on the things nearest to us, so counteracting that subtle movement of our eyes can help us reverse the effect in the rest of our bodies.
* M is Movement: Gesture, posture, action, behavior; the actions here are standing, shifting your posture, shaking, marching, running, pushing your hands or feet into a wall— any kind of movement. Movement can feel instinctual, especially in fight or flight, but sometimes we suppress the need to move, maybe because it would be socially odd in the context of the situation we are in, or because we’ve been conditioned out of certain behaviors. Movement also includes sound like vuuu or growling (making a rawr sound), or a primal scream. If I’m feeling activated and like I need to move, I like to have an adult temper tantrum where I go into my bed, thrash my body around, make roaring or screaming noises into my pillow. It’s very cathartic.
* E is Emotion or feeling. If we are active feelers or often feel overwhelmed by our emotions, we might favor this channel. Many of us also suppress this channel. If that’s the case, the action here is sitting with and feeling the emotion that is coming up for you. Often times we suppress emotions as they come up because they’re uncomfortable to feel. We then might spend a lot of time and energy on that suppression, when in reality, if we gave ourselves the space to feel that emotion, it would process through us in minutes if not seconds.
* S is Sensation: Felt sense; the action here is noticing the physical sensations that are coming up for you through external touch or your internal sensations. You might be really in touch with your body’s felt sense, or you might be like me and have good overall awareness, but have a black censor bar over your pelvic area. To activate this channel, we can practice noticing tension or pain in one part of the body, then finding a place in your body on on your skin that feels comfortable, and shifting you attention between the two spaces— this can lead to a sense of dissipation of tension or pain in that one spot. Yoga Nidra, or yoga sleep, which is like a form of guided meditation for scanning the body, is great for this.
We experience and process information through these channels in different ways at different times. They might correlate with certain nervous system responses. For example, when we go into a sympathetic state, I mentioned our eyes subtly push forward in their sockets and our vision sharpens, and our posture may change from relaxed to upright, or we'll start moving. But our felt sense might start to dim into the background, or our thoughts may get blurred. Or perhaps we feel we lose control of our thoughts or our emotions and get overcome by them. By using our awareness to notice which "channels" we're in, we can identify a different channel to move into to discharge or change the energy.
An example that Kimberly Ann Johnson provides in Call of the Wild is of a woman being intimate with her partner. They end up in a body position that feels vulnerable to her and she starts to get emotional. She let’s her partner know she needs to take a break so she can switch from Emotions to Movement. They stand up and have a little dance party, and even though they didn’t end up having intercourse, they end up having a great time dancing and laughing together.
This takes practice, and you might need different things at different times, so don’t be afraid to experiment.
Another thing I like to consider when needing to regulate my nervous system is a concept I call laddering. Again, I don’t know if I made this up or if this idea exists somewhere because I listen to a lot of audiobooks and podcasts and don’t always remember to write down a citation. Anyway, this idea is helpful for me. Laddering is essentially thinking of nervous system states as rungs in a ladder that I want to step up or down, depending on my state, ideally one at a time. For example, a friend of mine was in a multi-car accident. I don’t believe anyone was injured, but damage was done to multiple vehicles. She was naturally shaken up after the accident. When she got home, she practiced Yoga Nidra, which is something that typically calms her down. But she didn’t feel better afterward, in fact, she almost felt worse because the energy just kept lingering in her. We happened to chat later that day, so I suggested things like organic movement, wall presses, and sounding to discharge some of that pent up energy, which she said worked! I see this as an example of jumping down rungs of the ladder from activation to relaxation— if you skip too many, you might proverbially crash and burn. Yoga Nidra might be a great option for her later in her deactivation journey, but not when she’s coming from such a heightened state.
Likewise, if I’m feeling lethargic and depressed, forcing myself into my regular cardio HIIT class, might not be great for me in that moment. I might need to do some Yoga Nidra to first get out of my head and into my body, then perhaps I start some gentle movements in my bed, get up to splash some water on my face, walk to the kitchen to do the dishes, and ease myself up into activation one step at a time vs. forcing myself to skip ladder rungs.
One thing I want to call out here is that we likely have differences in what we find activating or restful than others, and the things that support us may change based on life stage, fitness level, etc. When I was younger and in arguably better shape than I am now, intense cardio HIIT workouts could actually be something that helped me to process stress and anxiety and move down my ladder. Now, I’m older and the way I move my body is different, and if I’m already feeling stressed or anxious, HIIT workouts actually make me feel a lot worse in that they push me up the ladder of activation vs. helping me come down. Movement is still helpful, it just looks different— like weight lifting or more organic dancing. So again, you might have to play around and experiment with what works for you, and what works might change over time.
If you’re in the mood for homework, I encourage you to reflect on what nervous system states feel familiar to you, how you typically respond when that feeling arises, and brainstorm ways you could pull an Evelyn from Everything Everywhere All At Once and approach that state differently, using the TIMES method and laddering.
Coming up, we’ll chat through the parasympathetic nervous system which is associated with the root chakra and working with the PNS with a yoga lens, and then we’ll dive into the other lessons the root chakra has to offer us— including examining our belief systems and creating foundations of safety and trust within ourselves.
Until next time, take deep breaths into your lower rib cage and lower back, and wiggle out anything you’re holding onto from your day, and I’ll see you on the other side of vaginismus. Peace.
