Emotions, Vaginismus, and the Case for Feeling Your Feelings
Something I personally struggled with (and sometimes still do) is feeling my feelings. Grief, anger, disappointment, rage, sadness, sorrow, and more all swirled inside me for a number of years, unacknowledged and unprocessed.
I ended up going through some pretty big emotional releases that can be a story (or a few) for another day, and I mention them here because they were actually important steps on my pelvic health journey.
It’s a Western yoga teacher cliche to say something like “we store emotions in our hips,” and in the case of vaginismus, we might change that to “we store emotions in our pelvic floors.” While that might not literally be true, there can be an important connection between the two. In this post, we’ll explore the link between emotions and vaginismus and using yogic principles to access our feelings, so we can feel our emotions all the way through— without managing them, minimizing it, or moving past it as quickly as possible— in the name of healing our pelvic floor.
The Emotion Connection Isn't Just a Feeling
There's a psychological term for difficulty identifying and describing your own emotions: alexithymia. It's not about being unemotional — it's about the signal getting lost between your body and your conscious awareness. You might feel something is off, but naming it, locating it, or even fully registering it is harder than it should be.
A study published in the International Journal of Impotence Research found that just over half of patients with vaginismus showed alexithymic traits, compared with about 18% of a control group. The researchers were careful to note that this was a correlation, not proof that one causes the other, but the relationship is interesting. Other research on genito-pelvic pain and penetration disorder has found similar links, noting that alexithymia and perceived parental bonding during childhood both connect to how emotion gets regulated in people with this diagnosis, and that the less clearly someone can read their own emotional signals, the more their body seems to hold onto physical tension as a stand-in.
Why "Just Relax" Doesn't Work — and What Might
If vaginismus involves an underdeveloped signal between body and awareness, then the fix isn't more effort to relax. It's building the actual skill of sensing what's happening inside you — a capacity researchers call interoception.
This is where yoga's role can get more specific than "it's calming." Researchers have described yoga as operating through a system of tools — postures, breath regulation, meditation, and ethical principles — that build bidirectional feedback between the body's internal signals and the brain's higher-order processing. In plainer terms: yoga trains the communication pathway that alexithymia disrupts.
A broader review of yoga and self-regulation similarly found that yoga-based interventions may work by integrating bottom-up sensory processing with top-down cognitive and emotional regulation — essentially, teaching the body to send clearer signals and the mind to actually receive them.
None of this means yoga is a cure, or that it works the same way for every body — vaginismus has diverse causes, and yoga is one tool among many, not a replacement for pelvic floor PT or trauma-informed therapy where that's needed. But it does mean there's a real physiological reason why building interoceptive awareness — learning to feel what's happening in your body, emotional and physical alike — may support the release that willpower alone can't seem to reach.
A Yogic Lens: Svadhyaya, Svadhisthana, and the Discipline of Staying
Before Western researchers had a word like "interoception," yogic philosophy had a whole framework built around it.
One of yoga's foundational principles is svadhyaya — self-study. It's often taught as reading sacred texts, but at its root, svadhyaya simply means turning your attention toward yourself and observing honestly what you find, without editing it into something more comfortable. Applied here, it's the practice of actually noticing what's happening in your body and your emotional state, rather than skipping past the noticing altogether. It's the starting point for everything else in this section, because you can't work with what you haven't first been willing to see.
Yoga also offers another useful pairing of principles: sthira and sukha — steadiness and ease. In the Yoga Sutras, these two qualities are meant to exist together: enough steadiness to stay present, enough ease to not brace against what's happening. That's a remarkably precise description of the skill vaginismus asks of you — staying in a sensation, even an uncomfortable one, without either gripping harder or checking out entirely.
This is also where ahimsa (non-harm) becomes practical. Practicing ahimsa toward yourself doesn't mean forcing your body or feelings past their limits in the name of progress. It means letting sensation — physical or emotional — arrive.
What This Might Look Like for You
Building this kind of body-emotion literacy isn't about one big breakthrough. It's slow, repetitive, often undramatic work: noticing a sensation, staying with it a few seconds longer than usual, naming it if you can, letting it move through rather than shutting it down. Some days that will feel like nothing. Some days it will feel like everything. I can remember distinct practices where I felt a big emotional release in half pigeon (because, again, the hips). More often than not, there have been plenty of practices that haven’t necessarily stuck with me, but I know something shifted during or afterward.
If you’re interested in exploring emotions and movement, check out my On-Demand Yoga Classes, many of which focus on slowing down enough to actually notice what's happening in your body — which, it turns out, might be the whole point.