Why Dilating Feels Impossible — What Science and Yoga Say About Change
There's a moment that many people with vaginismus know well: you understand what you need to do. You have the dilators, you've read the articles, maybe you're even in PT. And yet — you're not doing it consistently, or at all. And the gap between knowing and doing feels like its own kind of failure.
Here's what I want you to hear: it isn't.
That gap isn't a character flaw. It's a stage. And understanding which stage you're in — and what it actually asks of you — might be the most underrated piece of your healing puzzle.
The Stages of Change: Meeting Yourself Where You Are
In behavioral health, there's a framework called the Transtheoretical Model, or the Stages of Change. It's a way of mapping how humans actually move through transformation — not in a straight line, but in a spiral of readiness.
The five stages are:
Precontemplation — You're not yet aware that a change is needed, or you're not ready to consider it.
Contemplation — You're thinking about making a change. Weighing it. Sitting with it.
Preparation — You're gathering what you need: information, tools, space in your schedule, mental bandwidth.
Action — You're doing the thing.
Maintenance — You're continuing to do the thing, integrating it into your life.
Yogic philosophy has a word that lives quietly underneath all of this: svadhyaya — self-study. The honest, compassionate act of turning your gaze inward and witnessing yourself without judgment. Asking yourself, what stage am I actually in? Not the stage I think I should be in. Not the stage I want to be in. The one I'm in.
This is not a passive question. In yoga, svadhyaya is one of the Niyamas — the inner observances that form the ethical backbone of a yogic life. It asks you to look clearly. And looking clearly is the first act of change.
Why Rushing Ahead Keeps You Stuck
One of the most common patterns I see — and have personally lived — is trying to skip to action before you're ready. You buy the dilators. You set a reminder on your phone. You try once, it doesn't go well, and suddenly you're adding "can't even do this right" to the pile.
What's actually happening? You were likely still in contemplation. Still needing to think, to imagine, to let the idea of doing this thing settle into your nervous system before your body would cooperate.
Here's why contemplation is genuinely sacred and not just "waiting": when we imagine ourselves performing a behavior, we're creating new neural pathways — worn-in grooves that make the actual doing more possible when the time comes. Contemplation isn't the absence of action. It's internal action. It's your psyche doing the prep work your body will need later.
In yoga, we call this the cultivation of sankalpa — a heartfelt intention. But here's what I love most about this concept: a sankalpa isn't something you manufacture or force. It's something you already carry. It already lives in you. The practice isn't creating it from scratch — it's dropping into the felt sense of what it would be like to fully embody something that already exists within you. To rehearse, from the inside, what that version of yourself feels like when it’s free to emerge from behind whatever was protecting it. Over time, that internal rehearsal deepens the groove until that way of being becomes more natural than the one guarding it.
You don't plant a seed and immediately pull it up to check if it's growing. You tend the ground. You return to it. You trust what's already there.
So if you're in contemplation right now: good. Be there. Listen to podcasts. Journal about what this change might mean for you — the fears, the hopes, the "what if it actually works." You don't owe yourself a commitment yet. Your job is just to think, and to occasionally close your eyes and feel what it would be like to already be on the other side.
Going Deeper: The Integrated Behavior Model
Once you have a sense of where you are in the stages of change, there's another framework I want to share — one that has, quite honestly, changed the way I understand myself.
It's called the Integrated Behavior Model (IBM), and it maps the full terrain of why we do (or don't do) the things we intend to. I first encountered it in graduate school and immediately felt that specific kind of excitement reserved for ideas that feel like they've always been true — you just hadn't had words for them yet.
The model tells us that behavior depends on five things:
Our intention to carry out the behavior
The knowledge and skills to actually do it
Whether the behavior feels important and relevant to us
Absence of environmental constraints
Repeatability — our ability to keep doing it once we've started
The most interesting layer is the first one: intention. Because intention, it turns out, is not one simple thing. It's a whole landscape of grooves.
What Actually Shapes Your Intention
Your intention to do something — to dilate, to do your PT exercises, to start a yoga practice for your pelvic floor — is shaped by all of the following:
How favorable you find the behavior
Your emotional response to the idea of doing it
Whether you believe it will actually work
What you think the people in your life would think about you doing it
How motivated you are to meet those expectations
Whether you've witnessed anyone else doing it (and whether it seemed possible)
Whether you know how to do it
Whether you believe you're capable of doing it
Whether you feel you have control over whether it happens
In yogic philosophy, these are the marks of samskaras — grooves worn into us by repeated thought, experience, and conditioning. The belief that your body is broken. The fear of what your partner might think. The assumption that this won't work for you because nothing ever has. These aren't character flaws. They're grooves. Old ones. And here's the good news: you can make new ones. And to quote Madonna, you can get into those new grooves.
The IBM questions above are essentially a map of your grooves. They help you see, specifically and honestly, which ones are running the show — and which ones might need some tending before action becomes possible.
Working With Your Answers
Let's use dilating as our example behavior and walk through what to do when your answers reveal a groove that isn't serving you.
If you don't think dilating will work for you — that belief is worth sitting with. Where does it come from? Is it based on one hard experience, or something you absorbed from someone else? Seek out stories from people who have been where you are and moved through it. Real stories from real people change what the nervous system believes is possible.
If you think the people in your life wouldn't support this — get specific. Who? Why? What would it look like if those same people responded with total compassion? Sometimes we carry imagined disapproval that was never actually expressed. And sometimes it was expressed, and we need to work through the weight of that. Either way, naming the groove is the first step. Ahimsa — non-harm — turned inward means refusing to let someone else's discomfort become your ceiling.
If you don't know anyone who has dilated or done pelvic floor work — you do now. The internet is full of people who have walked this path. You don't need to know them in person for their stories to begin reshaping what feels possible for you. Find the ones that resonate and return to them.
If you don't know how to dilate or aren't sure you're doing it right — that's a knowledge gap, and knowledge gaps are the most straightforward to fill. Dilating 101 is a great place to start, and includes a de-armoring practice you can explore at your own pace.
If you feel like you don't have control over whether this happens — let's get curious about that. Is it your schedule? Lack of privacy? Not having dilators yet? Worth noting: you don't need dilators to begin. Manual work with your own hands is a valid, effective starting point. Name the constraint as precisely as you can. Vague obstacles are much harder to overcome than specific ones.
The Practice of Tapas: Tending the Groove
Once you've done this inventory — once you've identified your grooves — you'll have something incredibly useful: a map of where to focus your energy as you move from contemplation into preparation and eventually into action.
This is where tapas comes in. Tapas is often translated as discipline or austerity, but I prefer to think of it as the steady tending of a flame — the gentle, persistent return to your practice, even when it's imperfect, even when it's five minutes, even when you'd rather not.
My teacher Brett Larkin offers a beautiful companion idea here: when an unhelpful thought or pattern arises, rather than fighting it directly, you cultivate the opposite. If the groove says this will never work for me, you don't wage war on that thought — you simply, deliberately, practice returning to its opposite. What would it feel like to believe that healing is possible for you? You don't have to fully believe it yet. You just practice the feeling. You deepen that groove until it becomes the more worn path.
That's tapas in practice. Not force. Not perfect consistency. Just the small, steady return — to your sankalpa, to your body, to the version of yourself you're already becoming.
The flame doesn't need to be a bonfire. It just needs to stay lit.
Bringing It Together
The Stages of Change and the Integrated Behavior Model are both asking the same thing, in their different languages: where are you, and what do you actually need right now?
Not where you think you should be. Not where you were six months ago. Right now.
Svadhyaya — honest self-witnessing. Samskaras — the grooves that shape what we reach for and what we avoid. Sankalpa — the heartfelt intention already living inside you, waiting to be felt more fully. Tapas — the practice of returning, and of gently cultivating the opposite of whatever keeps pulling you back.
Healing from vaginismus is not a sprint. It's more like a garden — tended over time, with different needs in different seasons, and always more alive beneath the surface than it appears.
You're not behind. You're exactly where you are. And that's a place worth understanding.
Ready for a starting point that meets you where you are? Dilating 101 includes a de-armoring practice you can explore at your own pace — no pressure or perfection required.