Awareness Before Performance: What the Research Says About Healing Through the Body

Irene Andersson Author

Jun 23, 2026 |

What happens if you stop trying to "fix" yourself? By Irene Andersson - Pelvic Floor Awareness

Most women have spent years learning to manage their bodies rather than listen to them. Eat this, not that. Hold this in, not that. Look a certain way, respond a certain way, on cue. Even rest gets scheduled and optimized. So it's no surprise that when something in the body doesn't feel right — pain, numbness, a sense of being shut off below the waist — the instinct is to ask "what do I need to do to fix this?"

That question assumes the body is a machine with a performance problem. Most of the time, it isn't.

The strength myth

For decades, the default advice for almost any pelvic floor concern was the same: train the muscle, make it stronger. It's intuitive — and it's only half the picture. Across a number of clinical studies on pelvic pain and painful intercourse, researchers keep finding the same thing: many pelvic floor difficulties aren't simply a strength problem. They're a tension problem. A perception problem. A coordination problem. A nervous-system problem.

Treatment built only around "more reps" often misses the actual issue — which is usually a body that has learned, for good reason, to brace and guard rather than relax and respond.

This matters because it flips the goal entirely. Instead of achieving a stronger pelvic floor, the work becomes about restoring choice — the ability to tense or release on purpose, rather than by default.

Awareness changes what the body can do

This is where the research gets genuinely interesting. Wolf Mehling, who built the most widely used scientific measure of body awareness, has spent years demonstrating that how well someone can sense what's happening inside their own body — not how strong or flexible they are — predicts a great deal about pain, recovery, and regulation. Awareness isn't a soft add-on to physical work.

It's often the mechanism that makes the physical work land. A 2024 study looking specifically at women's experience of pleasure found something similar: women who scored higher on "noticing" their internal sensations, and who trusted their own bodies, reported more satisfaction —regardless of the specific technique involved. Nobody was being trained to do anything differently. They were simply more in their bodies while it happened.

Mindfulness-based approaches developed by researchers like Dr. Lori Brotto and colleagues point the same way. Across multiple studies with women experiencing low desire or difficulty feeling present in their bodies, the intervention was never "try harder" — it was guided, non-judgmental noticing. Desire and satisfaction improved, and the gains held up months later.

Performance was never the target. Attention was.

Why this is slower, and why that's the point

None of this happens on command. A nervous system that has learned to brace doesn't unlearn that in one session, and it can't be willed into softening any faster than it's ready to. This is also where some of the original explanations for chronic pelvic tension — like the influential work of Anderson and Wise in the early 2000s — have aged well in one respect and been refined in another. They were right that tension and nervous-system patterns, not just structural damage, drive a lot of pelvic pain. Where the field has moved on is in seeing this as one part of a much wider picture — stress, history, emotion, and learned protection all interacting — rather than a single mechanical fix.

That wider picture is exactly why we don't teach technique first. We make space first, and let awareness do the slow work that pressure can't.

A small, concrete practice

Right now, without changing anything: notice if your pelvic floor is gripping or soft. Don't try to relax it. Just notice. That single act — noticing without correcting — is the entire mechanism researchers keep finding evidence for. It is also the first and smallest version of everything we do across a full weekend together.

Eva, 43, described what it was like to stay with this for longer than a moment:

"I feel something unlocked in me; I can be present and express myself more naturally. I connected to a life force that was always in me but now shows itself."

"The practice of meeting my cervix had such a strong impact on me. I simply smile whenever I think about it. It gives me a feeling that everything is okay."

Nothing was performed. Nothing was achieved. Something was simply noticed, and allowed to be there.

If you'd like a gentle introduction to this work, join us for the free webinar on 1 september — and if it calls you further, we'll be in Budapest together this November.

Key research

• Ghaderi m.fl. — Pelvic Floor Rehabilitation in the Treatment of Women with Dyspareunia — International Urogynecology Journal — 2019

• Mehling m.fl. — Body Awareness: Construct and Self-Report Measures — PLoS ONE — 2009

• Dixon m.fl. — Interoceptive Awareness and Female Orgasm Frequency and Satisfaction — Brain Sciences — 2024

Categories: : female sexuality, Non-sexual approach, helaing, Bodyawareness