The Power Source

Foreword

In the spring of last year, I was looking for a change. I had spent more than a decade pushing myself through grueling workouts, judging my body, comparing myself to others, and always feeling dissatisfied. More often than not, these intense sweat sessions left me feeling depleted, in pain, and down on myself. I was sure that only the most competitive, calorie-torching workouts could give me the results I desired. “No pain, no gain,” I told myself. Massage, ice, and ibuprofen were the only counterpoints that could balance my body’s response to the grueling routine I was in. The cycle was exhausting and I felt disconnected from my body.

It hadn’t always been like this. I was a dancer as a teenager. Back then, I took such joy in movement. I loved my body. I loved what it could do, how strong I felt as I moved across the floor, how connected I felt to my core, how my muscles stretched and elongated. I began to realize that I was craving movement like that again—movement that made me feel better, not worse. How could I get back to that?

Enter Lauren Roxburgh. Initially I thought of her as The Roller Girl, and I must admit, I was skeptical. The idea of working out with a foam roller and squishy ball just didn’t seem very challenging to me. I worried that giving up intense exercise would backfire on my waistline. But after an hour with Lauren, I was intrigued. At nearly six feet tall and with a big smile, Lauren radiates warmth, intelligence, and strength. She listens as much as she speaks. When we talked about movement, she used words like “fascia,” “lymph system,” and “pelvic floor,” all of which were foreign concepts to me at the time. But for some reason, I immediately trusted her.

Through our work, I began to release layers of knotty tissue and restore blood flow to stagnant areas of my body. As my jaw loosened, my mind felt calmer. As I awakened my lymph system through graceful movement, rebounding, and self-care, I watched my skin texture smooth out. As I released the pressure on my diaphragm, I felt my anxiety lessen. As we broke up the knotty tissue in my shoulders, my arms lengthened and toned and my shoulders dropped. As my hip flexors started to open, the lean dancer legs I had loved as a teenager began to reveal themselves once again. As my pelvic floor released, I felt years of buried trauma unwind. I began to feel more connected to my own sensuality.

Lauren’s movements are nurturing and replenishing. Instead of feeling drained after a punishing workout I didn’t enjoy, I was suddenly looking forward to my rolling and rebounding sessions. It became a kind of therapy. I would bring my roller wherever I traveled, to hotels across the country and to my trailer on set. My joy in movement was restored. I felt good again.

Then came the affirmations. At first, I could only laugh. Lauren told me that anytime I had a negative thought about my body, I was to say aloud: “I live in the body of my dreams.” At first, this felt ridiculous, comical, and uncomfortable. But I had trusted Lauren before and it had worked, so I agreed to try. Each time I’d experience negative self-talk and the anxiety that came with it, I’d shake it off and say aloud, “I live in the body of my dreams.” This happened once in the supermarket and a woman buying broccoli nearby gave me a kind of quizzical smile and nod. Anyway, it works. See, your brain believes what you tell it. If you tell your brain, “you’ll never be good enough,” “you’ll never be worthy,” “you’ll never have the body you want,” or “you shouldn’t feel empowered in your sensuality,” well, that’s what you’ll believe. When you start to talk to yourself in a kind, supportive manner (and as if what you desire is already true), you reduce anxiety, reprogram your brain, release stress, and lower cortisol. With that, your body actually starts to change.

My friends began to say things like “you seem different” and “your energy is calmer, more centered.” I was standing taller, unafraid to take up space in the room, while also feeling less reactionary and less judgmental of myself and others. I’ve gone down a jean size since I started working with Lauren, but that’s not the best part. I feel stronger and more connected to my body than ever. I feel happy in my skin.

See, it’s not about working hard—even though this work is hard—it’s about working smart. It’s about working with your body, not against it. The exercises in this book are gentle, but they reduce inflammation, work the fascia, and stretch the tissues in your body to engage metabolism and settle anxiety. It doesn’t happen overnight, but this program is effective and sustainable.

Now, I can understand if as you’re reading this, you might be thinking, “This sounds silly.” But chances are, if you’re reading this, you’re looking for a change. Maybe, like me, you’re in pain and looking for an easier road to a better solution. Maybe you’re sick of grueling workouts, feeling disconnected to your sensuality, or stuck in the mindset of “no pain, no gain.” Well, now I say, “No pain? That’s a good thing.”

It’s time to reconnect to your true self, find your real body, shed whatever is holding you back physically or mentally, and create more space within yourself. You will be amazed when you see the beautiful body that exists underneath those layers of tension. I believe in the power of alignment and I’m so excited for you to experience the restorative, rejuvenating results that The Power Source can bring you.

—Emmy Rossum

Introduction

Before I could embrace my life and myself for who I really am—before I could let go of my notions of what “should be” and embrace what is—I was often disappointed and frustrated. I tried to control and hold on to everything. I had been an all-American swimmer and a collegiate athlete, so to many I was the epitome of “fitness.” But my body was tight, heavy, and contracted, and so was my life. It wasn’t until I learned to soften physically that I started to let go in other ways, too. I learned to change my perspective, harness stress, release stagnant emotions, and, most of all, let go of the need to control every situation. I learned how to surrender, let go of uphill battles, and stop trying too hard in general. With this, I began to live in a state of ease, gratitude, grace, acceptance, joy, and inner knowing.

I know all of this works, because I’ve created new patterns and habits in my body and my life. There was a time when my day-to-day life involved a lot of physical pain, tension, and fear. It felt like I was pushing to get through, both physically and emotionally. I didn’t realize if I could just allow more, surrender, and go with the flow of life, everything in my life would improve—very much including my physical state.

Once I shifted my perspective, everything that I had been working so hard to change and struggling against fell into place easily. Equally importantly, the things that were not meant to be fell gently away without the anxiety or growing pains that I had been experiencing up to that point. I had found a better way to live in my own skin. With that, everything in my life transformed. I transformed.

We are all meant to receive the many gifts life has to offer. The problem is that, too often, we get in our own way by getting stuck in a story, belief system, or program. When we do this, we shut the door on possibility and get stuck in the way we think things are supposed to be. All we really accomplish when we do this is to create blockage, tension, more of the same story, more lack, and more exhaustion.

When people use phrases like “let go,” “be vulnerable,” or “get comfortable in your own skin,” it can sound very nebulous. But there are actually things you can do in a pragmatic way and on an everyday basis that will get you there without a long to-do list. Not only that, but it’s probably simpler than you think. The whole point here is to deepen your awareness, open up to possibilities, soften into your amazing self, become more present, and surrender to and embrace the flow of life instead of clutching to try to make things happen.

Surrender to Grace and Strength

If you have picked up this book, my guess is that you’re looking for answers you have not yet found.

Perhaps you are experiencing ongoing or regular physical pain, inflammation, bloating, disconnection to your body, or tension. This might include lower back, neck, or jaw pain, or pain during sex. Maybe you are experiencing some sort of inflammation in the gut, the annoying feeling of perpetual bloat, a weak pelvic floor, or the inability to shed weight. You might be unable to take a deep breath. This might manifest emotionally as well, either as anxiety or depression or a feeling of perpetually ongoing stress or guilt. Or perhaps you’re feeling something more nebulous than this—a nagging feeling that you have somehow veered off of the path that is meant for you. Only you’re not sure what that path is or how to get back on it. Because of this, you might feel the need to grip and control rather than live in a state of gratitude, allowance, and grace.

Like so many of us, you may be living in a constant state of “white-knuckling” it and bearing down in your body and your life. This can manifest in both the very literal sense of creating tension and tightness in your body by clutching, and in the emotional sense of trying to hold on to or will a state of being rather than accepting and loving who and where you are.

Life has its up and downs, and when we try to live up to perfection (which does not exist), try to be someone we are not, or attempt to fit into someone else’s box, it makes everything tenser, denser, and locked up. Quite frankly, it’s exhausting. We become disconnected from ourselves, our purpose, from the world, and from our life. It affects us in very real ways on every level.

The goal here is to allow yourself to effortlessly and gracefully live in your amazing body and experience the life that you truly desire without forcing that life into being. But first, you have to define the life you want and align with your authentic self. It is only with this that everything else falls away. In order to understand what you want your life to be, you have to be able to make the space within yourself to listen and connect. You have to be able to feel and listen beyond the stress and pressure and hurdles of daily life and really understand what is going on inside. You have to be able to hear you. You have to choose to let go of the controlling and clutching and just be the beautiful person that exists underneath all of the negative self-talk and density.

This applies just as much physically as it does emotionally and energetically. Just as many of us live lives that are muted by stress, pressure, and stagnant emotion, many of our bodies have become physically altered by stress and clutching. For some of us, this manifests in the form of extra pounds that just won’t come off, no matter what. For others, it manifests in the form of tension, knots, and pain. For some, it even presents itself in the form of disease. In this book, you will learn how to release the thick, dense armor of tension that often presents itself in our connective tissue. It is in our layer of connective tissue that we store up all of the unreleased physical and emotional energy that’s built up over the years. With awareness and a few simple daily shifts, you will be able to experience freedom, fluidity, space, and lightness on a very physical level. It is difficult to imagine how freeing this is. But soon, you will see for yourself.

In the pages that follow, I will show you how to awaken your senses in order to bring yourself into the present moment. You will awaken to feeling, moving, smelling, and tasting. The tools in this book are designed to help revive your true essence, unlock your pure potential, and allow you to experience both the power of being present and the power of yourself. This is an inside job. Only you can do it. Once you do, you will build an awareness that will allow you to attract the right people, experiences, and relationships into your life. You will learn to lead with your heart to create tangible shifts in your body and in your life.

We live so much of our lives from a subconscious state. We have developed patterns, programs, brain loops, and habits that are on autopilot. It’s like when you drive your car—you don’t have to think about steering or braking; you just do it. The only way to make any changes in your body, in your surroundings, and in your life is by connecting to your deep subconscious. We connect to this part of our being through presence and inner silence. Our brains produce electrical patterns called brain waves, and new research has found that when we get into a slower, calmer, quieter state, we have more access to the subconscious mind and can make the positive adjustments we need to up-level in all areas of our life.

Think about it like this: your conscious mind governs your thoughts, and your subconscious mind governs your feelings. In order to create real, long-lasting, transformational change, your body, thoughts, emotions, and actions have to match your intentions. Your conscious and subconscious have to work together. You have to not just think about your intentions, but also feel them on a cellular level. Only then can a shift occur.

If you decide, for instance, that you are going to develop the habit of practicing 10 minutes of meditation every morning, and you truly commit to make the choice to invest in yourself, you can build that habit by meditating each morning until it becomes a subconscious program like brushing your teeth every morning. But if you just think, “Maybe I should meditate,” and leave it at that, chances are that it won’t become a part of your daily ritual. You are attempting to work solely from your conscious mind, without integrating the practice on a subconscious level.

In this book, you will build a new foundation from the inside out to merge together your conscious and subconscious. This includes a combination of mental and physical practices, mindfulness, and even some alternative therapy. The information you’ll learn about is drawn from both Western and Eastern thought, bridging science with spirituality. You will learn to focus your perspective in the most positive direction, live more authentically, breathe more deeply, harness stress into motivation, and strengthen your pelvic floor (this might sound oddly specific, but very soon we’ll discuss why this area of the body is critical to holistic wellness). You will become conscious of those things you can change for a rejuvenated body and a more fluid life of ease, joy, and purpose. From there, we will begin to develop subconscious habits through a series of awareness practices and presence.

Why the Pelvic Floor?

My mother was a model and actress who was quite focused on her physical appearance. Growing up around this, it’s no surprise that from the time I was a teenager on, I was very body-focused. As an athlete, I was on a constant quest to build strength and embody physical fitness. The type of strength I built was forceful and dense. It didn’t feel right for me, even though I made a conscious decision to build this strength, and went to a lot of effort to do so.

In my late twenties, I began studying structural integration, a form of alternative medicine that focuses on the body’s connective tissue (also known as fascia). This was a game-changer for me. When I was doing my training, a teacher told me I had one of the tightest jaws and pelvic floors he had ever seen. Knowing what I know now, this isn’t surprising. Aside from all of the forceful workouts I was doing, I was also in an unhealthy marriage, my mother was deathly ill with cancer, and my business was experiencing major financial issues.

Most of the time, I didn’t feel very good; I was incessantly stiff and tight. Everything in my body had locked up because of the combination of the hardcore workouts I was doing and the tension in my life. It was during structural integration training that I realized I was making choices for the outer world and not living authentically from my heart and gut. I started deepening my practices of self-care and learning more about how we as humans are all connected and how everything is energy. I started studying quantum physics and the law of attraction. It was then that the lightbulb went off. I realized that thoughts become things, energy attracts like energy, and we are so much more powerful than we are led to believe.

A few days after my mother passed away in 2010 (right around the same time I received my credentials as a structural integration practitioner), I felt led by my mom’s spirit to an amazing bookstore in Topanga called Inn at the Seventh Ray. The book Anatomy of the Spirit by Caroline Myss literally fell off the shelf in front of me. It completely changed my life and my perspective on how powerful our emotions are, especially when it comes to the health and vitality of our bodies and our true fulfillment in life. My focus shifted to the body-mind-heart connection and holistic healing. Whereas the work I had been doing with clients previously centered completely on their physical health, I now began to help them work on their emotional wealth, as well. I focused on healing and looking within to view the body and wellness from a holistic perspective.

As I dove deeper into the physical, mental, and emotional mechanics and connections within the human body, it became more and more clear to me how incredibly important the pelvic floor is. I also began noticing the state of my clients’ pelvic floor and how it related to other issues in their bodies and emotional lives. Because so many of us have lost our connection to this powerful area of our body, we’ve also lost the ability to mindfully relax the area. Without connection, we also lose sensation, tone, resilience, and flexibility in the pelvic floor. When we can’t connect to our pelvic floor, we also cannot connect to our deep core muscles. This certainly makes it more difficult to feel and tone our bodies, but it also makes us weaker and sets off a whole chain of reactions—biological, neurological, and emotional—that inhibit us from attaining vibrant holistic wellness.

When we lose the connection to those deep muscles, it becomes difficult to relax the area. This means that the pelvic floor becomes hypertonic, or perma-flexed. Imagine flexing your bicep constantly and never fully letting go: the muscles will become weak, exhausted, and disconnected. That’s what most of us are doing with our pelvic floor all of the time. If you did this same thing to your bicep muscle, after a while, you would lose flexibility, strength, and the ability to relax. That’s more or less what happens to the pelvic floor. Until, that is, you become aware of the stress and tension in the area and do some work to alleviate it. Part of this is willfully relaxing and unclenching these muscles—and then directing energy to build strength.

In Eastern traditions, the pelvic floor is known as the root chakra—it’s where we hold our fears; specifically fears around primary instincts, such as our health, our family’s safety, and our financial security. It’s where we process emotion and house our fight-or-flight reactions. You know that feeling when you get cut off by someone while driving, get bad news, or are about to go into a high-stress situation? This can cause you to clench your pelvic floor.

We talk about holistic health all of the time, but we never talk about the pelvic floor. If we don’t bring the pelvic floor into the discussion, it’s not really holistic health at all. We are missing out on an entire, very critical area and energy of the body, one that has a serious impact on our physical, emotional, and energetic wellness.

In 2014, I published an article in goop about what I had come to realize in terms of the relationship between the pelvic floor, mind-body connection, fascia, and stress. I was stunned by the response and by how many people—particularly women—related to what I was talking about.

The floodgates opened. People flew in to work with me from all over the world, and the volume of clients was so intense I had to refer them out to other practitioners. At the time, there were very few bodyworkers or physical therapists who understood the mind-body connection as it pertains to the pelvic floor. Four years later, that is beginning to change.

It’s not that no one has ever addressed holistic health through the lens of the pelvic floor. They have, just not to the masses in America. In France, for example, health insurance has long covered pelvic floor rehabilitation following childbirth. We are behind other areas of the world in this regard, and it’s time we catch up. Too many women struggle with incontinence, pelvic pain, inability to have an orgasm, low back pain, a weak deep core, the dreaded post-baby pooch, middle-aged pooch, and pain during sex. And these are only the examples of issues that are clearly related to the pelvic floor. There is so much more. The health of our pelvic floor has a significant trickle-down effect on the health of our entire body, being, and emotional life.

Today, my practice focuses on personal development, empowerment, and alignment of all areas of life and being. My intention is to help us all shift the paradigm that says we need to abuse our bodies and ourselves in order to see results. In both my own life and through working with clients, I have come to believe that we only truly see results through emotionally choosing to transform and actually nourishing and nurturing ourselves. Of course, this sounds obvious, but it is not a practice that most Americans engage in.

The end result of this work is that clients have a huge shift. They come to a place of inner knowing, feeling more, allowing the good to flood in, acceptance, grace, and flow. They experience an empowering change in mindset that allows them to get out of the adrenal fatigue stress mode and into a thriving, present, connected state. They begin to reset, feel incredible in their bodies, and live with more purpose and gratitude.

As human beings, we are not meant to be in a state of doing all of the time. Nourishing, nurturing, allowing, listening, and cleansing will always get you to your end result more happily and effectively than clutching, fighting, controlling, and forcing. We want to get into the flow, rather than fighting against resistance.

A Quick Shout-Out to You Mamas: Pelvic Floor Recovery for Pregnancy and Labor

For many women, the experience of childbirth might be the first time you ever hear the term “pelvic floor.” And since the pelvic floor is at the heart of everything we will discuss in the coming pages, it’s important to address how this area of the body is impacted during the journey of pregnancy and labor—because there’s no doubt that having a baby can do a number on your entire system and, of course, the pelvic floor. (Please note that all of the tools and information in this book will still apply to you, regardless of gender and whether or not you have ever given birth.)

The muscles, tissues, and nerves of your pelvic floor are stretched and pressed down during pregnancy due to the weight of your baby. This is compounded by a flood of the hormone relaxin, which allows you to stretch even more. This is only the beginning. During childbirth, your pelvic floor opens and expands, which after pregnancy and birthing can result in scar tissue (which is considerably denser than regular tissue), trauma, and damage to the nerve endings in this region. In short, your body—particularly your pelvic floor—goes through a lot to miraculously give birth.

In France, insurance pays for postnatal pelvic floor therapy. Here in America, we don’t offer much to postnatal women after their 6-week postpartum OB-GYN visit. Even at this, doctors are primarily monitoring your ovaries, not your pelvic floor. No one tells us how to heal the pelvic floor or, for that matter, that we even need to heal, restore, and reconnect to our pelvic floor. No one talks about how a pelvic floor that is not restored will go on to impact the rest of the body in all the ways we are discussing throughout this book.

Every woman requires a recovery period after giving birth, which should last for a minimum of 6 to 8 weeks postdelivery. During this period, most women experience sensations ranging from discomfort to pain, along with incontinence, which is normal. For all of us, this should be a period of healing and rest that involves physical exertion no greater than a bit of light walking.

If after these first several weeks you experience ongoing incontinence, lower back pain, or tightness in your hips, it’s a sign your pelvic floor has not healed or has healed incorrectly. Unfortunately, many women think this is their new status quo. It doesn’t have to be!

I’ve had many clients tell me they were informed that incontinence is just something they have to deal and live with postbirth. This is absolutely not the case. In fact, I’ve helped these same clients heal through a combination of body awareness, pelvic core connection, contract and relax Kegels, deep squats, body rolling, gentle bouncing, and diaphragmatic breathing.

The good news is that, although they’re not widely discussed, there are actually more opportunities now than ever before for postnatal pelvic floor recovery. Among these are postnatal yoga, light bouncing on the rebounder, Pilates classes and physical therapists who specialize in the pelvic floor, and even online programs that focus on pelvic floor recovery.

The reality is that everyone’s pelvic floor health should be checked and monitored post-childbirth. We’re not there yet—but with these modalities, we’re moving in the right direction.