People who are new to my work always ask me, “How did you, as a young woman who had never been pregnant, start thinking about your pelvic floor?” It’s only recently that the pelvic floor gained its reputation as “the sex muscle”. Before that, it was only known for having something to do with postpartum care and incontinence. People only paid attention to it if something wasn’t working.
Although I developed an interest in sex at an early age and was obsessed with becoming a skilled lover, I had never heard about the pelvic floor before I started to research human anatomy as a dancer. I assumed I was using my vaginal muscles for my pussy acrobatics. (By the way, this is a common misconception, and we clear it up in my book Pussy Yoga.)
How the Pelvic Floor Came into My Life
It all started when I decided to learn belly dancing as a kid around 1988/89. I had a difficult childhood. Emotional and physical abuse led me to dissociate from my body to escape reality. That allowed me to numb my pain and retreat into a fantasy world. I became a shy, depressed child who couldn’t see the point in anything.
My first bellydance performance in primary school.
But there were moments when I would be gripped by a mysterious passion and could feel in every fiber of my being that there was hope, and that life could be beautiful. These were moments when a piece of music touched me deeply, or when I saw a passionate dancer on TV and sensed that she felt the same as I did. One summer in primary school I got the chance to learn bellydance and perform it, it was like a surreal dream for me, and I loved every second. These moments gave me the energy to persist through my depressing reality.
One day, on the verge of suicide, I realized that if I had nothing to lose anyway, I was actually free to do anything I wanted. What was the worst thing that could happen? If it all ended in catastrophe, or it turned out that I was indeed a total loser, I could always kill myself then. So I decided to leave my wallflower existence behind me. I envisioned a wild and free life full of adventure, romance, and spirit. My inspirations were dancers and femmes fatales like Mata Hari, Anita Berber, and Kiki de Montparnasse. I was fascinated by how free they had been and how they had lived life by their own rules—and I wanted to break free from the hopelessness of my small-town life in the same way.
I found a belly dancing video in our city library that I borrowed again and again. I tried out the movements while walking down the street, and later, once my life started to gain more momentum, when I went out to clubs and in my first intimate encounters with boys. Being able to move this way and feel my body gave me confidence. It freed me, step by step, from my old, hated self-image. My new body awareness gave me the eyes to see myself more fully and the strength to stand by this self, to voice my unconventional ideas freely, and to design my life the way I wanted it to be: intellectual, radical, and free.
I kept my belly dancing a secret. I didn’t tell anyone why I could move like that – there was something embarrassing about the belly dance cliché. Officially, I was doing ballet, jazz, and yoga; the rest was my natural sexiness. I didn’t even set foot in a real belly dance class until 2002, when I moved to Wuppertal to study architecture.
I Became a Belly Dancer
In my first belly dance lesson, I was both fascinated and repelled at the same time. What fascinated me was the mysterious music that touched something deep inside me, like an old memory, a feeling I had known since childhood, vague and impossible to name. It was so intense that I couldn’t stop searching for more of it, hoping I would finally figure it out at some point. The feeling contained a hint, a promise, that there was still something hidden in me, still some possibility that I could not yet imagine. But what repelled me, even outraged me, was the amateurism and profaneness of the class. It had nothing to do with my pursuit of beauty and perfection in movement and expression. Everything was “good enough,” and you were supposed to just relax and let your belly hang out. As a little control freak, I found that impossible.
But there was a third element, something I had never found in any other environment before: the solidarity between the women. They all came from different walks of life, but they formed a warm community. They welcomed me with open arms in a way that I’d never been accepted in any group before. It was very touching. I still wore thick emotional armor and hid so much, even from myself, but here I was allowed to just be.
In Wuppertal, not only could I badger my Iraqi belly dance teacher, Mona, with all of my questions, I finally had access to better books and CDs too. I devoured everything I could find about the Middle East and dance. I saw my first belly dance shows and found two wonderful mentors in my teachers Isolde Ackermann and Salma Alexandra Abdelhadi. They generously shared their extensive knowledge of Middle Eastern dance with me and supported me on my quest. I researched, danced, and attended all the workshops I could find, but they only left me hungrier than before. I had this great yearning that nothing I learned could satisfy. I had an inkling that there was still a whole other world waiting for me, but I couldn’t grasp it. I wondered why nobody danced the way I imagined in my dreams.
2007: Bellydance show at the Sparkasse Gala in Göttingen
Fast-forward: In the years that followed, I actually became the dancer I had seen in my dreams. I moved to Berlin and developed my own shows, fusing Middle Eastern fantasies with pop culture, tapping into the pulse of the times. I became Germany’s most famous belly dancer, dancing on big stages and on national prime-time television. But something was still missing. I didn’t know what it was. I had this nagging feeling that I wasn’t good enough, that my dancing lacked something essential. Obsessed with finding that something, I looked for role models from whom I could learn more.
Looking for Clues in Egypt
While researching the countries where belly dance originated, I discovered Egyptian belly dance stars who were as famous as pop stars in the West. They performed with huge orchestras on the stages of five-star hotels and on television, and unlike most Arab women, they lived free, self-determined lives. Sadly, this world of beautiful female expression has all but disappeared since the Egyptian revolution in 2011. With the arrival of a more conservative regime, belly dancing is now banned in those venues.
These women had incredible charisma. They cast a spell on their audiences with moving interpretations of classical Egyptian music and poetry. They gave their viewers goosebumps and brought them to tears of joy, grief, love…and something else I’d never experienced in a performance before: spiritual ecstasy. The feeling they conveyed was more electrifying than any performance or concert I had ever seen before. The Egyptians even have a word for this phenomenon that doesn’t exist in any other language: Tarab.
2006: Coco performing at the 5-star hotel Mena House in Cairo
I was determined to figure out what these women were doing. Why were they so vibrant, so powerful, so present in their bodies? Sometimes, they would be a sexy femme fatale, then they seemed to enter a trance. Next, they would be playful, joyous, and close. The audience was carried away with them and hung on their every movement.
And the way these women moved! Their movements were smaller but much more intense than those of other belly dancers. They seemed to move straight from their pelvis, straight from their belly, straight from their heart. Sometimes, you wouldn’t see any movement at all, but they would build such tension that you could feel it deeply under your own skin.
These women were forces of nature. I sweated; I fevered. I ran hot and cold, feeling new sensations that somehow seemed so familiar to me.
I was filled with passion, and knew I was in the right place to find what I had been looking for all of my life.
At the time, I wasn’t exactly spiritual, but in order to understand what those women were doing, only one explanation made sense: these women had a direct connection to something supernatural. They electrified the air and flooded the entire venue with emotion. They were so strong, yet so vulnerable. They revealed so much of themselves without shyness or shame, yet still seemed invincible. I was deeply touched. The spell would not let me go.
2008: Halftime show at the Basketball Eurocup in the Mercedes Benz Arena, Berlin
I went to their shows, took private lessons, and attended workshops. These Egyptian women are dancers, first and foremost, not teachers. They learn intuitively, without much formal instruction. First, they learn through imitation, the way children learn movement patterns and behaviors from their parents, with the help of mirror neurons. Second, they access subconscious implicit knowledge through their female bodies. Scientists call this “embodied knowledge”. It’s a biological intelligence, something we’ve all learned to deny in the West, and something we can relearn to use through the method I was about to develop.
I was astonished to discover that this intuitive way of learning worked for me too. I learned their intricate movements from the dancers, but more than that, I learned to open my heart, to feel more deeply, and to trust my feelings. After all, it was my intuition that had led me to them. I started to understand what it meant to be powerful, vibrant, and at home in my own body.
Still, I couldn’t figure out how they managed to create those tiny but powerful movements in their hips. These women were doing something different with their pelvis than belly dancers in the West, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I noticed they had a place of power deep inside their pelvis, where I felt a void. It was as if I was missing my root, my connection, my essence.
When I was obsessed with femmes fatales as a teenager, I experimented with love balls and Kama Sutra exercises. I was very familiar with my sexual organs, so that couldn’t be the problem. What was I missing? The Egyptian belly dancers couldn’t help me. Did these women not know what they were doing, or were they not willing to share their secrets? It dawned on me that I wouldn’t find the answer with their help, nor would I grasp it intuitively on my own. I was completely cut off from something ancient that these women were rooted in.
I had to find it. I knew it would help me answer all my questions and unlock the mystery of life. Who are we? What is that supernatural power, and how can we access it? I knew that it would not only make me a stronger artist and performer; it would also turn me into the powerful, radiant woman I could already sense was inside me.
The feeling that I was on to something fueled me. I wanted to understand my body much more deeply with the help of science, modern body work, and traditional mind-body methods. I wanted to try everything to find the truth about life.
Body Awareness Is the Way
Back in Germany, I began delving into my body, my mind, and my soul with the help of physiotherapy, body work, anatomy, and dance theory. I wanted to understand everything. I noticed that simply understanding my body was already making me a better dancer. Connecting my mind and my body freed my flow of movement. And in turn, everything that made my body strong and supple also freed my mind. At the same time, my dance technique was best when I felt emotionally alive. Our body is the access to our subconscious and the mirror of our soul. The better we understand it, the better we come to know our whole being. The more freely we move, the more liberated we become as human beings. Physical mobility is therefore essential to a fulfilling life.
Bellydancing on German national TV 2005-2013
Connecting with my body in this way was like reuniting with a long-lost and forgotten part of myself. Shedding tears of joy over the reunion and tears for the buried trauma that now dared to come into the light were the order of the day in my work. Every piece of tension or block I dissolved in my body freed something in my mind as well. I saw more clearly, had more energy, and discovered an increasingly free way of being. I was on the right path.
In 2006, I started teaching and coaching women. To my great surprise, I found that everything that fascinated me in this work also moved the women who came to me. They not only wanted to learn how to dance; they also yearned to find themselves in their bodies.
Any new discovery I made, I immediately tested on them, and I was thrilled to see that these tools worked for them too. Insights arrived like downloads while I taught. You can look at it spiritually as well as rationally: when we connect with our bodies through our physical sensations, we get access to our “Felt Sense,” our implicit body knowledge. In a state of flow, we are also able to combine conscious and unconscious knowledge to create new ideas and insights—and I was usually in a state of flow during teaching! I felt like a dog tracking a scent on a secret trail as I followed my intuition into unknown territory. I forgot who I was and that there was a life outside of the here and now in my studio.
From the outside, teaching was not as glamorous or profitable as my shows, but for me, it was groundbreaking. Watching all of those women transform right before my eyes touched me profoundly. For the first time in my life, I felt the deep satisfaction of having a purpose. I could now create a space where women felt safe and accepted, just as I had felt in my first belly dancing class.
When I completed my degree in architecture in 2007, I had to decide whether to pursue my already successful career as a dancer or to become an architect. Each path would require 100 percent of my focus and energy. It was not an easy decision because, for as long as I could remember, I had been fascinated by both fields. I had pursued architecture with the same passion as dance. I knew that if I became a professional architect, I wouldn’t have any more time to research the connections between body, mind, and soul, and I was so close to solving that great mystery. Giving up everything I had worked for seemed the more painful choice, so I decided to go all in on my dancing.
The Pelvic Floor Is the Key
I threw myself into intensive advanced dance training. At last, here was my chance to spend all day exploring body, mind, and soul, exchanging ideas with other professionals and exploring different areas of contemporary dance and body work. It was my Rolfing therapist who suggested I look more closely at my pelvic floor. I admit, I felt a little attacked. I was a professional belly dancer; we automatically train the pelvic floor—don’t we? I had to get to the bottom of this.
I got hold of all the relevant literature on the pelvic floor and started to try out and compare the various approaches. I also joined certification programs, but there was a lot of contradictory information. I trained, researched, and tested everything immediately in my dancing, and bit by bit, I got the feeling that I was finally getting at the key, finally finding my center. I was discovering the thing I was missing in belly dance, its essence, which also seemed to be the key to connecting to my own essence.
The pelvic floor seemed to unlock the answers to all the questions in my life. Not only did it allow me to develop the same power as the Egyptian dancers; it resolved my fears and doubts and the feeling of not belonging in this world. The pelvic floor offers direct access to the root chakra, which yogis associate with grounding and a sense of connection. It’s something most of us today lack, but we long for it all the time.
Integrating my pelvic floor gave me an entirely new quality as a woman and a performer in my shows. When I danced, I no longer felt like I had something to prove to those watching me. I just rested within myself and could connect much more deeply with my audience. I was fully present, and could express myself more clearly and authentically. I opened up to a power greater than my small self. It flowed right through me and my audience, electrifying us and permitting me to express things for which there are no words.
My sex life changed too. Not only did I have more desire and strength; I also felt more sensation in my pelvis, as if an entire galaxy of new nerve cells had sprung up there. By integrating my pelvic floor and learning to relax my pelvis, I discovered for the first time what it felt like to just let go during sex, to just be, instead of performing gymnastics. My students were also enthusiastic!
Every woman who finally discovers her own key through my method is deeply touched and astonished that the access to her power has been in her body all along. Being connected to our ESSENCE is so important for all of us.
ESSENCE IS A GLOBAL MOVEMENT – JOIN US!
Since 2006 I have been teaching ESSENCE to women around the world, and since 2013 we have been training teachers, who are now teaching in 26 countries.
Why are women so touched and transformed by this work? Because it gives them what other modalities can't.
In ESSENCE, we combine the sensual art of belly dance with the unique Pelvic Floor Integration™ and contemporary body-mind-techniques. It's based on state-of-the-art science, and it keeps evolving.
Our practice connects us to the power that resides deep within us. It makes us confident, magnetic and in love with life itself.
In one way or another, this essential feminine way of moving and relating has been handed down from woman to woman over thousands of years in various archaic dances.
This ancient knowledge has been lost to us through our patriarchal civilization, and we have been missing it. We have been feeling empty, longing for something more.
But now we can rediscover it and share it with each other — our body shows us the way.
Are you coming?
We are looking forward to having you in the ESSENCE OF BELLYDANCE family of incredible women who unleash their power through feminine embodiment, dance, and sisterhood.
With love,
Coco & the ESSENCE team
Become part of our international ESSENCE family!
