Crying in Pigeon: Hearts, Hips, & Emotion

Have you ever had a yoga instructor tell you that we “store our emotions in our hips,” or that it’s normal to cry during hip-opening poses (pigeon, lizard lunge, etc.?)

 

That sounds like some utter hippie nonsense, right?

 

After rolling my eyes one too many times, I finally asked a beloved teacher, who works with doctors and scientists to study the biomechanics of yoga, what his take was, and it actually made a lot of sense to me.

 

He said that as humans, we create habitual patterns of movement in our lives.  Think about it: when we feel confident, we stand tall, shoulders back, chest thrust out. When we’re happy, we’re loose; heads get thrown back in laughter.

 

One very common one is this: anytime we feel threatened or scared, we tend to close in on ourselves, clenching the legs together, tightening up. Particularly for people who have had trauma in their lives, poses that require a counteractive motion—opening of the hips—release the tightness and tension held there, and can make the person feel really vulnerable. It can be very freeing.

 

So it’s not that, within the bones of the hip joint, we hold fear or anger. It’s just that we associate certain movements with certain emotions, and counteracting those habits through asana can force us to really feel. Kind of cool, right?

 

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