[00:00:00] Monica: Welcome, friend. Today's episode is all about emotions, and why getting angry can be healing for us. It's actually really common for anger to arise in our yoga practice, so today I'll share why that happens, what to do about it, and why that means your yoga practice is working. I also share how feeling our emotions can reduce anxiety.
[00:01:25] But before we begin, let's take a long, slow exhale together.
[00:01:32] Now most people think that people who do yoga are always relaxed and calm, and that's why it can come as a rude shock when we suddenly feel angry or intense rage in a yoga class. I remember the first time that happened to me. I'd been doing yoga religiously for a few years and then suddenly I was overcome by intense rage.
[00:01:55] I can't even remember what pose I was doing but I knew I was supposed to be relaxing but my blood was boiling, I was getting hot and sweaty, my muscles were twitching and my jaw was clenched and I had this overwhelming feeling to punch something. I immediately thought there was something wrong with me and did my best to shut it down and pretend it wasn't there.
[00:02:16] And when I spoke to my yoga teacher about it, she told me it was a sign that my yoga practice was working. That I was maturing in my practice. She said it was a good thing. And I was kind of perplexed by this because I always thought yoga was about making us feel calm. Yet I was having a rage attack on my mat on a semi regular basis.
[00:02:36] Now, I don't know if you've had this experience too, but it's more common than we realize. One of the more frequent questions I get at the yoga studio is from students who are experiencing anger and trying to figure out what's wrong with them or why it's happening. I often joke about it in a yoga class when we're doing certain poses and I say, if you're feeling angry, it's the pose, it's not me, it's you.
[00:03:01] And there's always somebody who looks up and gives me a dirty look when I suggest that I'm not the reason they suddenly feel angry in class. Now, there's good reason why this happens, and emotions aren't out there, they're inside. They're in our tissues, they're in our cells, and pretty much every thought we have has an emotional charge attached to it, either positive or negative, some of them are neutral.
[00:03:26] And when thoughts trigger an emotion in the body, it's because of our brain chemistry, our hormones, and our nervous system response. Physical change is occurring in the body when we're experiencing an emotion. And emotions are stored and experienced in the body, they're a feeling. So bending, twisting and stretching our body can bring these emotions to the surface.
[00:03:51] There's also this concept in yoga called the Koshas or five layers. And in yoga philosophy, it's thought that we have five layers to our being. The innermost layer, the core of who we are, is pure conscious awareness. And this is surrounded by the mental layer, comprising our thoughts and mental patterns.
[00:04:12] The emotional layer, which is all of our stored emotions. The energy layer, which represents our nervous system and the outermost layer is our physical body. And the practice of yoga works with each layer. It starts off on the physical layer with the asana or poses to strengthen our physical body. Then we work with our energy and nervous system with the poses.
[00:04:36] We use breath work and cultivating inner awareness through pratyahara or centering. And then we work with the mental layers through dharana or concentration and dhyana or meditation. And as our yoga practice unfolds, we begin to work with the deeper layers. It works from the most external layer to the innermost layer.
[00:04:57] So when we hit that emotional layer, all of our emotional baggage comes to the surface to be processed. So think of the practice of yoga as one of stages. Initially, we'll be focused very much on the body, then the breath and the nervous system, then yoga deals with the emotional and mental stuff that was lurking behind all of the physical.
[00:05:19] And this clearing or unraveling occurs in stages. Initially, we practice yoga because it feels good and our body responds with fewer aches and pains, more energy and feelings of well being. But this is just the start. We inevitably reach a point in our practice where we get angry or bored, we want more or we feel our practice isn't giving us enough of that feel good stuff that we were seeking.
[00:05:45] And this is when a lot of people stop or stagnate. They think that yoga's not working anymore or maybe they try something else or go looking for another class. Maybe they think yoga isn't the magic fix that they thought it was going to be. But it's at this point where the real yoga begins. This is when it becomes an inner journey.
[00:06:05] This is when yoga gets personal. And this is also really confronting. When I reached this stage, it was like hitting a wall. How come the practice that I'd grown to love doesn't feel good anymore? I'd really enjoyed releasing tension and stress from my body and freeing up energy. And to be honest, I was really comfortable with not dealing with my issues.
[00:06:30] Paradoxically, the more I tried to hide from my dissatisfaction, the more it came up. The more I suppressed my frustrations with life, the more frustrated I became. Anger, sadness, grief, shame, you name it, it was arising out of nowhere. Yoga used to be my refuge or my sanctuary. Now it was making me feel like shit.
[00:06:54] And it was at this point that I shifted from practicing exercise yoga to practicing authentic yoga. I told my beautiful teacher Aranya, and she said all was well. She said it was all okay. And she encouraged me to... I let myself have these emotions instead of continually stuffing them away. She talked about the yoga mat being a sacred space.
[00:07:18] She talked about surrender and letting go of control. And it was then that my focus shifted to what was happening inside my body, rather than the shape that I was making. And the penny finally dropped. It all started to make sense. And I really love it when I see this in my students, when they start to get it.
[00:07:40] The process of yoga works from the periphery to the core, from the physical body to the innermost layer of our being. And these layers, these koshas, are the physical body, the energy body, the emotional body, the mental body. And the bliss body comprising pure conscious awareness.
[00:08:03] So the initial focus of yoga starts with the physical body, then we learn to harness the breath, then we release our emotional patterns, then we develop insight and awareness into the workings of the mind, and finally we experience that inner sense of bliss where we connect with universal consciousness and our thoughts slow right down.
[00:08:22] It's a process. It happens in stages, and those middle stages can be a bit mucky and yucky. That emotional layer can be really quite confronting. But if we persist and continue to work through that, on the other side is a new level of understanding and appreciation of ourselves. We may even blossom into Self love and certainly we feel a whole lot calmer and quieter because we don't have these emotional blocks or baggage stored in our body and so Releasing blocked energy can be like a surge or flood of emotions It may arise out of nowhere and seemingly overcome us.
[00:09:07] This is energy being released from our body Our body has these holding patterns or bracing patterns which are often coping mechanisms for dealing with emotional pain. We clench the jaw when we're angry, our shoulders hunch up to our ears when we're stressed. Our posture shrinks when we're depressed.
[00:09:29] All of that emotional memory is stored in the body. So when we open up the chest or release the shoulders, we're letting go of these holding patterns and releasing blocked energy. And in releasing the energy, we release the accumulated emotion with that energy. And just like when you take the kink out of the garden hose, water comes rushing out, sometimes our emotions can rush to the surface.
[00:09:54] But if we give ourselves enough space, they'll pass. When it happens on your yoga mat, breathe through it. Let it happen. Emotions aren't permanent, they aren't bad. We don't need to direct our rage at the teacher or the person next to us. We just want to let it come to the surface, breathe through it, and let it pass.
[00:10:16] Now, often this happens out of the blue, like it did for me. I never really considered myself an angry person, but it turns out that I had a lot of suppressed anger in my body that needed to be released. And when students get angry in yoga, they might like to project their blame onto the teacher, or the music, or other students in the room being annoying, or maybe the temperature in the room's not quite right.
[00:10:42] But these are often projections, and the reason we feel angry is because we have anger inside of us. Often we look to an external cause for our anger. We want to find someone or something to blame for our uncomfortable feeling. Yet a different approach to dealing with anger is to accept that anger is a normal human emotion and we feel angry because we have anger inside of us.
[00:11:09] It's also important to remember that we're not anger. Anger isn't who we are. Rather, we're having an experience of anger, and this is important because it depersonalizes the anger and allows us to step back from the angry feeling so it doesn't consume us and so that we don't conflate our identity with our emotional state.
[00:11:32] So if we accept the premise that emotions are stored in the body, then it's possible that certain yoga poses or sequences may lead to an emotional reaction. And especially when we understand the meridians or energy lines in the body and their emotional connection. According to Chinese medicine, we have 12 major energy lines or meridians in the body.
[00:11:56] And these are associated with the main organs, the heart, lung, kidney, liver, bladder, etc. And interestingly, these meridians also have an emotional component. And when our energy is sub optimal, when it's not flowing, when it's blocked, when it's stagnant or deficient in some way, we experience certain emotions.
[00:12:17] And this can be why certain poses that target the liver meridian, for example, can cause us to feel anger. Because according to Chinese medicine, the liver is the seat of anger in the body. when we stimulate that meridian, which runs from our big toe through the inseam of the leg and up into our torso, it can create a temporary rush of anger in the body.
[00:12:38] And frog pose, or anger removing pose, is famous for this. Poses that target the gallbladder meridian, such as pigeon, can release frustration and resentment. Poses that target the lung meridian, which runs through the thumb, the inner arm onto the chest, can release grief and sadness. And these are just examples of how certain yoga poses may induce an emotional reaction.
[00:13:02] Especially in yin yoga, which specifically targets these meridians. But it's also possible for emotions to arise at any time during our practice. We don't necessarily need to stimulate them for them to arise. And this can be a sign of the maturation and deepening of our practice. Remember that yoga works its way from the outside in.
[00:13:26] And so when our practice goes beyond the physical and targets those inner layers of our emotions, it's a sign that we've created a baseline level of safety in our nervous system to actually feel our emotions instead of suppressing them. And this is a very good thing. And when we reach this stage in our practice, we might think that yoga's no longer working because it doesn't leave us feeling good.
[00:13:51] But in actual fact, it's working on a much deeper layer. Even though clearing it doesn't feel good. As humans, we're meant to experience the full spectrum of emotions. Yet we try to exclude the negative and chase the positive. You see, we've had limited education on how to deal with our negative feelings, so we just suppress them instead.
[00:14:15] But suppressing our emotions doesn't make them go away. It just buries the feelings deep into our body, where we experience them as tension and anxiety. So here's a really common scenario. Imagine you're at work and someone makes a comment that gets under your skin. Your heart beats faster, you clench your jaw, your belly tightens.
[00:14:36] But it's not appropriate to express your anger at work, so you just suck it up and get on with it. And when you get home, you might be pissed, you might be in a bad mood, but rather than dealing with the emotion and moving it through your body, maybe you just pour a drink and watch Netflix and try to forget about the day's drama.
[00:14:54] These daily micro frustrations and disappointments tend to accumulate. They end up stored in our body and subconscious mind and we experience them as muscle tension, fatigue and anxiety. And I see this a lot with my yoga alchemy of clients who experience anxiety. When I work with these clients over the course of seven months, I teach them practical tools to regulate their nervous system and how to move their emotions through their body.
[00:15:25] And as a result, their anxiety lessens, sometimes resolves completely. Because beneath anxiety is often big, unexpressed emotions like rage, anger, grief, shame, guilt, fear. And when clients learn how to safely express and release these emotions from their body, they often feel less anxious. Now if you think about it, opposites are everywhere in the world.
[00:15:50] We've got yin and yang, night and day, inhale and exhale. But when it comes to our emotions, we have very little tolerance for the negative. It's like we're holding our breath, forgetting to exhale. And ironically, when we learn to acknowledge and express our negative emotions, we expand our capacity to experience the positive emotions too.
[00:16:13] Because when we numb, block, or avoid any emotion, it reduces our ability to feel all emotions, including the positive ones. And humans are designed to feel the full spectrum of emotions. Emotions are what give meaning to our lives. And if you ask someone about the best moment in their life, they usually describe a peak emotional experience.
[00:16:38] And so, think of emotions on a spectrum. On one end of the spectrum, we have the pleasant, positive emotions like love, joy, happiness. On the other end of the spectrum, we have the uncomfortable emotions like anger and shame. And society conditions us to chase after the positive emotions while ignoring, suppressing, or numbing the negative emotions.
[00:17:02] But emotions provide contrast and meaning to our lives. We can't just feel the positive ones and ignore the uncomfortable ones. That's just not how it goes. And just like a good artist can't just paint in bright colours, they need dark colours to provide contrast and to make the bright even brighter. We need the full spectrum of emotions to give meaning to our lives.
[00:17:24] And a lot of people are stuck in a really limited emotional range. They just feel blah or meh all the time. They're in this mid range of not bad, but not good either. These people aren't depressed necessarily. They've just blocked their access to happy emotions because they've blocked all emotions. Think of emotions like energy.
[00:17:48] They're chemical messengers that provide sensation to our thoughts. And when we feel a strong emotion, it's a sign that this means something to us, this is important, even if it's uncomfortable. Unlike energy, emotions need to flow. Emotions like to move, they don't like to stay stuck. And emotions aren't permanent, they're like the weather and they're constantly changing.
[00:18:14] Just like we can have long stretches of sunny days, and then some dark and stormy periods, but the sun always returns. Our emotions are similar when we allow them to flow. But when we don't allow ourselves to feel the emotion, for whatever reason, it's too hard, too painful, or we don't know how to, we end up storing that emotion in the body.
[00:18:36] And in our society, a display of emotion is often considered a weakness. As kids, we were told not to cry, to cheer up, and we got in trouble if we displayed anger. We've grown up believing our emotions problem and not to be trusted. No one gave us an education on how to deal with our emotions. And the emotions that we don't express are stored in the body.
[00:19:02] And often they're stored as muscle tension, fatigue, and anxiety. Emotional numbness prevents us from feeling positive emotions like joy, love, and excitement. It requires an extraordinary amount of energy to suppress our emotions, and this can lead to fatigue or existential tiredness. Emotions are not the enemy, provide important meaning to life and carry significant wisdom.
[00:19:32] And if we ask most people what they want in life, their response is often that they just want to be happy. And when we ask them to recall the happiest moments of their lives, it's usually a peak emotional experience. Our emotions give meaning to our lives and they're extremely important to the quality of our lives.
[00:19:49] Now, anger is an incredibly healing emotion. There's a lot of energy available to use when we feel angry, and we can channel or transmute that energy into making a change or making a difference. Anger is a really normal human emotion. Yet all too often it's been conflated with violence or aggression.
[00:20:12] Anger is needed for survival as it can energize us and motivate us to take action. Yet a lot of us feel ashamed for feeling angry because we incorrectly associate it with violence or loss of control. Culturally, anger is unacceptable and unfeminine. Sometimes we feel like we don't deserve to feel angry because others have it worse.
[00:20:34] Well, many of us were taught to suppress our anger, and we try very hard to hold it together, convincing ourselves and everyone that we've got a handle on things. And when we suppress our anger, we contract. We tense up, we tighten, we brace ourselves as we go out into the world. And there's a lot of energy in anger, which is why suppressing it has such a negative effect on our health.
[00:20:58] It traps so much emotional charge, or energetic charge, which causes tension, anxiety, and exhaustion. And another downside to unexpressed anger is that we can often direct it towards ourselves in the form of judgment, criticism, sabotage, and self loathing. Releasing suppressed anger was a huge part of my healing journey from breast cancer, as I'd spent so long suppressing anger because I thought it was bad.
[00:21:26] I didn't even realize how much anger I had suppressed. But once I learned how to safely move it through my body, I felt so much better. And one of the things I teach in Yoga Alchemy is a healthy way to process our emotions by moving what we're feeling. Movement is a great way to release and discharge our pent up emotions.
[00:21:47] It's a really healthy and controlled form of emotional hygiene. And some of my favorite ways of releasing anger are shaking my body, stomping my feet, non linear movement, punching or kicking a bolster, Yes, I still do that. It's actually incredibly, cathartic to punch or kick a bolster and yelling or screaming.
[00:22:12] Sometimes when I go swimming, I scream under the water. It's a great way to discharge that pent up energy. So my friend, next time you catch yourself feeling angry on the yoga mat, it's a sign that yoga is working on the deeper layers. Remember that emotions are temporary. They always pass and the more we allow ourselves to feel the full spectrum of emotions.
[00:22:37] The better we'll feel. And if you're curious about the emotional side of yoga, then you might be interested in my yoga alchemy program. I'm still finalizing the details for the next round, but if you join the wait list, you can save 500 off the next round. And the link to learn more will be in the show notes of this episode.
[00:22:58] And remember, everyone gets angry. It's how we deal with it that matters. And yoga has the potential for incredible emotional healing. Till next time my friend.