Why Yoga Makes You Cry; Here’s Why That’s Good

Ever cried or had a surprising emotional release during yoga and wondered what just happened? In this episode, we get into the why (the science and the subtle) of these common tender moments, trace it back to something powerful and name part of what makes yoga so healing. If you're on a journey know yourself more, grow, heal and expand you might find answers here to why emotions rise, tears flow and ease settles in every time you roll out your mat. 

This episode was a direct response to a question I've been asked too many times to count over the years. If you have a question you'd like me to answer email or DM on Instagram. 

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Meet Keri Marino 

Keri Marino is a Somatic Yoga Therapist and founder of The Nourished Woman, helping women move beyond overwhelm, anxiety, and self-doubt into embodied confidence and nervous system balance. Through women’s empowerment yoga, somatic healing, and inner work, she guides women to regulate their bodies, break old patterns, and reconnect with their strength, pleasure, and purpose. Her approach blends grounded spirituality with practical tools for real-life transformation.

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Transcript

Welcome And Theme Of Safety

SPEAKER_00 0:25

Welcome to the Nourished Woman Podcast, a space for women who've been doing the work to grow and heal and are ready to feel good again, body, mind, and soul. I'm your host, Carrie Marino, somatic yoga therapist of over 16 years, mentor and mama of three. I help women like you fall in love with how yoga makes you feel. Alchemize the hard things you've been through and experience more pleasure and aliveness in your body and relationships. I'm so glad you're here. Let's dive in. I just know I can't survive. Without mystery. And it's one that I feel like so many of you are wondering about. And so I want to talk about it. And the question is why do I cry when I'm practicing yoga? And first off, I want to just normalize that any yoga teacher, any yoga therapist will tell you that crying in yoga class or crying when you're doing yoga is just routine. Like it happens in nearly every class I teach at some point, or in every workshop, or it happens to me even after having practiced yoga for 20 years. I frequently cry when I'm practicing yoga. And there's a very specific reason for this. And if you are somebody that is taking an in-person class and maybe you feel a little bit shy about having some tears come, or maybe you're working privately with me or with another yoga therapist or yoga teacher, and some tears are coming up, you are so not alone. This is normal and frankly to be expected, and actually a really good sign that you're feeling safe enough that you can cry. I know we can all relate or have heard stories of women who want to cry and can't, and what a gift it is to have some tears flow. Am I right? So let's talk about what's happening and why tears come easily when we're practicing yoga. And first off, yoga is a pretty unique place for most of us. It is a space of slowing down, it is a practice of tuning in, and it is usually somewhere that we're guided. We're told what to do and how long to be in a pose and when to rest, and we're given options and ideas. And like, can you even think of another space in your life where you're told to slow down and tune in and you're guided in a really gentle way, in a loving way? You're guided by somebody who has a kind of presence that you resonate with and you notice yourself responding to. That is a natural environment for emotions to come up. And especially if we compare that to any other type of practice where you might be guided to move your body. Like if you compare it to an exercise class, which obviously yoga is so much more than exercise, yoga is medicine, yoga is nourishment, yoga is a sacred relationship that you have with your whole self. But if you compare exercise classes to a yoga experience, when you're in an exercise class, there might be loud music or bright lights, and there might be a like a performance aspect of performing and getting it right and doing it right, and you know, not looking like a fool in front of the other people. And a real yoga class, like a true yoga experience, is not about performance, and it is likely happening happening in an environment where there is more ambient light and a more relaxing and soothing environment. And it's a journey of self-connection and inner awareness. And again, that's that's a recipe, my love, for you to feel some different feelings. And then also, emotions don't just live in your mind, emotions are in your body. And whenever you're moving through a yoga practice, your nervous system is receiving medicine, your fascia, your body, somatically, you're receiving all these different therapeutic benefits. And the combination of the different poses and the rest and the breathing and the soothing music and the presence and the voice of the person that you're practicing with and they're guiding you, like all of those things are communicating some very specific messages to your nervous system that in an ideal world are going to make you feel less stressed. They're gonna help you shift out of fight or flight states or fawn or freeze states and into something called the window of tolerance. And when you're in the window of tolerance, you have access to your broader emotional range. So when you're in fight or flight or fawn or freeze, for example, which are not inherently bad states for you to be, they're just natural places where your nervous system will go. But we don't want to live our day-to-day life in fight, flight, fawn, or freeze. We want to be able to move through all the different states of the nervous system. So when you're in fight or flight or fawn or freeze, you're gonna have a smaller window, a smaller list of emotions that will be possible for you. So you might be more prone to anger or irritability. You might be more prone to anxiousness, you might be less emotionally aware in general of your own inner self and more like taking the emotional temperature of the people around you. So you're gonna have a smaller list of emotions that are coming up for you when you're in those states, versus when you're doing a yoga practice and it's helped you to access the window of tolerance and to downregulate or upregulate so that you're in that space, then your full emotional range is now possible. So you could feel grief and you could feel sadness and you could feel hopeless and you could feel joy and you could feel really intense love and you could feel an immense amount of gratitude, gratitude, and you might feel shame, and you might feel rage, and you might feel like any number of things are then possible. Because as you've been moving and practicing stillness with your body, you've quite literally been moving and practicing stillness with your emotions, and then your nervous system is shifting into this window of tolerance where all of those emotions are then possible for you to feel. And again, I've said it many times like this is a natural environment for those emotions to want to come out, and tears are actually your nervous system regulating for you. It's they're amazing. I personally love to cry. Like, how real how better, how relaxed do you feel if you're not uncontrollably crying? Because that's different. But how like how much relief do you feel when you've had a good cry? And then the final piece that I want to address is that when we're practicing yoga, we're really tuning in, you're tuning in to your entire self. You are becoming more connected to your body and your breath. You're becoming, whether you know it or not, more in touch with your energy body that lives inside of you, your subtle body. You're more in tune with your mind, you're more in tune with what's going on in your in your thoughts, you're witnessing your emotions, you're aware of your intellect and all of your intelligence, all of your knowledge, like you're more in touch with all of these parts. And you're also aware of the fact that you live in a life, right? Like your yoga practice doesn't happen in a vacuum. Maybe you're a mom, maybe you're a sister, maybe you're a friend, maybe you're a dog owner, right? Like you, maybe you're whatever it is that you do for your work, like you're more in touch with you as a whole person who exists inside of this system of a life and has a body and an energy body and a mind, and who also at the very core is a soul. You are a spirit, you are a spirit having a human experience. And so this journey of really being with your entire self is very disarming. Like the part of you that might feel a need to protect in order to belong, she's not going to be so active when you're in this place because you have a sense of belonging from within you. I was reading an article the other day, and it was talking about how people who cry during movies are actually like that's a sign of your ability to process emotion in real time. And this is a sign of healing. This is evidence of growth and healing because you're you're able to move through the emotions as they're coming up in the present moment and to let them process for you and work through for you. Another follow-up question, this particular woman named Miranda. Thank you, Miranda, for asking this question about why we cry in yoga class. Miranda is a therapist, and so she was wanting to know, she was asking about this for her client, and she asked me, should I tell my client to continue to let herself cry, or do I give her some other advice about what to do when she's crying in yoga class? And I will tell you what I told Miranda. And it's basically as long as you feel safe and secure enough to say yes to crying, absolutely just let it move through you. And obviously, if you're in like a studio class, you're not gonna do like guttural crying. You mean you might want to go outside if you're gonna do that. But if you're at home and you are doing like a home practice, or you're in a private session and you just feel like those deep guttural cries want to come out, or if you feel any degree of tears want to come out, soft, silent tears that just kind of roll down your cheek. Like if you can, if you feel safe enough and secure enough in your environment, say yes. Say yes to letting this process, to letting this happen, to letting those tears move through you. Recognize it for what it is. It's you feeling safe, it's you feeling resourced, it's your nervous system feeling relaxed, it's emotion moving through you in real time, it's evidence of your growth and healing, it's evidence of your emotional intelligence increasing, it's evidence that you're feeling like you can feel your whole range. And this is literally what coming home to yourself feels like. It is what nervous system medicine feels like, it is what embodiment feels like, it is what self-love and self-connection feels like. So if you're crying in yoga class, good on you, babe. You're doing great work, and you're not alone. There's me and literally millions of women around the globe who are crying with you, and it's a totally normal and natural physiological response that can happen. So there's a little nugget of yoga therapy science for you. I'd love to hear how this lands for you, and I'll see you next week for another episode. Thank you so much for listening to the Nourished Woman podcast. I would love to hear what resonated with you and what you're carrying with you out into your life. Send me a message on Instagram at the Nourished Woman or even in my email. Your messages really mean the world to me, so don't be shy. The beautiful music that you're hearing is by Sean Johnson and the Wild Lotus Band. You can find them on all streaming platforms. I'll see you next week for another episode.