Feeling inflexible or stuck in a yoga Manly pose may be more than just your tight hamstrings. It could be an old feeling holding you back. You can have unexpressed emotions stored in your body over time, creating stress, physical tightness, tension and even pain.

Yoga is the best tool when it comes to releasing emotional tension in your body and experiencing the healing it brings.

Feeling emotional during yoga

During yoga, we start to unravel muscular tension and this process releases the associated emotions bound in our muscles. Yoga strengthens our mental, physical and emotional body and increases our capacity to process past traumas and difficult emotions.

The slow and deep breathing in yoga allows us to pay attention to the energies inside us. As breathing increases awareness and the receptiveness of the body we have an increased awareness of our emotional energies. Yoga poses encourage the unblocking of the energy channels in our body and this increases our ability for our emotions to flow.

The deep inner focus of yoga will naturally allow you to be more aware of the subconscious or forgotten emotions. As the light of yoga focus and awareness shine brighter, we are able to see inside our unconscious self. This means that we should be consistent in visiting a yoga studio.

Yoga tools for emotional release

As we start being aware of the inside of our body, we start feeling things that lie under the surface of our ordinary awareness.

During yoga, keep the mind focused on where you experience sensation when holding a yoga pose. Explore where the sensations begin, stop and travel to. You should also pay attention to any feelings or emotions that come up from these physical sensations. If emotional feelings come up, keep your focus on the sensation of your feeling and not the thoughts of your mind, memories and reactions.

Yogic breathing

We have several breathing techniques in yoga that can encourage emotions to be stimulated and even be brought to the surface. Dirga pranayama will bring awareness and energy to the belly, chest, hips, and even allow emotions to be released from deep within our body.

There are those emotions that lay near your body’s surface and Kapalabhati will stimulate and move those emotions and bring them up and out during yoga Manly. Breathing through your mouth will invoke the emotional body and is very effective in expressing emotions and releasing them after bringing them to the surface, especially grief and sadness. Hara breathing helps release frustrations and anger from your body.