This is an excerpt from Yoga Journal. I am familiar with this type of release happening in a hip opener or backbend class, but have never experienced it myself, until last night. Took a fantastic class from Ed Harrold - a very deep hip class, focused on the right side - which just happens to be my weak side and tight area. It was amazing, and felt like a soul pot-stirring. It's just one of those things that you can't understand until it happens to you.
It's a Good Thing
"The holistic system of yoga was designed so that these emotional breakthroughs can occur safely," says Joan Shivarpita Harrigan, Ph.D., a psychologist and the director of Patanjali Kundalini Yoga Care in Knoxville, Tennessee, which provides guidance to spiritual seekers. "Yoga is not merely an athletic system; it is a spiritual system. The asanas are designed to affect the subtle body for the purpose of spiritual transformation. People enter into the practice of yoga asana for physical fitness or physical health, or even because they've heard it's good for relaxation, but ultimately the purpose of yoga practice is spiritual development."
This development depends on breaking through places in the subtle body that are blocked with unresolved issues and energy. "Anytime you work with the body, you are also working with the mind and the energy system—which is the bridge between body and mind," Harrigan explains. And since that means working with emotions, emotional breakthroughs can be seen as markers of progress on the road to personal and spiritual growth.
That was certainly the case for Hilary Lindsay, founder of Active Yoga in Nashville, Tennessee. As a teacher, Lindsay has witnessed many emotional breakthroughs; as a student, she's experienced several herself. One of the most significant occurred during a hip-opening class. She left the class feeling normal, but during the drive home became extremely upset and emotional. She also felt she'd experienced a significant shift in her psyche—something akin to a clearing of her spirit. Lindsay felt, as she puts it, released. "There is no question that the emotion came out of my past," she says.
By the next day, her opinion of herself had taken a 180-degree turn. She realized she was a person who needed to constantly prove herself to be strong and capable, and saw that this was partly the result of an image instilled by her parents. Her spirit actually needed to recognize and accept that she was a proficient person and ease off the internal pressure. This realization, Lindsay says, was life-changing.
Not every spontaneous emotional event is quite so clear-cut, however. Difficult and stressful breakthroughs occur most often when the release involves long-held feelings of sadness, grief, confusion, or another strong emotion that a person has carried unconsciously throughout his or her life.
"Whenever something happens to us as a kid, our body is involved," says Michael Lee, founder of Phoenix Rising Yoga Therapy, which is headquartered in West Stockbridge, Massachusetts (see "Therapy on the Mat," below). "This is particularly true of trauma. The body comes to the defense of the whole being. In defending it, the body does things to stop the pain from being fully experienced.
"Emotional pain is overwhelming for small children, because they don't have the resources to deal with it," he continues. "So the body shuts it off; if it didn't, the body would die from emotional pain. But then the body keeps doing the physical protection even long after the situation has ended."
Painful experiences, Lee adds, can range from small, acute ones to intense, chronic problems. Still, the mechanism at play is unclear: "We really don't understand the body-memory thing," he says, "at least in Western terms."
The Body-Mind Connection
In yogic terms, however, there is no separation between mind, body, and spirit. The three exist as a union (one definition of the word yoga); what happens to the mind also happens to the body and spirit, and so on. In other words, if something is bothering you spiritually, emotionally, or mentally, it is likely to show up in your body. And as you work deeply with your body in yoga, emotional issues will likely come to the fore.
In the yogic view, we all hold within our bodies emotions and misguided thoughts that keep us from reaching samadhi, defined by some as "conscious enlightenment." Any sense of unease or dis-ease in the body keeps us from reaching and experiencing this state. Asanas are one path to blissful contentment, working to bring us closer by focusing our minds and releasing any emotional or inner tension in our bodies.
Though the ancient yogis understood that emotional turmoil is carried in the mind, the body, and the spirit, Western medicine has been slow to accept this. But new research has verified empirically that mental and emotional condition can affect the state of the physical body, and that the mind-body connection is real. (Newsweek and Time both dedicated issues to the topic last year.)
Many doctors, psychotherapists, and chiropractors are embracing these findings, and are now recommending yoga to help patients deal with problems that only a few years ago would have been viewed and treated solely in biomechanical terms.
Hilary Lindsay recently experienced this firsthand. "I woke up one morning with my body completely distorted," she remembers. "I went to see a chiropractor, who told me plainly, 'There's nothing wrong with you physically.'" The doctor suggested she try a Phoenix Rising session, which she did. The practitioner put Lindsay into some supported yogalike positions on the floor. "He did not focus on anything more than, 'Here's this pose and how does it feel?' I would say something; he would repeat my word and say, 'What else?' until I would say there was finally nothing else." The therapist never analyzed or discussed what Lindsay said, but still, she felt he helped her to see her problem.
"When I drove off on my own, I realized my words had just painted a clear picture of my approach to life," she says. "I saw a power-driven maniac who was probably in the process of driving herself nuts."
As the day went on, she felt physically healed, and attributes that to the emotional outcome of the session, which the asanas helped her access. In other words, she was able to release the distortion in her body only by releasing her inner tension.
"I did not have any repeat of the symptoms," Lindsay adds, "and I felt the calm that comes with knowing yourself a little more than you did before. The awareness does not occur like the lightbulb over the cartoon guy's head. It doesn't come ahead of its time. The student has to be ready to receive it."
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