Three Scientific Reasons Why You Can Get Emotional During Yoga

Yoga explores the physical body, the emotional body, the spirit, the mind, and how what makes up our own unique beings. Through movements and practices that work within the body to open muscles, send energy to connective tissue, and connect to the breath – the release of physical and emotional tension that is simultaneously stored occurs.

It is common during a yoga asana practice to feel a wave of emotions that seem to come out of nowhere. Discomfort and hatred towards the sensation an asana brings, overwhelming emotion such as sadness, melancholy, or uncertainty. Sometimes it is a surprising joy that can come up, as stagnant emotions are explored and released that can emit a feeling of relief like a weight taken off your shoulders.

Why is it that in pigeon pose you may all of a sudden feel a wave of emotion that you can’t explain? There is recent research revealing reasons and giving scientific backing to why this happens. Here we are exploring three reasons that could all go together in one reason, with different pieces of research that work together.

The Three Reasons:

1. Mind-Body Connection

2. Emotional Storing in the Body

3. Yoga Explores and Integrates Facets of Self

At some point, an experience led you under stress where your body reacted to the stressor, and emotional trauma was stored in your body. It does not have to be a particularly significant event that does this, it could be, but also can be the buildup of chronic tension. For example, when we get stressed or ticked off – our shoulders raise, fists tighten, jaw clenches and the tension in the body grows and accumulates.

So, where this accumulation of tension and emotional trauma is held in the body is explored within the practice of yoga. In yoga asana, the body is explored in postures that creates space, openness, compressed, and twisted that wakes up and wrings out stagnant emotional energy.

The Mind-Body Connection

As human beings, we each have a complex system of interactions and connections between the mind and body. The mind entails immense emotions, feelings, thoughts, and ideas with the physical body’s immense ocean of physiology. When the two are working together to create a stable internal environment to interact and respond to the external world, and allow connections to be made so that the mind can accurately listen to what the body needs and the body can interact with the mind and emotional needs. These facets of our beings all work together, impacting and interacting together with the positive, negative, and in between. We can positively impact our body with our mind, and our mind with our body. This happens in ways that are physiologically measurable and ways that cannot be measured, like emotions and ideas. In this society that we live in there is an emphasis on the external world and boxes for individuals to fit into. Comparison, money, stress, and fears of inadequacy