How Yoga Helps Regulate Emotions by Nicole

One of the surprising benefits of practicing yoga is the regulation of your emotional well

being. Most people, when going to a yoga class for the first time, are thinking along the lines of all the physical benefits of coming to a regular yoga practice: increasing strength, flexibility and being able to move easier. Every once in a while you get someone who is looking for stress reduction and relief. However, regulating emotions is a huge benefit that comes from the practice whether you are trying to achieve that or not. 

The power of the pose, sitting in a posture that is uncomfortable, say warrior 2. The body is using all the major muscle groups and because of that, your heartrate and breath is elevating. But since you are holding the postures a lot of times some sort of emotion will come up. Maybe is it anger at the teacher for making you hold a posture so long, maybe annoyance, impatience, mental tiredness, you just want to give up. Or maybe your body is getting physically tired since your not used to holding postures like this. This is when you have opportunity. 

The opportunity to change that initial reaction. The first step is to just notice it. What is coming up for you? Sometimes this step is the hardest. Its the awareness state after coming out of a state of being completely unaware of your reactions or blaming your reactions on your outside environment or the people around you. Your reactions are your own. Period. I get that there are a lot of situations that we can not train for, that push us beyond our capabilities, but if you are mentally strong from practicing awareness and regulations of your emotional mindspace, I do believe that we can react better. Make better decisions by staying in a calm mind and treat ourselves and those around us better. 

How many times have you yelled or acted out to someone you cared about, you could see yourself doing it and know in your heart that you actually don’t want to keep yelling but do anyway? This is that lack of control of reacting to your internal space. We first practice on our mats with a calm mind. Its always easier to practice things first before we are put in situations where we need those skills. Emotion regulation is no different. 

Back to the practice. Get on your mat. Maybe even bring a notebook with you so you can take notes for a few classes. This way, at the end of the practice, you can review what you went through. Let the teacher know why you are writing during class as you check into class, chances are your teacher will think you are reviewing them and get nervous about that, especially if they are a new teacher. 

Your notes can be something simple. Say you feel anger rise up at the long hold in a pose that is uncomfortable for you. Pause and write anger and the pose name. Later when reflecting back on your notes you can ask yourself why that came up and add that to it. Or you can write that down right away if you already know the answer. Sometimes it takes a bit of thought to really understand why an emotion came up. Then take it a bit further. Say, for instance, you found that anger rose up in crow pose because the teacher had given a bunch of options and none of them were helpful to you. Why would anger rise up because none of the options were working in this moment? Maybe its a feel of less than. Maybe a feeling of uselessness.  What happened right before the anger. Anger typically is a protective response. There is something else that we are experiencing and instead of experiencing less than or uselessness we react with anger instead. Once you discover the hidden emotion that caused the more obvious emotional response take it a step even further. 

Say you discovered that the anger you felt in crow pose because the teacher gave a bunch of options to make it accessible and none of the them worked for you was actually because you felt like you didn’t belong in the class because you couldn’t do crow pose and most of the people in the class could. Now ask yourself why did not being able to do crow pose make you feel like you didn’t belong? Is that a correct statement? The people around you may have much more experience than you do, have earned crow over the years and you are brand new. I bet many of those people could not do crow pose when they started. So why does that make you feel like you don’t belong in the class? Write down whatever comes up with that statement. The answers will sometimes surprise you. Sometimes we need to ask ourselves many times why we reacted that way before the answer comes up. It will eventually come up. I find that if my mind is too busy to listen, if I focus on my breath or do a seated meditation and practice stillness the answer will rise. 

Once the answer rises, whatever it may be, then is the opportunity to work through whatever it is. So, let’s go back to our example: The teacher gave a bunch of options for crow pose, I could not do any of them and then I felt angry. I felt angry because I felt like I didn’t belong. When I feel like I don’t belong it reminds me of when I was a child and I used to get made fun of for being different and now I get angry when I feel like I don’t fit in to something. At least for me, a lot of my responses are something that occurred when I was a child. But again, this is just an example. Don’t be surprised if your answer causes a physical emotional response. Sometimes our secrets create tears when they are finally uncovered. It is all apart of the process. Don’t be fearful of it. Light is on the other side. 

Once the answer comes up, or what I like to think of as the root of the emotional response, now we can change that. Then we create a script for ourselves. 

“No one is making fun of me, this emotional response is not relevant for this situation.” Sometimes we need to remind ourselves this many times until the response no longer occurs in the situation we have noticed it. It takes time, it is a practice. After you have gotten much practice about the emotional response in your yoga practice you can start to play around with your emotional responses to other areas of your life. Why did I get annoyed when my coworker asked me to repeat my lunch order? Why am I frustrated when I do the dishes? Why do I avoid letting my dog out even though I love my dog? The more me analyze the more we can understand, the more we understand the more we can grow within ourselves. 

Getting our emotional landscape in our awareness will help you stay calm when an emotion begins to arise. The habit of reacting immediately to whatever emotion comes up is just that, a habit, and habits can be changed with practice. Yoga is the perfect medium to do that. Yoga exposes the stress responses that our body has become accustomed to over a lifetime. Take the opportunity to stay calm in those moments over a consistent practice and that calmness will leak into our daily lives off the mat.