Tight hips

on stiffness, teaching yoga, and repressed men

There’s a particular pose I sometimes incorporate into my yoga classes that appears impossible for the men to do. It’s called Firelog pose and involves stacking the shins on top of one another. I have to then make the guys in class do a different pose entirely, albeit one that still stretches the hips.

I remember when I first started doing yoga, in my drawing room from downloaded hour-long videos by Travis Eliot. He had (has) a particularly dramatic style of teaching that I probably wouldn’t resonate with now, but I fell in love with Savasana through his classes. Moving my body like that was super challenging and that rest in the end…yum. But another thing I remember hearing him say (and I have heard this from other yogis and movement practitioners also) is that we tend to store emotions in our hips. Some we store in the shoulders, some in the hips. These are the areas we tend to get the tightest in, at least in my experience. They’re a big muscle group, and I was never really sure what it meant to ‘store emotions’ in a body part or muscle. Let’s explore that a little.

First of all, what do your hips do for you? They’re connected to either side of your pelvis, and the entire joint bears weight, stabilizes your core, and helps you move your upper leg. If you’re tight in there, everything goes wonky. You overcompensate with anterior pelvic tilt which misaligns your head and neck and you can imagine how that might affect your stiffness and pain levels, although you’ve probably already felt the implications of this in your back at some point.

According to an article about this on Healthline, “neuroscience and somatics point to the hips as a potential storage vessel of emotions. They also offer a window into emotional healing.” The psoas, located in the pelvis and connected to the front of our hip, provides deep support to the core, which essentially is where we wanna move from no matter what we’re doing. So if the psoas is weak, your core is weak. And a lot of the pain and stiffness we experience comes down to what we’ve all heard before: poor posture.

But what about the emotional stuff? I know and understand it intuitively, but what’s the science? Within the psoas are the kidneys and the adrenal glands, responsible for: fight, flight, freeze. Bodily responses to stressful situations. Whenever you’re stressed by something small or large, you will notice a tightening. This is why there’s a big focus in yoga on the breath, because even if a pose feels challenging you want to use the breath as a cue to remind your body that you’re safe and it’s okay, it doesn’t need to worry. When you worry, you tighten. Even after that stress is long gone, the bodily memory of it stays.

Late neuroscientists Candace Pert, apparently quite famously, quoted that the “body is our subconscious mind.” Emotions are little electrochemical signals that carry messages, which are then stored in various areas of our bodies. This influences brain activity too - and the overall message here is that cells carry consciousness. Wild. Again, I know this intuitively but when a neuroscientist says it I don’t feel quite so woo-woo.

So… people with pain and stiffness will come to a yoga class, and they will maybe do the somatic practices and they will maybe get more massages. And maybe it will help. But I wanna come back to the thought I had about this tightness in men. It can’t be that they are naturally ‘like this’ and women are more flexible. I know a man or two who have been practicing yoga and working on flexibility for years, but they’re not able to get there, but I can also think of man-yogis who are way more flexible than I am. Perhaps strengthening and stretching are of negligible use when you’re not aware of where you store your emotions. And I can say without really digging into the research that men just do not have that awareness most of the time. They’re far less in tune with their feelings and of course they are, they were told to stop crying when they were 3 years old. Why should they let their emotions hold any validity?

Maybe people already know this, and maybe it’s obvious. But it’s starting to make sense that a purely physical practice may not be enough to release a tightness that has been in the body’s memory for years or even a lifetime.

I’m tired of reading articles that tell you to go talk to a professional. Being on the receiving end, it feels impersonal and like I am a problem that needs fixing. I’m beginning to think that number one for nearly anything at all is self-awareness. To notice where I feel something.

Anxiety? In the stomach and gut.

Worry? Same, but also a little in the face.

Love? In the chest/heart, but also a little bit everywhere.

Anger? In my jaw.

Learning this is good for me. I acknowledge the responsibility that it is to guide people through a movement practice, especially one that can provide deep release and healing. I have a sense that everyone’s practice is their own and this prevents me from saying too much so that they may have their own experience. But knowing this will hopefully bring a little more awareness and sensitivity to what I offer, in class and outside of it.