"In a fight or flight situation, your muscles respond by tensing up. If you think of your pelvis as the center point for your body to work off of when trying to get away from trauma, and your body's response to trauma includes making your muscles tense, it makes sense that your hips tend to store a lot of tension."
This unconscious tension can be held from one traumatic event, or lots of little events where the stress of feelings like sadness, fear and worry are stored and can get stuck. No matter how you say it, stretching the hip muscles causes a release and allows stored emotion to melt away.
People with trauma, stress or mental illnesses such as anxiety and depression often suffer physical symptoms as well. In all of this, there may be one common link: the hips. Neuroscience indicates that the hips are a potential storage vessel for emotions.
Stretching the hip muscles causes a release; pent-up emotions may resurface, suppressed memories may arise, unconscious tension still held onto from a traumatic event may bubble up. All of which may unleash a seemingly inexplicable barrage of tears.
Tight hips, psoas, and hip flexors can mean that we're hesitant about facing the future. More specifically, we fear living up to our own expectations and those laid out by others.
The sacral chakra is associated with the color orange and the element of water. When the sacral chakra is blocked, it can affect your hips, kidneys, pelvis, sexual organs, and lower back. Issues affected by the second charka are sexuality, creativity, pleasures, movement, intimacy, empathy, and change.
You may deal with somatic symptoms such as pain or digestive distress or feel a steady stream of anxiety. This is because trauma is stored in the body in your nervous system as an overactive stress response.
Grief can be stored in various parts of the body, such as the heart, lungs, throat, and stomach. People may also experience physical sensations like heaviness in the chest or tightness in the throat when experiencing grief.
For some people, the tremors are big movements in the muscles. For others, they are tiny contractions that feel like electrical frequencies moving through the body. TRE® is not painful—in fact, most people enjoy the sensations.
To sum up, since hip muscles are where emotions are trapped caused by events that switch your fight or flight mode, working on deep tissues in hip-focused postures like pigeon pose can release both physical and emotional stress.
Practice mindfulness to get better at recognizing your feelings and observing the bodily sensations connected to those feelings, as they come and go throughout the day. Offer yourself self-compassion as you go through more difficult emotions. PRACTICE: Sit still for few minutes with your eyes closed.
Like a virus in our encoding system, unprocessed traumatic memories can become sticking points that cause our mental and physical processes to malfunction. Early evidence of cellular memory shows that it's not just our brain, but our body's cells that could hold an imprint of past traumatic events.
Unresolved trauma puts people at increased risk for mental health diagnoses, which run the gamut of anxiety, depression and PTSD. There are physical manifestations as well, such as cardiovascular problems like high blood pressure, stroke or heart attacks.
Crying is not a bad thing. In fact, it's how your body releases pent-up energy after a traumatic or distressing event. During your recovery period, let yourself feel your emotions. After crying, you may feel like a weight's been lifted off your shoulders.
As more and more research comes out about the long-term effects of trauma, we're also learning about how to help the body heal from it. Massage therapy for trauma release is highly effective for many people.
The biggest cause of tightness is what we do all day long: sitting for too long is a major culprit in tightening the hip flexors. When you sit all day at a desk, the iliopsoas shortens, making the flexors tight.
Lower Back: Anger
If you sit in frustration, the lower back is a common place for storing repressed anger. For relief, learn to articulate frustration constructively and address conflicts with others.
Hip-opening poses activate Svadhisthana, the second or sacral chakra, located within the pelvis along the spine. This chakra energy center is about self-expression and creativity, and is located near the bladder, womb and ovaries. It is the source of sexual energy and passion.
There are numerous advantages to practicing Pigeon Pose. Emotional benefits: It is a primal reaction to store stress, trauma, fear and anxiety in the hips. These bottled up feelings create tight hips. – Pigeon Pose opens the hips and releases negative feelings and undesirable energy stored in your system.
Neck Tension = Fear and Repressed Self-Expression
Fear and anxiety are also frequently stored in this area, particularly as a physical response to danger (as the neck is a vulnerable area) or strange environments. Neck muscle tension is also related to trust issues.
Symptoms may include flashbacks, nightmares and severe anxiety, as well as uncontrollable thoughts about the event. Most people who go through traumatic events may have temporary difficulty adjusting and coping, but with time and good self-care, they usually get better.