Put on a brave face. You don’t want to upset others. Don’t let your opponents know how you’re feeling. Use your poker face. Grin and bear it. There’s no crying in baseball!
These are all familiar sayings from my past. As an athlete, I learned to not show my emotions. If I blew a balance beam routine, I would turn and smile at the judges after my dismount and then I’d march off and crumble in the corner completely out of sight. Heaven forbid that anyone knew what I was feeling, especially when I was being judged for it!
It’s taken deep awareness and effort to un-learn the act of stuffing down my feelings. It’s easier for me to hit the mute button then to let the emotions rise to the surface.
So why change? Why not maintain the stoicism? Because eventually it will catch up with you. You can’t hide what you’re feeling or trick your body into ignoring the tough emotions. Many people believe that if we stuff feelings, tamp them down tightly that the body becomes un-easy and can lead us more rapidly into states of “dis-ease”. Yup…it can make us physically sick.
Ever had the experience of being verbally abused and ending up with a stomach ache? Ever had a pending deadline and when the work is done, you’ve got a pounding headache? That’s what I’m talking about.
And this is the beauty of yoga.
Yoga is about bringing ourselves into harmony…all aspects of ourselves, not just the bits we like and gravitate toward. The good, the bad and yes, the ugly. Yoga teaches us to simply bear witness to the present moment. In this moment, I feel _____. OK, now in this next moment, this _____ is my experience.
It teaches us to be ok with what is, to bring our breath into the experience and maintain a sense of balance and equanimity. Can I find my breath when someone is berating me? Can I open myself to what I’m feeling rather than shoving it down deep into the crevices of my being?
Emotions come up during our yoga practice, sometimes in the form of a giggling cascade of laughter, other times in deep heavy tears. I love the saying, “all emotions are valid” and our yoga mat is a safe place to have this ebb and flow of experience. I remember a client saying to me, “you put me in that pose and it made me cry”. Well, I didn’t actually make her cry, something arose within her own body, perhaps a stored, tamped down memory and her reaction to that physical experience was the emotion of crying. In other words, the pose was just the channel used to release whatever it was that needed moving.
I have had many emotional experiences in my yoga career ranging from the most hysterical gut wrenching laughter to the deepest of grieving sob sessions. And either way, I feel better for it. I feel as though I have allowed myself to release the need to “keep it together”. I felt free.
