Your hips are your emotional junk drawer

Hips support more than our pants, they also hold onto our feelings.

Hips support more than our pants, they also hold onto our feelings.

You know that drawer you have in your kitchen where you store all the junk, the odds and ends?

Or the glove box in your car that is a Pandora’s Box of rubbish, stale chewy wrappers and important stuff?

Well, bodies also have storage systems - the hips.

Even before Goop was a twinkle in Gwyneth’s eye, hips have long been associated with storage lockers for emotions, trauma and stress. 

I bet you an alternative milk latte, you’ve heard yoga teachers mention the significance of the hips during slower paced classes like yin. Poses held for five or more minutes with concentrated breathing - proper deep into the pit of your stomach breathing known as diaphragmatic breathing which lowers cortisol levels and calms you down - help release tight muscles and sometimes, feelings.

Back in 1985 American neuroscientist Candace Pert discovered that small proteins in the brain activate the circuits linked to our emotions. 

“Your body is your subconscious mind,” Professor Pert said, adding the physical body can change depending on what we’re feeling. 

Her work involved exploring the brain and she became a huge proponent of alternative medicine in her research.

In Pert’s paper “Neuropeptides and their receptors: a psychosomatic network”, she referred to emotions as “electrochemical signals”, sparks that are carried around the body which subsequently sees our emotions expressed, experienced and stored in our minds and bodies.

While we were all trying to calm down our vagus nerves during lockdowns and other bouts of pandemic induced anxiety, in 2021 three researchers from universities in Vancouver and Germany doubled down on Pert’s work and the wisdom of yogis.

The study, sexily titled “Biomolecular basis of cellular consciousness via subcellular nanobrains”, outlines how cells in humans are “cognitive and intentional”. 

Thanks to all this research and a deeper interest in eastern medicine taken on board by us in the west, not to mention witnessing a lot of people cry while laying on their yoga mats, the connection between mind and body is strong.

Judging by book sales, most of us spent the summer devouring, dissecting and dog-earring Lucia Osborne-Crowley’s memoir, My Body Keeps Your Secrets.

“This is a story about…how, despite our best efforts, the body finds a way to express what the mind cannot,” Osborne-Crowley wrote, recounting her rape at 15. Something she didn’t talk about until she doubled over in pain 18-months later. She tried to bury what happened, her body rejected the secret.

My Body Keeps Your Secrets continues the work of psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk’s studies published in The Body Keeps The Score, a tome which became a New York Times best seller following a new audience discovering it on TikTok recently. Both books explore how stress is expressed by bodies in ways that are involuntary and can make us physically sick.

So what’s with the hips? 

It’s got a lot to do with the way we listen to our bodies and seeing what they are trying to tell us about our emotional health. 

According to the “somatics” of eastern medicine, the hips hold emotions and can be a window for healing. 

The area of the body is where the psoas lives. A deep ab muscle that helps support the core, the spine and connects the upper and lower parts of the body. It is also the CEO of an internal corporation called the sympathetic nervous system, where our fight or flight responses are activated. 

Stiffness and tight hips - also symptoms of our increasingly sedentary lifestyles and hours spent sitting at a desk or hunched over our phones - can also indicate stress is “trapped”.

A concept Byron Bay based yogi and Organically Wealthy founder, Maryanne Edwards frames her classes around. 

"Yin poses as pressing on any kinks in the hoses of our energy channels, if anything has been stuck in those corridors it can feel freeing to nudge them and when energy moves the release can often be expressed as a cry, a sound, a temperature change," Edwards said.  

 

 

How do we keep our hips, and therefore our brains and emotions, healthy?

 

"Movement!," Edwards exclaimed. "In the whole range of the hip socket but also the muscles around - the lower back, the hamstrings, the quads. The second chakra is likened to the element water so any slow fluid movement is wonderful." 

For those who follow the chakra system, it’s also where the sacral energy centre is based. An area in the body where some believe creative energy and sexuality lives, which is also linked to how you relate to your emotions and the emotions of others. 

According to therapist and Eastern Body, Western Mind and Wheels of Life author Anodea Judith, a blocked sacral chakra can lead to emotional instability as well as reductions in pleasure. 

When the hips are tight and contracted, it’s possible that sacral energy that is not processed or expressed remains stuck there niggling away at our hip flexors. Which is why in some stretches like low lunges can make us feel teary or fill us with white hot with rage during pigeon pose.

The hips are the nark of the body, they know what’s going on before you even realise. Shakira was right all along, they don’t lie. 

Illustrations: Emilia Tortorella

Yoga instructions: Sophie Gallagher, Vinyasa and Restorative Yoga Teacher