Feeling your feelings:

One of the greatest gifts of yoga is that it invites us to embrace our humanness. Our nature to think and feel so much every single day is what makes being human so unique. Sometimes it seems our minds just don’t ever stop thinking (because they don’t!), and sometimes we might feel the entire spectrum of emotions in one day! Whew. This can easily become overwhelming if we don’t have practices in place to help us manage.

Enter, yoga…

Yoga and Emotional Wellness

The key to managing our emotions and thoughts is our awareness. Once we realize that we are not our thoughts or feelings, but the one witnessing them, we embark on the path of healing and transformation — the path that takes us on the journey to creating a life we love.

Yoga postures give us various opportunities to be in whatever experience we are having without the need for it to be different. Yoga is a practice of letting go of resistance and letting life be what it is — and life is emotional. Through returning to our breath, over and over again, we return to the present moment, over and over again. We acknowledge, and let go. Acknowledge, and let go again. We can feel the fear, the anger, the sadness, and acknowledge that it is just passing through. We can let it bubble up to the surface and continue on its way. We train ourselves to live more fully in the present, less attached to what we are experiencing in our body and mind. The cultivation of this space between what we are experiencing and who we are has a direct impact on our quality of life. The more aware we are, the more present we are.

Learning how to breathe through difficult situations (aka yoga postures) is one of the greatest gifts of our practice on the mat.

It is with — and only with — this loving awareness of the nature of our humanness that we become able to make the changes in our lives necessary to build the life we want. To change anything, we must become aware of it first. This process of loving awareness + embracing change becomes an ongoing cycle that perpetuates our greatest work of art: the masterpiece of our life.

The 5 Core Emotions

I’ve been reading Gabrielle Roth’s Maps to Ecstasy, and I can hardly put it down, y’all. Highly recommend. I absolutely love the way she speaks about the core emotions, so much so that I wanted to share it with you here today.

Below are the central emotions that are vital to our well-being, as explained by Gabrielle Roth in her book, Maps to Ecstasy. I am quoting her directly here, as I love how beautifully she defines each:

1. Fear

“Fear is a vitally useful emotion. It places you on the alert, catalyzes your senses, and heightens your awareness in the face of danger. Fear is your friend, the radar for your voyage through life. It is a basic instinct for human survival — physical, psychological, spiritual. We need to have an acute sense of what threatens our well-being. Sensitive antennae well-tuned to danger signals allows us to spot and deal with threats as they occur. Fear teaches us to pay attention to what’s going on, and a well-honed sense of fear allows us to maintain dynamic equilibrium in an inevitably unpredictable world.”

2. Anger

“Anger is an integrity-protecting response to the invasion of your personal boundaries. It is a ‘no’ to a wrong, a violation. It draws lines and throws up barricades. Proper anger cuts like a knife through water. It is quick, clear, needs no explanation. It’s the barred teeth of a bitch protecting her litter, the arched back and hiss of a cat threatened by a coyote. There’s nothing cleaner, more effective than appropriate anger. Authentic anger is specified and justified, and its direct expression exposes impropriety and defends integrity in a way that benefits everyone.”

3. Sadness

“The pursuit of happiness is a national right, a universal obsession. And we think that the obvious way to be happy, to have the lilt, the sparkle, the high of happiness, is to avoid sadness. In fact, the opposite is true. It is only through accepting inevitable sadness that true joy is possible. For sadness is the healthy response to the blows to our expectations that are inevitable in living… Sadness, then, connects you to the core of your vulnerability and the primal attachments that constitute the web of your experience. It is an energy of release, a thunderstorm that breaks the tension and clears the air. It is a dissolving dance, a chaotic vibration at the cellular level, engendering a healing catharsis vital to your being’s fluidity and resilience. Sadness is the transforming medium in our lives that allows us to meld our rigidity, our longing for security, stability, and assurance, with the inevitability of change and the need for growth.”

4. Joy

“Joy is the expansive energy of dynamic well-being. It uplifts, energizes, makes our eyes shine, gives a lilt to our step, light to our whole being. Joy is naturally generous and relaxed and open. It comes when our emotional energy runs freely in a dynamic of appropriate responses to our experiences. Many of us experience the natural high that comes in running or dancing or other physical activities, when you reach the point where your body is moving wholly, naturally, unforced — like an animal’s — with everything working and in sync. Such joy comes, of course, only when the other emotions of fear, anger, or sadness flow.”

5. Compassion

“Compassion comes as the fruit of fear, anger, sadness, and joy. When you know these emotions in your everyday life, you can then empathize with them in others’ lives and begin to give people precisely what they really need. Compassion is not always a hug; sometimes it’s like a slap in the face. It involves being able to feel what another is feeling while remaining sufficiently detached to know what is needed and then to respond appropriately. You might feel someone’s pain, joy, fear, but it’s not yours; rather, the emotion connects you to them. If you’re truly compassionate, when someone is afraid it doesn’t make you afraid, but allows you to feel and relate to their fear. You can genuinely empathize because you’re free of muddling projections of your own.”

In your yoga practice this week, I invite you to practice welcoming all of your emotions. Join me on your mat at The Studio or online at Practice with Loren on YouTube.

I have an exciting studio update I’ll be sharing here soon, and some new offerings in the works for 2025 that I also can’t wait to tell you about. Thank you for being here! Check out this week’s practice below, an invitation to feel your feelings…