233 - Are Emotions Really Stored in Our Hips?

It's often said in yoga classes that emotions are stored in our hips. It's offered as a statement but today, I want to offer it as a question to explore. 

Takeaways

• Emotions are not necessarily stored in our hips; they are part of our overall human experience.
• We are more than one thing, and our emotions can be felt in various parts of our body.
• The hips are connected to the chakra system, representing safety, security, creativity, and expression.
• Pain, pleasure, and discomfort are subjective experiences that vary from person to person.
• Yoga practice can help us build a relationship with our bodies and explore different sensations and emotions.

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The music for this episode is Threads by The Light Meeting.
Produced by: Grey Tanner

Transcript

Bonnie (00:01.282)
Hello, my friends. Welcome back to the podcast. Today, I'm going to take on a statement that is said often in yoga. And that is that perhaps, maybe you've even heard the statement saying, emotions are stored in our hips. And I guess I wanna pose that as a question.

because it's so often said as a statement saying, emotions are stored in your hips. So, you know, if you have the feels or whatever in today's class, like that makes sense because emotions are stored in your hips. And it's a question or it's a statement, but I want to pose it as a question today and say, are emotions stored in our hips?

is that where emotions are stored in our body? Does that make sense? How could it be true? What do the hips represent? How do we, what are the types of experiences we might have in regards to our hips in a yoga class that might bring up emotion? Is that the only place we feel emotion in our body? Because if emotions are stored in our hips,

Like, is that like, is there a drawer? And does that exclude that we won't feel something in another part of our body? So this is where we're going to go today. And I am excited about it because I am an and person and think, well.

Could emotions be stored in our hips and not be stored in our hips at the same time? What would that mean? And I'm not interested in any sort of blanket statement and saying emotions are stored in our hips. As a blanket statement doesn't feel appropriate, it also doesn't feel appropriate to say emotions are not stored in our hips. And I'm gonna use the word stored and my understanding of it to say, when I think that people say the word stored,

Bonnie (02:16.142)
think like held, like that's where they're sitting, that's where they're resting. Um, and, and that we may be, maybe it said in a way that like, if, you know, you're not moving, if you move your hips more, that then those things are rustled around and so then you're going to feel them more or something to that effect. So that's my own interpretation of what I think of as stored, like, uh, yeah.

So there's that, but I love talking about the physical body. So let's talk physical body for a second. Because if we were to look at a skeleton, if we were to look at a skeleton and look at the hips and look at the way our femur, like our thigh bone is our femur femur.

and see where that attaches to our hips, our hips, we can grab on to our hands and our hips, right? Like those bony parts. Those are our hips. So our hips are connected to the rest of us. They do not act as solo players. They are where our legs connect to us and our femurs and a big, big giant bone from our legs for knees all the way up to our hips. That's our femur. And then they are connected on the backside of our body.

with the sacrum which is the and the tailbone and the sacrum so the tailbone is part of that system there and it went to our spine like the sacrum is part of the spine and then the spine is fused along the lines of the sacrum it's kind of like a triangle shape on the back side of the pelvis so for bones wise we have our femurs we have both our femurs we have our pelvis we have our spine and the different parts of our spine

And those are what is kind of being connected. Now there's, we could talk about more bones and more specifics of the different parts of the bones and what happens with them and et cetera. And the different shapes of them, that it totally exists by oftentimes by gender. So if you were born a sign male versus born a sign female, the shape of your hips might be different, but also bones change shape.

Bonnie (04:39.186)
And so depending on what your patterns of movement were, even as a child, that might make a difference of how your bones are as an adult. And the length of our bones is different. So even for me, and if you're listening and you are a teacher right now, or if you're somebody who practices yoga or does any sort of movement, and you're like, why is that so easy for that person? Or why is that so hard for that person? Their bones might be different shapes. Maybe my femur, my thigh bone.

is much longer than somebody else's, so it makes something easier or harder for me to do. And the angle at which my femur and my pelvis come together and that the bone, the kind of the round part of your femur, the way that is angled could make a difference in what and how my hips move. And this is fascinating.

because we could take the structure of the bones. And now we layer on muscles and tendons and ligaments and all different connected tissues and fascia. And we innervate it. That means put nerves in it. And we have the nerves in it, innervate it. And it's also with all your blood flow. So we'll put our veins and our arteries in it. We will have all the things running through our muscles and our veins and our arteries. And now that's part of our hips.

And then we'd say like, okay, well, what else on top of just the skeletal and the muscular structure? And then if we have, um, veins on it, then that means, okay, we're, we're putting our lungs in the body and our heart in the body to move this blood through our body, and now we've got to put our guts in it. So inside our, the bowl of our pelvis, like this is also where we use the bathroom, right? Like we have an asshole. So you're, and you're peeing. So like, you're going to like.

be doing the human defecation sorts of things. Everybody poops, everybody pees. So that is part of the hips. Then we have the sex organs that are part of the hip region. So that could look like a variety of things. Some people have a uterus, some people do not. You also have your gut that rests is part of your pelvis because again, this is where your asshole is. So...

Bonnie (07:02.114)
You're gonna have your food process go through your gut and then also be part of the system. So there's a lot of things. And also if you are standing upright, your pelvis and this gut part of you is very commonly like the center of your body. And it is a sensitive part of us.

and suggest as like a setup of what this body is and like the science of it where we could slice it open and say, this is the parts that are in there. There is no pockets in there that are emotion. There is this tissue, right? Here's my fallopian tubes. Those are down in my hip region. All right, so, and also, let's talk about fallopian tubes. If I were to ovulate and all of a sudden I have

I have on my, on the cycle of my ovulation and my bleeding, then do I go through different emotions? Yeah. Does that mean that they're stored in my hips? I don't think so. I think that like my hormones and the things that my body is doing will affect the way that I think and the way that I feel, but that's not.

necessarily stored in my hips, I am an interconnected being, the same as all of us. And that's really what I think I want to give you today is that we are more than one thing. And I say this phrase often, like where I might be a mom and I might be a lover and I might be a creative person and I might be a business owner and I might be a podcast host and I might teach yoga and I might.

speak and I might make pictures and I like, right? Like all the things. So that I'm more than one thing, but also inside of me I am blood and breath and muscles and bones and I'm also like joy and anger and hope and longing and excitement and laughter and tears.

Bonnie (09:23.186)
And I am more than one thing, right? We have this brain and we have this like kind of spiritual soul part of us and we have the body. We have like so many different parts of us. We are more than one thing, both in the things that we might create, do and be, and also in how our body functions. And so...

I like the idea that emotions are not necessarily stored in our hips. Our emotions are part of our experience as a human being. So I do not say emotions are stored in our hips. I'm not sure it does a service to our students. If we say that I do want to say that I do want to share that, that say, what if we stopped saying that and spoke to maybe things more specifically? It's kind of like the phrase, use your core. If your core is like,

Really from your diaphragm all the way to like muscles that even reach like below your ass. Like what do we really want people to do? It's not specific enough. And so emotions, somebody might feel emotional when they like are moving their hips in interesting ways in a yoga class, but I don't know that that's so stored, but I think experience in our body can help us tap into different emotional processes.

And the hips are one part of our body that might be a space that people might happen to experience and paying attention. And in a yoga class, we might be going slow enough and you might have to pause and might have like your own brain. Everybody's having their very much their own brain experience as they're in a class, which is one of the reasons why I just tell teachers like trust the yoga.

Like you're going to show up, you're going to help people move and breathe and rest. They are having a full experience in your head that you will never know. The same as I go to a class and my head, I'm talking to myself. I'm like, Ooh, that was cool. Oh, what am I doing here? Or like, Oh, that phrase totally made me think like, yeah, I can do hard things. And it has nothing to do with my physical practice, but it has something to do with like being in a mom or something. I don't know. Like we can draw analogies. So we just trust the yoga.

Bonnie (11:37.97)
If I think about emotions in our hips, like that kind of takes away this idea that, that I could feel emotion in other parts of my body, cause I've never walked into classes and had a teacher be like, you feel emotions, emotions are stored in your shoulders, but your shoulders are also like your shoulders and your hips, like those are big, those are big joints, right? And those are big joints in our body. They're big movers.

And there's like shoulder and hip things, like that's like pretty common. And then you have knee and ankle things that, and then we have elbow, wrist things, right? So these are our hips, these are our joints and then full spine experience. So our spine is part of our hips experience, but we don't hear like emotions are stored in your wrists, but our wrists aren't in the center of our body. They're not connected to some of the biggest muscles and biggest bones. And they're not connected to our spine that holds us upright. And so,

I think that maybe I wonder, like my wonder is, and I'd love to hear from you, if you have an idea of a wonder, then like, let me know. Like a wonder of, because they're in the center of our body, because they have so deeply connected, I wonder if this was a phrase that started to be saying, because some people were really starting to feel into their own experience, and they're like, you know what, I think my emotions are connected to my hips. So that must be like, means that they're stored there.

And I don't know if this is the stored, but like, I don't know. I wonder if, you know, things get passed and we pass things to each other and words to each other. And I don't know that it's like all wrong per se, and it's not necessarily wrong to say it, but I don't think it's a big enough picture. So let's talk about heartbreak for a minute, because if you've been, like, had this experience through heartbreak, I don't know about you, but I have felt it in the middle of my chest. And.

Like all the people that I have talked to so far, it's like you can feel it in your physical heart. You feel heartbreak. You feel like you can feel a lot of different emotions like in that particular space where your heart is. And that is an emotion. And so is emotion stored in my heart? Right?

Bonnie (14:01.046)
where I feel I can feel that. Like that's valid. And I guess that's what I want to say is if we say that emotions are only in our hips, like, can we speak to it in a more expansive way and say, and everywhere else in your body? But it's going to show up differently. I had a friend and I feel like I've told this story before, but I have a friend who anytime she does anything on her elbows, like form stand, dolphin, et cetera, like she gets angry.

but like you're asking your shoulders and your chest and your neck, like the expansion of even your chin, you're lifting your chin up and you have an exposed neck. And so your physiology, like your body, like the shape of your body, the way it's made, the experience of your body is going to play into your emotions of your body being in different shapes. 100%. If you stand in star and you have your arms wide and you have your feet wide and you have to take up room with your body,

That's a whole feeling that feels way different than being in child's pose where you're like all pulled in and tight and holding yourself. It feels different, not just from the physical, but from like an, a mental and emotional place. Okay. Cool. So let's talk about, let's talk about these, these parts of our body in regards to the chakras. So chakras being like, let's talk about the root chakra all the way down into our base, right?

as like bottom of the chakras, like if we're going to line them up, so that's the bottom, then moving up from that is going to be your sacral chakra. So we have these two chakras that are really then like this base piece of us that are part of the hip region. So thinking of our root, thinking of safety, thinking of security, thinking of what is it to create a foundation for ourselves that we can trust that we've got ourselves and that is a representation in our hips.

Okay, so that, number one, sacral chakra is now number two, where that's like our birthplace of creativity. That is our sexual powers. That is our expression. And in a creative sort of way, a birthplace. And it doesn't matter whether or not you have an actual womb, a uterus, or if it has birth children or not, that doesn't matter. Like this is just the area of the body that represents that, that really like as sex organs, all of us have

Bonnie (16:24.978)
sexual organs there and in some sort of manner and that those are creation like this is about creation and so if we think about the culture of the cultural experience of people and their upbringing maybe what they've been taught about sexuality and about uh

their experience with their body or what they can or can't do about the safety they feel in their body. Like, do they feel home in their body and do they understand their body? Do they trust their body? Those are, those are old questions that deal with those first two chakras. And those are in the hips. So if we take out the idea of emotions and say like, okay, well, let's like, use some analogy here. Let's talk about the chakras. Like let's go the, the yoga route of chakra system and talk about.

that area of our body. Okay, now, now that we've named those things, now let's talk about people's, where are they at with their money, right? So money is a sense of stability. Where are they at with family or housing or food or feeling like they have a sense of belonging? That's gonna be part of that. And what is their current internal experience of that? I don't know. We don't know what somebody walks in the room with and where they're feeling.

Those sorts of things are not aware. They're feeling like they're having to grow and they don't know what that looks like yet. And they're in transition. And then let's move up and talk about like your sacral space and talk about creativity and work and stress and how that relates also to that space in our body. And the tension we might hold in our pelvic floor from this. And if we talk about

sexuality and sensuality and eroticism and the way that we might give ourselves permission to use our voice to take up space to create something that didn't in the world before to allow ourselves to be bold.

Bonnie (18:32.338)
I was reading a post from a friend, if you can look her up on Instagram, as Dance Brave Official, and she was talking about the experience of women in being like, let's say you're in a business meeting, and as a woman, will you sit with your legs wide? And what I would say in air quotes like,

man spread. Is that something that a woman can do? Yes. Is that something that a woman will do? I don't know. And what would you think about that? If you were sitting there and like some dude in the meeting like sits there, spreads his legs, he's not trying to be sexual, is literally just his knees are further apart, they are angled out away from his hips. What is the thought process that goes through a woman's head?

in that moment? Is that okay to spread your legs? And I want to bring this into conversation. And sometimes bringing sexuality into a conversation of the yoga room is not very comfortable for everyone. And if that's for you, that's totally fine. But I think this is really important. And if we're going to talk about emotions stored in the hip, let's talk about sex because we're having people lay down on the mat and bring the soles of your feet together and take your

spreading your legs open. Maybe you know the teacher, maybe you don't. Maybe you don't know anybody else in the room and you're like a stranger in the room and now if you just spread your legs open. It's a space that has been invitational for people to be able to explore their body in positions that maybe are atypical for your normal life that are accepted to be like, yeah, come to yoga, spread your legs, like lay down, whatever. It's not usually like a spread your legs cue, but like.

Like let your knees roll out to the sides. Like there's the, like, but yes, like it's, it's all right. Lift your hips up and back. Like you're like putting your ass up in the air and down facing dog. It is an invitation to put your body in shapes that you might not in regular life and that culturally, um, might have stories attached to them of right or wrongdoing, um, both morally and socially.

Bonnie (20:58.07)
and politically and like all of the things. And so if there is a positions where we are inviting people as teachers to put their bodies and their hips in particular and just with the idea of like awareness of stories of sexuality and of what are the shapes that are acceptable to make with our bodies.

What are the acceptable shapes for women to make versus men? Are they different or are they not? And that's totally fine if you have different answers with all these things. But I just wanna pose these as questions and say, I think that there's more that maybe we don't even think about when we are doing things with our bodies. And I have a class in Studio B called yoga for better sex. And it is fun. And I tell you at the very beginning of the class, this is a class.

I am going to talk about sex. I'm going to talk about these positions for sex and it's going to be fun, it's going to be playful and I am going to be very direct about it because you also can. That might not be the class that everybody wants to take, but also these are, some of these are like, this is great positions for sex, right? Like you give me a forward fold, like could that be a sex position? Yes, it could be. Does it have to be? No.

like repeat everywhere in your whole life. Are you gonna bend over and put a cup from the sink in the dishwasher? Yes, could that be a sex position when your body goes in that? Yeah, but you're just like loading the dishwasher. So am I sexualizing the practice? No, I'm literally saying this is a position I'm doing somewhere else. And like I could draw the line between that and kind of play with it. And that could be really fun. And it doesn't make it wrong. It just makes it an and.

And I think that's important because there's more than one way to be right. And so recognizing that as teachers, we might be asking people to put their bodies and their hips in particular in shapes that they might have been told and might be telling themselves that are not appropriate and maybe they're even not even thinking of those stories.

Bonnie (23:18.102)
And this is definitely something that I haven't always thought of, right? Like we're not even thinking of the stories of how we give ourselves or not permission to make those shapes outside of the yoga room, but that does exist. Even if we're not as students aware of it in that moment, like it does exist. It's also why it's really tricky when teachers do any sort of hands-on things in some of those vulnerable sorts of positions.

and the exchange of yeses and nos. I am all here for assists. I like hands-on assists done consensually with a very clear directions and like an understanding for the student of really what that means. So I can, and some people will be like, just touch my body, I love it, right? Because we're also missing a lot of touch and that's been a part of even...

since COVID and more classes online, and as people step back into the studios, there is less touch, and I hear about it. And working with teachers and also students will say things. So I think that people do want more touch, but not everybody does. And especially in these vulnerable sorts of positions. So again, let's loop this back. Are emotions stored in our hips? Are they? Well, if we think about the root of us, our safety, food, literal food processing coming out.

Right. In our hips, in our hip area, we're going to talk about sexuality. We're going to talk about expression. We're going to talk about creativity. Um, the, all those, that area, like if your gut doesn't feel comfortable, right. And, and you have irritable bowel syndrome, right? Like this, it's an uncomfortable space. And then layer on top of that, this idea of like the body size.

and weight and if people have a bigger belly and how that affects like the weight on the hips and how that affects that area of your body also like it ties in together around the stories. So if we were to like, okay, like we've had that's a bit of words about that. Now, now let's take this into the experience of, of pain and pleasure because yoga is hard.

Bonnie (25:33.33)
And sometimes a stretch of our body, let's take pigeon pose. Sometimes it feels so good. And you're like, I did just lay here for 10 minutes. This is amazing. And other times you want to get out of it immediately. I have had students where they like are so lifted up off the ground in that. And you know, there's like take 90 do something else. Like, so students have some other options that like the blocks don't even get there or think about.

I mean, splits is kind of aggressive, but it's like for, for pigeon, I think I like that one cause it's a really intense, if you're do King pigeon, but like not grab the back foot just to do kind of like a laying down pigeon. And of course we can flip this over in all different sorts of directions. But if you're there, well, like the ask of the flexibility in the backside of the hips and.

the stretch of all of that feeling, the sensation. I just wanna put the label of sensation. The sensation of that experience is going to be significant or not, right? It's gonna be very dependent on the person. And that might be painful or it might be pleasure or it might be a mixture of the two. And I like to speak to the idea of not.

having anybody fear their body within a class, but speak to this conversation of discomfort and pain, and pain being sharp and spicy and something you wanna run away from. And we don't wanna lean into like that type of pain where you're like, oh my gosh, I'm like, I'm gonna die. And then there's some discomfort. We're like, discomfort, it's okay, but you also have control over how much discomfort. And we all have different levels of acceptance of that. And sometimes that varies.

from season to season, day to day as well. But with this, and if we're speaking to the hips in particular, there's a lot of external rotation that happens in yoga classes where we're rotating. If you're standing up in Tadasana, you're gonna rotate your knee out to the side and open one leg so your knee is pointing outwards, right? So you have an external rotation in your hips. That is a movement that is very common within our yoga practice. And so...

Bonnie (27:49.75)
thinking our external rotation, right? To have our hips, but then we also have a folding. So if we were to fold forward in pigeon pose and bring our elbows down to the ground, now let's pop it back up and say low lunge with your back knee down, front foot up. Now you're stretching the front side of that back leg. So if my right foot is forward, my left leg is back, then the front side of my left hip is being stretched. So that's also my hips. So that's also an experience of that part of my body.

And we can work the spine a little bit. The spine works with the hips, the legs work with the hips. So there's a lot of different positions where we can do inner thigh sorts of things, and then we can do outer thigh, outer hip things, outer butt things. Like the butt is part of this experience as well with the hips. And this brings into the conversation, the play with pleasure. Play with pleasure.

and the play with pain. And we all have different experiences with pain. And some people might label it pain spicy, like I wanna get away from it. And some people might put the label of pain on something that's uncomfortable, be like, ooh, that one was painful. And you're like, wait, what kind of pain? They're like, oh, well, it just like wasn't comfortable. I'm like, oh, okay, okay. But they stayed, like, and really give people the option of choice because.

like maybe they want to play with more discomfort, maybe they want to play with less discomfort, but they might label it as pain and that we all have a different experience with discomfort and the different capacity for our brains to be able to hold that because pain science with our brain, like get give yourself that whole rabbit hole talk, go like research some brain science, some pain science in regards to like your brain and how you think about your body, how you function, how you process pain.

And we all have different experiences with that. And if you're somebody who thinks that there has to be a certain level of pain for it to count, or if receiving pain in your hips in some sort of way, like if you're in a yoga pose and you're like, wow, I'm in like a pyramid pose and I can feel this like going up my leg into my ass, like there's like a whole thing that's happening in my hips.

Bonnie (30:15.218)
maybe that feels good. Maybe you're like, Ooh, pain actually feels kind of good. And are we okay with that? And, and, and there's something, if we want to bring this back to sex again, like bringing it back into a little bit of pain sometimes is something we want. And then other times we're like, Oh, pain is part of the process. And there's a lot of unlearning that happens where some people are like, Oh, to have sex, it's just, it's always painful. Or it's actually not and not supposed to be painful. And if it is painful, that is a problem.

if sex is always painful, but the idea that it just is painful. And so I think the same goes for the yoga room is if everything is always painful, then it's like, that's just how it goes. Or like, I don't want to do yoga because it is too painful. Like, is that like, how do we help students? How do we help students understand? Where that play is between pain and pleasure and.

discomfort and exploration and giving yourself permission to really pay attention. And it's pretty nuanced. And I think it could get overwhelming as a teacher to try to talk about all the things, but let's just remember this whole conversation is happening because our emotions stored in our hips. And what is each of our experience with pain? And do we run away from pain?

And if we feel pain in our hips, how is that reminding us of something else that's painful in our life? Because we draw those lines. We draw those lines. If some teacher says like right here, right now, we're going to do the thing. Just stay right here, right now, right here, right now. And they say that 25 times in a class. You're going to start thinking right here, right now. I went to a cycle class once and they said that to the person said that like maybe 75 times.

And I remember the cycle class, I remember that class. Like, and I think about like right here, right now, we're just right here, right now. And that enters me in more than just a physical way. And so if I am in this experience of feeling sensation in my hips and it's starting to feel painful, then how does that maybe something that I'm drawing a line of in my head to like maybe another experience that's currently painful? And can I sit with that pain?

Bonnie (32:37.534)
And because our hips are the center of us, because they attach to so much of our body, there's a lot of opportunity for intense sensation. Doesn't necessarily have to be pain, but that intense sensation might be translated as some version of pain in our physical body, which might translate in our brains as a reminder of some sort of pain that's happening, not in our physical body, in our emotional self, in our mental processing, in the current situation we're like navigating.

And so like my friend who has like shoulder things where she like has the feels with shoulder things, is it shoulder things? Does it like make her, like it's making her angry in her emotional self, but like her shoulders aren't necessarily angry. It's like, she's like, it's coming up with something. So there's a discomfort in her shoulder. And then it's like also bringing something else up. That doesn't mean she should or shouldn't do it. Like I'm not even like putting any category of that, but just to pay attention that

There's like, we draw these lines because we're more than one thing, we're more than one thing. And that just feels really important to say. And the body talks. And my hope is that the yoga practice is a space where we start to pay attention to our body and are aware of, you know, where's my, where are my left toes in relationship to my right hip right now?

And how do I take my hands from reaching up towards the ceiling and take them to the ground if I don't go straight down? Can I like circle them? Do I like, in what way do I do that? And how can I, like it becomes like all these questions of curiosity of how to move my body through space. And the body is the tool, which is so freaking cool. The body is a tool for helping us

be able to discover the inside parts of us. I think emotions, we're an emotional body. And so you might feel emotions. Emotions might arise when you do things that are centered around your hips. It's really hard not to do anything that's not centered around your hips because they're kind of a big part of our body.

Bonnie (34:59.354)
and because they're connected to our spine too. And we're in an emotional self. So if I relax my face and think about relaxing my whole face and the muscles, even my eyes, and I close my eyes, and I think about relaxing the space between my eyebrows, I'm relaxing the space between my eyebrows and my ears.

and relax the space from my eyebrows up to the top of my head. And I'm doing it right now as I say this to you.

And as I try to relax all of that, and even the space behind my eyeballs, like soften that. How does relaxing your face and the physical, right? That physical face, how does that change the experience inside?

What kind of pause does that give you that's not physical, that might happen some sort of emotional or mental way?

Hmm, the body talks. The body can be the teacher in so many ways. And I think that emotions are part of our living experience and that we might experience them when we move our hips and we might experience them when we soften our face. And we might experience them when we have heartbreak and we might experience them if you get an injury and all of a sudden,

Bonnie (36:36.866)
Like I could not, I hurt my wrist and I tore some cartilage in my wrist almost two years ago now, and I couldn't do handstands. And it hurt really bad. I couldn't even hold a cup. Like I couldn't even pick up a single cup. My wrist was injured that bad. And that gave me some emotional processing. And I can do those things all now. I can handstand and whatnot. I had a healing journey, but.

there we are more than one thing. As my invitation to you is that if you are somebody who teaches yoga who might say this kind of statement to just ask some questions about it, ask some questions of why you say it and maybe expand some of the words that you might say around it if that is a phrase that you like to put within your class of having a good why of why you believe it or think it and perhaps

offer students an expansive way to think about how they are more than one thing and how doing different postures might bring up different emotions and it is not necessarily about your hips but our hips are a big part of our body but there's other players in this too so as your as your friend that says and

Bonnie (37:59.926)
tries to ask a lot of questions and I am not here to be right. I'm here out of curiosity. I'm here to say like, what else could it be? And to really make sure we look at like the full human and there's like more things we could talk about here, but the lived experience, the cultural experience, the regular living experience, the experience with pain and pleasure, the experience of breath and the nervous system, like

like how people breathe, like your pelvic floor is part of your breathing, like all your core muscles are part of your breathing system and your pelvic floor moves with your breath and so your breath is part of it too and how comfortable or not you feel in your body.

I think one of the gifts of yoga is this building of a relationship with your body. And there is no rush to that. There is no rush.

So wherever you are, feel your feels and practice paying attention. Until next time.