You Don't Store Emotions in Your Glute Max

What the Body Keeping the Score Actually Means

We say it in yoga spaces constantly. Your emotions are stored in your body. Open your hips to release what you are holding. Your hips are your body's emotional "junk drawer".

It feels true. And something genuine is happening when a practitioner becomes emotional in a hip opener. That experience is real and it matters.

But the mechanism is not what most yoga teachers think it is. And the mechanism determines the intervention. Which means if we have the mechanism wrong, we may be responding to those moments in ways that may not actually serve the person on the mat.

What van der Kolk actually argued

The Body Keeps the Score is one of the most important books written about trauma in the last thirty years. It is also one of the most misread books in yoga spaces.

Van der Kolk's central argument is not that emotions are stored in tissues waiting to be released by specific poses. His argument is that trauma is a physiological state that can become chronic. The autonomic nervous system, dysregulated by overwhelming experience, gets stuck in patterns of threat response that persist long after the original threat is gone. The body keeps responding as if the danger is still present because the nervous system never received the signal that it was safe to stop.

The body is where you see the evidence of that nervous system state. Chronic muscle guarding. Altered breathing patterns. Hypervigilance in the postural system. Digestive dysfunction. Difficulty accessing interoceptive signals. A system organized around protection that does not know how to stop.  And at times, not letting go is protective because feeling the enormity of grief or whatever the person on the mat is carrying may be too much.

That is meaningfully different from saying grief lives in your chest or fear lives in your hip flexors. And the difference matters enormously for how we teach. It is also a consideration for us to have when that the nervous system may be protecting the person on the mat by controlling the rate at which they feel emotions.  It's possible that some things people carry can't be processed all at once and the best thing they did was just get on their mat. \]=

The mechanism always runs this way

In chronic stress states, nervous system activation often drives downstream tissue adaptations and protective patterns.

A practitioner with chronic sympathetic dominance has chronically elevated fascial tone, shortened hip flexors, restricted thoracic mobility. These presentations are real. They are clinically significant. They are what you see in your class every week.

But they are downstream. They are effects of chronic nervous system activation, not the location where that activation lives. The tissue reflects the state. It does not contain the experience.

Addressing the tissue without addressing the nervous system state that produced it is addressing the symptom without addressing the cause.

So what is actually happening in a hip opener

The psoas often becomes central in this conversation because of its role in posture, locomotion, breathing mechanics, and protective flexion patterns. It is the only muscle that connects the spine to the lower extremity. It is a primary hip flexor. It is also directly innervated by spinal levels closely connected to the sympathetic chain and the visceral organs.

In chronic sympathetic activation the psoas is often in a sustained state of facilitated tone. It is part of the flexion withdrawal pattern, the protective curl the body moves toward under threat. Chronic stress, chronic fear, chronic hypervigilance all tend to produce a shortened facilitated psoas.

When a yoga pose brings the psoas toward length in a slow, sustained, relatively safe context, several things happen simultaneously. The mechanoreceptors in the tissue send novel sensory input to the nervous system. Interoceptive awareness, the body's ability to sense its own internal state, increases with the slow sustained attention the pose invites. The shift from a contracted facilitated state toward a lengthened state in a tissue that has been chronically organized around protection can produce a release of that sympathetic holding pattern.

That experience can feel emotional. Because the sympathetic activation organized around a threat response had an emotional valence when it was first activated. As the nervous system shifts state, those associated emotional qualities become available.  The practice may create conditions where the nervous system is able to move through previously unresolved protective responses.

The hip opener created the conditions. The nervous system did the work. The tissue was the site of the experience, not the source of it.

Why this distinction matters for your teaching

Two completely different teaching responses follow from these two different understandings.

If tissue holds experience: encourage more activation. Go deeper. Stay with it. More sensation equals more release.

If the nervous system generates experience: create safety. Support regulation. Know your clinical role.

Those are not subtle differences. They produce fundamentally different outcomes for the practitioner in front of you. And in certain presentations, the first response can cause real harm.

Your nervous system cannot let go on command. Safety is not something you can instruct someone into. The nervous system releases its grip when it decides the environment is safe enough. Not when a teacher says breathe into it. Not when a cue tells it to surrender.

When someone cannot let go in your class it is not resistance. It might be the most intelligent thing their nervous system knows how to do right now.

What to say instead

Rather than we store our emotions in our hips, you might try: the hip flexors are connected to your nervous system's threat response. When we create conditions of safety and slow sustained attention here, the nervous system sometimes shifts state. What surfaces can feel emotional. That is not stored emotion being released. That is the nervous system doing exactly what it is designed to do when it finally feels safe enough.

That language is more accurate. It is also more powerful. Because it respects the intelligence of the nervous system rather than reducing a complex physiological event to a storage problem.

When emotional release happens in your room

Stay regulated. Your nervous system is the most important tool you have in that moment. A regulated teacher creates a regulated field.  Your job is not to push release, it may be to simply create a safe space for the person on your mat to 

Do not interpret the experience for the practitioner. Do not say your hips were holding that. Do not narrate what is happening. The experience belongs to them. Create space. Stay present. Offer grounding if appropriate.

And know when what is happening exceeds your scope. Yoga teachers are not trauma therapists. When what surfaces appears to be acute trauma activation, your role is to help the practitioner return to a regulated state and to have a referral relationship with a trauma informed therapist you trust. That boundary is not a limitation. It is part of being a clinically responsible teacher.

The body does keep the score

Van der Kolk was right about that. The nervous system tracks everything. Every stressor, every demand, every experience that exceeded the system's capacity to process and integrate. And it expresses that tracking through the body in ways that are measurable, predictable, and real.

What yoga offers is not a release mechanism for stored content. It is a practice that, when taught with precision and intelligence, creates the conditions where the nervous system accumulates enough evidence of safety to shift out of chronic protective states.

That is not a lesser claim. It is a greater one. And it is one you can make in any room, with any practitioner, with any clinician in the audience, and hold it with confidence.

On June 16 we go deeper into all of it. We will look specifically at what is happening in pigeon pose, why that pose in particular produces emotional responses, what polyvagal theory tells us about the three nervous system states your practitioners are arriving in, and what the fascia research actually supports versus what goes beyond the evidence. If you teach yoga and you have ever had someone cry in your class and replied "your hips are body's emotional junk drawer"...this is for you.

Click here for more information on the workshop.