Releasing Emotional Memories With Yoga

Imagine you have an energy center inside your body that stores and creates your emotional memories… in the area of your solar plexus... and it has the firmness of a sponge ball.

Imagine a size that fills that body center within you.

Let us imagine the emotional energy center within us is like a sponge ball and that it is completely saturated with the chemicals of the emotions we have been practicing.

If we use the metaphor of the kitchen sponge saturated with dish soap… 

we likely have experienced how long it takes to rinse the soapy sponge with water and wring it out, and rinse the sponge and wring it out, over and over again before it is completely free of soap.

Using Yoga Poses To Clear Our Old Emotions

Then we can imagine our yoga moves are a sequence of bends and twists, using the breath to squeeze one side of the sponge and elongate the other side, while we move through each pose.

The sequence of yoga poses in a class is designed to stretch and squeeze that energy center across all 360 degree range of motion.

Breathing Fully Helps Clear Stress

We use the slow controlled breath and exhale to deepen the squeeze as we curl into a ball, we use the breath and inhale to expand the heart and chest as we back bend, we use the breath as we twist our spine, squeezing and stretching our core energy center, this ‘soapy sponge ball’, in every direction.

This releases the habitual emotional chemicals and toxins from these production centers, and encourages fresh blood flow that cleanses all the stress chemicals and hormones from the source and refreshes this energy center of the body, the solar plexus.

By stretching and opening the chest and heart with deep backbends, we supply them with fresh blood and oxygen, leaving us space to begin retraining the habitual emotional setting of our body with the happy imagination of the most successful, rewarding or comical thing you can think of.

Three Phases Of A Yoga Practice

As you hydrate before yoga class, set the intention to use different parts of the yoga class for a progressive purpose.

1. The first twenty minutes of the class is to detox the emotional center from the day or to detox first thing in the morning.

2. The next thirty minutes are dedicated to breath awareness, calming your thoughts and coming to a still mind.

3. The final minutes of each yoga class is intended to re-train the body's emotional center by intentionally practicing the habit, the pose, the posture of feeling the emotions of gratitude, accomplishment and self-love.

This way, we are using a guided yoga sequence and guided meditations on wellbeing to intentionally teach our energy centers to feel a different set of emotions as our habit.

In time, our energy center become a reservoir of healing chemicals and hormones of happiness that we can count on when the bumps of life occur.