Do we really store emotions in our hips? A curious dive into yoga, trauma, and science

It’s a phrase you’ve surely heard in a yoga class because just about everyone says it: “We store trauma and emotions in our hips.”

You’ll find it mentioned in teacher trainings, Instagram captions, and post-yoga chats. It is said so often, it seems to be a timeless truth, handed down through the generations.

Many of us have felt calmer, more grounded, and emotionally lighter after yoga. So it seems reasonable to assume that yoga itself is therapeutic by nature.

But is it? When we compare this idea to modern clinical standards of therapy, a complex and fascinating picture emerges.

I get it: saying "emotions are stored in the brain" (even if true) just doesn't have the same impact!

Where did the idea come from?

The origin of this concept seems to have emerged from a melange of somatic therapy, Jungian psychology, body-centred trauma work, and Eastern philosophy. Our fascia, that mysterious connective tissue net, is often implicated, said to “hold” onto emotional residue. But the science here is more metaphor than mechanism.

Truth be told, there’s no anatomical vault in your psoas where your unprocessed breakup from 2012 has been cryogenically preserved but this metaphor might have its place.

What does science actually say?

Modern science is deeply interested in trauma, particularly how it’s processed (or not) by the nervous system. Post-traumatic stress disorder, for example, is known to alter how the brain responds to stress, emotion, and bodily cues. But trauma isn’t “stored” in a specific location like a microchip in your glutes.

Instead, what we know from neuroscience is that trauma changes how we experience our internal world — what’s called interoception (Craig, 2002). This is your sense of what’s happening inside your body: your heartbeat, your breathing, your gut health.

These days, trauma can get tossed around a lot (“That bad haircut totally traumatized me!”). But in clinical terms, trauma refers to experiences that overwhelm a person’s ability to cope, often involving real or perceived threats to life, safety, or integrity. Just to say, this does not mean all adversities in life are necessarily traumas.

For people with a trauma history, this interoceptive sensitivity can become dulled or distorted (Khalsa et al., 2018). Research suggests that, for these people, the body might not feel like a safe place to inhabit.

That’s powerful stuff with lots of implications for anyone interested in trauma-informed yoga. But it doesn’t mean that trauma is “in the hips.” It’s more accurate to say that trauma can shape how the brain processes signals from the body.

So why might “hip-openers” make someone feel emotional?

First of all, there are various issues with the term “hip opener” but that's a discussion for another time. For now, let's go with hip openers as things like Pigeon Pose and Wide-Legged Forward Fold.

It’s certainly possible that someone in a yoga class might feel an emotional reaction during hip-opening postures. But that doesn't mean there’s trauma in the tissues. Their emotional experience could be due to several factors:

• The parasympathetic shift: Deep stretching, especially in long-held poses like Pigeon, can shift the nervous system into a more relaxed, parasympathetic state. That can sometimes release held “tension” — physical or emotional.

• Associative memory: Emotions can be contextually triggered. A certain posture might unconsciously remind someone of a previous experience — not because it’s stored there, but because the brain is very good at pattern-matching.

• Cognitive priming: If a teacher tells you that a pose will release trauma, you might be more likely to experience something intense. Cognitive priming is the placebo effect’s cousin: basically, expectation shapes perception.

What do modern clinical standards say?

In clinical psychology, trauma is viewed through a biopsychosocial lens: complex, nuanced, and grounded in evidence. The diagnostic texts used by healthcare professionals (such as the International Classification of Diseases) outlines trauma-related conditions based on cognition, behavior, and physiology — not by body part.

Somatic therapies, like Somatic Experiencing and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, do use body awareness in trauma healing. But they do not suggest that trauma is “stored” in the hips. Instead, they view the body as a vehicle for processing, not storage. It’s about patterns, responses, and regulation, not trapped memories in your piriformis.

So when we use phrases like “you store trauma in your hips,” we are oversimplifying a deeply complex topic and misleading people in the process.

Even though we aren't freeing shackled ghosts of emotion in our hips, that doesn't change the fact that yoga make lots of us feel really, really good!

So what should yoga teachers say?

First off, yoga can be an incredible context for self-inquiry, emotional processing, and nervous system regulation. And saying “emotions are stored in the hips” might be a useful metaphor for certain people. But we shouldn't state this as an anatomical and biomechanical fact, like there’s a memory card in our fascia.

Personally, when I hear a yoga teacher say something that doesn't jive with modern scientific truth, I switch off and I (sorry to say) tend to find that teacher less credible.

So, if you want to be more accurate with your language, you could try something like:

• “Notice any sensations you feel — physical or emotional — without judgement.”

• “If you feel something unexpected here, there’s no “right” way to respond.”

• “Let your breath be your anchor if anything feels intense. Shift your position as needed.”

These cues empower students with a sense of self-agency without suggesting that their hips are haunted.

The bottom line

Yes, our bodies “carry” experiences, but not in the way the emotions-in-the-hips phrase implies. Trauma can impact how we sense, move, and interpret the world. Yoga might help us navigate those internal landscapes, but we don’t need to mystify the body to honor its complexity.

Let’s keep the magic of yoga while pairing it with the precision of modern science.

Do you have any other cues that can help our clients find a sense of self-agency when experiencing an intense emotion during a yoga class? Let me know by commenting below the references. 👇

References

Craig, A. D. (2002). How do you feel? Interoception: the sense of the physiological condition of the body. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 3(8), 655–666. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn894

Khalsa, S. S., Adolphs, R., Cameron, O. G., Critchley, H. D., Davenport, P. W., Feinstein, J. S., ... & Paulus, M. P. (2018). Interoception and mental health: a roadmap. Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, 3(6), 501–513. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bpsc.2017.12.004

American Psychiatric Association. (2022). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed., text rev.; DSM-5-TR).