Hips Don’t Lie – Was Shakira Right All Along?

“Don’t be surprised if you feel big things – or even start crying. When we stretch our hips lots of stuff tends to come up, because hips hold a lot of our emotional memory.”

Now, as an actor and yoga instructor, I’ve heard a lot of wacky things over the years. I remember hearing this statement for the first time in acting school and I dismissed it. How can the body “hold” emotions? What does that even mean? Ridiculous.

Well, dear reader, I was wrong. 

While our minds perceive the world around us through thinking and analyzing, our bodies perceive the world through our five senses – sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell. This perception often falls outside our conscious awareness – the body cannot help but experience sensations, but we don’t always notice them. It is the combination of these two kinds of perception – mental and physical – that create our realities. Both help to form and shape memories, which in turn impact our sense of self, our place in the world, and how we move through it.

Much of Western therapy is focused on the mind’s perception of events. As therapists, we often try to help clients adjust how they think about things to ultimately improve mental health and functioning. But the body is a powerful tool that we can and should leverage in this process. Bessel Van der Kolk, in his popular book, The Body Keeps the Score, talks about the importance of the mind-body connection in healing and change. “In order to change, people need to become aware of their sensations and the way that their bodies interact with the world around them. Physical self-awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past.”

While Van der Kolk’s work primarily focuses on trauma and recovery, this point is valid for everyone looking to manage anxiety, and depression, or simply understand themselves better. It begins with awareness. When I work with clients I not only ask how they think or feel about something but have them identify where they sense these things in their bodies. Often clients can’t identify it – which is normal. Our modern world isn’t exactly built for a somatic experience and understanding. But over time, with practice and noticing, it becomes easier. When you tap into this knowledge, this other way of noticing, you soon begin to gain insight into all the ways you experience a problem. The problem often becomes more nuanced, and more complicated, but also, a little easier to sit with and, in time, address.

Another reason the body is so helpful in gaining insight is often because our minds are so good at protecting us from things we’d rather not think about or feel. Therapists call this tendency avoidance, but it can be a powerful way of protecting ourselves from being flooded with emotion and overwhelmed. What do you do when your mind is protecting you from getting where you need to go? You go a different way. Here’s a short example: 

Recently, a client was struggling with choosing a school for her kids. While she’d been fairly happy with their current situation, they were offered a spot at a much better school. She was happy about having the choice but was truly torn about making it and engaged in significant mental back and forth over several weeks. Finally, I asked her during a session to check in with her body. We sat still, closed our eyes, and checked in with our breath. I asked her to think about this choice she was trying to navigate and then asked her to notice what, if any, sensations were popping up in her body. Sure enough, she quickly said, “I feel a hollowness – a slight ache – in my chest. Right in my heart.” We opened our eyes and then talked about this sensation and what it might mean. For my client, she quickly identified the struggle between her head and her heart. While she knew that this was an incredible opportunity that she couldn’t pass up, she was grieving the loss that this transition would inevitably bring – leaving friends, families, and relationships that she’d built over the past few years. She cried as she talked about this loss and how hard she’d found it to build community in recent years. 

Now, would we eventually have reached the same conclusions by talking about it and engaging mentally? Possibly. But I believe it would have taken much longer. The problem for this client wasn’t in her thinking about this problem – it was a hidden feeling that she didn’t want to face. In my experience, when we encounter a feeling, a thought, or an issue that remains intractable, it can be helpful to go a different route. To check in with the body to see what, if any, messages it has for us. 

So do we really store emotions in our hips? I honestly don’t know, but I do know that the body has an intelligence that we often overlook. In our attempts to heal, change, and grow, we tend to lean into our intellect, when we should be calling upon all our resources to help. 

I encourage you to start noticing your body as you go through your day. When you walk to work, eat lunch, or lie down at the end of your day, close your eyes, take a breath or three, and notice any physical sensations. Sometimes you won’t feel anything, and other times it’ll just be a neck cramp because you slept funny. The important thing is to practice. To slow down. You might be surprised by what you discover.