Hip Problems?? LET GO of 🫵 Grudges, Resentments, Betrayals, & Toxic Encounters
Mindfulness Practices to help you MOVE FORWARD and attract healthy relationship where you feel 👁️seen, 👂heard, and ❤️loved.
Storytime
Hurt me once, shame on you.
Hurt me twice, shame on me.
Hurt me over and over and over and over, it’s time to cleanse yourself of their energy, establish (and maintain) healthy boundaries, and break the ancestral shame • blame • defame pattern.
This is how life goes when you nurture those toxic relationships that do absolutely nothing to nurture you back.
You know the pattern way too well.
You love, and you love, and you love some more.
Hoping your love can heal their toxicity issues.
And you get taken advantage of, used, and even abused.
You rationalize all kinds of reasons and excuses,
And you take the pain, cuz they really didn’t mean it.
So you keep loving until loving hurts, and even then, you love some more.
You’ve established a habit, a pattern, and dug yourself into a rut of responsibility and guilt.
And that resentment festers to the point where you can’t even tell if you are resenting those you are trying to love, or you are resenting yourself for caring too much. It doesn’t matter. The resentment is there, but the guilt is louder.
As a result, you’ve built up a couple hefty saddle bags that you carry around filled with silent resentments and unspoken grudges.
Until one day.
You just can’t.
Not anymore.
You want out.
But HOW?
Those saddle bags are HEAVY. They keep you stuck, and as much as you want to move forward, you just can’t. Everything is just too much.
Lesson
Do you carry your excess weight in your hips?
Those saddle bags I mentioned, they live in your hips. Those extra resentments, responsibilities, grudges, betrayals, and guilts that you carry from caring too much, they tend to live in the hips. They can manifest in both excess weight on carried in your hips, and/or in tight hips that stop you from moving forward.
When you hold onto grudges, resentments, betrayals, and other relationship traumas, that energy needs to go somewhere. If you don’t let it go, it’s gonna go to the place in your body where it can be held…your hips. If you keep adding to those saddle bags over time, the tightness and excess baggage will hold you back from moving forward in YOUR life, because you are too weighed down by the heaviness of the toxicity of dealing with the issues of others.
Are you holding yourself back in life?
The physiological purpose of your hips is to give your legs flexibility and movement, the ability to step forward, and step forward again. When your hips are over-weighted or over-tight, that ability to step forward is severely limited.
If you carry grudges, resentments, toxic relationships, and past betrayals and traumas in your hips, you hold yourself back from moving FORWARD in your own life.
When you can’t move forward in life, it manifests in your hips. Without hips, your body would waddle around like a penguin (only worse).
How I Learned (the hard way) that Hips Hold Resentment
I used to have very tight hips, and carry my excess weight on my hips. It’s a genetic trait. My mother and aunts all have hips that are somewhat disproportionate to the rest of their bodies.
Then one day, the first day on an intensive yoga retreat (it was actually called Yoga Bootcamp), my yoga teacher put us in frog pose…for 30 minutes. For reference, the average yoga pose is meant to be held for 5 deep breaths, approximately 30-seconds. It was quite possibly the most physically excruciating 30-minutes I had ever experienced in my life. By the end of the 30-minutes virtually everyone in the room was sobbing, some even wailing.
The next day, I found myself processing an immense amount of not-pleasant emotions. It started with irritation, which built to anger, and then rage. In the embers underneath the rage was a deep well of resentment, betrayal, guilt, and victimization.
But I didn’t just feel it emotionally.
I felt it physically too.
The frog pose unlocked my saddle bags and poured all their contents out onto the Mexican beach: all the hidden grudges, resentments, betrayals, angers and rages I had stuffed away and never expressed. I discovered just how much I stuffed my emotional junk into the saddle bags of my hips and pelvis. It wasn’t pretty.
While the rest of my yoga classmates went into their afternoon class, I crumpled into a puddle on the sand outside the Mexican palapa yoga room. I dissociated and went into a sort of trance state where I re-lived every physical and emotional assault of my life.
It lasted hours.
I don’t recommend it.
Sure, a 30-minute frog pose is a highly effective somatic exercise to release pent up pain and trauma, resentments and betrayals from your past. It is also its own kind of trauma. And healing from that trauma was a whole other process. It was just too much.
For the next several years, I developed a practice of doing deep hip openers on a regular basis to release these pent up pains. And it was always painful.
But I did feel lighter, and my hips felt better, and I didn’t carry excess weight in my hips anymore.
But damn…it hurt.
There is an easier way…SOOO MUCH EASIER…and far less painful. In fact, it’s rather pleasant and not painful at all.
My shaman teacher taught me that deep emotional and spiritual healing doesn’t have to be painful, or difficult. It can be as simple as engaging with the natural elements and letting them softly and tenderly and gently return you to baseline.
When I told him this story of my yoga instructor’s approach to healing deep trauma, he laughed and suggested something so simple that I didn’t believe it could work. But he assured me, his approach was so common sense, how could it NOT work.
He was right.
It works.
Every single time.
Practice/Homework
Read on to learn the mindfulness exercise I do to process guilt, resentment, betrayal, grudges, and more emotions we tend to hide in our saddle bags.