The power of hips
Let’s talk about hips again. (I wrote about why your hips are keeping you sad here.)
Your hips store stress and trauma. This isn’t news to me. What is news to me is that they hold a lot of power. At least I believe this to be true. Let me explain why.
At the I Am Power Retreat, hips came up a lot during Krav Maga training with Jarrett and Jennie. Whether we were punching or kicking, the power came from our hips.
Drive from your hips. Use your hips. Hips. Hips. Hips. That word was on repeat.
My mind quickly connected the dots from what I knew about hips and the emotional body and what I was learning through Krav Maga training.
Trauma lives in your hips.
Trauma can make you feel powerless.
Power comes from your hips.
Release stored up trauma … release your power ...
OH MY GOSH IT ALL MAKES SENSE.
In yoga philosophy, power is more associated with the third chakra, located around your navel. However, now I believe it goes deeper into the second chakra zone. This chakra is located more in the hip region and is linked to creativity and sexual pleasure. But when I was using my hips to punch and kick, I wasn’t channeling creativity. And I certainly wasn’t channeling sexual pleasure. It was 100% power.
Your nadis (energy channels) flow throughout your body. It’s not preposterous to believe these channels can move things around a little bit. I don’t think you have imaginary red tape throughout your energetic body that say things like “Third chakra ends right here."
And it's not just Krav Maga that reveals the power of hips, especially if you're a woman.
Our Hips Help Bring New Life into the World
Our hips widen when we're pregnant in order to deliver babies. Our bodies change so that we can bring new life into the world. It's like magic. And a lot of relaxin. Oh, and of course: POWER.
Our Hips Give Us Superwoman-like Performance
If you want to train to run faster or jump higher or hit a baseball harder or any number of performance-based movements, you better start working on those hips. Hip strength and mobility is connected to athletic performance ... AKA Superwoman abilities.
Our Hips Can Demand Attention
The visualization of a woman seductively swaying her hips as she walks is powerful. She can get everyone, man or woman, to turn their heads and take notice ... just by swaying her hips. POWER.
Our Hips Can Kick Some Ass
As I already mentioned, force comes mostly from your hips when you're hitting/kicking. POWER.
Jarrett brings the power
It's fight ... but it's also flight and freeze
Power comes from our hips, but we must allow it to unleash. Not so ironically, that means we must let go of the stress and trauma that's built up there.
"The hip muscles are programmed to be easily activated for 'fight, flight or freeze' response. You might kick an assailant, dash away, or drop into a fetal position. When the body suffers a trauma, our instinctual reflex is to clench these deep muscles. The problem is, we don’t let go." Kachina Autumn (Source)
If you have any other ideas about the connection of hips and power and how it relates (or doesn’t) to the third chakra, I’d love to hear them. I’m still trying to understand this connection and welcome any and all ideas.
Let me be clear: By suggesting that power goes into second chakra territory, in no way am I trying to challenge yoga philosophy. Rather, I’m offering up my interpretation of them based on my own experiences.
I enjoy learning about the chakra system and sharing that knowledge in my yoga classes, but I don't pretend to be a "chakra expert."
However, I am the world’s biggest expert on my body; my hips. My hips were wound tight after storing past trauma. They opened up when I began to process that trauma (and learned to love pigeon pose). When I used these same hips to increase my force while hitting, I felt their power unleash.
In the wise words of Shakira: “My hips don’t lie."
Expect hips to be incorporated in core-focused sequences in my classes.
Namaste.