7 Ways to Release Anger & Grief Through Your Yoga Practice

Anger is a natural emotion that should be expressed and channeled in a healthy way. That’s why today I want to discuss seven ways to release anger through your yoga practice. Expressing anger through movement is a powerful tool and surprise, you’re probably more angry than you realize. There are various yoga poses and breathwork techniques that are well-suited for moving anger and grief and setting aside conscious time to grieve or rage is extremely therapeutic.

Listen in to learn:
🔹How creating a ritual container for anger and grief can provide a safe space for expression.
🔹Yoga poses and breathwork techniques can help in moving anger and grief through the body.
🔹Somatic principles and intuitive movement offer holistic approaches to working with emotions.

🎁 Get my FREE $67 Somatic Self Healing Workshop => https://www.brettlarkin.com/ffy

FREE Practice: KUNDALINI YOGA FOR EMOTIONAL RELEASE with Music 💜 Trauma Informed Yoga for Beginners 💜 – or – Somatic Yoga for Anger Release – Embodied Yoga for Emotional Release

Relevant Blog: Feminine Rage: Transforming Anger into Empowerment

Find the Archetypal Series in Uplifted here.

Relevant to Today’s Episode:
📖 Yoga Life Book
🐍 Yoga for Self Mastery
🔮 300-hour Online Yoga Teacher Training
💖 Uplifted Membership
💞 Somatic Yoga Life Coaching

🎧 Also Listen to:
#318 – What Is Somatic Yoga?
#324 – The Importance of Emotional Processing and Regulation: DENT Model Trauma

Awaken Your Feminine Energy with my Somatic Self Healing Masterclass (usually $67) FREE👇

Transcript:

Brett:
Hello, my friends. Today we are talking about seven ways to release anger through your yoga practice because you’re probably more angry than you realized. And especially if you’re a woman, you probably have a lot of repressed anger. I think for both men and women in our society or however you identify gender wise, like we’re taught at a very young age that anger is inappropriate, tears are inappropriate.

emotional expression is inappropriate. It’s kind of been regulated out of us, but we’re still animals and we still get angry and we still get irritated. And I think we’re seeing this like resurgence now of like rage rooms and all that kind of thing emerging everywhere because we’re realizing like we’re angry as a culture.

And it’s coming out in our culture being more polarized and through social media and kind of like anonymously behind screens and and really we just need to channel this anger through our body and it works very fast, very efficient, very effective. I think the more and more I work with students the more I hear them tell me like, wow, I thought it would be really painful or take a long time to like move this anger or this grief but it actually started moving quite quickly and it moved much faster than

I realized and you know, a big thing I want you to take away from this podcast before we go into the nitty gritty is just this idea that like you can create and set aside conscious time to grieve or rage. You probably need a rage practice. You probably need a grieving practice and this doesn’t need to be overwhelming. I think a lot of times we think, I need to take, you know, a 10 week. vacation or I need to do some big trip or some big retreat. But I’ve had more bandwidth this year to really work with moving and processing my father’s death. And I’m often doing it just a couple times a week for 10 or 20 minutes. But I’m setting up ritual space for me to consciously grieve, to feel that anger. And then I kind of go on with my day.

And when I first started talking to students about this in my somatic certification, my embodied yoga life coaching program, it was a revelation to so many of them that they could actually like just set aside time. Like you’d set aside time to do a 20 minute Pilates or yoga class. You could just like set aside 20 minutes to like fully feel some anger or grief and just chip away at it a little bit over time. And then afterwards, you pretty much always feel lighter. Not saying you’re gonna feel better, but you pretty much always feel lighter.

And the more you practice this, the more you’re able to move a lot of energy, which I think is what yoga is really about, the science of energy management, quite efficiently. It doesn’t end up being this big thing. So let’s talk about poses and breath work that I think are really well suited to moving anger. And to me, anger is kind of first, and then often there’s sadness and grief underneath that. So these two things.

kind of, you know, then sometimes you’re sad and you get angry again, right? So I think these things are very interconnected. And then we’ll talk about kind of some more somatic principles, ways that you can actually work with this more holistically, no matter what pose you’re doing. So to kick off our pose exploration, I absolutely think that so many of the Kundalini practices are designed to move anger.

So let’s just take wood chopper, for example, the Kundalini wood chopper. So your fingers are interlaced, for those of you who don’t know, like fingers, palms interlaced, and it’s like you’re chopping wood in front of you. Your arms are straight, you reach them up over your head. So just imagine making a fist above your head, fingers interlaced, and then you like, with the breath, like chop down. So your arms become like this giant ax, and you’re chopping in front of you with the fingers interlaced.

And obviously, you know, when we think about releasing anger and grief, we’re thinking about the exhale, right? Like a, right? So in the wood chopper, you’re breathing, exhaling forcibly through the nose, but you could also experiment with like a cannon breath, which is like the O shaped mouth, exhaling out the mouth. Or you could do it through the nose. Options with wood chopper. You can do it seated on the heels. You could also do it on the knees.

like up on the knees in one of my more recent Kundalini kind of somatic videos, we do that and it’s super fun. It’s just, it feels like a little more empowering because you’re taller and bigger and you can actually visualize something that you want to kind of chop your way through or unblock yourself from in front of you. So absolutely love wood chopper. Next pose I wanted to talk about was kind of the Kundalini punches.

So here you’re in cross -legged, you can sit up on a cushion, you could do it seated on the heels, but you’re moving one elbow back and the opposite arm in front of you with the arm extended. And we’ll talk about the different ways you can have the hand. So you could have it in fists, like you’re actually punching with the thumb on the inside. I really like bare claws right now. So that’s where all your knuckles are kind of micro -bent and your…

Yeah, you have that tension in the hand, which is actually activating meridians and knotties in the hand in a different way, especially the center of the palm. So if you like aren’t driving and you can just bend all the knuckles right now of your hands, you’ll notice that it actually stimulates the very center of your palm, which is a really important meridian channel.

If we look at a lot of the text on like yogic mudras, it’s talking about the center of the palm place. So you can have these bare, bare claws that you’re moving back and forth. You can also have like, as if you were making stop with your hand, like stop, no, with your palm, you know, just forward, your fingers facing towards the ceiling, kind of in like a stop motion, like what a police officer would do, or someone’s conducting traffic. And you can do it like that.

with the palms kind of flexed back. So lots of options of how you can kind of do this swinging punching motion. For me, this is very much a core exercise. So I always tell students, if you’re doing any kind of swinging punches, you’re actually secretly doing core work. You wanna be lifting up on the pelvic floor. You wanna be drawing the navel back. And then you wanna be taking the elbow as far behind you as possible because guess what? It’s also a twist. So I just want you to visualize right now, like if you’re just punching and swinging the arms,

That’s not nearly as powerful as actually, you know, engaging the core and taking your elbows way back and think of like twisting the whole torso. So my shoulders are traveling as well, and then really amplifying the breath. Right? So the breath is the amplifier of how we can move energy in the body. We can move energy in the body through breath, through movement, through sound. And the more we can use breath or sound,

especially for discharging anger, it’s going to help you so much. You could even say like, no, no, no, no, right? Or you could do that kind of canon breath. So just think about that experiment with what kind of claws you want to have, like you want to have the bear claws, you want to have a fist, you want to have a stop sign, like what feels most resonant to you. And the more you do this, the more intuitive you’ll get with what feels good to you in the moment or what you want to teach in a class.

Another one I wanna talk about is like having your palms face up, elbows close to your rib cage, and just kind of circling your hands back. So your elbows and your hands, like everything just going back and like a, huh, huh, huh, huh. And remember what’s making this magical again is the breath, is a little bit of vocal sound and emoting.

It’s kind of like you’re shrugging the weight of the world off your shoulders, because it’s like you’re doing backward shoulder rolls and elbow rolls and hand rolls at the same time. And of course, don’t worry, I’m going to link a YouTube video for you below that is showing all of these movements. So there’ll be a couple of video resources for you to experiment with all of this yourself. But those are some of my favorite ways to release anger. And then lying on your back and taking your legs up in the air and just having a tantrum.

Like a three year old, kick those legs, shake those legs, kick the booty, right? In the uplifted membership, one of the most popular classes that journey up the chakras, Kundalini Kriya, we actually start in this position. I mean, we do a couple warm ups, but then we’re on the back and our legs are straight up in the air and you’re actually trying to hit your booty with your heels. So you’re like kicking your own butt in a sense with your legs up in the air, bending the knees over and over again.

And this is said to stimulate the root chakra and that particular kriya, but it’s just such a great way to get like energy and aggression out through the legs. I mean, a lot of times when we’re feeling afraid or angry, we want to kick or maybe we’re in a trauma response and we want to clench the legs to run and go somewhere. And all of that tension just gets trapped in the lower body if we don’t actually do it. And I’m guessing you’re probably not like kicking.

you know, kicking people or running away from people. You’re just kind of stuffing down your anger and resentment. So to lie on the back and really let the legs go crazy, you could shake the legs if you don’t like the kicking the seat thing. Just shake them, shake them, shake them like crazy. This is also really like therapeutic I find for my ankle joint. Just like kind of resets everything. This is an inversion, right? So you’re also, you know, just taking some pressure off your feet and then kind of letting that ankle joint.

recalibrate, I mean, you have 26 bones in each foot, people. So there’s just like a lot that can kind of meld and reorganize and click back into place when you shake the legs like crazy, lying down on your back, because there’s no weight on the feet or the ankles. So, so healing. And you’re getting all of that energy out through the lower body. So I absolutely love that for anger as well. Now, I could not, could not talk about yoga poses that I love for anger.

without talking about lion’s breath. Okay, if you don’t know lion’s breath, it’s so fun. You basically just inhale through the nose and then you’re gonna exhale, open your mouth as big as you possibly can, like visualize the dad in the Lion King or Jafar, not Jafar, that’s Aladdin, who’s the mean uncle in the Lion King, and then you’re just gonna stick your tongue out as far as you possibly can, and that’s the position that you’re gonna exhale in, making the exhale really powerful. So it’s like a,

And the secret with this is you want it to stick your tongue really far out, like almost to your chin, because the tongue, the fascia of your tongue actually connects down into the fascia of your heart. So I love this. As we do lion’s breath, it’s like we’re getting all this anger and aggression out. We’re emoting, we’re visualizing being that angry lion. And at the same time, we’re massaging, gently massaging the heart.

So the more you pull with the tongue, the better. And the more you can open the jaw, the better. Because guess where we hold a lot of anger, folks? Our jaw. People have TMJ. I see this with my students all the time when I used to do body work. So many people had TMJ, jaw issues. We are storing intense amounts of tension in our jaw. And the lion’s breath, the more you can open the mouth, do these big wide mouth.

exhalations or inhalations. We do that a lot in the somatic certification I teach, inhaling through a big wide open mouth jaw. And that’s a more cooling feminine technique. But for the anger release, really opening that jaw, challenging yourself to open like as if you were a snake that wants to swallow something whole, right? Opening it as much as you can, even if it’s a little uncomfortable and doing that big lion’s breath. Super, super healing. And

I notice like the more that I do somatic yoga, the more I am constantly like moving my jaw to side to side like just throughout the day because I’m just noticing how much tension accumulates for all of us in this part of the body. So whether it’s forcing yourself to yawn or doing a ton of like the pleasure practices and somatic practices that I have in.

the Uplifted Yoga membership where we’re doing that like big open mouth inhale or like anything you can do. Even just taking your hands if you can, take like just your index and middle finger right now to your jaw and just start making some circles. I mean, if you’re driving, you can have one hand on the wheel and just do this with one hand on one side, like just massaging that, you know, think about doing it like just forward of your ear and then kind of going down the jawline, right? We so desperately need this. So a lot of us clench our teeth, like a lot of us clench our teeth at night, that is me. So thinking about how can I incorporate, really opening the mouth wide, which is one of the things that lion breath does, staying on the pranayama technique train, breath of fire can be really nice. It depends. I feel like if you’re feeling really angry, Breath of Fire can almost like amplify that anger or it can feel like a discharge. It sort of depends the mood you’re in, but it can be a really nice release. So I want to mention that one as well.

and if you’re wondering what pose is, should I be doing that lion’s breath we talked about in? I love doing it in chair pose and then adding in like bear claws, like the knuckles bent and taking the elbows like alongside my shoulders and goal post arms and doing like, like we do that a lot in the Kali yoga challenge I have in the uplifted membership where we just like explore anger through Kali semantically for I think it’s like five or seven days.

So I love doing it in chair pose. You can do it in lunges, like in a low lunge. You can just like, ha, do a lion’s breath, like let it rip. I also kind of weirdly like doing it in like a baby cobra. So those are some places that you could weave it in.

You could also even just do it in Tadasana, but like maybe taking the, again, finding those goalpost arms. So a lot of times I like to do the lion’s breath with like some sort of chest opener or heart opener. So think of the elbows moving back in space. It just, you know, makes you feel more like that lion warrior expressing.

So there are seven super fun yoga asana pranayama techniques that you can use to discharge anger through the body. Notice we’re not trying to calm ourselves down or counteract anger. We’re actually trying to express it and amplify it, which leads into somatic work, which I’ve done a bunch of podcasts on already. But some ideas for you, if you are feeling a lot of anger, if you are feeling a lot of grief and you want to kind of consciously work with it,

beyond these poses, you could do other intuitive movement and kind of just think of expressing the emotion and amplifying it as much as you can through your body. So basically, however, you know, whatever anger and grief you feel, try again, only do this in a ritual container that you’re kind of setting up. You have a safe space. You have some time set aside to practice. You’ve regulated your nervous system first through

you know, lying down or doing something calming, but then you’re like consciously going to go in and try to express and amplify that anger and turn the volume up on it to a 10 out of 10. So it can be fully felt, fully witnessed. It’s almost like watching little you inside of you who’s having a temper tantrum, right? Maybe like younger you who’s very upset and being like, I’m going to witness your tantrum, my love or my darling or you know, little Brett.

I’m going to be here. We’re going to feel it full out together. I’m not going to be afraid of it. We’re going to express and amplify it together. And remember, this is one of the key principles of tantra. Anything that is fully felt will dissolve or will shift or will change slightly. Like even if it’s just fully witnessed, something that’s fully witnessed isn’t the same as when it was repressed and pushed down within you.

If you see something and have the courage to look at it and feel it and potentially even amplify and express it to volume 10 out of 10, like it can’t stay the same. I’m not saying it’s going to completely go away. Sometimes it does, but it can’t stay the way it was before. Something about it will evolve or shift. Another thing you can do is once you’ve expressed the anger or amplified the anger. And of course, I love to use sound here, use sound. It’ll just.

you know, take your healing journey where it needs to go so much faster, if you can use sound, is to think of actually like wrapping the anger with love. Wrapping the anger with love. I always talk about like wings coming from the back of your heart and wrapping that anger or that grief or that sadness, whatever is coming up. And in the conscious grieving ritual that I teach in the somatic certification, we kind of play with all of these things step by step. And a lot of students told me that they really love this feeling.

of wrapping, getting bigger from the back of their heart, from the back of the heart, out and around and wrapping some of these more difficult emotions, whether it was grief, sadness, you know, frustration, with love. Another key somatic technique would be to actually open as the emotion itself as an offering to the divine. So this is where, you know, maybe you start with

some of the videos that I’m going to put in the show notes for you, you know, these ones where we’re doing some of those traditional anger postures like the woodchopper and the punching, you know, we play with all of that. And then once your body’s kind of warmed up, you say, OK, how can I open as the anger? If I were to move as the anger, right, like the anger is now my muse or the grief is now my muse and I’m actually going to move as it.

as an offering, like as a moving prayer dance to the divine, what would I do with my body? And we actually practice this in the Somatic Certification, and it is so incredible to see, you know, the intelligence that comes online when we ask the right questions. And of course, we need to be regulated, we need to be warmed up, we need to have expressed and amplified a bit already.

This is where you know, somatic yoga poses and Kundalini poses can really help us as a stepping stool to be able to move intuitively in this way and offer our body as a moving prayer in honor of to move as an emotion that we are trying to release, transmute, change, right? And then another somatic practice is to think of, I’m just trying to give you a lot of different prompts that you could work with in your own personal practice or again if you want the conscious grieving ritual I’ll put info about that in the show notes.

But the next technique would be to actually set, think about how you could set the emotion free through your body. So if you were working with anger, you could ask yourself, how can I set this anger free through my body? What would that look like? Maybe that shaking. my goodness, did we forget to talk about shaking? Well, I guess we talked about shaking the legs lying down, but just whole body Kundalini shakes. Yogi Bhajan, who I know controversial, not necessarily our favorite person here, prior podcast, all about him.

But he did say, or go on the record as saying, like, you should shake, like full body shake as part of, you know, your Kundalini practice every single day. He was a huge proponent of shaking. And, you know, more and more science is backing up that just like, yeah, I mean, animals shake, we see this in nature. It’s so obvious, right? So many of these things are like so simple, it’s stupid. If you’re angry, shake it off. Optional to play the Taylor Swift song. You might want to play something a little bit more angry.

And that’s another thing, you know, having the right music to help you in this amplifying, expressing, moving as the emotion, setting the emotion free through your body, which is what we’re talking about now, is so, so essential. Like the playlist that I put together for the conscious grieving ritual, I mean, I was putting it together for weeks. There were so, there’s so many pieces of this ritual and it’s not long, I think it’s like 30, 40 minutes, but.

so many different stages that I wanted to walk people through and to have a very particular experience in their body. And I needed to find like the exact right music and songs to kind of inspire this kind of expression and intuitive movement. Because once we enter the realm of intuitive movement, I find people really need the right music in order to be able to let go.

So we can express the anger, sadness or grief. We can amplify it, we can wrap it with love, we can open as it, we can ask ourselves how we could set it free through our body and then see how we wanna move. We could also, and this is a little bit of an advanced technique, but I visualize it as like taking an elevator down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down to the base level of the emotion. And you could try to kind of connect with the pure energy.

beneath the emotion instead of the more surface level of the emotion because all emotions at their core are just energy. So if you can connect with the pure energy beneath the anger, you’re just like, if I am not so associated with the anger part, which is more surface level, like really I’m just channeling a lot of energy. I just have a lot of charge and that actually can feel quite powerful or that actually could lead into all sorts of different interesting places.

So that’s another potential technique. And another idea is to just widen and try to diffuse the anger or grief. So kind of like when you see smoke like rises up into the sky and then the sky is so big and air is so big, the earth, you know, just the world is so big that the smoke like diffuses and it’s no big deal, right? Like it’s just, it vanishes. Like we can’t even see it anymore. It widens, it dissolves. So actually doing.

kind of a visual where you think of the anger or the grief or the sadness moving up through your heart and thinking of the heart almost as like a big blue sky and just like the smoke would dissolve, you know, thinking of that emotion dissolving and not just dissolving, but like widening, widening, getting bigger. And it can be helpful sometimes to, if you’re having trouble, you know, widening it, like thinking of,

You know, not just your anger, but the anger of the world. Like not just your grief, but the grief of like everyone who’s lost their dad or lost a baby or whatever it is. And when you make it not so you centric and you can kind of grieve with the collective or grieve with the earth or nature as a whole, it kind of gets you out of the intensity of the pain because the intensity of the pain is often very like a me, me, me.

type of texture where it’s very me focused and I’m the victim and this happened to me and I’m angry about this, right? But when we just feel more into the anger of the collective, it helps us diffuse and widen. And there’s absolutely amazing practice about this. It’s a weird one, it’s a challenging one, but it’s really good if you want to play into this idea of like the collective anger or the different textures of anger that exist.

The archetypal series, my friends, in the Uplifted membership. This is a newer series I did in the membership. It’s all about exploring different textures of energy. It’s super fun. Like we explore the texture of sensuality and joy and playfulness and wisdom and of course darkness as well. And we use different, you know, gods and goddesses from different wisdom traditions to inspire us. So it’s like we’re moving as like Athena in the wisdom one. And it’s super, super fun. But the one that I did for anger and darkness, we explore like three very different textures of anger going from like the anger that’s very personal to me to sort of the anger of the collective to rage, right? And again, we’re feeling this in the body through specific movements. And I really think it’s like one of those classes that’s maybe like a little intense to get through. But once you’re through it, it’s like you’re never going to look at anger the same way again, ever.

or grief really, because you start to see all these different textures or frequency to it. So that is the archetypal series for those of you that are interested.

And then a really important last piece of all of this, if you are going to release anger through your yoga practice, which I absolutely encourage you to do, is to set some time to kind of close the ceremony. Don’t rush off to your next meeting. Set some time or in my conscious grieving ritual, I had like a whole song or section of the playlist that was just for this closing kind of ritual piece of it.

where you’re honoring yourself, you’re honoring the time you put in, you know, you’re regulating your nervous system as well. You’re truly kind of putting a book end and helping make the experience feel like a sacred practice. And you know, I prompt like a lot of different things you could do. Like you could walk in a circle around your whole space that you were just in. Maybe you want to do, you know,

26 like really deep bows. Maybe you want to do a super slow sun salute. Maybe you want to light some sage. Maybe you want to, you know, blow out a candle. Maybe you want to visualize the anger or grief like a red balloon like floating up away from you into the sky. Maybe you want to work with some of those like diffusion practices I mentioned. But something very specific, whether it’s visual, like just in your mind’s eye, or actually physical, like you moving around your space in a certain way that

is an honoring of you having taken time to process your anger and grief and closing the ritual space in some way. And then of course, I would definitely encourage Shavasana or what I call regulation in the somatic world or certification like to close, right? To just lie down after that little ritual and of course take some time to reintegrate. And then…

You can go about your day. So this is my invitation to you. Like what if instead of burying everything down or thinking we had to, you know, hire all these therapists and all this help, you could just create some time for a conscious rage or grieving ritual a few times a week and just make it something that you chip away at. This is a way, believe it or not, of honoring yourself, of practicing what we call in yoga for self mastery, svadhyaya.

Self -care, that first huge component of being like a conscious being, right? Knowing how to take care of ourselves. If we just walk around with the anger, you know, in our body all the time, pushing it down, which takes so much energy to push it down and hold it down. And instead are like, you know what? I’m gonna be responsible. I’m gonna set aside time three times a week for just 15 minutes each morning.

with some songs or with Brut’s conscious grieving ritual, like twice a week for 30, 40 minutes, to just move some of this, to just feel some of this, to just face some of this. And I promise if you start doing this, like you’re gonna see the power of these somatic practices and your life will change. Things will not stay the same. So open up the show notes.

Go explore some of the anger videos. That way you can do some of the poses we just talked about. Absolutely join the Uplifted membership if you are not a member because it’s so affordable and there’s so many incredible class series in there like the archetypal one that I mentioned as well as all my best courses bundled in the membership. Over 45 hours of continuing yoga alliance credit for yoga teachers in there.

and I’ll make sure we have information about the conscious grieving ritual in there as well. I’m sending you so much love. Make sure to take some time today or before the next episode to express some anger or grief or sadness in a conscious manner.

through a sacred ritual container that you design or through a video where I’ll guide you through it. All right? I’m sending you so much love from my heart to yours. Namaste.