If you practise yoga regularly, you’ll have heard your yoga teacher talking about emotions being stored in the hips and how it’s common for hip-opening poses to cause an emotional release.

There have definitely been times when I’ve felt particularly emotional and sensitive – close to tears, even – when holding pigeon pose (a deep hip-opener). But not everyone feels an emotional reaction when in these poses, and that lack of release can lead people to wonder if they’re doing the pose right. If you’re just hanging out in frog pose, concentrating on the pain rather than some deeper emotion, it might be off-putting to continuously be told that you’re bound to feel something.

So, why do some of us get all the feels and others get nothing? To find out the answer, we’ve been chatting with Cat Meffan, yoga instructor and founder of the Soul Sanctuary. Here’s her explanation for the link between emotions and hip openers, and why no yogic experience is invalid.

“Why don’t I feel emotional during yoga?” Here’s why not everyone gets teary during hip-openers