My Highlight Time is a HiMoment column where real readers share the small, often unspoken moments of self-care, connection, and discovery that shaped them. Names have been changed to protect privacy.
Crying During Yoga: The Emotional Release I Needed
By Simone, 33 — Los Angeles, CA
The first time I started crying during yoga, I was lying on my back in a room full of strangers and I could not stop. It was a Tuesday evening class in a strip-mall studio off Melrose, the kind of place with mismatched bolsters and a faint smell of sandalwood that never quite leaves the carpet. Savasana had just started. The lights went low, the instructor said something about letting go, and my body decided to take her literally.
I want to tell you what triggered it, but I honestly do not know. There was no single thought. No memory that surfaced like a scene in a movie. Just a quiet opening somewhere behind my sternum, and then tears rolling sideways into my ears. The woman next to me shifted her blanket. Nobody asked why. Nobody looked. And somehow, that was the thing that broke me open even more — the permission of being invisible while falling apart.
How I Ended Up on That Mat
I should back up. At thirty-three, I was running a marketing team for a wellness brand — ironic, I know — and I had not taken a full breath in months. My days were back-to-back calls. My evenings were delivery food eaten standing at the kitchen counter while scrolling through metrics on my phone. I had a boyfriend, Jake, who was kind and patient, and I was slowly becoming someone he could not reach.
Everything had gotten routine. Not bad, just flat. We would sit on the couch, his hand on my knee, and I would feel nothing. Not anger, not sadness. Just a low static hum where connection used to be. We both wanted to talk about it — I found that out later — but neither of us wanted to be the one to say something was missing. So we watched another episode. And another.
My body had been trying to get my attention for a while. Jaw clenching at night. A knot between my shoulder blades that no amount of stretching could reach. A heaviness in my hips that I chalked up to sitting too much. My therapist — yes, I was in therapy, and yes, I was still this wound up — suggested I try something somatic. Something that got me out of my head and into my body. She mentioned yoga. I rolled my eyes internally but signed up for a beginner vinyasa class that same week because I was tired of feeling numb everywhere.
What Emotional Release During Yoga Actually Feels Like
The first few classes were fine. Good, even. I liked the structure of it — the predictable sequences, the way the instructor told you exactly where to put your hands. I liked that nobody talked. I liked that I could be bad at it without anyone keeping score. I would leave feeling slightly looser, slightly more present, and that was enough.
Then came the hip openers.
If you have never held pigeon pose for three minutes, it is hard to explain what happens. Your body starts to shake. Not dramatically, not like a workout tremor — more like something vibrating loose from the inside. The instructor said, very casually, that the hips store emotion. That it is normal if feelings come up. She said it the way you might say it is normal if you sneeze during a dusty walk. No big deal. Keep going.
That first time, I felt a lump in my throat but swallowed it. The second time, my eyes watered and I wiped them quickly, pretending it was sweat. The third time was the Tuesday I am telling you about. The one where savasana hit me like a wave I did not see coming.
I cried for what felt like ten minutes. It was probably three. When the instructor rang the singing bowl to bring us back, I sat up slowly, my face blotchy and wet, and no one said a word. A few people smiled gently in my direction as they rolled up their mats. One woman — maybe sixty, gray pixie cut, beautiful posture — caught my eye and gave me the smallest nod. Like she had been there too. Like this was just part of it.
Learning to Feel Again After Going Numb
I drove home that night with the windows down and did not turn on the radio. I sat in the parking lot of my apartment building for a few minutes, just breathing. I felt emptied out in a way that was not sad. It was more like someone had opened a drain I did not know was clogged.
That night, I told Jake what happened. Not the yoga part — the bigger part. That I had been feeling numb. That I had been going through the motions at work, at home, with him, with myself. That I did not know when I had stopped being honest about what I needed. He was quiet for a long time. Then he said, I have been wanting to tell you the same thing.
We talked until one in the morning. Real talk. The kind where you say the thing you have been circling for months and it lands and nobody flinches. He told me he had been afraid I was pulling away. I told him I was afraid I had already left without noticing. We did not solve anything that night. But we started.
Over the next few weeks, I kept going to class. I did not cry every time. Some nights I felt nothing special — just the good ache of stretching muscles that spend too many hours in a desk chair. Other nights, something would loosen. A memory of my mother that I thought I had processed. A flash of anger I did not know I was carrying. It was never dramatic. It was always quiet. That was the part nobody warned me about — that emotional release does not look like a movie breakdown. It looks like tears leaking sideways in a dim room while a stranger’s Spotify playlist plays ambient piano.
I started paying attention to my body in other ways too. I began winding down at night without my phone. I bought a small device from HiMoment — one of their personal massagers — and started using it as part of a nightly ritual, not for any grand reason but because my therapist had said something about reconnecting with sensation, and she was right. The warmth of it against the knot in my shoulders, the low hum against my skin — it was another way of saying to my body, I am still here. I am listening.
Why Safe Spaces for Vulnerability Changed Everything
What I did not expect was how much the yoga studio itself mattered. Not the poses. Not the philosophy. The room. The implicit agreement that you could fall apart here and no one would try to fix you. No one would hand you a tissue and say, are you okay? with that concerned head tilt that makes you clamp right back up. You could just feel it, and then it would pass, and then you would roll up your mat and drive home.
I think about that a lot — how rare it is to have a space where vulnerability is not a performance. Where nobody needs your breakdown to mean something. Where you do not have to explain. At work, tears mean something is wrong. In relationships, tears require a conversation. On social media, tears require a caption. But in that room, tears were just tears. They came and they went and the world kept turning.
I started to bring that energy home. Not the crying — though I did cry more freely, and Jake learned to just sit with me when it happened instead of trying to talk me out of it. I brought home the permission. The idea that not everything needs narrating. That sometimes the body knows something the mind has not caught up to yet, and the kindest thing you can do is let it speak.
Jake and I started a small nightly check-in. Nothing structured. Just, how are you — and meaning it. Some nights the answer was fine, really. Other nights it was, I do not know, something feels heavy and I cannot name it. And that was okay. We stopped needing to fix each other. We started just being in the room together, which is a different thing entirely.
What Crying on a Yoga Mat Taught Me About Self-Care
I have been going to that same Tuesday class for eight months now. The instructor knows my name. The woman with the gray pixie cut — her name is Diane — sometimes saves me a spot. We have never had a deep conversation. We do not need to. There is a knowing between us that lives below language.
I am not going to tell you that yoga fixed me. It did not fix me because I was not broken. What it did was give me a place to thaw. A weekly hour where I could stop performing competence and just exist in my body — shaky, imperfect, alive. And from that thawing, everything else started to move again. My relationship. My sleep. My appetite for things I had stopped wanting.
Last month, I was lying in savasana and I felt something I had not felt in a long time. Not sadness. Not release. Just warmth. A quiet, spreading warmth behind my ribs, like the first sip of tea on a cold morning. I lay there with my eyes closed and thought, this is it. This is the moment. Not a highlight reel moment. Not an Instagram moment. Just a real, unremarkable, deeply felt moment of being a person in a body who is finally paying attention.
Nobody asked why I was smiling. Nobody needed to.
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