Feeling Angry During Yoga? Here’s Why It’s Perfectly Normal
“I Feel Angry During Yoga. Is Something Wrong with Me?”
Not once have I heard from my students, “I feel angry during yoga. Is something wrong with me?”
Truth be told, I’ve experienced anger during a yoga session myself, and not just once. I felt ashamed and couldn’t stop wondering about the reasons.
Why does this feeling make us uncomfortable? Well, first and foremost, many of us don’t know how to handle our emotions, especially the “bad” ones like anger, sadness, shame, and jealousy. From a very young age, many of us were told to suppress these emotions, to not let them show, to hide them away. Remember Elsa from Frozen, who was told to get a grip on her aggression and stay a good, quiet girl: “Conceal, don’t feel, don’t let it show.”
Moreover, feeling anger in the setting of a calm, serene yoga class seems so out of place. But where does this anger even come from?
Where does anger come from during yoga?
Experiencing anger during yoga is completely normal and simply part of being human. This emotion often surfaces when things don’t meet our expectations — perhaps you’re struggling to fully extend your leg, or you find yourself constantly losing balance, or you see other students excelling and feel like a failure.
Experiencing anger during yoga is completely normal and simply part of being human.
What if I told you that anger is a normal and healthy reaction when stepping out of our comfort zones, something yoga often encourages?
Anger serves as a protective mechanism, helping your brain grasp that something isn’t going as you wanted or expected, and that you’re in an unknown situation that could bring you down.
Our primitive brain doesn’t like losing. Losing could mean potentially being kicked out from a group, losing your social status, and ending up alone in the wild. But let’s acknowledge that we no longer live in times where we have to fend off mammoths.
We’re pretty independent now, able to live alone, feed ourselves, have a house, and not rely on others for survival. However, social recognition is still a top priority in Maslow’s hierarchy. We still desire to be loved and liked, and we don’t appreciate the feeling of not doing something well.
Of course, anger can arise for other reasons: perhaps your mind is full of thoughts, and instead of feeling focused and calm, you can’t stop thinking about what your colleague wrote in a review of your work. Anger can also stem from the yoga teacher’s voice, music that disturbs your peace, external noises, the smell in the room, and many other distractions.
The worst part is when you decide that feeling anger during yoga practice is bad, and you begin suppressing it, convincing yourself that this is wrong and that you shouldn’t feel this way. Unfortunately, suppressed anger doesn’t disappear; it comes back with friends — shame and desperation.
Why Acknowledging Your Anger is Important
My first and foremost recommendation is to acknowledge that feeling anger is normal. It’s neither good nor bad — it’s just an emotion that all humans experience. Believe me, even the most enlightened yogis feel it!
So, you’ve acknowledged your anger. What’s next?
Simply allow yourself the space to feel this anger. Say to yourself, “Yes, I’m angry. I feel anger.” Just saying it can significantly reduce its intensity. This act of naming the emotion empowers you to recognize it for what it is: just another part of your experience and human nature, not something that defines you as a bad person or your yoga practice as flawed.
Being in the Emotion
What does it mean to be in this emotion? There are a few recommendations that I practice myself:
- Don’t try to distract yourself from this anger or think of something else.
- Bring your attention to the sensations in your body. Where do you feel the anger? Is it in your chest, hips, arms, or somewhere else?
- Focus on your breathing. Is it calm and deep, or shallow and rapid? Stay here with your breath for a while, noticing how your chest expands or how cool air enters through your nostrils and warm air exits.
- Continue noticing what’s going on within yourself. You may find that anger, like a wave, comes forward and flows away, intensifying and becoming smaller.
- Eventually, you might discover other emotions within yourself, such as satisfaction, happiness, or embarrassment, alongside the anger. You may notice the intensity of your anger starting to weaken.
Embracing Imperfection and Growth
The fear of feeling anger is closely tied to the modern obsession with perfectionism. Today, it’s so trendy to juggle multiple jobs, sacrifice sleep, skip meals, and neglect time with friends and family. We’ve become such perfectionists that we’ve even added yoga — a practice meant to help us escape our to-do lists and deadlines — to the list of things that can make us feel like complete failures.
The fear of feeling anger is closely tied to the modern obsession with perfectionism.
The journey through yoga — and indeed, through life — is not about achieving perfection but about learning and growing through challenges. Learning to accept our emotions and to find enjoyment in discomfort, just as we do in comforting poses, can help us understand our minds and bodies better.
What we experience on the mat as a rehearsal for life’s challenges.
In the end, feeling angry during yoga isn’t a sign that something is wrong with you. Rather, it’s a reminder that you’re human, with a complex collection of emotions that don’t simply switch off the moment you step onto a mat.
I like to think of what we experience on the mat as a rehearsal for life’s challenges. We fall, we struggle, we stand up — sweaty, exhausted, but happy.
