One of the biggest misconceptions about yoga is that if you practice yoga, you should never feel irritated or angry again. That you should just be able to go through life above it all, removed from the ups and downs of being human.

And this is just not true. Yoga is not there to bypass our very real and valid emotions, it’s there to help us feel steady as we experience them fully.

So instead of feeling like a little boat being rocked and tumbled about, at the mercy of the waves and storms of our mind, we remember that we ARE the ocean and this weather is simply passing through.

Because at the end of the day, we can’t just go and live in a cave by ourselves. And personally I don’t think we should, we are social creatures and life is for living. For me, yoga has always been about living our life in the world rather than distancing yourself from it.

And the world will always include people we don’t get on with, stressful situations, and things that annoy us.

It’s so common to feel guilty for any negative emotion, like they make us a bad person, or mean we are ‘bad’ at yoga. But emotions don’t have any morality attached to them, they are simply data. There to be felt.

It is how you behave, not how you feel, that makes the biggest impact in the world. And yoga can create the space you need to make sure you are behaving in a way that aligns with your morals.

When we react out of anger, this is often when we lose integrity and do something we don’t feel proud of later. So taking a beat, returning back to ourselves and then responding means we are acting from a place of self power, and it usually means we get better results.

This is never about pushing away our emotions or making ourselves okay with other people’s not-okay actions. We are not putting ourselves in ‘time out’ for having a ‘bad’ emotion.

Instead, we are returning our nervous system back to a more steady state so we can decide how to act, and make the changes we need to make, to respond rather than react.

So next time you are activated by someone try this 5 minute session to bring you back.

Don’t forget to save it for when you need it.