Healing Through Hip Movement: Feel & Flow

Do you ever feel like you’re carrying the weight of the world in your lower back?
That might be your root and sacral chakras talking.

This video is a powerful blend of body science and energy wisdom to help you explore the connection between our emotional and physical tension in our hips and our chakras. To help you ease tension, feel more grounded, creative, and flow better, reenergised.

Here are 5 ways this video might help you:

✅  See how stress and trauma can settle in our hips, leading to pain, tension, and disconnection.

✅  Discover the role of your psoas muscle in this process.

✅  Understand how our root chakra helps ground us.

✅  And how important our sacral chakra is, in our emotional expression and creative flow.

✅  Learn an easy breathwork practice to support your vagus nerve, and a gentle reset exercise to help release your tension and improve your flexibility. To improve your emotional regulation, circulation, and restore trust in your own body. So that you can move more freely and live a more fulfilling life.

So join me, and come home to your base, your breath, and your body.

Rather read the transcript?

Here it is…

 This month, we’re talking about coming home to our center and strengthening our core and why that’s important.

This week is week two. Holding on, in our hips. Emotion, movement, and our sacral chakra. 

Have you ever felt like you are storing tension in your hips? That stretching just won’t shift it. Maybe you feel like your hips are heavy, like they’re holding onto something, something that is just not being spoken. 

Hello and welcome. I’m Sarah Gowans, remedial massage and craniosacral therapist, and emotional integration facilitator at Blossoming Me and the Healthy Learning Lounge. Here we are a sanctuary for you to tap into and nurture your health, wellbeing, and a positive mindset. We focus on helping you to clear stresses, tensions, and blocks that can hold you back from living your most fulfilling life.

That heaviness in your hips, that tension, that you can’t stretch out, that tension may be more than just physical. It could be emotion that your body hasn’t had a chance to release, and it’s living in your pelvis, in your core muscles, and your sacral chakra.

 

Your Hips – the Emotional Reservoir

The hips are where we carry what we don’t or can’t process. Grief, fear, tension, and trauma. They’re also the source of our rhythm, sensuality and creative spark, energetically. This area corresponds to our sacral chakra, which governs emotion, movement, intimacy, and flow.

So in this talk, we’re exploring our hips, their physical and emotional role, especially through the psoas muscle. 

Question 1 – Why do stress and trauma settle in our hips and our pelvis?

Question 2 – What’s the connection between our hips and OUR sacral chakra?

Question 3 – How do softness and fluidity restore movement, breath, and energy in our body? 

And finally,  I’ll show you a short embodied flow exercise to help you soften, sway, and let go. 

 

Question one – The Hidden Keeper of Stress

So let’s go back to question one. The hidden keeper of stress deep inside our pelvis, is our psoas muscle. A muscle that connects our spine and our legs.

It’s not just crucial for posture and walking. It’s a major player in our fight-or-flight nervous system response. When we experience chronic stress, the psoas stays short, tight, and reactive. Over time, this can lead to hip and lower back pain. A chronically tight psoas muscle can pull on our lumbar spine, contributing to stiffness and discomfort. Tension in our psoas muscle compresses the pelvic space, making it harder for our pelvic floor and abdominal organs to function well.

Postural imbalances too. A short or imbalanced psoas can tilt our pelvis and destabilise our gait or walking pattern.

 

Improve Your Range of Motion Without Force

One quick tip: our psoas muscle actually responds even more to safety than it does to stretching!

So focus on slow, soothing movements rather than aggressive mobility work, to try to mobilise and loosen things.

Gentle dynamic movements can improve our range of motion without force. According to Liz Cock, our psoas is where our body remembers everything that our mind tries to forget. 

 

Number two – Your Sacral Chakra – the Center of Your Sensation and Flow

The sacral chakra is located in our lower abdomen and pelvis. It governs our emotional expression and processes how we can safely share those feelings with others. It governs our pleasure and sensuality. It’s the center for receiving and experiencing enjoyment in our body, whether through movement, touch, or creativity.

This chakra is home to our creative energy. Our ideas, projects, and artistic impulses are all born from this space of inner fluidity and flow. Our flexibility and adaptability, not just in movement, but in how we respond to change, relate to other people, and to the world around us. 

When this chakra is blocked or depleted, you might feel disconnected from your body, especially from your hips, pelvis, or your lower belly. You might feel emotionally flat, or at the other end, overwhelmed. Either numbing or becoming completely flooded with feeling. You might feel stiff or stuck in your movement, as physical tension mirrors our emotional resistance. 

So to help with that, you can recenter and calm yourself: Placing your hands on your belly, close your eyes and breathe into that space, letting, letting your breath move you.

“Our flow isn’t about water. It’s about feeling, creating, and moving freely”, says Gabrielle Roth.

 

Question three – Why do the hips hold on physically?

The hips are our base for movement and balance. Emotionally, they’re tied to safety, expression, and letting go. When life feels unsafe or overwhelming, we unconsciously hold here. It’s our body reacting unconsciously, in a physical way, for emotional protection. But over time, this holding becomes habitual, and we can lose mobility, creativity, and even intimacy. 

Softness and fluidity in our hips is like giving our body permission to exhale. Gentle rhythmic motions can send a message to our nervous system that it’s safe and can let go. When our hips move freely, our breath deepens, our pelvic floor softens, and our energy can circulate freely, without obstruction. This can open the door to greater emotional regulation, improved circulation, and restored trust in our own body. 

 

An exercise to help you create flow in your sacral chakra:

Somatic therapy research shows that the pelvis and hips are common sites of muscle guarding related to emotional trauma, so gentle hip circles, while we are seated or standing, can reintroduce this softness, fluidity, and flow to this region. 

Softness in our hips invites safety in our nervous system. Flow becomes possible when we stop bracing against it and against life. So here is an exercise that can help you create flow in your sacral chakra:

• Sit. If you can sit with the soles of your feet together, knees wide open. If not, sitting in general will be fine. On a flat surface or a chair.

• We are going to let gravity do the work. We don’t need to push our knees open or our bottom more deeply into the surface we’re sitting on. 

Just let gravity do the work. No pushing. 

• Place your hands on your lower belly and breathe slowly, letting the breath move your hips, from the inside, gently out. You may notice your ribs moving too. That’s perfectly wonderful.

• Just breathe softly into this space, with your hands sitting still in that sacral chakra, just below your belly button, palms open.
• Breathing softly into this space and visualise a warm orange light glowing, gently pulsing with each breath in and out. 

Stay here as long as it feels good. 

 

In Conclusion – Feel It to Free It

Softness is not weakness. It’s permission to feel, and to flow. 

Your hips aren’t just joints. They’re deep worlds of memory and energy. When we move them with awareness, we give our whole self permission to release, to create, and to reconnect. The sacral chakra reminds us that movement is healing and emotions are simply energy in motion.

 

So I hope you found value in today’s video, and if you did, please like and share it.  And join us next time, as we head down to the root chakra in the lower back and spine, and uncover how chronic stress and allostatic load can weigh us down. 

So get ready to ground, to help you start living your most fulfilling life. 

And to help you even more, I’ve created a “Winter Peace Meditation: Journey Within” to help you ease your hip and lower back pain, and to reduce your stress and anxiety.

Like a copy? See the form below 🙂

From my heart to yours,

Namaste. 

Sarah xx

Interested in further reading?

Unlocking Gut Health: Eastern Meets Western Wisdom

Relaxation Revolution: The Secret to Alleviating Lower Back Pain and Enhancing Your Well-being

Are Tight Hip Flexors Causing Your Lower Back Pain?

Beyond the Ache: The Amazing Link Between Fascia, Pain, and Emotional Well-being

Back to Balance: Clearing Lower Back Pain by Balancing Your Kidney Meridian

About Blossoming Me

BlossomingMe offers a fully integrated approach to your wellbeing. Located on Sydney’s Upper North Shore. Sarah is our Cranio-sacral and Remedial Massage Therapist and health and lifestyle coach. She can help relieve those problematic knots, tightness and other specific ailments to promote a healthy recovery. These complementary massage therapies can be combined to suit your needs, and include: craniosacral therapy, shiatsu, acupressure, reiki, remedial, swedish, and body-mind-massage. 

Our qualified Osteopath, Alexis, offers a drug free, minimally invasive, “hands on” treatment focusing on the musculoskeletal system with its associated muscles, tendons, ligaments, membranes, bones and joints. Alexis takes a functional approach. This means that she focuses on the way a component (body part, tissue or group of tissues) performs its role, as well as the way the body works, performs and integrates as a whole. Our team can support you to improve your posture and therefore your overall health.

**Disclaimer** The information provided by BlossomingMe, on our website, in our courses, and in our blogs and posts, is for educational and informational purposes only. The information provided on this site and social outlets is not, nor intended to be, a substitute for profess

ional advice or care. Please seek the advice of a qualified health professional before you make any changes to your health regime, before dealing with new symptoms, and, if something you have read here has raised any questions or concerns regarding your situation.