Most of us have the proverbial pain in the neck on occasion and changing the way we perceive the world through our senses can often give relief. A lot of the movement of the neck happens in the top two vertebrae and a lot of neck tension happens because of what’s happening above it. I’m going to start with a few basic assumptions about the relationships between the neck and head and I’ll leave it up to you to decide if they’re true for you. So here are my assumptions:
Your top vertebra, C1 (the atlas), is balancing the tension of your brow (if furrowed), your sense of sight, and your inner ear.
Your 2nd vertebra, C2, (the axis) is balancing the tension in your nose and your sense of smell.
Your 3rd vertebra, C3, is balancing the tension in your jaw, temples and outer ear, or your sense of hearing.
It goes without saying, upper neck tension can be caused by a lot of things, but these are some of the big culprits and in my experience they go hand in hand with a flat neck. When you try the following exercise, consider it a success if you are able to produce even a small change. Developing a richer awareness takes time and commitment to changing the way you relate to your world through your senses.
Start by lying on your back. Try moving your head side to side to see how well your neck moves before starting. Begin by tilting your head back slightly, allowing for a slight curve in your neck, letting your chin lift. As you gently tilt your head back, you should begin to feel a curve forming in your neck as the neck vertebrae shift forward.
C3 and Hearing… Gently place your fingers on either side of C3 (just below the vertebra at the top of your neck that sticks out). The C3 vertebra should feel tighter on the side that your jaw is tighter. Bring your attention to your jaw and imagine all the tension melting away into the floor. Try making the sound “ahhhhhh” and allow your back teeth to float apart. Finally open up your ears. What do you hear? see if you can allow your ears to expand out to meet the sounds. Often in New York we are so overwhelmed with loud noises, it’s easy to develop tension around the temples and ears. Let this go and you should feel your jaw letting go. Check C3, did it soften at all? If not, you may need some more help getting your jaw to release.
The Axis and Smell… To work with C2 find the vertebra that sticks out just below your skull when you let your jaw go slack it will shift forward, but lets see if we can release it with your mouth loosely closed. If you flatten your neck and tuck your chin, you’ll notice that most of the air goes through the bottom of your nose. Now try breathing in through the top of your nose. To do this you might have to tilt your head back a little and relax the bridge of your nose. The upper passage of the nose is where the olfactory nerve allows us to smell. It is no coincidence that the posture of reckless abandon or ecstasy is with the head back. When we are most enjoying ourselves, our heads goes back to take in our environment through our noses. I find that it helps to close your eyes and imagine smelling a beautiful flower to really get the feel for opening this part of your nose. Alternately, flattening the neck and tucking the chin is the posture of disgust (when we don’t want to smell something) or more generally the posture of withdrawl, something we have a lot of opportunities for in New York with summer garbage smells. If you play with breathing through the bottom and top of your nose, you’ll begin to notice a difference in the way things smell, but it is the ecstatic posture of really taking it all in, that allows the 2nd vertebra to lift and open up. You might experiment with some smells you really like-a rose, an incense or fragrance- to see if it helps you to open your upper nose. When it begins to open you will feel a lift and softening in the vertebra with your fingers. Breathing through this part of the nose also facilitates a deeper breath as the breath is directed more forcefully into the bottom of the lungs.
Seeing, Balance and the Atlas… C1, the Atlas, named for Atlas who holds up the globe, is harder to find from the back of the spine because of all the muscles around it. The musculature around the Atlas both holds up the head and also helps us to know where we are in space. It sits between the skull and the 2nd vertebra. For this exercise feel for the muscles between the 2nd vertebra and the back of the skull. To soften these often overworked muscles, imagine your temples softening and floating away like a balloon, let go of any tension in your brow by first furrowing and then letting go of your brow. This is the proverbial third eye, so you might also imagine an eye in between your eyebrows. Allow the eye to open and see how it feels. Allow your regular eyes to relax back into their sockets. If your eyes are open, imagine that the world is coming towards you rather than your eyes having to go out and get the images. When we try to grab what we see with our eyes it throws the head forward and forces the upper neck muscles to tense. Instead, let the world come to you. The inner ear is where we find our relationship to gravity and if we’ve lost touch with our inner ear we instinctively tense our upper neck to brace for a fall. One way to help jump start the inner ear is to hold your hand in front of one eye (on the tense side) and move your hand back and forth. Notice how the hand blurs? Keep the hand steady and move your head back and forth. Notice how the hand doesn’t blur? That’s because your vestibular system is talking to your eyes and telling them where you are in relation to your environment. If your neck releases from holding your gaze on your hand and moving your head, it’s likely that the tension in your upper neck is from your vestibular system. Now check your neck. Did the muscles at the top of your neck soften?
Finish by rotating your head back and forth. Did you gain any range of motion? If your neck is moving more easily, build up to doing this exercise standing and in different environments. Does it change when you’re with certain people or in certain places? If you allow yourself to breath through the top of your nose, soften your eyes, or let the sounds come in, does your experience change? Often it is our relationships to our environment and the people around us that determine whether we are able to stay free in our neck. Did you notice anything else change when you changed your perception? Let me know by sending me an email.
I started shooting video this summer with my friends Weena and Matt, but never got around to a final edit. I decided to cobble together some of the footage to show off Matts video…
In the slo-mo, we shot weena walking the way she normally walks (the way most people with heeled shoes walk), landing on the back of the heel. If you look closely you can see the shock-wave going up her leg, hyperextending her knee. In my experience, this can lead to stress on the knee and a stiffening of the subtalar joint (between the heel and ankle). If you’ve gotten used to wearing heeled shoes, you’re probably doing the same thing without even knowing it.
The other thing we played with that we don’t show in the video is how important balance over the knees is. For Weena, the shock-wave really diminished even more when we worked with her knees. When you stand with your knees locked, it’s much easier to hyperextend your knees once you start walking. While you’re standing, even just unlocking your knees until they’re loose can make a big difference once you start walking. Try it and let me know how it goes.
A fantastic story just came out on NPR about the impact of running in shoes vs. running without them…
Something I’ve claimed for years, based on my own experience running barefoot and also from working with runners, is that shoes causes more impact on your body than leaving them behind. Running in your birthday shoes lowers the impact on your body simply because it forces us to improve our alignment to avoid pain. Very quickly our alignment and running posture improves from the simple act of trying to avoid blisters and hard landings. Getting blisters running, while a painful annoying experience, actually help to tell you if you’re moving with too much effort!
Barefoot running works like this… Most people with very little coaching will naturally switch to landing forefoot first when running barefoot. When we land on the more stable forefoot (rather than the unstable heel) it guides the foot into the center of the arch. Anytime you land over the center of your arch, the foot acts like a spring. Something that might not be so obvious is that when we run heel first the leg is extended in front of us and all that straitening keeps the knee from being able to bend and really absorb shock. by landing on the forefoot or the center of the foot the tendency is to land with the knee slghtly bent and with the torso directly over the foot. This keeps us from driving our heels into the ground in front of us like it’s a pole vault we’re throwing ourselves over the top of, hence, less shock. With the knee bent, the body is also prepared to absorb shock by bending the knee. With a strait leg, the only thing that can absorb the shock of running is the little padding in your shoe and the curve in your lower back. Personally, I would rather use the full bend of my knee as a shock absorber than my low back.
Another thing that isn’t as obvious when you haven’t run barefoot is that the muscles you use are different. We are adaptable creatures and we can put ourselves to the task of all sorts of horrible postural imbalances if they serve our purpose, but there is a cost. The muscles that are activated from heel (shoe) running vs toe running (barefoot) are going to be different because you are balancing differently. If you lean forward your back muscles engage, if you lean back, your belly tones. This should surprise no one. So not surprisingly, when you land over the center of your foot, it tends to create more balanced muscular tone whether running or walking. When you walk or run with the weight in your heels it tends to engage the back and outside of the legs disproportionally because you’re swinging the front leg out in front and hooking your heel to bring yourself up and over the leg. When you move from your center it allowing the leg to go behind you to push you forward and engages the front and back of the legs in a more balanced way. When the leg goes behind the body it also lengthens the psoas, but this can only happen when we are walking or running over our centers. In the NPR article the photo of the man running in shoes is pitched forward and he as to be to get his weight over the extended leg. It’s far easier to be centered over a pair of moccasins or barefoot than fancy running sneakers.
Light like a deer… When you are running barefoot you generally want to be light on your feet to avoid impact. The tendency is for the drive of the run to come more from lifting the knees than from pushing the foot down. I’ve discovered from my own experience that this action tends to both strengthen and engage the psoas so much, that pilates exercises I thought I’d never be able to do became effortless after a 15 minute barefoot run. The opposite is true of running heel first. I’ve worked with many runners, or former runners who complain of tight hamstrings and painful IT bands as a result of running heel first.
Since it’s winter in New York I wouldn’t recommend going out and trying to run barefoot, but there are some great shoes for simulating the feel of running barefoot like Vivo Barefoots and Vibram Five Fingers. To really get good feedback on your form though, nothing beats doing a couple minutes around your gym track or on the treadmill unshod. Just be sure you start out slow and keep it around 5 minutes the first time you give it a try. Build up slowly. There’s a lot of adjusting that has to happen if you’ve been running with shoes your whole life. You wouldn’t go into your first yoga class and try to bring your ankle behind your head. The same caution applies to running barefoot.
With snow forecast for New York this week, you might think of it as your big opportunity to walk the way your body was meant to-over your center. All that slipping and sliding really forces us to be over the center of gravity, something that most shoes with heels discourage us from doing. Wearing shoes with heels, even most sneakers, tilt us forward as if we’re standing on a hill. To keep from falling forward and tumbling down the hill inside our shoe, our natural tendency is for the hips to go forward, and chest to go back. This helps us to balance. It also creates a kind of collapse, since our hips aren’t under us and the chest is behind us. It’s the All American posture and you won’t see it in anyone who walks around barefoot or in flat shoes. Go to any Caribbean beach town where flip-flops and barefoot walking prevails if you need an example.
What this does…
Heels also tend to shorten the connective tissue of the calves and as a result the hip flexors, and when you’re standing with your hips shifted forward the upper hamstrings shorten which makes sitting difficult. When the hamstrings are tight they pull the sitbones under which makes an upright posture while sitting impossible without strain.
Gentle exercises to try…
Full body arching and curling is a fantastic exercise to find a balance stance, especially the arching part. Standing, try arching back, your tail back and up as if you have a 6 foot squirrel tail and you’re trying to touch the back of your head. Really exagerate it. When your head goes back shift your weight into your toes, this helps the sitbones to lift. With your tail back, weight in the toes, breath deeply, spiraling the arms back to open the upper ribcage. Inhaling is important because it opens the upper ribcage and supports the shoulders to rest more on the back. When you exhale, let your body spring back to neutral leaving your hips back, tail lifted. You should naturally find a less collapsed posture.
You can also go back and forth following the inhale with an exhale into the heels, rounding the shoulders, but make sure you end by inhaling and letting your body come back to neutral.
Another one…
Calf stretches are good with the knee bent and the hips back.. straiten and bend the knees with the hips back, to work different parts of the calves. Be sure to put even pressure in the ball of the big toe as much as the pinky toe ball so your feet dont twist. This will help the hips rest more back over the center of the feet.
Flip Flops…
If this article finds you escaping the New York winter someplace tropical heels probably aren’t your biggest worry right now, but flip-flops might be.
For many people flip-flops or thongs force the wearer to lift their toes or scrunch them up (which is kind of like pushing your toes down while you lift them) to keep the sandal on. Walk down any street in New York in the Summer and you’ll see someone struggling to both hold their cell phone to their ear and balance while they shuffle along in this year’s flip-flops. Holding that floppy footwear on is tough work and it’s kind of like multitasking for the feet.
Your toes were designed to respond to the ground, and they have a much easier time doing so if they aren’t having to wrestle with your footwear at the same time. Lifting your toes is something that most yoga teachers will ask you to do to find your arch. This is a great thing in yoga because it aligns the bones of the foot. If you tend to pronate, you probably have a little trouble finding the ball of your big toe and lifting your toes really helps to find that part of your foot without loosing the alignment of your ankle.
Unfortunately, all that toe lifting makes our ankles and arches stiff, and makes for a hard landing on the heel when we walk. When we are walking we want the arch to flex like a spring. The spring of the arch provides shock absorbsion for our bodies, but it can only happen when the foot is relaxed. If this is you, try this.. Standing, try placing the outside of your heel down first, then the outside of your toes,then the big toe ball and then the inside of the heel. When you press your toes down, you might notice that it’s easier to lengthen them out as you press down. This is the action you’re looking for in flip flops, instead of scrunching, pressing down as you lengthen through the toes.
Easier walking…
This exercise can help whether you’re in shoes, barefoot or in sandals. When you’re walking, try starting by standing over the center of your foot (all four corners with equal pressure) with your knees strait but soft, feet relaxed. Once you’ve found this posture standing, begin to walk. If you try this barefoot on a hardwood floor your walk should go from loud and pounding to almost silent. This is because you are landing closer to the center of your foot, instead of the back of the heel. How you start your walk will essentially determine how you end up moving. If you start over your center, you’ll end up walking over your center.
While flip-flops aren’t the best for your feet, if you wear them, you’ll want to find ones with a tighter strap across the top of the foot for a snugger fit, or one that allows you to press your toes down to hold the sandal on. Your toes shouldn’t have to do anything more than respond to the ground, don’t make them hold your sandals on too.
In my last article about the breath, I wrote about the importance of contacting our inherent impulse to breath, and allowing ourselves to be breathed, rather than following an external or mental cue. This exercise is no different, but it takes a little bit more refined focus and it builds off of the last exercise.
The Bandhas in Yoga, or “locks” (as in locks in a river) refer to the horizontal membranes of the body that provide containment and regulate the pressure of the different cavities of our bodies (our guts, lungs, heart and brains).
Where are they?
The major diaphragms of the body are the respiratory diaphragm, the pelvic floor (muscles between your tailbone and pubic bone), the base of the throat, the base of the skull -at the level of the ear lobes (including the roof of the mouth and base of the eyes), the top of the head, and also the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet. The joints of the body are also diaphragms.
Why the Bandhas are important…
When we are having trouble breathing, or our limbs are stiff or weak, it is often reflected by in how our breath moves through our bodies. For example, if you puff up your chest you will notice that the base of your throat and your respiratory diaphragm have to tighten to retain the pressure in your ribs that allows you to puff up. These pressure regulators also have a dramatic effect on blood pressure, oxygen delivery to the cells, stress on the heart and overall health. If they are too tight oxygenated blood isn’t able to reach the tissue and if they aren’t toned at all, there isn’t enough pressure to squeeze the blood back to the heart and we tend to feel sluggish. Balanced tone in the diaphragms leads to longer more balanced breathing and a lot less stress on the heart. When we are feeling our best, our diaphragms are gently pulsating between contraction and release to allow a smooth flow of energy through our bodies.
Ready to feel amazing?
Lie on your back and notice your breath. Allow your breath to come and go, without changing anything about it. As you tune in, you may start to notice that when you inhale, all of the diaphragms naturally contract, and on the exhale, they all tend to release. Without changing anything about your breath, see if you can tune into the softening quality of the exhale. As you begin to inhale see if you can continue to soften your diaphragms. Since they all move together, you won’t actually have to focus on all of them to receive the benefits of this exercise.
At first see if you can bring your attention to just one or two at a time or try checking in with different diaphragms as you breath. With practice, you will be able to open your attention to all of the diaphragms at once. Just be sure you aren’t forcing your breath, either breathing harder or speeding your breath up or slowing it down. Just let it flow naturally in response to the effects of your attention on the bandhas.
The overall effect of this exercise is that it will begin to feel as if your whole body is breathing, as if your lungs extend all the way from your fingers, to your toes and out to the top of your head, every cell expanding and contracting. If this is easy, try the exercise sitting or standing. I hope you enjoy the experience.
A word of caution.
Big emotions can often come up when working with the breath. If you begin to feel overwhelmed or even just light headed, take a break, this exercise should ideally make you feel more connected to yourself and more at ease.
According to a study conducted by researchers from Belgium and the UK, your shoes have probably shaped your feet to work differently than their original design. They found that people who go through life unshod tend to have a wider forefoot, better weight distribution through the foot and they speculate, produce less impact as a result.
For a hit of how this might happen, try walking around on a hard floor without your shoes on and listen for the sound. More than likely, your heels are making a lot of noise when they hit the ground. This is often the result of wearing shoes with heel support. We tend to put our weight where we get the softest impact. But when we take our shoes off the padding is gone. When we’re barefoot, the impact of our bodies on our feet becomes our teacher. If you pick up your heel and poke it with your finger, you’ll notice that most of the padding is on the middle of the heel, not the back where you’re probably used to landing if you wear shoes (and who doesn’t!). Try walking letting the soft pad on the bottom of your heel land first. This isn’t easy if you’re used to it and the first thing you’ll probably notice is that you’re walking slower. Don’t worry though this is just the beginning of learning a gentler way to walk. The speed comes from the pushing off, but more about that later. For now, listen and feel if your walk is a little quieter or a little less hard on the rest of your body.
I’ve done a lot of research into shoes and posture. The impulse came after watching my clients walk out of sessions balanced, only to put their shoes on and see all of their postural compensations come back. One of my experiments was to run barefoot for a year. In the process, I learned a lot about how feet were designed to function in all of their varieties. This article is an interesting primer to understanding why we weren’t born with lifted heels and why most shoes aren’t so great for our feet. Here’s the article, let me know what you think… http://nymag.com/health/features/46213/
There is a growing amount of mainstream scientific research documenting the effectiveness of Structural Integration (SI), the therapy originated by Ida Rolf for reshaping the body’s connective tissue matrix. There has also been significant interest in SI at the newly formed International Fascia Research Congress, as knowledge and understanding of how important connective tissue is to the body’s freedom of movement becomes more apparent. One researcher reported that muscle contractions only account for roughly 20% of human movement and that after an action is initiated, the fascia does the other 80%, pointing to the possibility that connective tissue, the tissue we work on in SI work, is more important than muscles in determining how well a person moves. In 1992 a presentation was made to the National Center of Medical Rehabilitation Research on the effectiveness of Structural Integration used in the treatment of degenerative joint disease. A 1997 article in The Journal of Orthopedic and Sports Physical Therapy reported that Structural Integration can provide effective and sustained pain relief from lower back problems. A 1988 study in the Journal of the American Physical Therapy Association indicated that Structural Integration greatly influenced the parasympathetic nervous system, which can dramatically influence the healing processes of the body. In conjunction with the California Department of Mental Hygiene, The Department of Movement Behavior at UCLA has also shown that Structural Integration creates a more efficient use of muscles, allows the body to conserve energy, and creates economical and refined patterns of movement. Other recent studies have shown a significant increase in hight after an 11 session series of Structural Integration. While there are volumes of research to be done to understand exactly how and why Structural Integration is so effective, to feel the effects it only takes the first session.
As someone who spent a year exploring barefoot running, it was difficult for me to accept the idea that an insole could strengthen my feet. While I still think that walking and running barefoot is one of the best things you can do for your alignment and core strength, I do wear shoes most of the time I’m outdoors.
More than you probably realize, the way you find support from the ground has a lot to do with how easy or difficult it is to engage your core. Many of us were born with a foot structure that tends to promote instability and misalignments due to a congenital twist in the talus. This tends to promote a lack of contact between the big toe and the ground and less support through the midline of the body. If you do have "Morton’s foot structure" or "Rothbart’s foot structure" you’re in good company. In Botticelli’s painting of Primavera, Mercury and Charity have this foot design and you can see what it’s doing to the alignment in their knees. Unfortunately most of us are not gods, and are more prone to problems with our feet, knees or low back due to this misalignment.
The way that Posture Dynamic insole work is to provide a minimal lift to the ball of the big toe (we’re talking millimeters here) that allows the medial arch to engage sooner in the gait cycle. This subtle shift helps to align the foot and consequently the leg and pelvis. Because it’s not an orthotic it isn’t designed to support the foot, but instead strengthen it and bring it back into alignment by changing the timing of when you feel the ground through your big toe. A wacky concept, but it seems to work.
Anyway, here’s a link to Posture Dynamics. If you’re unsure about whether these insoles are right for you, I can do an assessment next time you come in. It takes about 5 minutes.
If you’ve already done the series, are thinking about coming in for a Hellerwork series or just want to know how you can improve your posture, this is a fantastic book. It’s called The New Rules of Posture by Mary Bond and I’m recommending it to anyone starting the 11 session Hellerwork series. The New Rules of Posture is filled with fantastic body oriented exercises that come from Mary Bond’s 25 years of experience as a Rolfer, Rolf Movement Therapist and Dancer.
Many of the exercises are similar to ones I practice with clients in a more personal way during the Hellerwork series. They cover the basics of breathing, sitting, standing, and walking while developing core stability and making changes in perception that make it easy to recover a feeling of balance no matter how out of whack you may feel. Even an advanced mover can learn something from this book. In my Hellerwork practice, I find that the movement aspect of the series is often what allows my clients to develop the personal awareness to continue to find balance and improve their alignment long after the series is over. The new rules of posture is a great compliment to this work.
