Do you think of your neck as a separate, or as part of your whole spine?
This week’s lesson is looking again at how you might stick out your neck, but from a different angle! We’ll be doing the lesson in sitting. The position change means you’ll explore different options of movement, gravity, and sensation.
Your posture can be best improved from the inside out.
Learning to stack the spinal vertebrae on top of each other needs you to be able to feel it. So that you support your head from the bottom (literally!). Then the muscles can do an efficient, and proportional amount of work. Learning requires your brain to feel differences that make a difference. So bringing you out of alignment and then back into it. Once you’ve felt that, your nervous system can choose the more effective version.
Working in movement allows your innate intelligence to shift in your unconscious. Conscious control takes too much brain space to maintain “good posture”. If you try to alter where your head is without feeling the whole spine you’ll likely not find it so useful.
Try it for yourself:
Sense if your head feels forward of your spine or chest, and if so, how much,
Then just push it back: imagine someone pushing your cheekbones backwards. Then hold the pose for a moment
It’s probably not comfortable, even if your head is now over your spine. Perhaps you can feel extra tension in your upper back or the base of your head, or top of the neck. And as soon as you let go, your head will come forwards again. You might still feel a little ache. It’s not sustainable way of making useful postural change.
So what should you do instead?
Exploring how you balance the head on top of the whole length of the spine is going to be more useful. Sensing the whole spine, from the bottom up. Working out what you’re holding and where, and which isn’t necessary. We can do this through movement exploration. So it’s an organic way of learning. In a lesson, you strip back to the simplicity of movement, in the moment. This allows your nervous system to sense without ambition to achieve. To feel simplicity. To sense when your head stacks up on top of the vertebrae. When it feels easy.
Unconscious control:
Coming back to sensation, movement, and play allows your unconscious in on the act. It allows your nervous system and brain to do what it does best -changing autonomic control. Your unconscious brain simply gets on with it in the background. It’ll choose the best option for the moment out of those available. Over time, this becomes internalised learning. Movement, Play, and sensing is how you learnt language and walking, on your own.
It’s not hard, but it does need time to explore, to sense and feel, and to distinguish differences.
the Feldenkrais Method with Emma Alter 