Sukie Baxter

February 4, 2017 Pain Relief

What Causes Tension in the Shoulders and Neck?

Search online for solutions on neck pain and tension and you’re likely to find page after page of stretches and posture corrections and strengthening exercises layered on top of reprimands about computers, smart phones and even your sleeping position.

For the record, there’s no right way to sleep, as long as you’re sleeping and not waking up from pain. Leave your poor body alone to rest.

(Anyone who has ever had the honor of being owned by a cat knows there are infinite options for sleeping positions.)

But back to your neck and shoulders, I’m sure you’ve tried some of the usual recommendations already. Maybe you’ve visited a specialist to rub out your pain or skillfully place needles for a chi adjustment.

All good things.

But, after years of observing humans in their natural habitat (read: cities), I’ve concluded that neck and shoulder tension aren’t body problems.

They’re cultural problems.

For a complaint as universal as neck and shoulder tension (have you ever met anyone who didn’t feel the gripping in their upper backs?), you’ve got to take a step back and look at the bigger picture.

And the bigger picture is the culture.

Pretty much everyone is rushing around from place to place these days. And if you’re not physically moving, your brain is jumping from task to task, trying to contain your entire to-do list of 523 things.

Tension happens when you’re readying for something. Or when you’re startled. Either way, tension is a predecessor to movement.

When you have a thought about doing something, your muscles tighten imperceptibly in readiness. It happens when you think about picking up a glass of water, or gaze longingly at the Costa Rican beach on your desk calendar.

Athletes have known this for decades. Visualization — the practice of imagining yourself playing your sport — is a widely used training tactic.

It’s not just about the mental game. Visualization gets your body in sync with your brain. It builds muscle memory.

And it works on non-athletes, too. Every time you feel the financial pinch of unexpected taxes, or your presentation accidentally gets half deleted and you have to rebuild it with only five hours to spare, or you just feel overbooked, overburdened and overwhelmed, your shoulders tense.

They tense in readiness to get something done.

And they tense in defense of all the stress. Because your body only understands stress as a threat to your life.

Humans are extremely complex social creatures; our brains are designed that way.

When you’re born, your brain immediately begins seeking ways to foster connection to other people, to preserve your personal safety and even to solidify your social strata because being a part of the tribe is essential to your survival.

Any threat to these three elements triggers your peril sensors (or sunglasses, if you’re lucky enough to have those). Any social rejection, any potential layoff at work, even feeling acute physical pain, can all trigger your defenses.

One client struggled with pain that wouldn’t go away after a severe injury. Through our work, we uncovered that this person felt they’d barely survived the intensity of pain immediately following the initial accident.

Therefore, connecting to the not insignificant residual pain — the pain that seemingly would not heal — caused this person to, on a very primal level, fear for survival.

These things aren’t rational, people. They’re biological. You can’t reason with them.

Stretches weren’t the right remedy for this particular person. In this case, you can’t address the pain without first and foremost dealing with the trauma. So stretching tight muscles is like putting the proverbial cart before the horse.

Another person notably went from a relaxed jaw and throat while lying down to clenching his chin whenever he was standing. A clenched jaw stiffens the tissue around your neck and shoulders, and even affects your spine all the way down to between your shoulder blades.

This person had built the muscle memory of “armoring up” to face the stresses of the world. He was putting on a mask, so to speak.

This is why stretching doesn’t seem to work long term. It feels better for a short period right after you perform the exercise, but as soon as you mentally shift gears back to the stresses and pressures facing you, then tension returns.

And let’s be honest here, an hour of yoga three times a week won’t counteract 165 hours of clenching, or, allowing for six hours of sleep a night (and assuming you’re actually relaxed while sleeping), 123 hours.

It’s what you do repeatedly that becomes the habit. And tension is the habit.

However, I’m not setting the blame squarely on your shoulders. I don’t think it’s your fault at all, actually.

Everyone wants to tell you to change your habits, but I want to look at why the habit formed in the first place.

Our culture is complicit in perpetuating our tension and our pain by refusing to address the underlying causes of our relentless stress.

On a very grave level, the chronic, daily stress foisted upon those who face judgement and discrimination directly affect their physical and mental well being.

Those trapped in a cycle of poverty lack the means of escaping their perpetual Ferris wheel of struggle just to get their basic needs met.

(For some great reporting on the poverty situation in America, I wholeheartedly recommend On the Media’s Busted: America’s Poverty Myths.)

Even those firmly entrenched in the middle fight hard. People with solid, high-paying jobs still find social pressures squeezing hard against them — little to no paid maternity leave, demotions at work when the dad actually takes paternity leave offered, executives boasting about how many years they’ve gone without a vacation (or how they always work when they’re on the beach in Tahiti), regular office workers clocking eighty-hour weeks, and on and on and on.

And let’s not even talk about the political scene right now. Whether you lean right or left or just want to hide your head under the closest blanket, everyone is cranked into high gear.

Instead of acknowledging the fact that we are a nation of stressed out, overworked, under-rested individuals, our medical system foists upon us a series of stretches and exercises that simply add one more line to already crammed to-do lists.

Because that’s the system. When you complain of a lack, the formula it feeds back at you invariably informs you to simply work harder. Or do it righter.

Because clearly you’re not doing enough.

We live in a system that tells us if we simply apply enough effort, we will get to a place where we can rest and be rewarded. That there is some meaning to all this madness. Put in the time now, reap the rewards later.

This same idea, taken to extremity, doesn’t play out. Hard work doesn’t necessarily equate to benefits.

The right work does.

So, this has taken us to a dark place. Neck and shoulder tension is a result of cultural forces that are beyond your control.

Are you feeling hopeless? Please don’t.

Because there’s a lot that’s within your control. Like space, and how much of it you take up. Owning your space creates healthy boundaries — and keeps you healthy.

Forget about stretching. (Well, not entirely, it’s still good to move and bend and stretch, of course.)

Have you ever gone on vacation and noticed all your pain disappeared, melting away into the sea like so many grains of sand?

This is what you do. Create space to nurture yourself.

Literal space is great. Get outside the city into expansive areas. Let your body feel what it’s like to take the pressure off.

Make space for your mind. Schedule blank times into your day with no agenda. Guard them as though your life depends on it (because it does). When they arrive, do whatever feels good. You might use the time to catch up on paperwork, or to go outside and watch the tulips bloom.

Or, just stare at the ceiling. It’s your time, so it’s impossible to waste.

And create space inside your body. This is the work that I do with my clients, and in The Space Lab, my signature program. I’ve learned that how you move your body is how you move through life.

And when you change the way you move? You change your whole damn life.

If the idea piques your interest, you’re welcome to hop on the wait list here to be first in line when the program opens for enrollment again (hint: super soon). Plus, get my Own Your Space book for free.

Because taking back what’s rightfully yours can’t wait another day.

P.S. If you want to read more about how you can create space for yourself, I recommend this post on anxiety and this one on taking up space.

January 21, 2017 Posture

Your Back Has a Front, And Other Truths About Your Body

Client: Is working on the front of my shoulders going to improve my posture? (voice: uncertain, questioning, confused)

Me: Is posture only in your shoulders?

It was eight in the morning when my answers are at their most terse and cryptic (pretty sure softness and compassion don’t boot for me until at least 10:30). But what I really wanted to say is, there are at least a hundred things wrong with that question.

Not that it’s the client’s fault, mind you. I suffer this inquisition nigh daily, fragmented across faces and ages and years. Because this isn’t a personal question walking into my office; it’s a cultural one.

The reason we, as people, refer to our bodies in such fragmented, discombobulated ways is that we’ve been conditioned to think about ourselves as a collection of parts, like Lego bricks. If one Lego is broken, just replace it with a new one and the whole construct will work again.

If one wall of your Lego house falls down, you don’t rebuild the opposite one. You fix the part that’s broken. Duh.

Bodies aren’t buildings. Thinking about them like staid structures — or even machines — leads people to mistakenly focus on their symptoms, often for years at a stretch, without ever uncovering the root of their problems.

It also affects how we talk about our bodies. My clients refer to issues they’re experiencing as “it.” Their intellect, of course, is floating above all that base nonsense of muscles and tissues and bones. “It” is misbehaving, completely apart from their highly intelligent brain.

My back is tight, why is it doing that?

My left foot turns out, why does it do that?

Let me just point out the obvious here: It is also you.

Of course, you are not your back or your foot, but your foot and back are parts of you. Part of a bigger whole, a synergistic organism.

In my client’s case, his complaints were largely in his back: bulging discs, pain from a motor vehicle accident many years before, aching shoulders, stiff spine, slouched posture.

These are such common complaints that I’m beginning to think we have a societal epidemic. And of course this person spent years addressing his “back” problems before coming to me where I promptly plunged my knuckles into the taught, wooden tissue of his chest and ribs.

Prompting his confusion.

Because if his back is where the pain is, we must fix his back. No?

No.

His back — and yours — has a front. That front, unlike the segmented wall of a Lego house, is not only connected to your back, but functions reciprocally with it.

There are actually two types of tight muscles: locked long and locked short (credit for this concept: Thomas Meyers, Anatomy Trains).

Locked long muscles are those that are stretched. When you bend forward to touch your toes, you feel a pull in your hamstrings. That’s your stretch reflex jumping in to protect your body from over-reaching and tearing a muscle. The tension you experience is your own nervous system contracting the muscle, holding on, keeping you safe.

This is most frequently what you’re feeling when your back and shoulders ache. The muscles are being stretched; they’re fatigued and sore and hurting and it feels so effing good when someone rubs the tension out.

But the sneaky culprit is really muscles that are locked short. Those little buggers never complain because they’re not being pulled on. Instead, they have a set point that’s quite short. Every muscle in your body has this set point. It’s a level of ongoing tension at which the muscle exists, constantly. If you didn’t have this, you’d be a puddle of bone soup on the ground. People under anesthesia are more or less in this soup state.

The problem is that after years of hunching forward over computers, away from stress, to hide from the world, to save yourself from overwhelm, that set point in your chest and ribs and diaphragm becomes constricted. It’s no longer helpful. In fact, it’s crunching you into the fetal position.

And your poor back bears the burden, hanging on for dear life, trying to keep you upright. Or close to upright.

The segmentation doesn’t stop within our bodies. It’s not just that we see our backs as separate from our fronts, that we talk about tight hamstrings but never correlate them to constricted cores, to locked up shoulders, to a clenched jaw.

No muscle exists in isolation in your body; a tight hamstring is not just a tight hamstring. It’s part of a larger stress pattern. That pattern might be related to physical habits, like poor ergonomics at work or slouching on the couch playing video games for too many hours.

But I’m honestly tired of the “fix your posture” mandate. People are being brainwashed to believe that if you just hold your body correctly, the pain will disappear (and also any impression of physical sensation along with it because, let’s face it, as a culture we’re panic-stricken by feelings).

There are two problems with this edict. The first is that holding your body in a pose requires tension. And tension zaps your energy. It drains your physical stamina. It perpetuates friction within your body. Working hard to get your body functioning properly is kind of an oxymoron. Because seriously, you think you’re smarter than thousands of years of evolution? Your body knows how to work right, if you would only strip away the barriers to it doing so. Like, tension.

Second, posture isn’t something you do. It’s an expression of who you are and what you’re experiencing.

To understand this, let’s look at horses for a second. (C’mon, are you surprised? I’ll take any chance I get to look at horses for a second. Or an hour. Or ten.)

People always say the same thing when they find out that I do bodywork on horses: That must be hard, horses can’t talk and tell you what hurts!

Can’t talk, eh? I’d beg to differ. Spend two minutes around a horse and I guarantee you’ll see that horse talk. They don’t use words, though; they use body language. The twitch of an ear, wrinkling a nostril. Lifting a head, bracing their hindquarters to run….you know when a horse is calm and happy or upset and scared.

The feeling shows up in the muscles.

I’m gonna say that one again: THE FEELING SHOWS UP IN THE MUSCLES.

You’re not so very different from that horse. Your feelings show up in your muscles, too.

So maybe it’s not so much that you’re sitting poorly at work that’s wreaking havoc on your back. Yes, those hunched and bunched shoulders are compounding tension into your neck and back. Yes, they’re shortening your pecs and locking out your traps. Yes, your scalenes are taught as a hanged man’s noose.

But. Is it the desk or the job?

You keep trying to fix your posture so your back feels better so you can go back to doing the same stressful, overly demanding work in a toxic environment that perpetuates your stress, tension and, ultimately, pain.

Or maybe it’s not the job. Maybe it’s a septic relationship, unwieldy financial burden, caring for an aging parent with dementia, the list does go on.

This, folks is the mechanization of humanity. This is the paradigm in which you are told, repeatedly, that you have to fix yourself. That if you’re breaking under the load, it’s you that’s to blame, not the load.

Fix, fix, fix. Better posture, better ergonomics. Studies say and standing desks. Examining bodies in segments. Did you know that spinal studies are done on human spines removed from cadavers and separated from their supportive structures?

They look at spines without their ribs and pelvis. They fail to examine the correlation between the femur and the neck. It’s akin to looking at a bicycle wheel without the tire or tube or spokes. Irrelevant.

Looking at your posture without looking at your life is the same thing: irrelevant.

Because your posture is an expression of your internal experience, and without taking that into account, you’re merely fixing surface symptoms, not identifying causes.

Your back has a front. And your body has a life.

No one part of the whole is whole unto itself, but they all contribute to the collective functioning of the entity.

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June 17, 2016 Pain Relief

When you say you have a high pain tolerance, you might as well shout, “Please violate my boundaries!"

Suffering makes you feel goddamn moral and tough.

You learned at an early age things that are good for you are also usually unpleasant. So, you eat your broccoli, even though it tastes like piles of wilting grass fermenting in the compost heap.

You let the doctor sting your finger with a needle, the dentist excavate your teeth with a metal pick and suffocate you with a fluoride treatment.

You compromise your vanilla latte with nonfat milk, sweat it out in bootcamp every Tuesday and Thursday, order brown rice at Chipotle instead of tangy cilantro lime white, endure sweltering yoga classes in stuffy, overheated rooms, run because #cardio, and cut out red wine because #calories.

You slug green juice like it’s your job, flinch at the price of organic produce, cut out wheat and gluten and dairy and soy, go vegan, go paleo, go to the gym (and then go more because a little wasn’t enough) and when you finally break down the kind of pain that’s not just soreness but downright injured, you let your physical therapist apply brutal scraping that leaves you bruised and sore with radiating pain searing down your leg.

And you feel pretty smug about it all. Because you’re no slouch, not a lazy slob draped across a sofa, nourished only by an uninterrupted stream of Netflix and potato chips.

And the pain? Is totally fine. Because you’ll put up with anything if it’ll just fix this problem, and pain means it’s working.

Right?

Err, maybe not.

A decade ago, I lie on a table shivering (because I was too timid to ask for a blanket, sheesh), patiently breathing as deeply as I could while a practitioner dug his elbow into the side of my thigh. I was pretty sure he had a hacksaw and was chopping off my femur, but I didn’t ask him to ease up. He was the expert. He knew best. (Or, so I thought at the time.)

I was younger then, and spent much of my days looking to others for clues about how to correctly manage a situation. In this instance, it seemed pain was the norm, so I put up with it.

But I’ve lived my life in dog’s years now and am quite a bit savvier. Which is why, when a slick gentleman perched on the edge of the white Scandinavian armchair in my studio explained to me that he understood this process might be painful and was totally fine with that, I kindly enumerated the reasons pain might not be the most beneficial treatment.

To which he replied, “Okay, but all that said, if you need to hurt me to fix this, it’s fine. You can inflict as much pain as is necessary.”

I’ll admit, holding myself on my own stool required literal muscular force. If my stomach had had its way, I’d have stood right up, handed in my metaphorical resignation and walked right out of the door.

Because this guy wasn’t just okaying a little discomfort in the interest of healing. He was straight out asking me to violate his boundaries.

And that just isn’t okay. Not ever.

Now, his words might indicate indicate a psychological predilection (I don’t know, I’m not a psychologist). But, given more than a decade of experience listening to people talk about their bodies this way, it’s more likely they illuminate a cultural malady. A belief system.

A viewpoint from which 1) if a condition is painful, the only way it can get better is with greater levels of pain than inflicted the injury, and 2) he who is the expert knows best, external data trumps all and my personal experience is interesting at best and completely invalid at worst.

And I must listen to the expert at all costs. Even when it’s uncomfortable, makes me squirm, feels wrong or causes me direct bodily harm.

Can you see how this could go bad faster than a gallon of milk in the car on a hundred and five degree day?

When you invite someone to cross that pain boundary, when you make yourself permeable and retreat to your body’s attic (i.e. your brain), it’s like signing that evil agreement Ariel made in the Little Mermaid. It’s a deal with the devil, selling your soul for something you crave in return.

In this instance, you’ll get relief from literal pain, which translates into a modicum of freedom. Or, at least, that’s the theory and the goal.

But pain is such a good metaphor, isn’t it? Because we all feel some kind of restrictive pain in our lives, even if it’s not in our muscles.

There’s the pain of being alone, of worrying that you’ll never find anyone, never mind the one. The pain of survival, of needing the basics like food and shelter and fearing you’ll wind up in a cardboard box on the corner if you lose your job and can’t pay your mortgage (while comforting yourself that it’ll be a classy box, maybe refrigerator sized, and possibly coated with waterproof finish – you won’t give up all creature comforts).

There’s the pain of feeling like it’s not okay to be who you are, that preferring the company of a few friends over a raging party or wearing clothes in the colors of a tropical sunset somehow make you a misfit. There’s the pain of not fitting in, of not belonging, because small talk never made sense to you and the very thought of happy hour with your coworkers causes you to hyperventilate.

And these pains are all equal. They’re just as limiting as physical pain, and like literal walls on your potential, keep you trapped inside their fortress, flailing bloodied knuckles against the walls in desperation. You’ll do anything to make your prison break.

Like let a partner into your life who insidiously degrades your self worth by calling you crazy. Or weird. Or stupid. By belittling your interest in botany. Or making fun of your spiritual curiosity, causing you to hide your copy of A Course in Miracles behind the couch in shame. (But at least you’re not alone.)

Contorting your life around a job that ultimately seems meaningless but, at least for now, allows you to pay your mortgage and put your son through school (and really, you can quit in a couple years when things are less complicated…right?).

Believing that it’s true you must suffer to be beautiful (or that you must suffer to be happy, which is often what beauty is equated to, i.e. you can be happy when you lose the weight, reach a certain size, have the perfect boobs and vaguely resemble a plastic doll with a dead eyed stare).

Believing that having your boundaries crossed is normal. That you must gnarl yourself into some other form, warping and convoluting and shattering your values to meet what appear to be cultural norms, or even the norms of a small community.

Let’s parse this out a bit. Why is inviting pain so dangerous, especially in the context of a relationship between an expert and advisee?

Well, the most obvious reason is that you’re basically handing over control of the situation to the person wearing the white coat. You’re giving them permission to do whatever they want, whether it’s within your level of comfort or not.

This creates an imbalanced power dynamic, and it gets you used to being out of control. You become the follower. Now, experts are experts for a reason. They’re there to guide you, advise you and, yes, perform procedures. Some of those might not be pleasant. Surgery comes to mind.

But experts show up in many areas of your life. There are doctors and lawyers, therapists and even spiritual experts, often called gurus or preachers or pastors, you get the idea.

How many examples are there of boundaries being crossed in the spiritual community? I’ve heard countless stories where leaders of yoga groups or Buddhist meditation centers or even churches have crossed the line with a student, developing an inappropriate sexual relationship.

I’m not saying this is always what’s going to happen when there’s an imbalanced power dynamic, but it’s a terrific example of how handing over personal power creates permeable boundaries and can lead to a negative situation, one in which you may feel violated in some small or not so small way.

When you consistently give your power away to a person perceived to be more knowledgeable, more expert, more in charge than you, it sets you up for some really terrifying patterns.

Like remaining in an emotionally abusive relationship because he’s the one who makes all the money and thus calls the shots (and you’re even not sure you can make it on your own).

Staying at a job because it’s the responsible/logical/practical thing to do and people in your life – parents, spouse, co-workers – think it’s right to take the sensible path (even when sensible is shattering your soul).

Diet culture thrives on permeable boundaries. It tells you that if you’re not in some kind of pain (i.e. hunger), you’re not working hard enough, that she who is the most beautiful is also the best at suffering, and it links your self worth to discomfort.

Taking the pain doesn’t make you tough; it makes you numb. You dull perception of pain until you can no longer tell what’s going on inside your skin, until you can’t even trust your own feelings.

Want to know what happens when you can’t feel your own body?

You lose your sense of self. Like, literally. This is a known neurological fact.

There was a famous case written up in a well known book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks, about a woman who had a rare neurological disorder that caused her to lose all internal sensation. She recounted that she would look at her foot, know it was hers, but not be able to feel it. It took quite a lot of focus and concentration to pick that foot up and place it on the ground in front of her.

She told her doctors that she felt as though she was losing herself, that she had lost all sense of who she was, that it was as though she was completely disappearing. There was no division between her own body and the rest of the world; she couldn’t tell what was her and what was not.

Numbing out means you lose the game. You don’t get better, you get lost, blended and muddied, undefined, undifferentiated, diluted, like a dram of strong whiskey poured in a bucket of water.

I’m not saying that life should be a walk in the park filled with sunshine and roses, that you should eat ice cream every night for dinner just because it tastes good or that you should skip leg day at the gym because it’s hard.

Challenging yourself is how you grow and get better. And yeah, as much as I hate to admit it, broccoli is pretty damn good for you.

And I’m not saying that bodywork or medical treatments shouldn’t hurt, because sometimes they just do.

But you – and you alone – are the only person responsible for knowing your line between beneficial and boundary crossing, between the discomfort of growth and healing and downright being trampled over. Because you’re the only person living inside your skin. Nobody on this planet (and probably not on any others, either) knows what it’s like to be you.

So, eat the broccoli. Lift the weights. Run the extra mile. But the next time you’re writhing in pain as someone scrapes your achilles tendon so hard you want to scream or cry or put on steel toed boots and kick the sucker, ask them to back the fuck up.

Because you’ve got boundaries, and they’ve just crossed the line.

April 29, 2016 Posture

That Nagging Old Battle-Ax, Shoulder Tension (Finally, an Answer to Why Your Shoulders Are So Tight)

Poor computers. They get blamed for so many evils, not the least of which are all our posture ills.

Hunched shoulders? Too much time in front of the screen.

Neck pain? Stop poking that smartphone.

Stabbing pain in the middle of your back? Must be your desk set up. (Also, this.)

Not that our electromagnetic glowing rectangles are totally blameless. Sure, hunching over spreadsheets and databases while crouching on hideous, lumpy “ergonomic” seats can do a number on your body (the first time I really noticed pain in my shoulders was when I got hired as a teenager to clean a health insurance company’s database and spent whole days in front of one of those ancient black screens with courier font blinking at me in lime green).

But there are a lot of reasons that shoulder tension happens. And this is one of those chicken-egg type scenarios that we find so frequently when it comes to the human body.

Back in the fifties, doctors used to have to see patients suffering from gastric ulcers. This was a seriously uncomfortable topic for these uptight, mind-body separation folks who believed that physical ailments had nothing to do with psychology (because the mind is totally different from the body and they’re, like, not even connected, obviously).

It was thought at the time that ulcers were caused by stress. Eek. Now doctors had to have a chat about lifestyle (ewwww!).

Imagine their relief when years later researchers discovered that ulcers are caused by a certain bacteria in the gut, H. Pylori.

Phfeww! Now doctors could just prescribe some antibiotics and go on their merry little medical way, no squirmy convos about stress needed.

Imagine their frustration, then, when we later found that H. Pylori lives in the viscera of around 80% of all humans and is typically asymptomatic except when exacerbated by stress.

Crap. Now we’re back to those uncomfortable little talks again.

I tell you this because, “Why is my shoulder tight?” is probably the most common question I hear. You want to know what’s causing all that shoulder tension, I get it.

Well, like the doctors above, I can point to some very physical triggers – computers, mousing, laptops in particular aren’t great, carrying heavy toddlers on one hip, of course athletic pursuits play a role, injuries, etc.

But wait, there’s more!

A few years ago, I was working on some horses at a stable in the Portola Valley of California. A lovely woman who had similar training to me struck up a conversation. She specialized in something called TMJ disorder, basically jaw tension and pain.

I loved what she told her clients. “Listen, you can keep coming in here and paying me to help you deal with this, but you’d be best served to go home and figure out why this is happening in the first place.”

i.e. what are you so stressed about, bro?

Because jaw tension, teeth grinding and jaw clenching, those are symptoms of inner friction. Sure, you could have an injury that’s causing this, but nine times out of twelve, it’s stress related. And, like the bacteria scenario, stress exacerbates tension from injuries.

Well, shoulders are like this also. There is, perhaps, no part of the human anatomy that’s so physically expressive (barring facial expressions and straight up words, of course).

Look at magazine ads sometime. Even the covers of magazines are great. Those models really use their shoulders.

They can make themselves look friendly and warm, seductive, innocent, sassy, strong, confident, introspective….

All just by tilting their shoulders a little differently.

Most of us don’t consciously pose our shoulders (thank god). But, our shoulders do express our thoughts, feelings and beliefs, both lifelong perceptions of ourselves and our current, fleeting mood.

It’s worth noting that your shoulder isn’t something separate from you that’s attacking you with all this uncomfortable tightness. You might ask me why it’s tight, I’m going to throw back at you that it’s not tight, you are tight. That shoulder has a brain, and you happen to share the same one with it.

You know how I’m a sucker for language reflecting physical stuff, right? (Admit it, you totally knew this was coming.)

We have numerous linguistic metaphors for stress in our shoulders.

She has the weight of the world on her shoulders.

Shoulder the burden.

A chip on his shoulder.

A shoulder to cry on.

It’s no wonder shoulder tension is a huge complaint. They should be called should-ers, actually, because on your shoulders is where all your “shoulds” rest.

All the things you think you should be doing, the roles you’re supposed to fill, the things you’re supposed to do, clothes you should wear, the way your body should (or shouldn’t) look, the needs of everyone around you, the responsibilities you may or may not actually have to take on.

So, are your shoulders tight because your pec minor is short, your serratus anterior is causing your scapula to wrap around your rib cage and restrict your overhead mobility?

Sure.

But why are those muscles tight in the first place?

What burden are you shouldering that you can just put down right now?

When you pause to notice that you’re moving so fast you forgot to breathe (more common than you’d imagine), that social situations are making you nervous and anxious and you’re tightening up those armpits (yes, these are part of your shoulder), that you don’t want to be seen in the workplace – either because people might start gunning for you or because you’re just more of a background, introverted type – so you clamp down on your lungs and stop filling your chest with oxygen (by the way, have we talked about the fact that your ribs and shoulders are intricately related?)….

With this kind of awareness is where real change happens.

Because you can stretch your shoulders until you’re blue and the face (and your butt’s covered in purple polka dots), but if you don’t look at why that tension is happening in the first place, you’re going to keep coming back to square one over and over again.

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March 13, 2016 Posture

No Pain No Gain? 5 Reasons You Might Not Want to Leave Your Massage Black and Blue

One of the questions I get asked roughly forty thousand times a week (besides if I know all my blue hair dye has rubbed off on my neck making me look like a zombie) is:

The more painful my massage, the better, right?

After which I take a deep breath. And count to ten. And try not to punch the full length mirror in my studio. (Breaking mirrors is bad for the karma, or so they say.)

In the more than a decade that I’ve been a professional posture magician, the thing that consistently drives me onto my proverbial soap box is our culture’s addiction to extremity in every circumstance. It’s downright pathological.

We’re programmed to assume that anything not at the very edge of uncomfortable, practically unbearable, can’t possibly be effective.

This is reflected in everything we do.

Lose 10 pounds in ten days.

Five minutes to flatter abs.

Crossfit.

Juice fasts.

80 hour workweeks.

Sleeping in conference rooms to roll out projects that meet arbitrary deadlines (that a decade from now, nobody will remember).

Bragging about not having had a vacation in ten years and getting by on twenty minutes of sleep a night.

Zero carbs. Not even wine. (Sob.)

Waist training (With corsets…did you know there are actually modern women who wear steel-boned straitjackets in an effort to choke their waists into a size four jean?! I’m not over it yet either. We can start a support group.)

Whatever happened to dialing back the junk food a little bit and going for a walk at lunch?

This never-ceasing drive for more, deeper, faster, harder, stronger, bigger, better and badder turns your body into your enemy, out to get you with its tight muscles and inflamed joints. And if you just beat it up enough, then finally, it’ll submit to you, its eternal master, and be forever skinny (or Forever 21?).

Really? Come the fuck on.

Your body isn’t against you. In fact, it IS you, so maybe you should just fucking cooperate with it for once in your life.

(I did mention a soap box, didn’t I?)

You wouldn’t beat a puppy senseless if he didn’t sit when you told him to. You’d be patient. You wouldn’t yell at him. You’d ask nicely and if he gave you the first inclination toward sitting, you’d lavish praise on him in the form of cookies and pets and loves.

So why are you beating your body, screaming at it and locking it in a cage when it doesn’t behave the way you want it to?

Listen, if you want your body to change, you have to give it space (and patience) to learn something new.

It’s not a machine; it’s a living, breathing, feeling, sensing organism. In fact, it’s not so very different than that puppy. Yes, there’s the modern, thinking you, but the vast majority of your functioning exists well below conscious awareness.

Basically, your body is still living in the jungle. If you’re not nice to it, it’s not gonna come out from behind the tree.

With that in mind, here are five specific reasons painful massage isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

1. Deeper work doesn’t always mean pressing harder.

For years in my private practice, several times a week I would hear the refrain, “I know this is gonna hurt, and that’s okay, whatever you gotta do to make this better is fine. I’ll put up with it.”

Because, let’s face it, most people think that deep tissue massage is best, and really, really, REALLY deep tissue massage is the pinnacle of effectiveness.

To be honest, I really can’t stand bodywork of any kind that feels like inattentive petting. When someone just sort of rubs oil on my skin, I feel like I leave the session more tense from trying to swell my muscles and push into their elbow a little harder.

So, yeah, pressure is really important. Too light and it’s irritating. But too deep? And you’re not necessarily getting more bang for your buck.

The body is organized in layers, and all of those layers are interconnected. Sometimes, work on a muscle that is readily available can affect deep change in the body.

What that means is, you don’t necessarily have to lean your whole body weight into someone’s shoulder to make changes to posture and movement at deep levels in the body. Sometimes, lighter pressure gets you more gain.

A good practitioner will contact tissue where it’s tight. Sometimes this takes a good amount of pressure. Sometimes, hardly any at all, but it always feels productive and like something you can hang with, i.e. stay relaxed throughout, even if maybe it’s a little uncomfortable.

The bottom line is that if more pressure were all it took to get people to feel better, we’d all have bought steamrollers years ago.

2. Your nervous system hates anything that feels threatening.

It’s easy to forget that your body isn’t a machine; it’s an information system. The tension in all your muscles is controlled by a big ol’ super computer – your brain.

And that sophisticated system is constantly taking in data about your position in the world, adjusting and tuning your posture and movement.

What this means is that the archaic notion that bodyworkers are “stretching” your tissue is pretty inaccurate. Yes, there’s some stretch going on, but the bigger impact comes from stimulating your nervous system to make a change.

When you alert the brain to a movement inefficiency, i.e. stored tension, it adapts, relaxes the tissue and allows for a new muscle firing pattern to take shape, one that utilizes less effort and causes less pain.

BUT. If you’re grinding away at tight muscles for all you’re worth, the brain senses a threat. It’s being attacked. This is like hovering over a puppy and shouting at the top of your voice for it to come to you. The puppy doesn’t know what’s going on, but you sure don’t seem like a safe base.

And so your muscle tightens. This shows up as you gritting your teeth, clenching your thighs and curling your toes. At this point, you and your therapist are basically two brick walls pressing against each other, and not much is actually getting done.

That’s why you feel good after a painful massage (endorphin rush) and then tight the next morning (your brain never had a chance to relax and find a new way to move).

3. You have to open up the superficial tissue before diving deep.

You know that big, green and yellow-turning-purple bruise you sport on your hip after a really deep massage, the one you brag about to your friends? As in, “My therapist really dug her elbow in there, hurt so good, I know it was tight but she really went after it.”

That bruise isn’t such a good thing.* I will say that sometimes bruising occurs with bodywork. I’ve certainly had a few cases of it. And yes, it’s usually in areas that are very tight, but also usually not in a muscle belly but rather in an area close to the bone where the soft tissue is not very thick. And notice I said “sometimes.” As in, rarely.

This is because when the therapist digs that elbow in so hard and you’re gripping your molars together practicing your Lamaze breathing, curling your toes until she lets go, the tissue is actually getting injured. Bruises are the result of tiny blood vessels being damaged and broken.

Damaged!

Listen, you went in for a massage to get better, not to tear your body apart even more.

Here’s a little secret: if the therapist moves slowly, releasing first the outer “sleeve” layers of your tissue before proceeding more deeply into your “core,” or what you might refer to as deep tissue, the muscles slowly melt.

Seriously. It feels like they open and spread and ooze out of the way. Clients often start to feel sleepy or even a bit woozy because the body is opening up, relaxing and feeling zero threat. And, no damage is happening. Working this way, slowly and methodically, a good therapist can often palpate all the way to the bone (feeling it through the tissue) with a client totally relaxed and experiencing minimal discomfort.

Now, that’s deep work. Tissue prep is uber-important. I once had a guy try to attack my quads with a rolling pin super aggressively. If that ever happens to you, throw him a raw steak and back away slowly until it’s safe to turn and run the hell out of there!

*Bruises from cupping are a different story and shouldn’t be lumped into the same category.

4. Excuse me, sir, I think you’ve found a bone.

I cannot tell you how many times I’ve heard massage therapists tell me that there are lots of knots in my back. Usually in my right shoulder. I know, I’m right hand dominant.

They then proceed to dig away at those knots as though they were excavating a hidden source of uranium. And me? I’m left with inflamed nerves and swollen tissue. This is why massage therapists will sometimes tell you cheerfully to “ice that area” when you get home.

Because you know what? Most of those “knots” in your back are ribs that are twisted, maybe slightly out of place or popped out of the joint completely, or warped by spinal dysfunction.

I don’t mean your spine is messed up and needs surgery or anything, but ribs connect directly into your vertebra. It’s like one big suspension system. The spine is like a slinky – it can lengthen and spread, open on one side while closing on the other, twist, bend. And your ribs kind of move like Venetian blinds connected to that spinal slinky.

If your spine is stuck in some areas (and most people have a few sticky vertebra if not many), the ribs will have to contort themselves to move around the column in your back. That means they’ll pop out of place a bit.

And when you dig away at them? Well, one, they’re not very far beneath the surface of your skin. The layers of muscle on your back are strong, but usually long and flat. And two, all that pressure directly on a sensitive bone like a rib really inflames it, so you wind up all swollen.

Which makes you think something got done because you can really feel where that therapist worked, right? I hear you.

But the reality is, that pressure on the bone won’t help reorganize the spine and rib complex, helping the bone move back into place. Gently releasing the tissue around the rib is an excellent start and doesn’t involve the kind of nervy, nauseating pain that comes from leaning your elbow into it full force.

5. Pain isn’t necessarily productive (but sometimes it is).

Okay, so you know I’m against mindless digging into tight muscles and leaning on poor, defenseless bones. But is pain ever useful?

Sometimes.

Have you ever heard that Eskimos have something like fifty words for snow? They have snow that falls in big flakes and wet snow, powdery snow, thick snow, I don’t even know really what kinds of words they have. But to anyone who lives in Florida, snow is snow, right?

Well, with regard to pain, we’re all living in Florida. In the western culture, we’ve got one word for pain, but that word actually encompasses a vast array of sensations.

There’s the pain that comes from being smacked by a 2×4 or punched with brass knuckles. There’s pain in your gut when you eat something that disagrees with you. There’s hot, inflamed pain when you sprain your ankle, and stiff, achy pain from arthritis.

The two kinds of pain I want to differentiate are inflicted pain and stored pain. The first is felt when stimulus is applied to you, as in I punch you in the shoulder. Ow! Why did I do that? To prove a point.

But stored pain, that’s stuff we usually carry around but have no idea we’re living with on a daily basis. If I poke you in a tight muscle, it will hurt. But, I’m not the one causing the pain. If the muscle were loose and I applied the same amount of pressure, it wouldn’t hurt at all.

The pain is in your tissue, I’m just making you aware of it. And in this sense, pain can be productive, informative and generally useful. They key is to never let the pain during a bodywork session exceed what could be described as “intense.”

Intensity is what you have with a good stretch in yoga. You can still stay there, hanging with it, relaxing into it and breathing, but yeah, it’s not exactly the most comfortable thing in the world.

So, if you find yourself clenching your butt and grinding your molars during a massage, maybe just ask your therapist to back off a teensy bit so your poor nervous system can have a chance to work with you instead of against you.

It bears mentioning that there are terrific massage therapists out there – I mean, really dedicated, well-educated, accomplished practitioners who have made it their life’s study to practice a very therapeutic healing art. They are sheer gold, those people, and this guide is in no way meant to denigrate their powerful work (who knows where I’d be in life without my army of healing practitioners?). Most of them are deeply aware of all the above and will take it upon themselves to educate you, the client.

But many, many, many therapists find themselves enslaved to the more aggressive, harder, deeper model instead of the more intelligent, more specific, slower approach simply because that’s what’s demanded by clients (who haven’t gone to massage school…). These five principles of intelligent bodywork are meant to help you as the owner of your body communicate better with your therapist to get the best results from your sessions in whatever form you might choose and to shift your perspective on your body from a mechanized model to viewing your anatomy as more of a high-functioning information system engaged in a constant process of change and adaptation.

Phew. Those were some big words. I might need wine now.

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