Free your neck: a powerful way to lose your slump

Many people believe that they can lose their slump and achieve good posture by an effort of will. In fact, this is impossible. At least, it’s impossible if you don’t know how to do it — and, as you’ll see, most people don’t know how to go about it. This article is going to show you how.

I’m going to teach you how to replace a slump with easy, alert good posture.

First you need know how to free your neck. To understand freeing your neck you really need to see it in action. So take a look at the two short video clips I’ve posted below.

How to do it wrong
(What a face! You really wouldn’t want to know me if I were normally like this  )

This first clip shows the kind of thing that happens if someone with a bad stoop makes a determined effort to straighten up.
Play it now.

Do you see how I end up very stiff and how my eyes go out of focus? I wouldn’t be any good for anything if that were how I straightened up. No wonder people soon give up on their effort to straighten out!

How to do it right
(Ah that’s better — even though growing a beard for the opera I was in)

In contrast, in this second clip, I’m doing it right. Play it now

Do you see how I’m just as straight as I was when I made the big effort (actually straighter)? But now, far from being stiff, I’m relaxed, at ease, fully focused and alert.

So what was I doing in the second clip? I was freeing my neck up. Okay, fine, but what does that mean and how was I doing it?

How I freed my neck up

I applied the tube principle to my head and neck. (I’m going to assume you’re familiar with the tube principle from my earlier posts, otherwise we’d be here all night.)

In the second video clip, I was working with two new bends in the body-tube — new in the sense that I haven’t written about them yet. Both of them are quite complicated:–

1. The bend in the neck itself
2. The bend in the head

1. The bend in the neck itself

In the video, like most people, I was caught up in the front of my neck and stretched out in the back. That made me arch my neck backwards and pull my head back on top of it. What’s that like in detail?

In detail, my throat, tongue, jaw and lower lip were all bunched up and pulling everything they could get hold of around from the back of my neck. So, at this bend, the front is the bunched-up side.

The stretched side is at the back. The most stretched bit of the back of your neck will be just under the bottom of the back of your head. Put your hand there and find where the back of your neck meets hard skull. That’s where I mean.

As well as the back of your neck, your soft palate is also stretched. Your soft palate is what you see hanging down at the back if you have a look down someone’s throat. As you free your neck, your soft palate is released to go back and up. Sometimes, I believe, it can even end up pointing upwards instead of down.

Do you find all this bunching and stretching in your body-tube confusing? Let me use a model to help you visualise it.

A model demonstrating what happens to your body-tube

Imagine yourself wearing a stretchy sweater. If you take hold of it somewhere at the front and pull the two sides together, the sides come forwards and the back stretches out thin and taut.

Visualising the sweater, you can see how the bunched up bit now has too much material and the stretched bit is stretched thin, with too little material. As a result, the sweater tries to pull you over from the bunched-up side towards the stretched side. Of course, the sweater doesn’t pull very hard. Your muscles do the same thing at every bend in your body-tube — except they pull much harder. They pull you over from the bunched-up side towards the thinly-stretched side.

Sometimes the bunching up is at the front, as we’ve just seen in your neck, and at other times it’s at the back, as for example, in your head.

2. The bend in your head

In the video, still like most people, I was also tightened and bunched up at the back of my head and stretched out in front, around my face.

So here the pull is from the hard, rounded back of your head. (This place is just above where I asked you to put your hand earlier). This pull at the back of your head stretches your forehead, your eyes, the bridge of your nose and your upper lip. Let’s see if we can visualise that.

To visualise it, don’t think of the sweater. Imagine, instead, a bank robber’s whole-head mask. Imagine the mask being drawn together at the back of your head and getting all stretched out in front. Of course, this part of your body-tube includes your skull and your skull is too solid to bend, as happens in other parts of your body-tube. Apart from that, this bend works just the same as all the other bends.

So, yes, the pull at the back of your head stretches your forehead, your eyes, the bridge of your nose and your upper lip. How are you to work with all this? It’s all so bewilderingly complicated! True, so let’s start with a simplified version and practise that first.

Start practising with a simplified version

Simplify by allowing the back of your head to ease, to soften and spread sideways around the sides of your head. This will allow your whole face to relax and smile. You don’t want a toothy smile. Smile with your eyes. That’s all you need to start correcting the second bend, but what about the first bend, the one in your neck?

In your neck, become aware of your voice box (Adam’s apple) or of the back of your tongue. Use whichever you find it easier to give your attention to. Just allow it to soften and spread. That will release the sides of your neck so that they can ease back and allow you to draw together, from left and right, the back of your neck at the place where it joins your skull. It doesn’t matter if you don’t feel those things happening.

As long as you’re not trying to do these things but just visualising them, your practice will be fruitful whether you feel it working or not. Spend just a few seconds at most on one of those two places and then go back to the other so that you alternate between the two.

Once you’re confident with this simplified version, you can add more detail to your practice. So long as you only visualise, so long as you avoid any trying to *make* something happen, you can’t go wrong. The more you practise, the better it will work for you.

As you could see from the video, We have here a very powerful tool for replacing your slump with easy, alert good posture.