How To Allow The Neck to Free (Part 2)

No... This won't free your whole neck...

Dec 12, 2024

A few posts ago, I wrote this post on how to free the neck. In it, I describe a little exercise you can try. I draw attention to the base of the skull and the top of the trapezius and invite you to think about that region softening up without attempting to physically manipulate that muscle. I think it’s an important exercise to try but I also note that if you do it, you will not have a totally free neck.

Today, I’m going to give you another “exercise” with a similar caveat. This post will not free your neck in isolation. But what it will hopefully do is give you a better sense of feeling around your neck and improve your Inner Sherlock.

Your Soft Palette Is Alive

When we habitually have tension in the neck, there is a tendency for the soft tissues of the voice, mouth, and soft palette to turn into stone. Over time, this stiffening becomes so normal that most of us cannot feel much of anything in this area. Oftentimes, this stiffening extends into the jaw and creates a lot of pain.

This inner soft tissue and muscle is all a big big part of your neck. Rather than being able to feel this, the pain in the jaw becomes dominant in our feeling. We begin sending our sense of feeling around the jaw and wishing that this goes away and we ignore the inner neck altogether.

Unfortunately as long as this draw of attention to the jaw is taking place, the neck will never be able to fully relax.

Relax Your Voice

This is what FM Alexander originally attempted to do to sort out his vocal injury. He was - understandably - obsessed with the functioning of his voice and spent a long time trying and failing to relax this area. Ultimately, FM would work out that the only way he could relax the inner soft tissue of his neck was to prevent the helicopter of his head from crashing down on his neck.

We can learn something important from FM’s journey. When he began this whole process of attempting to improve his health, he already had a sense of feeling for the inner soft tissue of the neck (here I truly mean everything below the skull and above the collar bones). It’s something that a serious vocalist is always thinking about but the average person is absolutely never going to consider.

In order for you to go on the journey of freeing your neck from tension, you may want to start wondering what the heck all of this soft tissue is and begin to gently ask yourself “What is this?”.

I do not need you to ever graduate beyond “What is this?” as that sense of knowing for certain where and what you are tends to generate rigidity. You are of course encouraged to discover all of that for yourself!

Getting Started

It can be a bit overwhelming to think that you need to learn/feel/explore each and every crevice of your inner neck. Most of us are extremely busy and it can be very frustrating to go about this business of neck freeing without some in person help.

With that in mind, I’ll describe one area that has been helpful starting point for me. It absolutely is not the one little trick that forever unlocks the Alexander Technique for you, but I am hoping it will give you a better sense of judging if and how your head can balance freely on top of the neck.

The Preamble

I encourage you to go through the exercise in part 1 so that you have a sense for the back of your neck. I think this will help you better feel what I’m talking about today.

The Exercise

I’d like you to start by feeling your ears.

If your hands are placed over each ear, you can imagine a cylindrical tube cutting right through your head. There are a bunch of muscles in this zone and I’d like you to gently think “What is this?” as you allow your sense of feeling to fill that tube. With any luck, you may feel the muscles around the ears gently relax and open.

In the dead center of this tube you will feel some empty space. Part of this space is the back of the throat where the food goes down. The other part of this space is directly behind your nose where your air hits the very top of the windpipe.

I am particularly interested in your exploration of the top of the windpipe behind the nose and the part of the windpipe that is just in front of the spine. This small fleshy region is a terrific canary in the coal mine for assessing the balance of the head. I expect that it will take quite some time to learn to just feel this region so for the purposes of this article, I do not want you to even attempt to get your head into a position so that this fleshy zone relaxes. I really want you to just have a gentle sense of this area.

As you explore this region, you may have a sense of a lollipop sized space at the top of the windpipe. If you feel pressure in this area, it absolutely means that your helicopter of a head has crash landed on top of the neck. Again. DO NOT attempt to correct this feeling.

At least not until your quiet “What is this?” has turned into a resounding, “Oh! THIS is a tight neck! THIS is a head pressing down!”

I think the rush to figure out what a free neck feels like is absolutely normal. After all, pain sucks and we want to feel better and there’s so much sh*t happening in our lives that it can feel absolutely overwhelming. It really doesn’t help that pain rarely is strong in this region; it’s typically much stronger in other areas. That’s why I’m asking that you really take a minute to feel the cylinder between your ears and wonder “What is this?”.

Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Assessing All the Feels

If the head is pressing down onto the neck, the fleshy region at the top and back of the airway will be tight. For me, it feels as if the skull is pressing forward and down onto the windpipe and flattening out that fleshy area. As one of my students said, “It doesn’t hurt, it just feels GROSS”.

You will not be able to get this region to relax without some movement of the head. This may only be a matter of a few millimeters of movement and the particular choreography of the movement will truly be based on the tension pattern of YOU. While I don’t know what you need to do, I can tell you that 99 out of 100 people confuse the directions “pitch the head up” with “move the head back and up”. It’s why I wrote my post on Left/Right Confusion and why I do not ask you to immediately try and “fix” your stiff neck.

As long as you have confusion between the direction pitch and cardinally move, you should continue playing with the game of rolling forward in the chair that I have described (or make up your own activity!).

Take Your Time

Learning to feel this area takes time. I don’t think there’s a short way around that. You may be reading this and thinking, “What about feeling the shoulders or the hips?”.

I don’t want you to ignore any part of yourself as you ask, “What is this?”. Leave no stone unturned in your journey of discovery and if you are in pain it can take a while for the dissolution of desperation to happen.

As that dissolution takes place and the sense of feeling is slowly trained, you will find that it gets easier. And with any luck, I’ll figure out how to help this out with some drawings in the future…