How to Lengthen the Spine - Part 4
Yet another way of describing sensations in the back!
Happy belated blogs!
This past week of teaching has been a bit testing with the heatwave. There’s something about the lovely combination of sun + concrete + zero breeze that turns New York into a sauna. My brain completely shut down last week and I think I’m still recovering from it.
Ah, the joys of getting older…
To the Blogssss!
I was going over the last 10 or so topics that we’ve covered here and I realized I had a bit more to say about lengthening the spine. In Part 1: How to Lengthen the Spine, I shared a photo of a profile and asked you to imagine how the weight of the head can balance over the hips. This is a pretty high level thought and can serve you well if you consider the depth of your inner space (the red lines).
In Part 2, I attempt to describe how our habit of pushing our heads down (in our own unique way) can create a crushing sensation throughout the whole torso. I liken this to feeling like a crushed coke can and gave you a picture of the musculature of the spine from the back with several zones to slowly scan over with your mind. Building a sense of feeling for the muscles in these 12 yellow zones is a critical skill in figuring out how to lengthen the spine.
In Part 3, I gave you a few exercises to try in a chair (or with a stool against a wall). These exercises are designed to let you feel what happens to your head, neck, and back when too much weight is pressed forward or backward (i.e. what happens to the neck if you press the upper back into a chair). If you can feel how to do the wrong thing, you can then maybe feel how to NOT do that specific wrong thing.
Here’s the short short short version:
Think about the balance of the weight of the head over the hips
Ask yourself if your torso feels like a crushed coke can
See if you can identify some ways in which you are crushing that coke can
All of these activities/thought pieces are written with the hope of growing your awareness of your self while navigating the everyday tasks of life. But as you can see, those three observations are insufficient for really lengthening the spine.
Do You Feel Dem Bones?
Before starting this series on lengthening the spine, I wrote How Deep is the Spine?. At the time of writing, I felt that the article was incomplete so I am expanding on that information here and hopefully you will see how it all adds up with part 1, 2, and 3. In that sense, you can think of ‘How Deep is the Spine?’ as part 0 of this series.
When we are quiet and calm, our sense of feeling can slowly grow a vivid living sensation of the bones of the spine within the torso. In my personal experience, I don’t just automatically feel the whole spine. Instead, I imagine bits - either from top to bottom or bottom to top - and as I imagine the bits they feel like they ever so slowly integrate with my full sense. I can get into trouble if I ping pong my attention from one place to another because the sense of integrated balance is lost and I just kinda herky jerk about1.
Sensing the Thoracic Spine
If you find it difficult to feel the spine, you should ask yourself if you tend to slump or if you tend to sit overly straight2. If this is you, it may make it tricky for you to feel the length of the spine in your neck. You might feel a little something up there under your skull and behind your voice, but undue tension in the thoracic spine can dominate your thoughts and take away your ability to feel the whole spine. Hopefully the tips bellow can help you figure out what’s happening with YOU3!
Those of us who tend to go into heavy slumps will feel a large build up of tension in the upper back around the base of the neck. This will feel like a giant lump of concrete in the upper back and will NOT feel like you have a spine. If you only have a mild slump, you may just need to allow for a slight nod in the head so that your upper spine feels like a fishing rod curved due to the weight of a fish. This little nod may alleviate tension in the neck and allow you to feel the upper spine more vividly4.
If the tension from this slump has turned into a lock, I would suspect that lying down is the best way to feel relief in this area. As the muscles of the upper back release, you may have a much easier time feeling the upper thoracic spine. You can aid this sensation of release by propping your knees up on a fat stack of pillows/cushions and putting a tall(ish) pillow under your head. When set up correctly, this will create a SUPER HAMMOCK for the spine and can be a terrific way to feel the upper back release.
This super hammock can also feel nice for upper thoracics that are too straight. When we are too straight in the back, the muscles along the front of the chest will get sore and tight as they are in a permanent brace. When this tension builds up along the front, it can take away the sensation of the spine as our sense of feeling tends to get drawn toward the tight front. In my experience, it feels like my spine disappears from my sense of feeling within the rib cage and I feel my neck lock up5.
When the thoracic spine is too straight in sitting or standing, this also tends to come with the thoracic spine pressing forward (part of the whole chest getting tight sensation). If you know this to be you, you really just need to take a minute - imagine the head relative to the hips - and recognize that this part of your back is further backward than you believe. With time and patience, you will find a particular way of feeling this zone come to life.
Sensing Relief in the Spine
When I go through these spinal observation games, sometimes I feel nothing change and sometimes I feel STUFF and THINGS changing. This could be:
muscular movement coming into a place that had been dead
pressure releasing
weight lightening
contact with the floor/chair changing and softening
If any of these things are beginning to happen to you, it could be due to weight flowing more along the front portion of the vertebrae. This shift in load in the back creates that sense of relief that everyone loves. Learning to sense this shift in load is the single most important part of learning how to lengthen the spine. You ideally want to feel this flowing from the head to the sitting bones.
As you go through your own observations, you might find that you can only partially find relief in this manner. Remember that I haven’t written anything about the hips, knees, shoulders, hands, or feet! These will all play a role in helping the spine lengthen, but the main event will occur from the release of the neck, the balance of the head, and the general wish to feel a little bit of all of your weight. Everywhere. All at once.
Does This Resonate With You?
These blogs are hopefully a way of helping you better understand yourself, how you function, and why things sometimes feel off in a general way. If these posts are helpful, I encourage you to subscribe, leave a comment, ask a question, or check out the archives for my previous articles. I like hearing from everyone and I’ll do my best to respond as I can.
Get In Touch
If you’re in NYC, you may learn more about my private teaching practice at johndalto.com.
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See The Whack-a-Mole Pain Game for a related topic.
Is your thoracic spine too curved forward or too straight? Neither feels good and neither allows weight to flow through the front portion of the vertebrae.
Don’t forget your head!
Remember…only if you have a little slump. Don’t go around nodding your head forever!
Some of these observations are from my own experience of living with an injury and others are from purposefully contorting myself into various shapes. Adopting these various “wrong” postures gives me a tiny clue about what my students might be going through. You can play along at home and see what you feel in your spine as you go into various shapes (slowly and gently!!!!! so you don’t hurt yourself!!!! Don’t do this with a hernia!!!!!).