Yoga
CRANIAL ADJUSTOR AND CERVICAL WEDGE
The Cranial Adjustor and Cervical Wedge is a wooden device designed for the manipulation and adjustment of the bones of the cranium, face and cervical spine and for pressure treatment of the muscles overlying these areas. The Cranial Adjustor and Cervical Wedge is small enough and light weight enough for easy storage and for carrying in luggage when traveling. Tension and strain in the skull, the dura (the membrane covering the brain and spinal cord) and the muscles in the neck and at the base of the skull have a large role to play in all the various kinds of head discomfort and headaches that plague so many people. By using this tool we can locate where specific tensions and strains exist and treat them at the same time.
Here the Cranial Adjustor and Cervical Wedge is used to apply pressure in the region at the base of the skull. A particular group of muscles located here (the rectus capitus posterior minor) have been shown to have a direct link to the dura (the membrane that covers the brain). It is in this membrane that pain receptors and blood vessels signal the onset of migraine headaches. By loosening the muscles at the base of the skull we help relieve much of the strain in the dura and make the onset of all the various headaches that people are prone to much less likely. The weight of the head itself is all the force needed behind most of the work done with this tool. By applying a gentle pressure in this region we can begin to treat many of our headaches and sinus discomforts in a way that does not rely solely on the use of drugs and painkillers.
Three cranial bones come together at the back of the head. These are the two parietal bones on either side of the top of the head and the occipital bone at the back and base of the skull. This juncture of cranial bones is called by the Greek letter lambda and by simply resting the back of the head on the flat surface of this tool we may find this crucial meeting point for these bones and effect a lambda adjustment. If there is tenderness or soreness anywhere on the head it often indicates that there is some impacted and distorted structure and by just pressing on the area of pain and sensitivity we can begin to open and relieve the strain. A minute or two on any spot is usually enough. We may be waking up these cranial joints (sutures) and discovering how disturbed and distorted they really are. Be patient and do not expect to relieve every strain with one or two treatments.
Here is a way to do a headstand that is not precarious and dangerous and is probably a more therapeutic and specific treatment than the traditional headstand we find in yoga or gymnastics. The top of the head is placed against the tool and gently pressed and rolled. The sagittal suture runs right along the top of the head from front to back and separates the two parietal bones of the skull. Press and roll the top of the head and seek out any spots that feel sore, stiff and tight. No need to apply much extra strength. Just the weight of your head and body is force enough for this manipulation. Not only will some of these pressure points be related to headaches but they are also points to press to relieve facial and sinus pains as well. Towards the front part of the top of the head is another important juncture of three cranial bones and it is called the bregma. It is where the two parietal bones and the frontal cranial bone come together and it may need to be pried opened and freed from strain and distortion. This would be the bregma adjustment and like the lambda adjustment it is often a crucial cranial area to work and adjust. Give a minute or two of pressure treatment to each sore and tender point discovered in each treatment session and not much more. Be gentle and patient and realize that the soreness and strain we find has been there a long time and probably will take some time to relieve.
From left to right: 1. The forehead is pressed and rolled. 2. The wedge is being pressed under the brow ridge. 3. The tool is used to press underneath the cheekbone and into the jaw joint. These facial areas can harbor a great deal of pain and soreness and may need treatment as much or more as the cranial joints and base of the skull. Any substantial pain and discomfort found is an indication that the area is under some strain, tension or distortion.
It can come as quite a surprise how much our heads are twisted, warped, stressed and strained. A tense and strained condition of our head is probably the precursor to all the ailments, aches and discomforts that afflict us here. By gently and intelligently applying pressure to the muscles, joints and structures of the head and face we can begin to unravel the mystery of why we hurt in this region and we may just begin to discover how to treat the real source and cause of our discomforts there.
ZUBO & THE NECK FLEXORS
Two groups of powerful muscles in the neck are frequently the source of many of our physical troubles. These are the neck flexors, muscles that bend our neck forward. The neck flexors, when they become tight and short, refer pain and disturbing symptoms into the chest, back, arms, face and head. These are the sternocleidomastoid muscles and the scalene muscles. Together they represent a major challenge to anyone who wishes to lift the burden of tension and ease the pain of stress and strain.
These neck-flexing muscles are highly reactive and prone to tension and shortening. By tightening and protecting our neck and throat area, this is the body’s primitive response to protecting our delicate throats. What was once a protective response to a very dangerous environment has become a permanent condition for many of us. A yoke of tension and strain develops around our neck. We may call it anxiety now but rarely are we ever completely aware of the physical reality (the tension, strain and distortion) that underlies our anxiety.
The Zubo is a 6 or 7 inch length of wooden dowel with rounded ends that can be a powerful tool for self-massage. It can be an aide in uncovering, and bringing into awareness, the reality of the tension in these muscles. Used properly the Zubo can be an effective means to relieve these tensions. The Zubo can be grasped as shown in the photo and pressed into to neck just above the clavicle. This is a major pressure point for the scalene muscles and while pressure is applied the head and neck can stretch towards the other side. This combination of stretch and pressure on the muscle is called a myofascial release technique and is more effective for treating tense muscles than either stretch or pressure used alone. Experiment and explore the range of possibilities for this technique in the treatment of neck tension. A tight scalene can refer pain into the chest, down the arm into the wrist, and even in the back around the inside of the scapula bone. Tight scalene muscles can entrap the nerves and blood vessels to the arm and hand. This often can cause a host of symptoms that often go misdiagnosed.
Hold the Zubo in the hand as shown and lean the side and front of the neck against the length of the tool and stretch the head towards the other side. Explore the sense of tension and ache that may be residing in the SCM (sternocleidomastoid) muscle. Tension and shortening of this and the scalene muscles becomes all too often a permanent feature to our physical and psychological condition.
We are usually quite unconscious of the tension, stiffness, strain and distortion we carry in our bodies. Yet here in the muscles and joints our biological energy is expressed or repressed. In a very real sense, until we glimpse the true nature of this physical reality, we continue to remain largely unconscious of a whole dimension of existence and one that exerts a profound influence on our well being.
We need to become conscious of our body sense. Most of us are conscious of having sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. The sense in muscles and joints of tension and stiffness is called kinesthesia. Tension, ache, and stiffness are basic components to our physical condition and yet for many of us this awareness has become largely subconscious. By bringing our actual physical condition into consciousness, we can begin a course of treatment that can have a real and powerful effect on our well being. As long as our awareness is mainly of the abstract and psychological variety, our view of ourselves is rather distant and vague and our course of therapy remains largely ineffective. Liberation and personal transformation require us to look into the kinesthetic sense. At first we won’t like what we are feeling in our physical depths, but it is reality in a deep sense and what we find there needs to be addressed. By tapping into our own kinesthetic sense, we find a true guide. Abstract concepts like repression, anxiety, pain and suffering take on a clarity they did not have before. The true meaning to spontaneity, health, and personal freedom becomes a reality in our lives.
REFERENCES
1. THE BODY HAS ITS REASONS
Therese Bertherat and Carol Bernstein, Pantheon, 1977
2. MYOFASCIAL PAIN AND DYSFUNCTION, THE TRIGGER POINT MANUAL, THE UPPER EXTREMITIES
Janet Travell, M.D., David Simons, M.D., Williams and Wilkins, 1983
3. MYOFASCIAL RELEASE
John F. Barnes, P.T., MFR Seminars, 1990
4. PAIN ERASURE
Bonnie Prudden, M. Evans & Co. Inc., 1980
5. RESURRECTION OF THE BODY
F. Matthias Alexander, Dell, 1969
6. SOMATICS
Thomas Hanna, Addison-Wesley Publishing, 1988
SPINAL HYGIENE
“Hygiene 1: A science concerned with establishing and maintaining good health. 2: Conditions or practices conducive to good health.”
From The Merriam Webster Dictionary.
Most of us associate the word hygiene with cleanliness but the dictionary defines it more generally as those “conditions or practices conducive to good health”. Civilized people usually brush their teeth every day and many of us take a shower or bath on a daily basis also. Eating right and getting some exercise and even taking vitamins can be an important part of our everyday health maintenance program. Many of these common practices are taught to us as children by our parents and even in school as part of our general physical education. And just like we need to learn to read, write and do some arithmetic to get by in this world, it is also equally important to learn how to take care of our bodies and our health.
Yet the kind of physical education many of us experienced in school comprised a lot of activities that may not have stood us in good stead in preparing us for the rest of our lives. Baseball, soccer, basketball, weight lifting, gymnastics, wrestling and track and field all certainly all have their place in any program of physical education. In the final analysis, though, they may not really be the kind of skills that will help us maintain our health and well being as we lead our lives and grow older. The exertions and stunts that characterize what usually passes as physical education may be appropriate for teenagers and people in their early twenties but what about those of us who make it into our 40s, 50s and older. And how many of those young athletes who engaged in all those exertions, strains and stunts in their youth end up broken and nearly crippled by the time they get to 40? Many of them are laid low by middle age by the slings, arrows and insults their bodies took when they were younger.
One of the areas that could be emphasized (but rarely is) when we receive our physical education is how to take care of our spines. Although we all know we have spines, we usually only have the barest knowledge of what the structure of our spines is really like and even less knowledge of how we can take care of them. We find as we age that our neglect and ignorance of our spines generally comes back to haunt us. Back pain must be one of the commonest complaints and ailments for people in our times. Look at the proliferation of orthopedic doctors, osteopaths and particularly chiropractors now. In some cities and towns there are more chiropractors than MDs. Doesn’t this tell us that a lot of backs are hurting out there? And as helpful as these practitioners can be, we can’t rely on their ministrations every day of our lives, and yet every day we may need to do something to maintain the integrity and health of our backs and spines. It is these daily practices conducive to spinal health that we might call “spinal hygiene.”
We have all seen cats and dogs engage in their own versions of spinal hygiene. They stretch and limber their backs quite effortlessly or else roll their backs on the ground until they are satisfied that all is as it should be. Animals are still in touch with some natural impulses and moves that help maintain their spines. By rolling their backs and stretching and relaxing they are giving themselves the kind of treatments that humans probably could also use. Many of us, without much thought, like to move and stretch when we get out of bed in the morning. Have you ever lied down on a firm floor and felt your back sink towards the floor and elongate as you continued to relax?
Our own feelings of ache and tension can be our guide in treating our backs. Doing what seems to relieve those little aches and tensions might be just the kind of treatments we need to do, on a daily basis, to avoid the bulging discs and contracted muscles that characterize the more seriously ailing back. This is preventive medicine, and we should ideally learn these things when we are young from our parents and our teachers but unfortunately rarely do. Just as we brush our teeth and wash our hands and face as part of our daily health regimen, we someday may limber our backs and open our spinal joints as part of a regular program of spinal hygiene.
THE KINESTHETIC SENSE
THE KINESTHETIC SENSE
Besides walking, stretching may be the easiest and most natural form of exercise. Exercise may not even be the best term for describing the stretching process. Most animals stretch and relax naturally in the course of their daily activities. An animal does not think in terms of this or that exercise is good for me so I’ll do it. Animals move and stretch because it feels right to them and they enjoy doing it. If they didn’t enjoy or get some satisfaction out of it, they probably would not do it. Animals have a kind of body wisdom that humans often lack.
Have you ever seen a cat get up from a nap? It will stretch out its front legs until its chest touches the floor, and then may stretch out its back legs till its belly touches the floor. Then, if it feels so inclined, it may arch up its back and hold the position for a second and then go about its daily business. What a quick and perfect treatment. No strain, no exertion, no need for special instruction, only a basic response to a felt need. What do animals know that we have forgotten?
The dictionary defines kinesthesia as “the sense whose end organs lie in the muscles, tendons, and joints and are stimulated by bodily tensions; the muscle sense.” Clearly here is another sense that we know little about and that we rarely consider when we count our other senses of sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch. We do not include or know about our kinesthetic sense because most of us have lost touch with this deep, inner sense. The kinesthetic sense is a lost sense that becomes conscious usually when tension or disease becomes so advanced that we cannot ignore it anymore.
The kinesthetic sense is often misconstrued to mean simply a sense of movement or else a sense of our body in space. These are peripheral aspects of the kinesthetic sense; in fact the “muscle sense” is most clearly experienced when the body is not moving but at rest or else moving quite slowly. Some discussions of this inner body sense even go so far as to imply that it is always unconscious. How far we have come from that simple cat feeling and responding to its bodily needs.
So what is this kinesthetic sense and what does it feel like? What is this new feeling, this unexplored territory of internal sensation, this life of deep feeling beneath our skin in muscles, tendons, and joints?
The kinesthetic sense is buried under thousands of years of civilization and human conditioning. Much of our conditioning within civilization has taken us away from an awareness of our physical depths towards an awareness and understanding of the world outside ourselves. We have become masters of the world and strangers to ourselves.
Eastern cultures have not totally forgotten this inner life, and so in India yoga has been developed and practiced for thousands of years. From China, Taoism and Chi Kung have preserved and explored this inner world of the kinesthetic sense. These Eastern practices characteristically call for a quieting of the mind and a turning in of consciousness towards the inside of the body.
What has come to be called the unconscious or even the id or libido in Western psychology is really only a vague and distant understanding of the flows and blocks of internal energy that yoga and Taoism have studied, in detail, for thousands of years. Unfortunately, the descriptions that have come down to us from these Eastern practices are not always clear or comprehensible. They are often in poetic or coded language, and they mean very little to a people steeped in the rigors of logic and scientific explanations. About all we can glean from esoteric Eastern literatures is that something is being felt inside the body and this feeling sometimes moves around inside the body. What is clear is that if we should learn to quiet the abstract mind and reduce the stimulation from our other senses, eventually this internal and physical universe will make itself known.
The grip of tension is often our first introduction to the kinesthetic sense. Our specific and real tensions rise up and fill our consciousness. Where we may first feel this tension is an individual matter. Some people feel it in their faces, some in their legs, others in the belly or the back. We may feel the tension as a gripping sensation that will not let go or else as a steady, heavy pressure on a part of our body that will not easily lift. At last we know something is very wrong and can actually feel the problem. This powerful sense of our discomfort, of our tension and stiffness, becomes a guide. Our lives may forever be changed by an awareness of the kinesthetic sense. We are not so fooled anymore. Our discomfort, mankind’s discomfort, becomes conscious and clear.
KINESTHESIA AS GUIDE
Discovering the kinesthetic sense is a breakthrough in yogic practice. Years can be spent in meditation or doing special exercises before the kinesthetic sense becomes conscious. We are so seduced by every other aspect of life (sights, sounds, thoughts) that our basic inner condition is really deep in hiding. Yet when the kinesthetic sense does finally dawn on us life is changed. We have found a true guide. The athlete learns a skill or practices a form that is external and that he tries to eventually master through practice. When the kinesthetic sense guides us, movement is motivated from internal feeling. Tension and stiffness become the cues we respond to so that our style of exercise or movement is a kind of ongoing physical therapy. Pleasure and relief from discomfort are the rewards. Increasingly, movement will be initiated from within, from a source of natural wisdom. One learns to move more smoothly; slowness can be a virtue. Speed and furious exercise will appear, if not funny, then a little insane. The ethics of hardness and drive are outgrown and softness in body texture and softness in personal style seem more in order. The inevitable good sense in relaxation and being one’s natural self becomes increasingly apparent, even unavoidable. The whole fabric and style of life becomes an expression of our bodies and the feelings we have of the inside of our bodies. This is certainly a new order of things when the body sense, the kinesthetic sense, becomes our guide.
INTERNAL AND SOFT TECHNIQUES
The techniques that are inspired by the kinesthetic sense are not exercises. Exercise works the muscles by rapid and repetitive movements, and it is performed in a spirit of mind dominating and controlling the body. We do push-ups and sit-ups because we were told they were good for us and the more we can do of them the better off we think we are. Exercise is usually a grim and mechanical way to use the body.
Internal techniques come from inner (kinesthetic) sensation. They are done in a spirit of relaxation and gentleness, and they allow the body to express its own wants and needs. Internal techniques are closer to physical therapy than to exercise. The sense of stiffness and tension acts as a guide; the body is treated gently and with respect. Instead of using force, the body is coaxed and eased into stretching and moving. Animals and young children move this way. Their egos are rudimentary or nonexistent and they haven’t lost touch with the wisdom of their kinesthetic sense.