“The good news is that the connection of heart and head can be reestablished through increased shoulder mobility.”
Do you ever forget your body-until it gets hungry, sunburnt or too big for your clothes? We feed it, clothe it and bathe it, but otherwise we tend to relate to our body as the downstairs neighbor, inferior to the talking head who lives above.
Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche taught that one of the first elements of meditation posture was to take your seat with “good head and shoulders.” When you are present, you naturally hold your head and shoulders in a dignified, uplifted way. When your head droops, your chest collapses and you can’t breathe fully. That leads to a lack of oxygenation in your body, low energy and depression. Because your vision is lowered, you can become self-centered and paranoid, like an animal that roams the world looking at the ground, concerned mainly with the search for food and protecting itself from predators. But when we lift our head we see others, which takes attention off ourselves and naturally creates opening in our heart.
The head and shoulders area has a big job description. Four of our five sense organs—nose, ears, tongue and eyes—are housed there. It is also home to the organs that allow us to think and communicate verbally. The concentrated activity of our thinking and talking mind can be quite intense—or just tense. When we get too speedy, the sense organs begin to harden and we lose the ability to really feel.
The good news is that the connection of heart and head can be reestablished in good part through increased shoulder mobility. There are three available rotations in our shoulders-rolling inward and outward, swinging in an arc away from the body, and circling forward and backward. Try moving your shoulders and arms in these ways whenever you think about it. When the shoulders experience more movement, the rib cage is opened naturally, freeing up your breathing. Popular yoga teacher John Friend calls the arms “the wings of the heart.” When your shoulders are loose enough, you can move your arms in more expressive ways. You can hug people, wave to a friend, shade your eyes, give a high five.
The most common areas in which we hold tension are our jaws, between our eyebrows, at the junction of head and neck, and especially in the trapezius muscles-those at the very top of the back between the neck and shoulder joints. When tension gets stuck here, the whole area tends to harden and then crawl up toward our ears. It’s as if our head and shoulders were trying to hoist up the rest of our body. Instead of letting this area pull up, we want to relax it down. From this point of connection we can then begin to extend our energy through release, intention and breath.
These synchronous movements of down and up are a physical expression of “joining heaven and earth,” which means we unite our aspirations with an ability to manifest them. In our body, the diaphragm divides the “heavenly” organs-the lungs and heart-from the more “earthy” visceral organs below. So we can explore the heaven and earth aspects in our body through yogic breathing. Yogic breathing has two main directions: apana, or downward-moving wind, and prana, or upward-moving wind.
Connecting to our apana, exhalation, is the first step in extending heavenward. The “down” energy creates a base for our upward wind and energy to flow up naturally like a fountain. Instead of pulling up physically, reaching with our mind or grasping with our senses, we may discover that dropping down helps us to lift up and open more.
Take a moment right now to sit tall. Close your eyes. Begin to familiarize yourself with your breathing. Now try to equalize the breath, in and out. Inhaling gathers energy in and exhaling radiates it back out. Riding this rhythm is the first way to soften and open our senses, and connect our heart to our head.
Since our head and shoulders get so overused on the job, this series of exercises, demonstrated by OM Yoga Center’s CEO, Richard Bascetta, is designed to be done at your desk.
2. Tricep and Shoulder Opener. Interlace your fingers and lift your arms straight to the sky, then over to one side, back up, and over to the other side. Repeat four times.
3. Chest and Shoulder Opener. As you inhale, lift your face and chest up to the sky.
4. Neck and Upper Back Stretch. On the exhale, let the weight of your elbows fall forward gently, stretching the back of your neck. Do this four times.
5. Eagle Arms. The first time you do this, move your eyes side to side three times, slowly, like you are watching a tennis match. Change your arms and take your eyes up and and down three times, making sure that you don’t move your head or furrow your brow.
7. Twist. This will release tightness in your neck an back muscles, bringing fluidity to the spine and health to the abdominal organs.
8. Forward Bend and Chest Opener. Folding over your legs is like a mini-inversion. This moves fresh blood into your head, neck and shoulders, rejuvenating your brain and leading to clarity of thought.