Exploring Neck Pain Through the Feldenkrais Method with Emma Alter

Very often when people come to see me, it’s around pain in the shoulders, neck or back.

Pains in the neck are a common problem! The neck is one of the many areas where the cure is often in a different place to the problem.

What does this mean?

The neck has 7 cervical vertebrae, but it doesn’t stop there. The neck is a small proportion of the long line of your spine. And the spine continues all the way down to the tailbone, some distance away.

The stacking of the other vertebrae below the neck affects what’s going on with the neck itself. But many people don’t think about that. So it’s important to realise that the rest of the spine is the support structure for the neck.

The rest of the spine is the support structure for the neck

Improving the alignment, and awareness of the whole spine is going to make a difference to the top part!

The neck has more delicate vertebrae than the rest of the spine. One of its roles is to help with the calibration of your teleceptors. (Those are the organs that help work out where you are in relation to gravity and orientation. And the majority are in your head: your ears, eyes, nose). So your neck is designed for strength (supporting the head), and for delicacy.

But often, part of the problem is that people think of and use the neck in an isolated way.

Look around behind you. How much of your spine do you use? Many people will look around using only the neck - even though there’s a lot of spine, great for turning, lower down!

How you think about the neck affects how you use it

Imagine you had 26 members of your family, and only 7 were doing the washing up. The smallest ones.

Okay for a while, but after some time, they’re going to start complaining. Why aren’t the big ones helping? They’re stronger and chunkier.

That’s just like your spine. And the vertebrae that are on holiday tend to create even more of a problem as they stiffen up with lack of use. Then you feel them less, and in turn use them less. So the spiral goes!

It’s partly because we tend to separate out areas with different names in our thinking. And often the spine at the back is harder to feel. If you don’t use the whole of the spine in a supportive enough way, then the neck has to do more work than it should.

If we’re not moving part of ourselves regularly, we don’t feel it as clearly. And then we can’t co-ordinate movement as successfully. And this happens, whether you’re aware of it or not.

Proportional use

So we need a communistic spine - whatever your political outlook - where every vertebra is doing its part, and none of them are on holiday! A proportional amount of work depending on the strength of each spiny segment.