I have many clients including athletes who hold their shoulders higher than normal. They are either sitting forwards and medially rotated down are up towards their ears.

As a child I was always being told to sit up straight, stand up and pull my shoulders back and down. Everyone was missing one key thing. It was my feelings, confidence and attitude about my school work. I was forever struggling with academia/schooling and longed to be moving for some relief. The constant left-brain drive and training from school, plus lack of sports which was taken off the curriculum, pressure from home, threat from the school of not passing the senior entrance, felt like I had the weight of the world on my body.

Human beings are energetic beings.  According to Chinese medicine and many other ancient traditions, we store emotions in different areas of the body. The hips are associated with survival stories. The belly holds instinct (go with your gut feeling). The shoulders carry the ‘should’s’.

Every external message from the outside world sits in our body. Unless we have a way of dissipating it, it becomes a blockage/a trapped emotion. The shoulders are the ‘shoulds’ in life. We have absorbed conditioning and conformity of what we should look like, dress like, believe in, behave, what we should of achieved so far, the striving, the self judgment.

Mind and Body

Human beings are spiritual, emotional, mental and physical beings. You cannot separate the mind from the body. Our gripping shoulders are also seen in the animal kingdom. Dogs, when going into defensiveness, will change their body posture. See how the dog reacts to fear with its body language plus aggression. Human beings behave the same, when we see someone who has different beliefs, perhaps dresses differently and has different behavioural patterns, quite often we will attack verbally. These emotions stem from fear, hence polarity stays as black or white rather than the grey area. My experience (both with humans and dogs) is that hurt people will only hurt other people.

The raising and gripping in the shoulders are protecting us from disappointment, responsibility, overload and fear of not being enough. This is why the movement practice you practice with me always starts with release, breathing, myofascial movement like Garuda, decompression in order to relax, release and help the nervous system to switch to more parasympathetic so that you can grow and repair.

When we start to soften , something profound happens – we stop living form obligation, a place of lack, scarcity and start living form the spirit of the heart. In Chinese medicine, shoulder pain is often associated with poor chi/meridian lines form the liver and kidneys. This is because the main organs of detoxification are the liver and kidneys. If you are overloading them with diet, lifestyle, feelings and emotions, this often has a link to pain.

Also, the right and left side of the body are associated with male and female, a depletion with one side of the body can often have a link with either the males or females in our life.

Case study – I know of a prominent business entrepreneur who went on a water fast for a few days, his shoulder pain completely disappeared. This is related to his organs.

‘Your personal transformation reshapes the cosmos’ – Ana Forest

 

Bibliography

Paul Chek

Ana Forest – Forest yoga