Headache? Free your jaw

If you’re experiencing neck pain or headaches, you might be clenching your jaw.

Release your jaw hinge (this joint is just in front of your ear).

Lay your fingers gently along the length of your chewing muscle. This is your masseter muscle and it’s one of the strongest muscles in your entire body. It runs north/south from your cheek bone to jaw bone.

Soften this strong muscle. Allow your fingertips to gently swipe down along the length of the masseter muscle, encouraging an unclenching you might find that your molars part at the back, or that your lips part. This is okay.

Allow the release to trickle down through your neck and shoulders.

How does your neck feel? Your head? Can you type from this released place? Text on your phone? Sing a phrase?

🐛 Get Your Wiggle On! - Finding Vocal Release Through Jiggling

🎥  VIDEO 🎥 

https://youtu.be/858vhGKSE_c

🐛 Come back to your innate wholeness by jiggling. In shaking and jiggling, we press ourselves away from the ground very quickly many times. In Alexander Technique we call this relationship opposition. 

🐛 Jiggle with an awareness of releasing your joints: let the hips, knees, and ankles be free. Allow your head to be dynamically poised on top of the spine (not slack but continuously pointing forward and up). 

🐛Jiggle with a sense of buoyancy through the pelvis, ribs, and arm structure. Not making these areas dead weight but feeling the springy nature of your torso as you bounce and jiggle and wiggle. 

🐛 Add sounds. Sing a phrase. What do you notice?

Pelvis and Sitting Bones - Freeing the Lower Back Through Mapping and Movement

🎥  VIDEO 🎥 

https://youtu.be/F5r9z22v8w0

The sitting bones are the two curved bones that make up the bottom of your pelvis. The fancy name is the ischial tuberosity (ya, that’s why we say “sitting bones.”)

We often experience discomfort after sitting for a long time if we’ve been balancing on the coccyx (tail bone) instead of these two majestic rockers. As a way to bring freedom back into the torso, we can explore the movement of the pelvis rolling around the head of the femur (thigh bone) by rocking forward and back on the sitting bones.

There are many ways into freeing your lower back from pain - this is just one exploration using some basic body mapping and gentle movement. 

🪑 Finding Freedom In Sitting

~ VIDEO ~

https://youtu.be/I-z_pEcQCtc

🪑 Here are some helpful landmarks that can offer more freedom and ease in sitting. 

🪑 Sitting bones

While seated on a firm surface (ie: not a couch - unless you have a wooden couch?), explore some movement in order to feel your sitting bones making contact with the chair.  As you rock side to side, forward and back, can you sense these two bony landmarks? 

🪑 Here’s what I want you to know:

While sitting, these rounded bones at the bottom of the pelvis are the base of support for your torso.  

So you can let go in your tail bone, release any holding in your hips and lower back, and unclench your thighs.

You can allow your heels to drop into the floor and release your calf muscles.

Can you hinge forward and back while allowing the hips, knees, and ankle joints to be free and easy?  

Can you do “vaudeville legs” while you hinge forward and back?  (In-joke from the video!)

🪑 Play around with including your head-spine joint while you rock and roll on your sitting bones.

Notice that your spine grows upward out of your pelvis.

When you hinge forward and back from the hip joints, your WHOLE TORSO PLUS HEAD comes out n the journey.

Add some 🎶 - what do you notice?