Neck pain so common that “a pain in the neck” is a phrase. Enough people related to that grouping of words that it became an oral meme. Being that it’s the main blood and nerve corridor between the brain in its safety case, and the visceral organs in its poorly named rib “cage” – neck pain is a sign of imbalance.
We have 7 cervical vertebrae, that differ from the 12 thoracic vertebrae below them, in that they do not connect to the ribs. This allows for more dynamic range of motions both in the endpoint of each stretch and the subtle variations in the style in which they move. No matter what our lineage If we look back to ancestors it’s easy to see the need for a healthy supple, pain free neck. Imagine living among predators, as so many people have done successfully. Hundreds of generations perhaps . At the conservative end homo sapien sapien go back at least 150 thousand years. Some anthropologist double that number. So a hundred generations, about 20,000 years well under a fifth of our shortest estimates of how long humans existed seems like a very modest numbers of years to have to be physically able to detect threats of predation.
Today the closest many of us get to predators is the car, which can behave irrationally but for the most part move in predictable linear patterns. Other than looking up and down the street they put little evolutionary pressure on us to move our necks in all the ways that we been genetically sculpted to do by more sophisticated predators of the past.
As we lose many of our ravenous partners in this wild culinary dance, we are at the same time creating more and more of our environment. How much of your background was created by non human. A tree maybe. That tree will never be exactly like any other tree. A bird will create a nest as no other nest. An industrialized person will create the same pattern or more accurately create a small part of a pattern that is duplicated endless times. Its is all too common for a house to be built exacty the same, having the same DNA or as builder call it blueprints, as as neighboring house. On an evolutionary level, we should ask ourselves are we getting our stimulation from a safer more predictable environment, or are we supplementing our sensations with our technology.
So we all too often bow our heads down as to humble ourselves before our soon to be AI overlords. How does holding this poster effects our neck health. Are different hormones at least partially influence by the poses we enact. There seems to be differing opinions about this. Many yogic schools have mapped out correlations between emotions and somatics. Conversely a good actor will act with their whole body, slouching over in one scene to convey a certain meaning only to jump to action for dramatic effect. These diverse cultures using the same building block of knowledge for different means, as well as personal experience leads me to believe emotions and posture are linked in some way despite there being mixed opinions about this in sciencetific thought as of now.
But even if posture has no influence on our emotional perception of events, posture certainly has influence over what you perceive. Gaze into a fixed screen, drive a car staring linearaly at the road, or read a book line by line for too long and the neck loses its flexibility. Our visible world becomes that much smaller in that loss of neck movement limits where the eye can see. Paradoxically it may take longer for the neck to move from position to position creating more temporal space between shorter physical distances.
Its is unsettled to why exactly stretching will lengthen muscle tissue. One theory which i think holds a couple of puzzle pieces is by stretching you are teaching your nervous system how far the muscle can be safely pulled. I have certainly strained my neck on various occasions as I suspected most everyone has to some degree. To heal anything first we need to be aware of it. It’s easy to ignore small injuries. So what does it mean again if neck pain is so prominent for us. How much of our realities are we not seeing because we cannot turn our head enough. How much of our metaphorical perspective, our point of view is being limited because it is limited in our physical bodies?
