Surrendering Your Neck Pain to Yoga

Hi Fightmaster Yogis!

Today is March 31st, and we’re so grateful to you for submitting blogs, reading them and commenting. We really are a community supporting each other on this journey.

There is one more blog on surrender, and it’s a wonderful tie in to the last one about the story of “Eye” and her experience with “Transient Global Amnesia” (TGA). You probably already guessed that “Eye” was me. A conversation with my colleagues at the club where I teach yoga led to hypothesizing if there was a connection with yoga and the TGA experience. As yogis we do allow ourselves to be more open and vulnerable in a good way. We are connected to our bodies and our bodies are made of cells that form layers of fascia and cells and fascia have memories just like our brain cells and nerves. The body is truly a wonder, and so we honor it by taking care of it.

My TGA experience started right away after teaching yoga. There was a lot of chest and hip opening asanas that evening, and some twisted balancing poses. A comment from a couple of students was along the theme of “that was a challenging class”. My colleague Stephen, a massage therapist, offered that body work opens up stored memories including trauma. Opening up the body doesn’t happen in one session. We condition the muscles and supporting bones, ligaments and tendons and the whole system into opening up, and that perhaps that night my body had released a stored trauma memory in my body. He could be right. I recall vaguely talking about my husband Bruno, who died in a motorcycle accident, after my class. After that conversation, I noticed that I spoke without emotions, almost as if I was “reporting” a story and not living it. I noted to myself that maybe I am better and healing that I can do this without getting emotional or melancholy.

So, onwards to our very last blog on surrender and it’s a great tie in, because Rachel speaks in her blog that…

The release of emotions stored in the body is a well-known occurrence during yoga (3), so be prepared for unexpected outcomes while working with your neck. For example, your thoughts may turn suddenly to a long-forgotten emotional upheaval from your past, or you may cry for no apparent reason. Take comfort in knowing that surrendering to whatever you experience during your practice is part of breaking the cycle of fear and avoidance that has kept you in pain for so long.

Enjoy her blog.

Namaste.

Surrendering Your Neck Pain to Yoga

by Rachel Dellinger

Does your neck never seem to stop hurting, regardless of how much yoga you do? Or don’t do? If so, then you are in good company. One study showed that for 50 to 85% of us who deal with chronic neck pain, our symptoms never completely go away (1). Rather than waging war on our pain with injections, deep tissue massages, chiropractic adjustments, or even surgery, yoga practitioners can instead use asanas to provide the neck with the loving attention it is crying out for. Here are some suggestions for how to surrender your neck pain to the benefits of yoga.

The Fear-Avoidance Model of Chronic Musculoskeletal Pain

After the initial onset of age-related spinal degeneration, people cope with pain along a continuum that ranges from full-on confrontation at one extreme to a complete avoidance of any movement with a remote chance of causing pain on the other. Researchers at Park Hospital for Children in Oxford, England first discovered that patients who confronted their pain during recovery were able to return to their normal activities. However, those who avoided their feelings by becoming less active continued to experience increasingly severe chronic pain, sometimes even to the point of becoming disabled (2).

Pain avoidance strategies are subtle when they involve the neck and people use them without consciously realizing they are doing so. These behaviors may take the form either of eliminating movements that hurt or of unnecessarily tightening surrounding muscles to protect the neck. The following are examples of actions that often begin imperceptibly but gradually become habits that lead to decreased range of motion and increased pain:

• Turning the torso rather than the neck to look over the shoulder

• Leaning the body backward rather than bending the neck to look up

• Keeping the head perpendicular to the ground while bending over

• Raising the shoulders or clenching the jaw when feeling stressed

• Thrusting the head forward while listening

If you find yourself doing any of the above behaviors during the day, then you likely bring them to your yoga practice as well.

Confronting Pain During Yoga

Out of fear of making their conditions worse, yogis with chronic neck pain sometimes assume that neck-bending asanas are off-limits to them. While this approach may feel like the safest bet, skipping poses that involve the neck reinforces your subconscious belief that you protect yourself from further pain and injury through restricting your movements. By neglecting it in this way, you risk making your neck less flexible with each passing year. 

A positive way to confront your pain during yoga is to acknowledge the fear of injury and focus on the tactics you use to avoid bending your neck in certain ways. For example, if you notice your shoulders tightening, choose to breathe into those muscles while moving slowly and being fully present with any discomfort you feel. Observe your pain when it first begins, notice its precise location, and don’t fight it. Instead, greet it as an old friend you are finally getting to know better. 

Poses To Help Your Neck Surrender

Below are suggested asanas for restoring functionality to your neck, and some potential emotional barriers to practicing them. Some poses are fairly advanced, so consider major modifications when you first start. Ideally, consult a yoga teacher who understands your motivation to be free from the emotional-physical neck issues that cause you pain. Only by gently incorporating what seem like impossible poses into your routine will you ever convince your mind and body that surrendering to an asana is a safe situation for your neck to be in.

Decompressing Poses

Bending forward and allowing the weight of the skull to pull on the neck creates space between cervical vertebrae. The tugging sensation might be be unpleasant at first, especially if you have negative associations with traction devices in a chiropractic office or hospital. Try the following, perhaps supporting your head on a block to begin:

• Dangling pose (baddha hasta uttanasana)

• Standing wide-legged forward fold (prasarita padottanasana)

Back-bending Poses

Releasing the skull backwards in asanas such as camel pose might cause anxiety because it triggers our instinctual fear of falling. Daily sun salutations are a nice way to begin restoring flexibility to the neck muscles responsible for this movement, and are a gateway to eventually adding these three poses: 

• Camel (ustrasana)

• Upward-facing plank (purvattanasana)

• Fish pose (mathsyasana)

Forward-bending Poses

Seated forward bends such as paschimottanasana usually come easily for those accustomed to protecting their necks with a perpetual forward head tilt. These forward-bending poses instead challenge you to lower the neck to the chest: 

• Staff pose (dandasana)

• Shoulder stand (salamba sarvangasana)

• Plow (halasana)

• Ear pressure pose (karnapidasana)

• Upward lotus (urdhva padmasana)

• Embryo pose (pindasana)

The release of emotions stored in the body is a well-known occurrence during yoga (3), so be prepared for unexpected outcomes while working with your neck. For example, your thoughts may turn suddenly to a long-forgotten emotional upheaval from your past, or you may cry for no apparent reason. Take comfort in knowing that surrendering to whatever you experience during your practice is part of breaking the cycle of fear and avoidance that has kept you in pain for so long.

References

1. Carroll, L.J., S. Hogg-Johnson, G. van der Velde, et al. 2008. Course and prognostic factors for neck pain in the general population: results of the Bone and Joint Decade 2000–2010 Task Force on Neck Pain and Its Associated Disorders. Spine 33:S75–S82. 

2. Lethem, J.; P.D. Slade, J.D. Troup, and G. Bentley. 1983. Outline of a Fear-Avoidance Model of exaggerated pain perception--I". Behaviour Research and Therapy 21 (4): 401–408.

3. Raskin, D. 2007. Emotions in Motion. Yoga Journal https://www.yogajournal.com/poses/emotions-in-motion/