Movement Coach Charles

The real medicine of what I offer is the invitation to feel what’s happening in your body and use sensation as a guide.
This sensory map of your body will help you feel whether a movement is distributed and supported through your system or compensated and overburdening an already overused pocket of your system.
Many people work out the way they live.. on autopilot. Defaulting to whatever movements have been most repeated in their body so that their brain has space to stay in the analytical mind.
Daydreaming, listening to a podcast, worrying about how they look. Anything but feeling.
More and more i realize that the biggest challenge and the biggest medicine for many of my clients is the initial suffering of staying in sensation.
For the distracted overthinker, being put into an uncomfortable position feels like standing on the edge of a cliff. “Why am I shaking?” “Is it safe to take a break from being in my head?” “I’m not used to feeling this much.” “I’m bored.” “When is this gonna END”
Re educating your relationship with feeling tension and pressure in your frame and teaching your body that these experiences are safe and helpful, creates the space in your nervous system to begin to correct the dysfunctions that come from years and years of moving on autopilot.
It’s hard at first but, as I’ve seen time and time again, this confusing and unfamiliar experience becomes clarified and starts to FEEL GOOD. You leave each session feeling better than you walked in, your analytical brain gets a break, you learn to trust tour body and your whole nervous system gets upgraded in the process.
This is not just movement health it’s nervous system health and it’s needed now more than ever.

Your neck is always “tight” because it’s weak, disconnected and generally feels unsafe.
You feel constant tension in it because you anchor your stress through your face directly into a neck that isn’t grounded into the rest of the system.
You breathe with your neck, lament with your neck, rage with your neck yet it’s so weak that it bobbles down the front of your chest like a newborn baby every time you look at your phone.
A strong, integrated neck knows when to be used and knows when to relax. The deep and superficial muscles work together and in sequence to do their job in the background of your life. When your neck is strong and integrated you don’t even think about it because it’s not sending concerning signals to the brain.
Most modern day humans have taught their neck how to be used through the context of emotional stress and anxiety, often in a sitting position . Our dominant side grabs and pulls while gravity pushes our head ever forward to the front of our ribs. This leaves the vertebrae of our neck compressed and misaligned.
The journey to a strong, secure neck is 3 steps.

1. Understand that the relative position of bones (posture) changes the prioritization of soft tissue (muscle) activation. Play with balancing your rib cage vertically and upright over the center of your pelvis and stacking your neck over your rib cage so that your ear and the middle of your shoulder are aligned vertically.

2. Rest your tongue on the roof of your mouth and practice relaxing your neck while you breathe through your nose. Add some movement of the upper body and continue to focus on relaxing the jaw and neck. Notice when your neck begins to grab and see if you can redirect that tension into your ribs and diaphragm or let go of the tension all together.
3. Learn how to STRENGTHEN YOUR NECK IN ALL DIRECTIONS and connect that strength throughout your entire system all the way down into our feet. Adding relative strength to your neck will retrain the neck to be used when is needed and take a back seat when it’s not needed.