Lifting the Head Off the Spine

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neck_alignmentYears ago my (Carol) first qigong teacher made the provocative statement that the world would be a different place if everyone’s heads were correctly held, in the proper position.

What did he mean by this? Most of us have the bad habit of letting our heads fall back, with the chin lifted, or forward, in a slouched position. First of all, the average human head is 8 to 12 pounds! That’s a lot of weight to carry around, and we’re too distracted, between work and other stressors, to notice.

This mal-positioning creates a constant blockage, leading to headaches, neck strain, shoulder strain, and worse, nerve impingement leading to numbness and tingling down the arms, to the fingers.

Ready to give it a try? Lift your sternum (the bony area at the center of your chest), tuck your chin in slightly, and lift the crown of the head center skywards, giving a slight tug to the muscles at the back of the neck. At the same time, let your shoulders drop. You are now lifting your head off the spine! Practice: hold it for several seconds at a time, any time, and soon your body will crave the correct position. Some examples of practice are when waiting (for a red light to turn green, for the water to boil, when listening to someone speak, or when you’re on hold), meditating, or during your daily peregrinations when you are called upon to be still for a moment.

soft_palateA related area to this is inside the mouth, where there are a number of muscles no one ever thinks of. These are: Tensor veli palatini, Levator veli palatini, Palato glossus, Palato pharyngeus, and Musculus uvulae. When you practice lifting your head off the spine, think of softening the muscles of the soft palate. This will create more space to free up the components of the jaw and neck.

Lifting the head off the spine is really a qi gong practice in that the focus is on the bones, allowing the surrounding tissue to lengthen, become stronger, and relax all at once. When you hit the “sweet spot,” you’ll know it, and with practice, will be able to hold the position for longer moments, then periods, of time.

http://mountaintopacupuncture.com/lifting-the-head-off-the-spine

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At Mountaintop Acupuncture, we have over 30 years experience. To read more, please click here.

If you have questions and concerns about acupuncture treatment, we offer a free 20-minute phone session: click here for contact information to call or e-mail us. We practice at The Highlands Ranch Medical Pavilion in Littleton, Colorado.

Insurance is welcome and accepted.

Filed Under: All Things Exercise, Health Tips, Philosophy, Stress Busters, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,

Stress, Your Brain, and Feeling Whole, Part I

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Brain illustration courtesy of The Human Brain Book
by Rita Carter

A recent study of interest looks at the intersection of the nervous system and acupuncture, and some brain anatomy and physiology might be helpful, so here it is, in a nutshell:

The hypothalamus-pituitary-axis (HPA) is a region in the brain that has to do with regulation of a multitude of body functions, from immunity, to reproduction, digestion, and temperature.

The sympathetic nervous system (SNS) is our “fight or flight” system that helps us survive.

The hypothalamus acts as the intermediary between the nervous system and the endocrine system, and the pituitary is the body’s major endocrine gland.

The hypothalamus-pituitary-axis and sympathetic nervous system work ceaselessly to attain and maintain homeostasis, the natural state of equilibrium, in the entire body.

The two hormones from the HPA were ACTH (adrenocorticotropic) and CORT (corticosterone); the peptide from the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) was NPY (neuropeptide Y).
ACTH, CORT, and NPY are present in abundance when the both systems are activated.

The hormones and neurotransmitter measured were obtained by blood tests over 10 days.

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At Mountaintop Acupuncture, we have a combined 34 years of experience. To read more, please click here.

If you have questions and concerns about acupuncture treatment, we offer a free 20-minute phone session: click here for contact information to call or e-mail us. We practice at The Highlands Ranch Medical Pavilion in Littleton, Colorado.

Insurance is welcome and accepted.

Filed Under: Research Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Keep Moving!

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millet_the_gleanersWhen I (Carol) took the Memorial Sloan Kettering online oncology course for acupuncturists, the recommendation for healthy people to exercise 30-60 minutes a day was the standout detail from the entire, 30+ hours of lectures.

That’s 30-60 minutes, seven days a week of formal exercise, not including the time you may spend traveling, changing, or cleaning up. And movement for our daily peregrinations, though better than nothing, doesn’t count.

Why, I wondered, did they advocate 30-60 minutes a day, and then it hit me: our DNA is programmed to move a lot more than we do in the 21st Century. It’s only been about 250 years since the Industrial Revolution, and many conveniences we take for granted didn’t exist before then. For our ancestors, chores and travel demanded constant physical effort; physiological evolution doesn’t change as quickly as our world has, so we have to accommodate our body’s needs by moving more.

Moving is one of the main ways to reduce your risk of getting cancer, because where there is blood flow, free radicals cannot pile up. When you regularly engage in steady, sustained movement, blood perfuses throughout your body.

Once I grasped this fact, I took up the challenge, and found it easy to justify the time spent, because being cancer-free is a compelling motivator. Viewed in this light, choosing to move is as simple as standing on one side of a line and stepping over it to the other side.

Regular exercise has many benefits, including leveling out the stresses encountered in a day.

If you are new to exercise, begin slowly and build up to it. You will find the body grows stronger exponentially, for it’s designed to do this. Expect some aches and pains as you make progress, but pay attention to the quality of pain to avoid injury (so you can continue working out!). If you overdo it, don’t give up, just take a break and get some acupuncture or a massage to speed the healing.

http://mountaintopacupuncture.com/keep-moving

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At Mountaintop Acupuncture, we have over 30 years experience. To read more, please click here.

If you have questions and concerns about acupuncture treatment, we offer a free 20-minute phone session: click here for contact information to call or e-mail us. We practice at The Highlands Ranch Medical Pavilion in Littleton, Colorado.

Insurance is welcome and accepted.

Filed Under: All Things Exercise, Health Tips, Stress Busters, Theory, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Take a Breath, Part II

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Lung anatomy

Now that we’ve moved to beautiful and mile-high Colorado, it’s taking a few months to acclimate to the elevation, and the best way we have found to do this is by swimming: rhythmical, evenly-paced lap swimming. My (Carol) theory why this works to calm the nervous system and enhance deeper breathing is that for every inhale, a lap swimmer is exhaling for at least two counts, thereby knocking more carbon dioxide (CO2), and thus waste-product, off. Less toxins in the body can only be a good thing!

Air is a form of nutrient in both biomedicine and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). The exchange of gases occurs in the lungs, where oxygen (O2) is inhaled and carbon dioxide (CO2) is exhaled. O2 binds to hemoglobin, travels in the blood to each cell, where the mitochondria use it to create ATP, THE energy molecule, via the Krebs cycle.

When you take deeper breaths, you increase the amount of O2 in your body, and the potential for more reserves of energy both immediately and in times of stress or depletion/illness.

Here’s a simple Taoist breathing method:

1) Inhale through your nose, and follow the breath down your esophagus, into your chest, and down to your lower abdomen, allowing the muscles to relax and expand.

2) Exhale from the lower abdomen by contracting the muscles of the lower abs and core towards your spine.

Breathing this way is very grounding, and with practice, will become second nature — it’s the way we breathed as babies, so that kinesthetic memory is stored in our nervous systems.

No need to rush the process: you can do it any time or place when you remember to do it. For example, when you’re waiting for the light to change, or feel your emotions or thoughts start to run away from you.

Guideline: never strain — follow the 70% rule — taking breaths only as deeply as they come naturally to you.

Benefits: increased energy, clearer thinking, calmer nervous system, improved metabolic and organ function, and less toxic waste in the form of CO2 floating in the blood.

Image:

U.S. Department of Health and Human Service, National Institute of Health website. Retrieved 10.18.10: http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/dci/Diseases/hlw/hlw_respsys.html

http://mountaintopacupuncture.com/take-a-breath

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At Mountaintop Acupuncture, we have a combined 34 years of experience. To read more, please click here.

If you have questions and concerns about acupuncture treatment, we offer a free 20-minute phone session: click here for contact information to call or e-mail us. We practice at The Highlands Ranch Medical Pavilion in Littleton, Colorado.

Insurance is welcome and accepted.

Filed Under: All Things Exercise, Health Tips, Nourishing You, Stress Busters Tagged With: , , , , ,

A Moving Image Becomes the Meditation

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Meditation has been a hot-topic in my (Carol) treatment room since the beginning of the new year. Patients express the desire to meditate, and I share their intention, but it’s hard to hit that mark each and every day.

Tom sent this time-lapse video of Yosemite, and watching it had a tranquilizing effect. There are so many ways to meditate, I’m adding this one to my arsenal.

Here’s the one I reach for most often, from Bruce Frantzis, qi gong and ba gua teacher back in the day. He repeated over and over while we practiced (standing): “the mind moves the qi.” I prefer to do this sitting or lying down, justifying the increased ability to focus within.

Sit up comfortably on the couch or against the wall, legs crossed, or lie with head on a pillow, so your heart is propped up a bit.

Starting an inch or so above your head, do a slow sweep down your body, as if you were a block of water that is emptying out. When you inevitably reach a tight spot, acknowledge it, breath into it, then move on once it’s softened. If your mind wanders, go back to the last place you remember you were aware of and continue moving downward.

I try for 3 sweeps if it’s daytime- bedtime is another story, since this can put you to sleep when lying down. Sweep 1 is often full of tight spots and takes awhile, but 2 and 3 go much faster, and the luxurious sensation as the sweep goes down and out of your arms and hands, and legs and feet is something to experience.

Tight spots are places we hold tension, and could arise from many sources. Like any meditation, instead of pushing them back and glossing them over, when we look at them squarely, they dissipate. This takes time, but be patient. I’ve found some areas will actually get tighter right before they loosen up.

This is the opposite direction that yoga classes do in shavasana (corpse pose). The reasoning is it is more grounding, emotionally, to move our “stuff” down and out: as westerners/living in the 21st C, we’re all way too much in our heads.

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At Mountaintop Acupuncture, we have over 30 years experience. To read more, please click here.

If you have questions and concerns about acupuncture treatment, we offer a free 20-minute phone session: click here for contact information to call or e-mail us. We practice at The Highlands Ranch Medical Pavilion in Littleton, Colorado.

Insurance is welcome and accepted.

Filed Under: Nourishing You, Stress Busters Tagged With:
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