Helping Hands for Healthy Posture: Tall Neck

Most of us are familiar with the idea of self-massage. For many it may grow from instinctively rubbing a sore spot. For a few it grows into an essential healing art, and may even incorporate skills such as trigger point work, myofascial release, and acupressure. 

Healing hands 

Many students opt for the in-person Gokhale Method® offerings (Free Workshops, Initial Consultations, Foundations, Pop-up, and Alumni Classes) because they place great value on their teacher’s hands-on work. I have found that hands-on work continues to be a force for good even in online work. For our online Elements students, who don’t get guidance from a teacher’s hands, it’s especially important to learn to do hands-on work with their own hands.

One of the most useful hands-on techniques that we teach you to do for yourself, whether you are an in-person or online student, is the hair pull. It is the subject of one of our free Gokhale® Moments videos, and one that we frequently refer to. In fact, Hair Pull is our most liked Gokhale Moment! See if you like it too…

The hair pull involves gently gliding your head back and up, lengthening the neck, aligning it more vertically, and pivoting the head slightly downward.

Confine your movement to the neck and head

When performing the hair pull, make sure that you are not pulling your torso and swaying your back. You may detect a straightening of the upper thoracic spine and feel stretch in the upper chest when gliding your neck back, which is fine. Other than that, focus on isolating the movement to your head and neck. If you find yourself swaying back with your front ribs lifting, you want to prevent this and protect against compressing your lower back by first learning to use your Rib Anchor—another Gokhale Moment video that we frequently refer to. 

Healthy head carriage

Rather than having forward head carriage, we want to return to healthy head carriage. Carrying not only your head on your spine, but an additional load on the head, is an almost universal practice in traditional societies, and both necessitates and encourages healthy neck alignment. 

A well-positioned neck and head align directly over the torso—not to the front or behind

The Gokhale® Head Cushion has just enough weight to help you find the verticality you are looking for in your neck. By strengthening your deeper neck muscles, it also helps to relax the more peripheral neck musculature that is often tight. (You can use our $5 discount code TallNeck, valid through Sunday October 13, to purchase a head cushion.)

Letting go

Undoing well-established patterns such as tensing the back of the neck can still be difficult to navigate by yourself. Often the body has “held tight” to a position for decades. This is rather like pulling on a knotted piece of string—the harder we pull, the tighter the knot gets. Take things slowly to allow your nervous system time to find a different response, and your tissues time to relax. If the back of your neck only knows how to draw tighter, you can call on the expertise of a Gokhale Method teacher who has guided other students through this same difficulty and out the other side. Once you have unlocked these patterns together, you can continue to gently coax the elastic release you have discovered using your own hands. 

Here I am guiding a student to experience more mobility, length, and verticality in his neck.

Pain will not bring gain

If you have any pain when you try this maneuver, stop. Don’t feel obliged to follow general instructions that are not tailored for you. Nature spent millions of years evolving a sophisticated way of telling you not to do something, and you don’t want to disregard that signal. This is an instance where a qualified Gokhale Method teacher can look at your health history, together with the advice of your preferred health professional if appropriate, and work with you to progress comfortably and safely. 

Previous generations rarely exhibited the forward head carriage and curved necks that commonly cause tension, pain, and degenerative conditions today.

Help that’s at hand

Once you have mastered this hands-on maneuver, you can remind your neck and head how to move back home into a healthier alignment as frequently as needed. Practice regularly and mindfully, and you will progress with both your range of motion and your baseline posture. 

Gokhale Method teacher Julie Johnson offers a student hands-on help in combination with a Gokhale® Head Cushion to gently lengthen her neck. The weight of the cushion encourages the deep spinal muscles of the neck to work, so that the outer muscles can relax.

Share your progress!

If you have practiced our “hair pull” technique and would like feedback on your neck and head position, please consider uploading a “Before” and an “After” picture in the comment section below. It’s a great way for all of us to share and learn from each other. 

Here I was in 2009, demonstrating the lengthening effect of pulling up the back of the head to a group of teenagers. Hopefully they have continued to enjoy the benefits of space for their cervical discs, nerves, and bones!

Best next action steps 

If you would like help to improve your neck and head posture, get started by booking a consultation, online or in person, with one of our teachers. 

You can sign up below to join any one of our upcoming FREE Online Workshops…