Since the winter months can cause muscle tension, especially in the neck and shoulders, I have explored teaching pilates with a strong focus on keeping the neck, shoulders and jaw relaxed. I start the class bringing everyone’s awareness to the jaw and unhooking it so that the roof of the mouth rises and the back of the tongue drops into the mouth. Then I get them to do a neck stretch to relax the neck followed by the pillar warm up where I give a strong focus to sensing how the neck is part of the spine and get them to use their hands at the base of the skull to pull upwards as I cue ‘reach the head out of the neck’.
Throughout the rest of the class I continue to remind the students to keep their neck on their spine as they do their matwork and every so often in between exercises I have them do neck rolls, capitat nods or circles. At the end of class I have them do neck presses and more neck stretching and remind everyone that it is a flexible neck that gives us the ability to have many perspectives in life and a stiff neck can lead to rigid thinking, so keep you neck, jaw and shoulders relaxed and put your tension into your ‘powerhouse’, your center of gravity. I also focus on the short relaxation at the end of the class on the connection between relaxation in the jaw and the breath being initiated from the ‘powerhouse’.
I was really inspired to focus my teaching on releasing neck and shoulder tension after reading Eric Franklin’s book, ‘Relax Your Neck, Liberate Your Shoulders’ which I took out from the liabrary by the way because I had no money at that time (yeah for libraries, they are heaven when you are broke!!!). At that time, I began to really emphasize in my teaching to let go through the occipital (base of the skull) and temporal-mandibular(jaw) joints and I noticed that there is a relationship between the jaw being relaxed and the breath falling into the body so that it moves from the center of gravity or ‘powerhouse’.
Years before when I studied acting I had also explored how releasing the jaw and opening the back of the throat is connected to opening the energy in the lower belly which is the second chakra (svadishthana) and our emotion and sexuality energy center. What makes an actor successful? The ability to express emotion and of course the ability to make the opposite sex and same sex gay people want them sexually, right? Notice when you are watching actors in film how often they have their mouths slightly open; it is an actor trick. So the exploration of the connection between the jaw openness and the energy openness in the lower belly is a powerful one worth exploring. It also forms a connection between the throat chakra (visuddhi) and the lower belly chakra (svadisthana) both chakras linked to creativity. When these two chakras are vibrating together one is literally a creative ‘powerhouse’.