Painful shoulder

When I woke up on Sunday morning, my right shoulder felt stiff. By lunchtime it was painful, and by the evening it was excruciating. On Tuesday the pain hadn't gone so I went to see the doctor – she said I should rest until it calmed down. On Wednesday morning it was even worse and on a recommendation from a friend, I booked to see a private physio. He said the muscles in my shoulder had gone into spasm – possibly as a reaction to the way I sit in front of my computer. He massaged the painful area which seemed to calm things down, then taped my shoulder back as a way of reminding me to hold a good posture. Today is Friday and it seems to be feeling better. More of a dull throbbing ache now.

It's amazing how something like this can bring up so much stuff! At first I was trying to work out what I did to tip the balance and make my shoulder start shouting at me. The fact that I couldn't pin it down to something specific was frustrating. Then there was the pain itself. As I've found before with pain, the more I resisted it, the more my body tightened and the worse it got! The key with pain is to do everything you can to soften around it – physically and mentally. But in those waves of excruciating sensation, it took all my concentration to stay with it. The problem with this kind of focus is that it's very narrowing. Like having blinkers on, I found it difficult to be aware of my surroundings or even hold a conversation when my focus was so tight. Pain sharpens and narrows our awareness, which is why softness and relaxation is so important.

When I heard from the doctor that it might take some time to calm down and I should just let it take its course, again up came the frustration, but also fear – what if it takes months? Can I take this kind of pain for months? What if it never heals? How can I continue working and teaching...? This is called "catastrophising", and as humans, we're very good at it!

When I saw the physio and he told me he thought it might've been brought on by poor posture... to that I reacted in indignation! "But I've done a lot over the years to make sure my posture is good... I practice yoga, I have a desk that raises up to standing height, I've been doing Rolfing over the last few months specifically to work on my postural integration, and I thought I sit at my computer with a good posture... How dare he suggest that?!" (that was just my thoughts – I didn't actually say that!).

He had this poster up on his wall (as pictured – Spinal Damage at 0 mph), and of course he's totally right. Even with the best will in the world, we all get caught out. Desks and computers are a major health risk! Hours sitting still with a bad posture puts huge strains on the body. The body was not designed to work at a desk.

Each week I volunteer with the Kings College Hospital Chaplaincy team to go in and visit people on the wards. One of the wards I go to regularly is a blood cancer ward, and now and then I meet someone who relates their story of how they first got their diagnosis. Maybe they'd had flu and got a blood test, or maybe got a test for something unrelated, and boom, it comes back saying they've got leukaemia (or similar). What I've experienced this week is so minor compared to that, but it does make me realise just how grateful I am for what I have.

In health we often go along thinking we'll be fine for ever. We forget life is so fragile. None of us are immune to pain – not even a yoga teacher that tries to take care of his body!

The Buddha described those of us that hold on to particular views, ideas, beliefs, wishes, etc, as stuck wheels (dukkha). You know, like when the brakes on your bike are done up too tight and they stick on the rims... Moving forward takes a lot of effort and we suffer. The trick is to let go and soften, and not just to know but to live the truth that everything is always in a state of change (anitya).

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I am a member of the Zenways sangha led by Zen master Daizan Skinner Roshi, and I teach meditation, mindfulness and yoga at the ZenYoga studio in Camberwell, London. See my website for further details.

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Releasing tension and stiffness helps us feel more

Tension and stiffness in the body create numbness. They create a barrier to awareness and the full experience of life. If we can’t relax, then life becomes dulled; the extra tension is tiring to hold and inevitably produces an undercurrent of fatigue. Look around you when you walk through the streets of the city and you'll see tension is a chronic condition. Happily through, yoga and meditation practice teaches us how to begin releasing all these tensions, better align and balance ourselves, and brings us to a new appreciation of the incredible vibrancy of life.


Perhaps one of the first things we notice when we start with our yoga and/or mindfulness work are these areas of stiffness or tension – and for some of us discomfort or even pain. They come about for a number of reasons, and can affect us on various levels: from the superficial to the deep. Causes include:

• our genetics (for example weak joints mean the muscles have to work harder, or scoliosis causes asymmetries in the spine muscles)
• past accidents (e.g. a broken toe meant you avoided putting weight on that foot and now the other leg feels overworked)
• past traumatic experiences (the body mirrors the mind in wanting to protect our soft vulnerable parts so often we end up hunching over)
• our occupation (e.g. sitting at a desk for long hours with bad posture)
• our hobbies (e.g. playing or doing an asymmetric sport like tennis or shooting)

So you can see that the reasons our body might be tight or stiff are intimately connected to our past, our upbringing, and our life choices.

I can see now that when I started my own journey into the world of yoga and self-exploration, I was pretty numb, desensitised, and tense! There were many blockages and tight areas, and I was nowhere near being able to feel the subtleties I'm now able to tune into. In the words of a good friend of mind, I was a brut... An insensitive, lumbering vertebrate with his heads in the clouds and a body that, if on a map, would be labelled “here be dragons”!

When we experience unpleasant sensations in our life, one of our strategies for blocking these out (after all no-one wants to feel unpleasantness!) is to tense up, because tension causes numbness. The body learnt that a long time ago!

Releasing the tension

For many years I understood in my head that yoga could help us release the tensions, blockages and imbalances, but I struggled to relate it to any actuality in my body. I could see my weight changing, muscles developing, and stamina improving, but had no sense of my body coming into better alignment or flow.

It took a sustained level of awareness and the keen eyes of my Zen teacher Daizan Roshi and yoga teacher Jonathan Monks to show me, on a physical body level, that this was actually happening. Through my yoga and meditation practice (and to some degree through my years of psychotherapy), I'd begun to let go of my body’s patterns of tension. Slowly, I’d begun to dismantle the layers of holding and blockages built up over years and years. With alignment, mindfulness and relaxation I suddenly found I could feel finer and subtler sensations in the body that I’d never noticed before.

One of the keys to releasing tension and encouraging relaxation is bringing the body into correct alignment. By aligning ourselves with the vertical, with our innate sense of “up” and “down”, then the force of gravity will support us instead of weigh us down. Right now try leaning to one side. It takes work! So aligning of the physical body with gravity allows us to relax and shed unnecessary tension. This is why in meditation sitting up straight is so important, and why in yoga we learn to move with gravity, not against it.

In the words of Will Johnson (from his lovely book Alignment, Relaxation, Resilience), I've started tuning in to the "fine, shimmering currents of sensation that constantly flow through the body”. As I described in this previous post, these are the shimmering currents of our subtle bioelectromagnetic field.

Spiritual energy by Alex Grey

Jaw clenching stuff

Just have a check - right now - are you clenching your jaw? Even just a tiny bit?

What about your lips? Are they pursed?

Clenched jaw, pursed lips...

If you've answered yes, just let yourself relax - release the tension. Un-clench your jaw, relax your tongue (very important) and part your teeth slightly.

Just by relaxing your jaw, you relax your entire nervous system. This is something that Zen and Tai Chi/Qigong masters have known for centuries.

Generally, the body reacts to fear, worry, stress, anxiety, and pain by tensing up. We all know about the tension that manifests in the shoulders, neck, belly – but the face, and particularly the jaw, often isn't one we so tuned in to. Sometimes the jaw might even carry the "burden of the emotion" on its own, and this can lead, for some people, to excessive jaw pressure, lock-jaw, or teeth grinding (technically termed Bruxism). 

Ok, so if you're tense or stressed you might clench your jaw. But it can so easily become a habit. Can you think of someone you know who often clenches their jaw or purses their lips? Often-times the habit will have arisen as a response to a tension/stress of some kind but then develops into a long-term habit. Habit energies can be very strong, and take a great deal of will-power to break.

Now let's just pause to think what that might look like who clenches their jaw and tightens their lips. What do you think? – angry, tense, sad, frustrated, hostile even. Body-language-wise, you're sending signals of closing off, being unavailable, unfriendly. Never mind the fact that by doing it, you're introducing tension into the face, which can often result in headaches, pressure in the temples, nerve pain, damage to your teeth... And it takes lots of energy to hold a tense, tight face!

So on many levels it's better to have a relaxed face and jaw! Try making it your object of focus in your next yoga class for example.

In fact we could go one step further. Try yawning... Yawning is known to help reduce anger, anxiety and stress, and enhance awareness, calmness, alertness and bodily relaxation. Yawning opens up and relaxes the throat – great for your voice and laryngeal health. Some research suggests that yawning actually plays a part in regulating the body's temperature so that we can think better. Perhaps that's why people often yawn when sitting in warm rooms regardless of whether or not they are physically tired!