Liberating Your Neck and Jaw - 2 - Side Slide Into the Ribs
Liza Bagg has eliminated all jaw tension to sing with the angels.
Liberating Your Neck and Jaw - 2 - Side Slide Right Down to the Ribs
How a slight tilt of the jaw can balance, or unbalance, the whole body
The jaw can slide up and down, as we explored last week. And side-to-side - the better to eat you with, my dear. This week we do some side-sliding to feel how the movement of the jaw affects the balance of the head on the neck and spine, down, even to the ribs.
The temporomandibular joint is a gliding and hinge joint. The head of the jaw, the mandible, fits into a socket in the cranium (the temporal bone), with a layer of synovial fluid (lubrication) between the bones. The jaw is the most-used joint in the body.
TMJ muscles. source: https://traditionalacupuncture.com.au
Lesson 2 in this series gets into this side-sliding action. There’s an optional standing scan, but the bulk of the lesson is done supine - on the back - with jaw, eyes, neck, and ribs building up the experience of the jaw ‘s affect on the entire body’s balance. A tiny habitual preference for holding the jaw to one side can, as I am discovering, affect the tilt of the head, binocular vision, and tension in the ribs. But that’s just me. Find out if you have any interesting little habits that have full-body impacts.
As the series creator, David Zemach-Berson GCFT®, reminds us, this is a go-slow process. The tinier the movements the more you will feel and the faster you will move towards deeper relaxation and improvement - towards better posture, deeper breath, twistier twists, and away from text neck and collateral pain.
We take inspiration from the exquisite Eliza Bagg, featured here in “gentle fingers” by Alex Weiser. Disclosure: Eliza is my college roommate Susie’s daughter and I claim to be her 18th fairy god mother, as I met her in the cradle. (She has hundreds of fairy godmothers at this point!) Eliza is a dancer and now the go-to soprano for the most interesting modern classical composers. She also has a pop persona as Lisle. Here she sings with Sandbox Percussion. Notice her pure tone and excellent posture.
Science nerd candy this week is all about the TMJ - how it works and what happens when it gets out of whack. These are the shortest useful videos I could find:
TMJ Explanation and Therapy (Dr. Brian Mills) - Watch “Sue” chew and grind her teeth and learn all about why she does it
How the Jaw Works (Dental Care of Stamford) – a one-minute informative but bizarre little video that seems to come out of early 1970s middle-of-the-night documentary programming
Temporomandibular Joint (TMJ) Anatomy and Disc Displacement - (AlilaMedicalImages.org) intense use of anatomical language but informative animations - you can turn off the sound and still get the gist of the anatomy (3:40)
Mandible | Skull Anatomy - Boring, but someone may appreciate the details
Temporomandibular joint & muscles of mastication - Sam Webster, a charming if slightly daffy Brit, uses his extensive collection of anatomical models to go into detail on the bones, muscles and nerves of jaw. Expect to see more of Sam moving forward. (20 minutes)
How you might feel after this lesson: Relaxed, taller, softer neck and jaw, deeper breath, new information about blocks and kinks between jaw and skull, jaw and neck, jaw and shoulder, right and down to the ribs.
Recordings should be available within a week of class here.
New Student Registration for the series. Continuing students use ongoing login. $60 for series. $15/individual class. PayPal or Venmo: jackisue@aol.com. Or Jacki Katzman, PO Box 116, Bethlehem, NH 03574