Hello, and thanks for joining Your Body Advocate podcast. I am Ruth Cummings, your host, and today I’m talking about how to set your body up for success, like for the rest of your life. And today we’re gonna start with the neck. So please join me for this really fun how to series. Let’s take a deep breath to relax.

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Now here’s your host, master of encouragement and Body Mind, Life coach. Ruth Cummings. Hello and thanks for joining me today for this How to Series on How to set up Your Body for success. This has been on my mind for a while and I’ve been doing a lot of interviews this year and I’m finally getting back to doing some just on my own, and I wanted to talk about what our throat and.

How it gets injured by us and how it can be helped by us. So first of all, the throat, the neck area controls all communication that comes into and out of our body. So anything you need to hear and anything you need to say. So when you don’t say what you need to say, there’s things that get stuck in that coming up to your throat, from your chest and inside your throat.

Like people can’t spit it out. These are statements that we hear about, uh, our body that are real through centuries, and then not hearing what you need to hear, like something is hard to swallow and not just hearing, but what that means really is to assimilate. To digest an idea. Something coming at you that’s just really hard to take and then you’re, you, you close your body to that coming into your being and just saying that word close right?

It by closing your body like that, it does create tension in your neck, in your throat, in your shoulders, in your jaw. And that does create problems in your. I’ve had chronic neck pain my entire life, and part of it was from disease of having really big tonsils that were inflamed from birth and I finally had to get them out.

And I’ve also had just chronic neck injuries and the sports I played and. Just different things in life, like car accidents or falling off horses, and silly living when I was younger and I’m paying for it now because I’ve had to pay such close attention to my neck. I have some ideas for you if you have neck pain or if you know somebody with neck pain of ways that they can help, but I wanted to start with how do we create issues in and around our neck, Physic.

By injury, of course. That’s the simple one. That’s the easiest one to find. Bad posture, how you’re sitting, how you’re driving. Are you having your neck go forward, your head go forward while you’re working. Also, sleep posture. How are you on a pillow? What is your neck doing during the night? So that’s just a few examples of how we can create pain, create issues in and around our neck, physically and then emotionally.

Like I said before, if we don’t say what we need to say. So let me give you more examples of this instead of just explaining it. You. Let’s just say as a kid, let’s start this because all these things in our body that I’ve been talking about, they, they build on one another, so one. Is, it’s like a bruise and then a bruise on top of a bruise, and then another bruise on top of a bruise if these keep happening.

So let’s say as a child, you’re not able to say to your parents that you’re angry. They do something that’s really, it might even be IL logically angry, right? Who? Who knows? Because our memory is not really logical of those times, but we aren’t able to communicate what we need to communicate at that time, and we stuff it.

So we. Jaw, our jaw gets tight. We stop breathing, we curl up a little bit, and you know, you’re having these thoughts of mad at the parent and you know, just being either scared or angry. So there’s these responses to your body. To what’s happening in your thoughts, like your thoughts are, I’d like to say A, B, and C to my dad, and I can’t.

So my body starts to get tense and a lot of that tension can be found in the neck, throat, sh upper shoulder area in the beginning. This tension can come and then easily. But it, when we do it over and over, that tension comes and then it stays, and then it stays. When I’m doing a massage on someone’s neck, there’s several layers of this where you go into a muscle and.

It’s tight, but it’s warm. And as you go deeper and deeper, if this knot has been there for a long time, it’s actually quite cold, which is very interesting within the body. So that shows me the layers of how long this knot has been there. So if this person has chronic. Kept their tongue, you know, not said what they wanted to say.

And then they get in a habit of doing that, where instead of just confronting what they need to confront, they really literally almost swallow their tongue. They swallow their words and. We can find tension along the front of the neck and we can find tension with this all around that area. And that’s what’s unique is that each person is different.

So when I teach this, like it’s not something you can say, Okay, follow this one muscle because it’s different. And that’s what’s fascinating and so cool about the body, is that your pattern is going to be different than someone else’s. Maybe it goes down your right arm, maybe it goes down your left arm, maybe it goes down the back.

It’s hard to know until you are watching your own patterns of responding to your words, the words that you can’t say or you don’t feel like you can say. Another interesting part of this is that when we need to say something and we take the deep breath to say it, for example, we’re about to take the deep breath and we’re about to say what we need to say, and then when we don’t, If you notice that right now, if you even practice it where you’re take a deep breath and you’re about to say something and you don’t, you can see and feel that there’s something left.

There’s something remaining on the top part of your chest and that goes into your throat, and that is the area right there below your clavicle. Right? That in that area, your collarbone, right below your collarbone, then you can sometimes feel tension. That should not hurt if you press down.

This is how we can find grief patterns in this area because there’s a layering system of someone having taken a deep breath to say something and not saying it, and that all that tension from what they’re about to say, and if they had said it would’ve left and not been stored in their body. But that layering system of doing that over and over again.

Then can be felt in the tissues right there. This is why when I find chronic pain in the back between the shoulder blades or right in the back of the neck, then I will also then try to find points in the front, right by the sternum, right by the. Um, clavicle or the, the collarbone. So I can usually match points from the front of the chest to right behind the neck, right where that is between the shoulders, meeting the neck or shoulders, meeting the spy.

The fascinating part about this is that we don’t even recognize or realize that it’s happening because it’s become such a pattern, such a, such a habit that we don’t even know that it’s happening. We don’t even know that. We don’t even know, and. That’s why I’m suggesting for people to really take, take a step back and try to recognize when they’re not breathing, when they’re holding their throat tight, when they’re holding their body tight during a conversation, during something that they’re not saying, and see if they can match what they’re wanting to say with the tension in their.

On the flip side of this is not hearing or assimilating what’s coming at you. Let’s go back to childhood again and have an example of, let’s say you’re eight years old and you hear from one of your parents or both if they sit down with you, that they’re about to get divorced, and oftentimes the children.

Absolutely not hear that. They will not assimilate. Even if they, they can tell you, they hear you, They, they nod their head, but in reality their body has not accepted that and that hearing that something that is so hard for them to hear, it stops right there. It stops and it doesn’t get assimilated into their body.

And then we can find tension in their neck. That’s quite old. That goes back really close to the spine on both sides of the spine, in the neck muscles. And that’s always fascinating to me, even. Years, decades later, we can trace that back to that feeling. And if the person can recognize that that specific tension goes to that specific memory, then the whole thing just melts away.

Sometimes this will show up. With receiving love, receiving gifts, receiving help, receiving any kind of communication or love from God, from our higher power, from the divine. And when we do not accept that, that’s what’s happening. It’s right there in our throat when it’s, it comes at you. Right. Someone’s, someone tells you, gives you a compliment, and you do not accept that compliment no matter what.

You either tell them something bad about yourself. You look really pretty today. Oh yeah, but I haven’t taken a shower. Like, you know, always like a something negative about yourself. Then. You’re not receiving that gift from that person. You’re not receiving the gift from the divine. If God is trying to give you something and you’re not feeling like you’re good enough, and you kind of put a hand to the face without moving your body, what’s happening is that your throat is closing.

And that can be found in those muscles around the front and the back of the neck, going all the way up into the oxy, put underneath your jaw, in your jaw, in your mouth. Like all these areas that have to do with swallowing. Like swallowing, somebody, giving you love, giving you compliments, giving you any type of gift, your receiving muscle, your receiving of that can be.

Tense from years of practice of not allowing that to assimilate or be digested into your body. . Okay, so how do we make that better? How can we start to be physically better, emotionally better, and spiritually better to our neck? Let’s set our neck up for success. Here are my three ideas. To make that better.

I have three areas, so physically to help your neck and to help anywhere around that neck. Three. Three things that I do every day. I strengthen my upper. So I do rows. I do bent over rows. If I’m not in the gym or at the gym, I do rows. You can also do like planks or you can do the seal any way that you can strengthen between your shoulder blades and behind your neck.

When I’m driving, I push my head back into the headrest so you can strengthen your upper back. Next, really practice good posture as much as you can. Nobody’s perfect, but try. Watch yourself in the mirror to see and feel how good posture looks and feels, not just how it looks, because when you can feel it, then you don’t have to have a mirror around to remind you.

And lastly, for the physical part, is to practice deep breathing. Just a few times a day. Deep breathing will really help open up your throat. The next thing I would suggest in the next area emotion. You can help your throat by singing. Why? Because you want something to vibrate that area. Vibrate your throat.

If you vibrate your throat with either singing or talking, humming even. It’s very, very helpful for the entire throat and neck, not just the front, but the back as well. Then I would also, of course, I would say, do some massage. Either get a massage or learn how to massage your own neck and throat. And the next thing, and of course one of my favorites that many of you know is hot tea.

Hot tea is just amazing and there’s so many cool options, but hot tea is really good for the front and the back of your throat and neck. And lastly, spiritually, I would say, to help your throat and neck would be to journal. Journaling is really good. Get that stuff out. You don’t actually have to say what’s bothering you for it not to be stored in your body.

Get it out of your body by journaling. Journaling is a great way. Also, pray. Pray and say the things that you want to come out of your body, or you can just hum and pray, but ask for help. Prayer is very, very vital to healing. Talk. You can talk to yourself in the shower, in the car, by yourself at home. You could talk to your pets.

You could talk to, you know, friends and family. Also, that also helps, but you don’t limit yourself. You can, you can, you know, I can’t do it because I have no one to talk to. It’s just getting out of your body. It’s not really having the words land anywhere, somewhere else. Right. Landing by someone else, hearing them on the other.

It’s really about getting it out of your body, so it’s just one sided. You don’t need to be heard on this part of this. You just need to say it so it gets out of your throat. So the homework would be notice how your throat is involved with your life, with what you say, with what you don’t say. When does it feel really good?

When does it feel text and tired? Like it can’t talk or it starts to go like this. When does that happen? Start to notice if you become really aware of your throat. When does the back of your neck get really, really sore and tight and just, uh, just feels like it needs a break or needs some massage? When does that happen?

Is it after you’ve been doing a specific type of. Was it around a certain person? Were you, um, were you happy? Were you sad? If you can match those feelings, those thoughts with when your neck is tight or happy. Happy means it’s like it’s strong. It could feel like you can take all kinds of weight. It’s so excited.

You were doing some exercises. It, it could sing for hours. That type of woo. When it feels like that, see if you can match that every day. When you know what is causing that, maybe you can reenact that, um, day after day after day, that would be. So to recap for your throat, say what you need to say. Also, try to assimilate what you need to hear instead of deflecting into your body, Say what you need to say instead of deflecting that into your body.

You can also not say what you need to say, but not have your body store. Attention. Same thing if something comes at you and it’s really hard to swallow something politically, something in your family. You get a diagnosis about yourself or a family member and it’s really hard to hear or assimilate. You can deflect that without it.

Becoming tension in your body with prayer, with any of the things I just mentioned. So your homework is to notice when and how does your throat respond to your life. And then here’s my favorites, right? Again, it’s strengthen your upper back with exercises. Call me or text me. I have a gazillion, truly, they’re all over the internet, but let me know.

All right? Strengthen the upper back. Good posture. Practice deep breathing. That’s what you do physically for your neck. Okay? Then emotionally for your neck, you can sing or vibrate your throat. You can massage your own neck, your own back of your neck, and the front of your neck very, very gently, and you can drink hot tea.

Spiritually, I would say do journaling, prayer, and talking to yourself, or talking to God, talking to friends, talking to pets. Just do the act of speaking to get it out of your body. All right. These are the ways you can set your neck up for success. Having the neck be successful in your. It really is awesome for the rest of your body.

The neck is what heals last. If it’s positive and it’s really doing well for you, then it’s really much easier to heal your entire body. Okay, so how did you like our first, How to set your Body Up for Success series? I love the neck and truly if you can get your neck and your throat to be as healthy as possible.

It will really help the rest of your body heal. Thanks so much for joining me today, and I will see you next time. Bye. Thank you for listening to Your Body Advocate with Ruth Cummings. We’re so glad you’ve joined us today, and truly believe you can live a pain-free, passion filled life. To connect with Ruth, work with Ruth, or to grab your free ebook, go to ruth cummings.com.

We’d love to hear. Don’t forget to rate, review, and subscribe so you don’t miss our next episode. Until next time, friends, be open. Include the unincluded, think outside the box, and spread love and kindness. One smile at a time.