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Areas › Your body › Touch and bodywork
The ones you can feel most easily run from behind each ear down towards the collarbone, with more just behind them along the side. Rest a warm hand there rather than digging in. Treating your neck as part of your emotional life, instead of a mechanical fault to be sorted out later, changes what you do with it, though a physiotherapist may still be worth seeing.
'Your suffering distresses him: he is deeply concerned for you' (Quran 9:128). Bodily distress taken seriously by someone kind is the model, including when the one attending to your neck is you.
التوبة
لَقَدۡ جَآءَكُمۡ رَسُولࣱ مِّنۡ أَنفُسِكُمۡ عَزِيزٌ عَلَيۡهِ مَا عَنِتُّمۡ حَرِيصٌ عَلَيۡكُم بِٱلۡمُؤۡمِنِينَ رَءُوفࣱ رَّحِيمࣱ
A Messenger has come to you from among yourselves. Your suffering distresses him: he is deeply concerned for you and full of kindness and mercy towards the believers
Qur’an 9:128read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
In a randomised trial of 60 people with long standing mechanical neck pain, adding connective tissue massage to stabilising exercises improved pain, anxiety and quality of life more than the exercises alone. Anxiety improving alongside the neck is the interesting part. It is one modest sized trial, so the size of the effect is far from settled.
Celenay ST, Kaya DO, Akbayrak T. (2016). Cervical and scapulothoracic stabilization exercises with and without connective tissue massage for chronic mechanical neck pain: A prospective, randomised controlled trial.. Manual therapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A neck braced for months keeps the rest of you on alert, and each holds the other in place.
Do not press hard on the front or side of the neck, and see a clinician about neck pain that comes with numbness, weakness or dizziness.
You choose what to work on and how big a piece of it. A sore shoulder, a low mood, the belief that you are too much: all of them are allowed, and so is starting small.
When the person in front of you starts yawning during body work, it is usually not boredom. Bodies yawn as they let go of what they were holding.
Slide one hand behind your head at the base of the skull and rest the other on your forehead. Let your hands take the weight for a minute.