Ingredients for freeing your neck and throat

So you want to cook up a free neck and throat?

Good. Before we start to prepare the dish, we will need to assemble the ingredients. That’s what I’m doing in this post. In my next post, on Monday, we’ll start cooking up that free neck.

So what are the ingredients you need? I’m going to divide them into two groups:–

• The parts of your neck
• The other bits

First List of Ingredients: the parts of your neck

You need to distinguish three separate areas in your neck:–

1. Your head/neck joint. This is the joint between your head and the top of your neck. That’s easier to say than “Atlanto-occipital joint”, don’t you think?
2. Your neck itself
3. The very base of your neck, where it joins your back

1. Your head/neck joint

Your head/neck joint needs to be absolutely free, able to move at the touch of a feather.

2. Your neck

Your neck needs to be firm enough to support the weight of your head. It should not, however be cemented in place as most people’s necks are. Although your neck does naturally have a slight backward curve, most people pull it hard back into an over-accentuated curve. Other people have over-straight necks. Unfortunately, these over-straight necks are often even tighter than the strongly-pulled-back ones.

3. The base of your neck

A healthy neck usually includes a small forwards bend at it’s base, where neck flows into back. However, the base of most people’s necks includes a very pronounced forwards bend. This pronounced bend is, like the bend in the main part of your neck, also a symptom of extreme tightness and effort. This bend, which usually continues into the top of your back, is what gives you your stoop. Most people have a stoop — although it’s usually at least partly disguised by their sway back. Stoop and sway back together form that familiar S-bend that you can see in so many backs.

Second list of ingredients: the other bits

In addition to that first list of ingredients, you need to be aware of:–

4. Your throat.
5. Your tongue.
6. Your jaw.
7. Your palate.

4. Your throat

Your throat spans all three of the above areas. The central part of your throat is your voice-box or Adam’s apple. Your voice box is suspended in the middle of a web-like array of fine, strappy muscles. Some of these muscles attach downwards to your the top of your chest (the top of your breast bone and and your collar bones). Others attach upwards to your jaw and to the base of your skull.

5. Your tongue

Your tongue is partly suspended in the upper part of the web of muscle that converges on your voice box. It also connects with your jaw-bone and your palate.

6. Your jaw-bone

Your jaw-bone has strong chewing muscles that can pull it upwards toward your skull so that your lower teeth can meet your upper teeth in in many different upwards, forwards, backwards and sideways movements. A tense throat inevitably pulls down on your jaw bone as well as your head — a major contribution to that stiff neck.

7. Your palate

Most of your palate is just the bony roof of your mouth. The interesting part is the soft palate at the back. This is where the hard bone gives way to soft tissue. It ends in the familiar uvula that you can see hanging down at the back of the mouth if you look down someone’s throat.

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