The Healing Power of the Vagus Nerve and The Need for Neck Rotation
Summary
This video discusses the book "Accessing the Healing Power of the Vagus Nerve" and its connection to postural restoration principles, particularly concerning neck tension, breathing mechanics, and the body's response to stress. It explores how issues like forward head posture and restricted neck movement can stem from prolonged fight-or-flight responses and impact overall physical and autonomic function.
Key points- The book "Accessing the Healing Power of the Vagus Nerve" by Stanley Rosenberg, with a foreword by Steven Porges, is discussed in relation to consciousness and the self.
- Restricted neck movement and the inability to breathe with the left diaphragm can lead to compensatory breathing using neck muscles like the SCM and scalenes.
- Overactive SCM muscles can pull on the base of the skull, potentially affecting the temporal bone, jaw, and cranial nerve circuitry.
- The book highlights the role of the trapezius and sternocleidomastoid (SCM) muscles, innervated by cranial nerve 11, in head rotation and survival.
- Asymmetries in SCM and trapezius tension can lead to ribcage compression and other issues.
- Stress and anxiety can cause the upper cervical vertebrae (C1, C2, C3) to rotate, often to the right, which is linked to a fight-or-flight pattern.
Chapters
Notable quotes (4)
“accessing accessing the healing power of the vagus nerve”
“the whole point is to keep the neck relaxed you don't want your neck doing anything that restricts its ability to move”
“he talks about how these SCMS are like reins on a horse right they pull side to side to rotate your neck in gross movement”
“because turning the head is a matter of life and death not just for these animals but for us also”
0:00I've had the chance to do a little bit of reading recently and I have two great books which I will show you one is I of the vortex by Rodolfo leanness not talking about this one today but if you're interested in consciousness and the self it's a really cool book but the other one I just got and it's really fascinating because it's called accessing accessing the healing power of the vagus nerve so accessing the healing power of the vagus nerve self-help exercises for anxiety depression trauma and autism by Stanley Rosenberg the foreword is written by Steven Porges I don't know who Benjamin shield is but
0:56Steven Porges wrote a book called the polyvagal theory and we talked about the vagus nerve a lot in postural restoration and in particular in the cervical Revolution course so cervical Revolution course is about that the neck and about revolution so rotation the ability to rotate your neck without restriction and I always tell people when people are asking about pure eye and what it's all about you know that people kind of know now it's about asymmetry and the left side and the right side breathing left hamstrings right gluts things like that but I would say the the whole point is to keep the neck relaxed you don't want your neck
1:45doing anything that restricts its ability to move when you cannot breathe with your left eye of RAM you're going to have to get more air into your right chest which is going to be compressed the left eye of RAM puts air into the right upper chest wall when you are over on your right side because you are in a left AI see right B C pattern remember you're stuck on your right leg your pelvis is oriented to the right you're compressed on the right side and yes I know some people are gonna say no my right shoulders higher than my left I get that comment all the time I
2:20understand that that's just extra compensation underneath you're still a ripe BC pattern which means this rib cage on the right side this chest wall off of the ribs / active right neck muscles keeping you over on the right side when you can't use your left eye frame you're gonna start to use these neck muscles the SCM and the scalenes and the upper trap to try to lift up your chest wall to get more air in there because it's compressed and the left eye frame can't inflate this right side so that's that's the you find that pretty much with everybody anyone who comes to see me and anyone who does online or
3:02Skype whatever is gonna be they're always gonna have this issue tight on the right side they can't get air over here so we have to keep the neck relaxed oh yeah I'm sorry because if you can't use left I afraid I'm gonna start to use your net to breathe and then once this right SCM this big this thing is big real big once that right SCM is overactive and trying to pull your chest up it can start to pull too much well you will pull too much on the base of your skull on the temporal bone it will internally rotate it compress it it will different
3:41planes of motion it may shift the jaw forward slightly now you have too much tooth contact on the right side your drama I end up to the left becomes a it can get very dicey let's put it that way now in this book he's taught what I love about the book is he talks about shoulder and neck and head pain cranial nerve 11 the trapezius and the sternocleidomastoid so the SE SCM he talks about how these SCMS are like reins on a horse right they pull side to side to rotate your neck in gross movement the ability to rotate back and forth side to side Bend side to side
4:24then the the more the finer points of rotation are performed by the sub openal muscles which are back here when you're locked into an extension pattern that we talked about in PRI all times that P EC bilateral rib flare forward head posture he talks about in here the S CMS get at over active and can pull your neck forward and now you can't breathe properly but the other thing is you can't rotate your head effectively and when you can't what's gonna happen there's so many things I can talk about here so I'm trying to limit myself so in this little here is the back of your
5:07neck and here's the base of your skull base of your skull if that forward if that net so your eyes or let's just say your eyes are horizontal and you need to maintain that horizontal line of sight once your neck comes forward it's being pulled forward by the SCMS or they come forward because your spine is so arched but the only way you can keep a horizontal line of sight is bring your head forward either way you're gonna end up in a forward head posture which is really a forward neck posture but either way messes your life up big-time and when that happens look what has the base
5:41of the skull has to do Oh compression boom base of the skull onto the top cervical vertebra which is the atlas and look at all these important things all this important cranial nerve circuitry comes out of this area it'll come out of the borders of the occiput with the temporal bones and remember the temporal bone gets locked into a position here and it closes the amount of space that's available for the vagus nerve and some artery I don't remember which one forward head SCMS are overactive you're using your neck to breathe you can't use your diaphragms your back is extended you can't rotate your body you can't
6:22rotate through your thoracic spine so it's going to come through the lumbar spine and it's going to come through SI joints you your legs are not going to be able to internally rotate externally rotate appropriately your glutes are gonna be dormant you're going to be a a you're going to turn into an autonomically driven human being that's what I was for uh 38 at least 38 39 years of my life I'm now 43 you don't want to be that but this is what he wrote and this is what I love he's talking about animals on the Serengeti for both the hunter and the hunted survival depends in part on
7:00turning their heads effortlessly and the muscles primarily responsible for this are the trapezius and the SCMS both innervated by cranial nerve 11 which is called the accessory nerve because turning the head is a matter of life and death not just for these animals but for us also it is not surprising that the structure of cranial nerve 11 is highly developed and complex for precise innervation of the individual fibers of these muscles so that was really cool that he is recognizing the role of the SCM and what it can do out hit and he does talk about the internal rotation the temporal bone which causes other issues he talked
7:43about asymmetries in SCM tension he also talks about asymmetries in the trapezius and when you have asymmetries in the trapezius you know all three upper middle lower I because of the fact that these the trapezius rotates the spine it can cause major issues and compression and actually he talks about huh where is it crap he talked about how it will compress your ribcage which is what we find over on the right side all the time in one of his classes he teaches at the start of the experiment a student observed that his thumbs were horizontal which means they were they were checking the position of his atlas okay and
8:31because the thumbs were horizontal in line with each other he knew that his atlas was aligned properly then I sent then I simply thought about something that was disturbing to me immediately the transverse process transverse process are these this is the spinous process which is basically the back of the spine and the transverse are on the sides but immediately the transverse process of c1 moved one side went up another went down so I would be frontal plane there's always gonna be frontal plane and rotation though the position of c1 felt like it had rotated approximately 45 degrees away from the horizontal with one side up and the
9:14other side down although this observation the only explanation I have is that the rotation must be a complex combination of the repositioning of c1 c2 and c3 taken together and all he had to do was have an unpleasant thought I found the experience highly unpleasant since I had to undergo a change of state away from social engagement and social engagement is what humans do on a normal basis you know it's normal interaction probably not what most people are experiencing right now since we're all kind of sitting at home with the corona virus so I'm sure probably a lot of you are sitting at home these days probably
9:53all over the world with c1 c2 and c3 rotated to the right because we're constantly under stress and anxiety most of us depending on how you deal with it just listening to them listening to the news he doesn't say and then he said he was able to with a little technique that I'm not even sure what it is to get these the c1 c2 c3 to rotate back to the centre again so I went back to a neutral state the important thing to realize though he didn't say whether it was to the right the rotation was to the right or to the left I suspect it would be to the right why
10:29would be to the right well if you're an extra member he's talking about fight or flight he put himself willingly with a thought into fight or flight if you watch my videos I'm talking about this all the time next our autonomic fighter flight he had a fight or flight fought and it went rotated to the right that is the pattern when you are stuck in a fighter flight position you're gonna be to the right that's what our testing always shows and the important thing is that he is not seeing it as a pattern he's just observing it postural restoration sees it as a pattern a
11:09pattern I guarantee that his body would also reflect right stance phase of walking and I can't remember there was something he has something else about that he said something else that was pretty interesting but it does not require a trauma two effects c1 c2 the memory of a past event can do the same thing when c1 and c2 come back into place it relieves tension on the vertebral arteries providing better blood flow to the brain and brain stem and allows us to return to social engagement so he is saying that this rotation to the right is adaptive it's part of how humans respond to threatening situations and it's actually
11:53a good thing under the correct circumstances however if you're living in this position which if you have a right TMCC pattern you likely are over time things start to go wrong your neck instead of just temporarily being tight because you're in a fight-or-flight response dealing with you know some sort of some sort of danger when you're living in it now you can't move properly you can't rotate and guess what you can't get to the left so he's no probably he said he was using a certain technique to to get these c1 c2 c3 back to the center again but I can tell you that if you get
12:31someone to pronate on their right foot and sense the ground underneath their left heel this thing will rotate and you've turned off a pattern and now you can actually get to the left if you only try to do his little technique in this book to realign c1 c2 c3 back to the center that might be great temporarily but you're still not using the left side so you can turn a neck off by sensing the ground underneath the arch of the right foot the ground underneath the heel of the left foot and sensing your body weight through that left side well also D rotate c1 c2 c3
13:09back to the left and actually bring you all all the way back to the left so you can get that left CoA left AFI or left stands position which i'm pretty sure he probably doesn't have on a continual basis but that's it i have nothing else to say this is gone long enough that was all over the place but it's a cool book I highly recommend reading it if you're interested in this thing and if you are trying to learn pri it's a great book because you know he's really talking about a lot of stuff that comes up in the lives of people that are
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