Undizzy Yourself

It’s that time of year where wheelbarrows squeak out of sheds, hiking boots come out of hiding in the back of the closet and the warm weather beckons us to wander further afield.

Yesterday, I did my first hike around Gaff Pt, which is a two hour walk along Hirtle’s Beach and then out around a long craggy peninsula that views King’s Bay on the way out and the mouth of the LaHave River on the way back. (BTW it’s where they tagged six Great White Sharks last year).

It’s a place where I find my soul. I hike out and sit. I listen to the waves pummel the shale cliffs and watch as sea birds soar, dive and swim in the water below. I’ve even seen whales swim by .

It’s a place where time stands still for me. 

Don’t we all need that?

On my way home I reflected on how lucky I am to be able to have the confidence, sure-footedness and stamina to go off on my own and wander.

It’s not luck, it’s actually my movement practice that I do  year round that enables me to do the things that make my heart sing. I can’t imagine getting to my age and having all this hard-fought wisdom and not being able to do the things I love with it.

Eavesdropping

I was sitting at a local cafe the other day and overheard a woman telling her friend that she was carted off the golf course because she felt dizzy and was diagnosed with vertigo. She went to her doctor, then was sent to physio and was completely perplexed why this had happened to her…out of the blue.

Vertigo can be caused by a lot of things, some of them quite serious and should be evaluated by a medical professional. But I also know from my own experience and research that it can be caused by the imbalance of the superficial neck muscles with the deeper core neck muscles.

There’s a big honking muscle called the Sternocleidomastoid that joins your breastbone and collarbone to the back of your skull. This muscle gets short and tight as your head gets pulled forward because of a lack of strength in the upper back, and subsequently a lack of tone and function of the deeper core neck muscles.

Bifocals are a big cause of this as we tilt our heads up and down to adjust our heads to be able to see out of the top or bottom of our glasses. What we do every day affects how our bodies function.

The sternocleidomastoid muscle attaches right behind your ear where the mechanism responsible for your balance, called the semi-circular canals, live.  These three little canals in your ears sense the movement of your head up and down, side to side and when your head twists. They have a lot to do with your sense of balance and can cause vertigo.

If you don’t move your head and neck in a range of movement (which most of us don’t) then the little hairs or cilia that act like antennae for movement, in the canals, don’t function properly.

The sternocleidomastoid can often be the culprit. Remember that when the smaller core muscles don’t do their job, the larger surface muscles happily oblige, except they get cranky when they do a job they are not designed to do for too long.

When this muscle is tight and overworked, it can cause dizziness. I know because I used to have really weak neck muscles and doing Pilates and trying to lift my head off the floor used to make my head spin.

Once I was able to do self-release on my sternocleidomastoid and strengthen my deeper neck muscles..the dizziness went away.

I learned about this thirty years ago in massage school. I  have continued to study self-massage techniques, and I know that self-massage combined with strengthening and mobility work is a powerful tool to rebalance the body and soothe the nervous system. These are the kind of hacks that every woman who wants to spend more time doing what she loves needs to know.

If you want to see this work in action, make sure you sign up for my newsletter (below), check out all my courses and free materials at my online studio, and find something that will work for you.