Shoulder Season
Ah, April in New England. Last week it snowed, rained, gusted to 25, and then the sun came out - all in the space of 10 minutes. We’re in this strange time that can’t quite commit to any climate; choosing the right clothes for going outside is an exercise in futility.
When I mentioned to a client from California that we were in Shoulder Season, she paused, then laughed, bobbing her shoulders. “Like, shoulder shoulder?”
But it isn’t only the weather. Meeting with folks in sessions means I get a front row seat to the themes that are roiling the collective. And so, when three separate clients mentioned the rotator cuff before noon on a Thursday, I noticed.
Yes, each of these folks was working with an injury, but because the body speaks in some very particular metaphors it became clear they were also speaking to larger, shared questions:
What are we shouldering? What are our habits of bearing? And more generally, how do we organize around responsibility?
Perhaps you, dear reader, have also noticed how these themes are up.
First, a bit of anatomy: The shoulder is a singularly capable joint. It has a range of motion other joints can’t even approach. For comparison, your leg - nestled deep in the hip socket - can do some nifty extension and rotation below the waist. But nearly 360 of movement? Not close.
The tradeoff for this capacity is vulnerability. Put simply, because it can do so much, it often does too much (perhaps some of us might relate, just a smidge, to this configuration?); shoulder injuries, tweaks and pulls are woefully common.
And though this is less anatomy than physics, it’s important to mention that the shoulder exists in gravity. I don’t meant this facetiously. When we focus our attention on the shoulder - either because of injury or intent - we’re often picturing this:
Because we’ve zoomed in here, everything else disappears. Everything, it should be mentioned, which actually holds the shoulder in place. Do you see how it seems to float? How we are asking this capable joint to function while forgetting… the rest of the body is also here? As able as the shoulder is, it does not defy gravity. It does not exist alone.
Friends, breathe for a moment and widen the lens to see how the shoulder feels when it’s presented to you this way, located within a whole framework:
When we explored this in our last Embodied Writing workshop, participants marveled at how different it was to experience this area as supported by the rest of the body. To include feet, hips, spine. By locating the shoulder from the ground up, we stepped into a whole different arrangement - felt deep in the body - around what bearing might look like.
Of course, we aren’t just talking about muscles here; you might recognize - just an iota - this pattern of supporting the world with your capacity, and perhaps forgetting that there are places from which you also must draw. Of forgetting gravity, we might say.
Our body metaphors are rich sites for listening. Part of what I love about working in this realm is that if we go in tenderly, we can discover - as a felt experience - a blueprint for a different way of moving through our lives. When we put down the magnifying glass of scrutiny, we find new postures that speak back to us with more ease, more alignment, and more potency.
And layers. Shoulder season is all about dressing in layers ;-)
