Of all of the common musculoskeletal conditions I’ve worked with, frozen shoulder seems to be the most stress-related one. I say this because as soon as it gets fixed on one side, it almost always moves to the other shoulder. So, to make sure we’re looking at all aspects of how a shoulder impingement happens, we also need to consider the emotional aspect.
I’m not inherently a woo person, but the chakra system has had some interesting overlap with common themes I’ve seen with frozen shoulder over the last decade+. Nearly everyone I’ve worked with who has frozen shoulder, has a lot of tension at the throat and jaw—like they’ve spent time experiencing a situation where they felt stifled from expressing their voice. This could be growing up, a relationship or a work environment. Moving down the chakra system, I see the arms as an extension of the heart with little energy centers in the hands. You may feel this as you hug someone or even pet an animal or touch something soft. And then we have the yellow portion, the solar plexus, which is represented as the career center and center of power/agency/volition. The way I’ve seen this all interplay in frozen shoulder is that there’s an incongruency between what someone feels like they should be doing with their life, their power being taken away, and what their heart knows it wants. The throat area then locks down in a must-do fashion and erego we have a arm/shoulder girdle that gets frozen as stuck as the person feels trapped.
Frozen shoulder is a breath issue. The third chakra area is the diaphragm. The heart and the throat are bisected by the collar bone, which is how the shoulders attach to the body—crazy, right? The shoulders on your back literally float on the back of your ribs (or, they’re supposed to) and the only place they attach in a fixed way to the rest of the skeleton is at the sternum, or heart area. When you breathe, muscles should be lowering and lifting your collar bone to make room so that your rib cage and expand all around, kind of like the opposite of pushing an umbrella open. As this happens, your shoulders should gently move up and to the sides of your back and then settle back down. When this can’t happen, the shoulder girdle gets stuck, and then we have frozen shoulder. So, to help unfreeze the shoulders, we have to open up the breathing muscles.
This video contains 3 opportunities for opening the breath and diaphgram. I offer several variations depending on how much pain you have in shoulder shoulders. Since I love that cupping set, another option you have is cupping along the ribs, stomach and sternum to help open the breath in a way that should be frozen shoulder-friendly.
As you do these exercises, see if any feelings, thoughts or memories come to mind. They may offer an entryway to seeing what you’re holding in this area or things in your life that need to change to make the pain move its way out of you. Don’t forget to breathe. ;)
