The Five Gifts of the Spine

The Indispensable Role of the Spine in Human Conscious Development

Emotion—I Like These Feelings But Not Those Ones

Once a person has evolved past the consciousness of simply surviving, we begin to see the development of the emotional range. Typically we want to move towards the good feelings and away from the bad ones. Early in life, while the brain is developing, there is not much cognitive thought so we only see the pure experience of emotional energy. If you observe a baby, this emoting is expressed through movement and vocalization. Initially this range may be limited varying from contentment to upset. As the baby has more experiences that elicit feelings, we see a wider range of emotion start to develop. The spine plays an indispensable role in the development of this range due to the movements, postures and sounds needed to experience the different emotions.

When we watch children interact, we can see that they literally try on different emotions. They play with the emotional energy and feel it in their bodies. There may not really be anything for them to be upset about, but they will cry and carry on. In the absence of anything funny, they may have fits of laughter. They can go from bored to elated to angry in a span of a minute. They also full on embody the emotion. That means that their whole bodies participate in the movements, postures and sounds that are needed to express that emotion. You never have to ask kids if they are upset. If they’re angry, you have a full on tantrum on your hands.

Before they learn the impact of the different emotions on others and become conditioned by parents and others in the culture, they simply experience the emotion without thinking first. The energy takes hold of them, it makes them move and it changes what they were doing. A child may be happily playing with something until his bigger sister comes and takes it from him. He may get upset and scream and wail long enough for a parental intervention but by the time she gives it back to him, he’s done. The emotion moved through him and he’s on to doing something else. He forgot why he even wanted that toy. That’s what emotions do. They take hold of us, make us move and stir up our bio-energy and when they are done with us, we are in a new state and our behaviour has changed. Emotions are supposed to shift our behaviour and change the flow of bio-energy radically.

While they are still simply allowing the full expression of the emotion, kids will engage fully in the spinal movements, postures and sounds necessary for the full embodiment. If they are angry, they will develop tension in their necks and shoulders, their spines will get more rigid and their movements become quick and sporadic. They will stomp their feet, snort and yell. If they are joyful, they will throw their arms up, arch their backs and jump about while hooting and hollering. They’re not saying one thing while feeling something else. Their experience is authentic and pure. They don’t keep anything inside. They just express until they are exhausted or until the next feeling comes. The truth is, these real and raw emotions take too much energy to sustain for a long time. They last a few minutes to hours at the maximum.

While they may find some emotions more fun and exciting and others less enjoyable, before they start being conditioned to the acceptable ways to behave and the right way to express, kids don’t care. They just feel and emote. The spinal movements, posture and vocalizations happen in just the right way to experience the emotional energy. It’s not until they get punished and discouraged from expressing certain emotions and encouraged and rewarded for expressing others, that we see kids starting to think about their feelings and attempt to control them. It’s usually somewhere around the age of four or five that we see them begin to tense up to limit the movements of the spine and body while silencing their sounds. This is the point where the internalization of feelings begins. We let the spine move in ranges that support the feelings we like and therefore allow, and we lock out the movements of the spine that transmit the energy of the feelings that we won’t allow or we dislike.

How are you at receiving the gift of emotion? Are there ranges of movement that are painful or difficult for you? More than likely, movement of your spine into that range would make you experience an emotion you do not like or will not allow.