Imagine You Have One Shoulder Joint

Notice how you are sitting or standing now. (Don't change anything! Just notice it.) Notice the movement of your breathing diaphragm. (You can curl your fingers up under the floating rib if you need to identify that muscle – which is not a very easy muscle to feel directly. Tuck your fingers there and laugh or cough… Yup. there it is.) Notice your shoulder joints. Wiggle them around a bit: clavicles (collar bones), shoulder blades, humerus (top long bone of the arm). Put the tips of your fingers on your clavicles and notice how the clavicles move – very little, probably, but that little bit is so important. Feel at the back for the knobbiest knob at the base of your neck. And then touch the notch in front where your clavicles attach-ish to the top of your sternum. Now imagine the necklace of the 1st rib, tucked into that notch in the front and attached to the knobby vertebra in the back….

Admire this costovertebral joint as one of the most complex parts of the entire skeleton. Wiggle around, change your weight on your feet or your seat. Follow your first rib in your imagination (or else pretend that you can). And now… let that go… and let go of the idea that you have two shoulder joints. Take the idea that you have just one: at the center, in front, at the costovertebral joint. And now wiggle! Wiggle as though you grew up all your life just thinking of having that one joint and all the rest of the shoulder apparatus is just a loose, even pleasantly ramshackle, floating bit of tensegrity, a constant harmony between friendly force, suspended from the notch in front and the knob in the back of your three-dimensional self. Find a movement of your arm that interests you and go back and forth between the 'one joint' imagination and the 'two shoulder joints' imagination? Does this subtly play with the way you organize yourself? Your elegance? Your mood? (Or not?) How does your breath respond?