We have worked our way down from the forehead, the eyes, the face, the jaw, and the neck. Each of these areas was fairly well demarcated. As we come to the next set of areas we begin to get mixtures. As we work with the shoulders, we are also working on the chest and when we work with the chest we will also be working on the diaphragm and the abdomen. What I am saying is that now the effects of the work begin to spread across areas.

When I wrote up the face and the neck there were some very specific instructions on how to do the exercise properly. In those cases if you did the exercise wrongly the only negative result would be that the exercise would not work as intended. With the shoulders we start to get to exercises where if they are done incorrectly, you can actually accomplish the opposite of the intended result. That is, before error was harmless; now error can result in making you more rigid and stuck instead of improving yourself.

The shoulder work actually involves two different areas of tension that both relate to movement of the shoulders and the arms. There are a lot of exercises in this region so I will try to indicate which are the early exercises, which the later exercises, and with some I will include very explicit instructions on the right and wrong way to perform the exercise. Most of these exercises can be done before you finish with the breathing training but, in general, it is better if you have the breathing down fairly well before you start these exercises. There are a few very advanced exercises here. I will indicate that on the individual exercise.

Roll The Shoulders Together Front

This is an easy exercise and can be done at any time.

While continuing the breathing properly, bring your shoulders forward as though to touch them together in front of your body. Here the arms position is changed. Normally the arms are slightly bent (see Figure 2 in Part One on page 19) but here they are straightened so that the shoulders can be brought together in the front (Figure 104). Keep the tension for about five minutes.

Note that here you are not just pushing your shoulder forward, you are trying to bring them forward and together in front of your body.

Figure 104

A common issue here is that the student can not feel the tension in the shoulders or the student's attention wavers. In both cases the shoulders tend to relax. The only fix for this is to pay close attention to the level of tension and work to keep it to the maximum amount for the full time of the exercise.

It turns out that this is also a good exercise for testing how well you are doing with chest breathing. With the shoulders pulled together it becomes a little more difficult to breathe properly into the chest.

Roll The Shoulders Together Back

This exercise can be done at any time. It is physically more demanding than the above roll the shoulders together front, but other than usually more physically exhausting there is no limitation on when it can be done.

Here you are, in theory, trying to touch your two wing bones together. The shoulders can not physically move backward to the same degree that they can move forward, so the issue is the tensing of the muscles between the wing bones and maintaining as much tension as possible. Hold the tension for about five minutes or, if you can't do that, until your muscles tire.

Again we have the same potential issue as in the previous exercise. The student is unable to feel the tension or his attention wavers and the full degree of tension is lost. Simply do your best to concentrate on your shoulders pulled together as though the two wing bones were trying to touch each other.

This might be a good time to add one of my standard warnings. This is not a race or a contest. There is always the next session. Do the exercise as well as you can and at some later session try it again. In time you will be able to do it for the full five minutes or so.

In Figure 105 you might note another example of fusing. Our model took my instruction to "roll your shoulders together in back as if you were trying to touch your shoulder blades together" and converted it into arching the back in the attempt to roll his shoulders together.

Figure 105

Tonic Shrug The Shoulders

This is an easy exercise that may be done at any time.

Shrug your shoulders and hold them as tightly as possible. Continue the effort to hold them in the shrugged position as tightly as possible. Don't just shrug them and then hold there, rather shrug them and keep trying to get the shoulder muscle (here the trapezius) tighter and tighter.

Continue your breathing normally: belly then chest inhale, start the exhale with an easy 'ah' sound, belly then chest exhale.

Figure 106

This exercise is also one of the daily exercises. Here, however, you are adding the breathing which makes it both harder and more effective. By shrugging the shoulders you prevent the use of some of accessory muscles of respiration (primarily the pectorals and, to a lesser degree, the muscles at the front side of the neck). The fact of this hard constant (i.e. tonic) shrugging of the shoulders may have a large effect on your ability to breathe into the chest. That only indicates that you still have work to do on freeing the muscles between the ribs.

It sometimes helps to free the chest muscles of respiration (the intercostals) to do this exercise; and, while holding the shrug tightly, concentrate on feeling your chest muscles move with the inhale. Recall that you can use a tape measure with a paper clip to check on chest expansion.

Shrug Up And Throw Down

This is a critical exercise and it is extraordinarily easy to do it wrongly. This exercise has as much, perhaps even more, effect on the chest than on the shoulders but it is included as a shoulder exercise since that is the part of the body being used.

This exercise is a little more advanced. That is not to say that you can not start early in your work to practice it. It is only to say that the effects are cumulative and it will produce more benefit during the middle part of your training than at the beginning.

In this exercise the single initial 'ah' sound of the breath is going to change. Here you are going to insert multiple 'ah' sounds into the exhale. DON'T STOP THE EXHALE FOR THE SOUND. The multiple 'ah' sounds are inserted into the exhale stream without stopping the exhale process.

If you like, you can practice just this part of the exercise until you have it down correctly. Take a full inhale, start the exhale with the soft 'ah' sound and then as you exhale add a few more 'ah' sounds. The 'ah' sounds during the exhale should sound exactly the same as the first 'ah' sound. That is, they all should be soft with no articulation or guttural and they should be an 'ah' not a 'ha' or a 'huh' or any other sound.

Next we look at the shoulder movement. It is JERK up (shrugging the shoulders) and THROW down. IMPORTANT: this is NOT a pull up and a push down. It is a jerk up and throw down.

This is the first of the several errors possible. By a JERK up, I mean just that. It is not just a shrug. If you do it properly you will feel it almost bounce your neck and head. It is difficult in words to describe the jerk. We are all accustomed to shrugging our shoulders. But the jerk is something we don't do naturally. Here is a method that might help to get the idea of a jerk as opposed to just a quick shrug.

Sit in a chair that has arms (Figure 107). Place your arms on the chair's arms and you hands in your lap. Now if you jerk properly, that is with enough speed and strength, (1) you will feel it in your neck muscles and (2) your hands will bounce off your legs.

Figure 107

But in addition to a shrug up, there is a throw down. By a THROW down I mean just that. Again, if it is done properly you will feel it in your chest. As the shoulders are thrown down, a part of the motion is inherited by the chest so that there is a slight ballistic effect on the chest sending it down a little bit and it then bounces back. Note that if your chest is rigid, you may not feel this in your chest but the effect should be there and when your chest is looser you will feel it.

This part too you can practice in a chair but one without arms. Here shrug normally but tightly. Then thrown your shoulder down. You should feel this in your neck muscles.

In this exercise the arms are straight and turned so that the hands are against the body. In the usual working posture your hands are against the bed. Here they are against your body.

Figure 108

There are a number of other errors that occur frequently in this exercise. One, of course, is to not do a hard and fast jerk up. The shrug is a jerk-the-shoulders-up. Another is to not do a hard and fast throw.

The most common error, however, is to make this exercise a motion of the arms instead of the shoulders.

Your arms should be rigid during this exercise: the elbows should not bend at any time and the hands should not be flicked. The whole motion is done with the shoulders and should be felt there, not in the arms or hands. The wrong bending of the arms and/or hands is shown, exaggerated, in Figure 109 on page 253. Even when the arms and hands are kept straight so that the motion has to come from the shoulders, still there is the tendency to treat the motion as one occurring in the arms. To the trained observer the difference between throwing of the shoulders and throwing of the arms is evident. But to the person doing this exercise on his own, I can only caution that you should focus your thinking on the felt muscular experience to insure that the throw comes from the throwing the shoulders down rather than throwing the arms down.

Figure 109

Now to the exercise itself.

On a single jerk (up) of the shoulders, gasp the inhale. Up till now you have been always breathing with the normal rhythmic inhale and exhale. This changes for this exercise. Here the inhale will be done quickly as a gasp. It is better if the gasp is a "gasp inhale chest" as presented in Part One of the book, but a "gasp inhale belly" is OK. Obviously you will not be able to inhale the same volume of air as you do when you are doing a normal slow inhale. It is important that the inhale be extremely rapid so that it is started and completed during just a single jerk of the shoulders.