Sawing arms, finding C7:
Freedom in the shoulders, chest, neck, and spine

This brilliant series explores just how flexible your arms and shoulders can be relative to the chest. You cross the forearms in front of you and begin by sliding them across each other.

The movements progress into many more complex scenarios, all of which rely on a bendable chest and collar bones. This series is wonderful for anyone who uses their arms—which is all of us—but particularly musicians, swimmers, and dancers.

As you continue, the lessons make bigger movements, rolling, rounding and arching, and sliding side to side. The spine becomes supple, the upper back wakes up as you use the newfound freedom in the arms.

This lesson takes you through four variations of sawing the arms: With crossed forearms in front of your chest, you slide one arm as if sawing across the other, then you slide the midpoint of that arm toward the wrist and elbow of the other. It sounds more complicated than it is. Then repeat with the other arm in back.

You will do this both sitting and lying down. At the end, you reach the fingertips toward the neck, which is a preview of future movements. Don’t worry, the whole series continues in gradual, slow steps. You’ll be amazed at where you end up! It’s very worth doing. Don’t worry if the first instruction is confusing, keep listening and it will be clarified as you go along.

TIP: As you reach your fingertips toward your neck, what happens in your ribs??

(Amherst, 4 August 1980, week 9, “Playing fiddle with the elbows”)

Here you begin to slip the elbows through and around. Slowly, slowly you begin to bend the chest to accommodate the arms. Playing with interlacing the hands and sliding them towards your chest, you discover how much your whole self contributes to the shoulders and collar bones.

Through many variations and repetitions, the learning dawns on you, as Moshe says.

In this lesson, you play with bringing the hands further behind the neck. There is no goal here, the idea is to experiment and play. In sitting, you practice tilting the head as you slide the elbow through, then keep the head still and feel what you do at the base of the neck to bring the elbow through. This can be life changing!

Lying on the back, you eventually bring the elbows forwards even more—along with the base of the neck—and then seesaw the belly and the chest in many ways. Then see how the ribs respond to the elbows going forwards! This wakes up the ribs in new and amazing ways so the arms can hang and the chest can be open and soft.

Play again with the fingers behind the neck and refine more and more how you use the ribs, back, abdomen, shoulder blades, collar bones, and head to slide the elbows forward.

Here, you also bring the hands into a “tray” or bridge position near the ears and start to slip the elbow behind the head. I know, it sounds unfathomable at first. It is possible with slow, small experiments.

At the end, regardless of how well you did the movement (if you were kind to yourself, you did the lesson), feel how amazingly your arms hang!

This lesson invites you to play with more sliding the elbows through and around the arms. The collarbones, chest, spine and shoulders become more and more supple.

You’ll see how bringing the elbow behind the head becomes useful as you start rolling up to sit while holding the chin with the opposite hand. Yes, the chin! Your right hand creeps toward the left side of the jaw to maybe, one day, hold the chin. Many people will not have the hand on the chin, do not force yourself into this position.

This movement integrates the folding and sliding of the chest and arms in an elegant, reversible, safe rolling to the side. The head and neck are safe in the crook of the elbow. You can see how this experiment comes out of Moshe’s judo background.

In this lesson you flop the right leg in and out while lying on the front. Then you reach the right hand onto the head and slide it across many ways, eventually moving toward holding the chin, one day.

You help with the left hand holding the right fingers, then the right wrist. As your right arm finds more and more freedom to slide across the head on the front, on the back, and in sitting, your whole upper back becomes mobile and flexible. This is a genius lesson for liberating the shoulder.

In this lesson you practice rounding and arching the spine in side-sitting while holding the chin. Now we see the left hand on the chin much more as you equalize the learning side to side.

Towards the end, you practice rolling up to sit as we did in a previous lesson. See how much this is improving!

This lesson is a brilliant piece of movement education. You find out how to move the base of your neck (C7) by starting slow and small, just identifying where it is at first. Then, you move it forward and back lying down, in sitting, and on your elbows and knees. Slowly, slowly you make more and more differentiated movements so that you can move the base of your neck in every direction relative to your head.

The increasing possibility for freedom in your neck can be a shocking revelation.

This lesson must be done in one go without breaking it up chunks. The learning is delicate and precarious so you want to preserve the growing awareness of these new patterns as much as you can.

Note: If you have a fusion in your neck vertebrae, this is not the lesson for you.

Believe it or not, this lesson adds some new moves! After you return to slipping the elbows through the crossed arms, you interlace the hands and caress the face with the hands. You’ll see how it works when you play with it

This lesson focuses on refining the use of your whole self, integrating the movement as one action instead of many parts. There are also many seesaw movements of the chest and belly with C7 (the base of the neck) forward and backward, and much attention is paid to the collarbones and shoulder blades.

The lesson also mentions the use of force. Just don’t. The lessons are about how you can play with the arms without shoving on the elbows. Many people get stuck in one strategy and, instead of testing different options, they shove harder, grit their teeth, and hold their breath—even after many lessons. This is common, it’s human. I remind you here that “doing” the movement is not the lesson.

The lesson is how well you can be with yourself without aggression or force. Once you know that, you can learn.

Last lesson! You made it! This one does some unusual moves on the belly with your arms crossed, leaning on the elbows. You move the spine, ribs, and pelvis in a rocking motion, or in a rounding and arching motion. Sometimes your head is still, sometimes it’s moving with the spine. It’s an ingenious experiment for your upper back.

This lesson wakes up your spine, ribs, and shoulders. At the end, you return to a “simple” movement of taking the elbows through with crossed arms. No expectations, just test the possibility.