I Carry the Weight of the World on my Shoulders-- from Atlas to Axis
“I carry the weight of the world on my shoulders” is a phrase I commonly hear in my chiropractic practice when someone comes in complaining of neck or shoulder pain. I usually say, “well don’t do that, it is a very bad idea.” But sometimes in the collective soup we are swimming in there is just a matrix of reality, an old myth that sticks and gets repeated and repeated and embodied and embodied throughout the generations until it becomes common.
Carrying the weight of the world goes back into ancient Greek mythology when the Titan Atlas was punished by Zeus and doomed to carry the weight of the heavenly sky on his shoulders. It was mis-remembered in modern culture as the “world.”
Indeed, so prevalent are these myths that the first cervical vertebrae (C1) that holds up the skull is called the Atlas. Up until a few weeks ago, C1 has been my very favorite place to work as a chiropractor and cranial sacral therapist. Indeed, there is a whole technique of chiropractic that only adjusts the atlas as it is considered so important in spinal and neurological health. It is also a key area that people store stress, making that area a key cause of tension headaches. Likewise, there are connective tissue bridges into the dura mater (the sheathing of the brain and spinal cord) that come right through that area from the sub-occipital muscles. A contact at that point can literally influence the brain and spinal cord through these connective tissue bridges.
But about two or three weeks ago I started noticing something new with my patients on the table. C2. The second cervical vertebrae is called the “axis” because it has this upward bone protrusion called the dens and that dens is what the atlas rotates around. An axis is an imaginary line around which a body rotates. Like the earth rotating around its north south axis.
When I noticed this pattern with enough patients as my hands held and listened at their upper neck, I knew it was significant. What I felt was the axis doing a little unwinding dance, pivoting and rotating until finally it settled in the center and the body re-aligned itself around the midline axis of the body.
I like to track things and make meaning, regardless of their scientific reproducibility. The meaning that came to me with this observation is that as a collective we are ready to shift from atlas to axis. What does that mean? Shifting ourselves from the automatic unimaginative workhorse that carries the weight of the world constantly, feeling like it is our responsibility to the nuance of the place of pivot. Now is the time of focus on the axis, getting savvy and intelligent mechanisms to create balance and support pivoting in our lives. I see it as a so above so below sort of situation where the dens of C2 is reaching up to the heavens and that C2/axis vertebrae sits and adapts and responds so that the atlas can continue to do its job. Hopefully the atlas too will learn how to have more fun as the axis is learning to play.
What would it feel like to set down the weight of responsibility, the weight of the world and leave it to the gods? What would it feel like to instead get savvy and build a new intelligence around pivot, balance, adapt, respond, play, lighten up-- not only for yourself but for us a collective? A re-membered or new template of being?
It is TIME!
