Throughout the Bible, God berates the Israelites as “stiff-necked” people.
Exodus 32, verses 9, 10: The Lord said to Moses, “I see this is a stiff necked people. Now let Me be, that my anger may blaze forth against them and that I may destroy them…”
Deuteronomy 9: verses 13 and 14: “I see that this is a stiff necked people. Let me alone and I will destroy them and blot out their name from under heaven…”
Jeremiah 7, verse 26: “They stiffened their necks, they acted worse than their fathers.”
In Micah 2, verse 3: The Lord says, “I am planning such a misfortune against this clan that you will not be able to free your necks from it. You will not be able to walk erect.”
There are more joints in the neck than anywhere else in the Bible, so Alexander Technique begins with freeing the neck from tension, then directing the head to release forward and up and the back to lengthen and widen.
If the neck is tight, stiff and compressed, the body cannot be free because all those joints in the neck mean that bones are connecting to bones and the compression of a stiff neck is going to ripple throughout the body in layers of constriction.
In this podcast, “Robert Rickover, an Alexander Technique teacher in Lincoln, Nebraska and Toronto, Canada, talks with Amy Ward Brimmer about the phrase “stiff necked people” that appears many times in the Bible and how it relates to Alexander Technique teaching today – which emphasizes the importance of not stiffening your neck.”
Robert: “If you want to change the way you use your body, you’re going to want to pick an intervention point, and the neck is perhaps the key intervention point because it affects everything else in your body.”
“How you manage the weight of your head on top of your body affects everything else in the body.”
