Eternity and the Spinal Eight

An introduction to a fabulous spinal sequence.

Both the Chinese and Japanese cultures seem to have a thing about the number eight. Something to do with how, when the number eight is turned on its side, it’s a symbol representing eternity. Granted, I could use Google or ask AI to then write me a paragraph on it, but that isn’t the point of this essay, nor my ‘way’ to come to that. Just Googling an answer does not mean you know something, in the same way that performing a practice whilst knowing a bit about its history and theory does not necessarily make you qualified to write, talk, or teach it. You need to know something, to have lived it, experienced how it impacts your life and others. And I have talked about, read, listened, and watched enough to know that eight is an important number. It also happens to be the number of movements our healthy spines move through on a daily basis.

But are our spines actually that healthy? Here I could use Chat GPT to give me the bullet points on what the spine is, why we don’t use our spines very well, along with how modern culture, environment, and the pervasive, invasive pull that technology inflicts on our posture. Yet again, to go down this route is me getting everything, all the answers in the moment, and thinking that “I’ve got it,” when I haven’t really done any work at all discovering how my spine in this moment is.

When Caroline persuaded me to join SubStack, one of my first essays was on a great assumption, where I look at how just because we can do something, like standing upright, we assume everything is ok, or adapt the attitude of ‘it’ll do’. Since then, the act of writing has led to some improvements in my storytelling skills, even if my grammar, sentence structures, and punctuation are still often off-beat and awry, yet this subject of the ‘ Great Assumption’ resonates in me like the Liberty Bell. Are our spines actually healthy? NO! Yet just because we manage to get through each day walking, moving, and talking, we carry the assumption that just because we are almost upright, everything is OK.

On a recent ‘business’ call (which is a whole comedic sketch in itself), everyone on the call was wonky. By this I am referring to deep twists within the spine which cause head to shift either to the left of right of centre. In essence our internal tensions cause is to spiral out of our midline. It makes sense then that the great disciplines of the world all seem to encourage us to develop some kind of centre line. Granted there are many different approaches to achieving this goal, ranging from top-down (those that suspend the head and drop the tail) or bottom-up (the master key, where the root opens the spine), outside-in (Rolfing and other therapies) to inside-out (meditation, release and somatic work) through to visualisation and pure energy work. These all acknowledge that in our human condition of being in this body, our central spine or ‘fifth limb’ is likely to hold a lot of unnecessary tensions. Tensions which twist us out of our centre and generally make life more difficult than it needs to be.

So what is a spine?

Feel free to get a better answer from google or your favoured AI, but my spine feels like segmented tube with a cord running through it. My brain plugs into this cord at the top of the spine, like a cable does your phone, but unlike the phone and its cable, the tendrils running out of this spinal cord feed and receive information throughout and beyond this body. Now, this part may not make sense to some, but it also seems like a ‘power source’ is found within my bowl (pelvis), and when my mind is fully plugged into my bowl, (like a key in a lock or a plug in a socket) I feel at my most bright and alive.

Anatomically I know I have vertebrae, but I know this most obviously when they click and pop, least pleasantly when they are stiff, painful, or worst of all so trapped and stuck I cannot feel them, only how the fabric surrounding them bunches, knots and complains. I know that the nerve endings reach from the cord into and through the fabric of my being, because when my spine shifts and the tensions around my neck or sacrum strangle nerves, a numbness appears as the information stops flowing. Just like, logically I know that aligned vertebra are better than misaligned, the reality of being able to lift, move, skip and swim with more power, grace and freedom tells me, shows me that life is better when my spine is more aligned. You could say that on this, my intuition was right.

Counter though to many folks intuition, and come to that common advice, is that softness and release have been essential to the successful quest of liberating my spine from my unnecessary tensions. Acts of ‘bracing my core,’, or ‘drawing my navel towards my spine’ only seem to create less freedom and more tensions, leaving my spine utterly unable to perform the eighth and final movement of the spine; lengthening. Yet sometimes, in order to get us through our day, walking, moving and talking, and especially when our spine is not very happy with misalignment and unnecessary tensions, we have to then give it some protection in the shape of bracing and sucking in.

To me, this is the same as placing a pole upright on the floor, balancing on top, and expecting it to balance and stand straight. Seeing that it doesn’t and you topple over, you then stack stuff around it to create some kind of foundation for it. This foundation however gets a little lopsided, and so the pole begins to lean, causing whatever is on the top (in the this case its your head), to the lean to opposite way to stop the whole thing crashing to the floor.

Welcome to the allotment, in the possession of my father since I was born. You may have noticed that there are no beans in the ground beneath the poles, only leeks. But this will change in the coming weeks.

Time for a quick story. I was at the allotment with my father yesterday, an allotment that he’s had since I was born, and it was time to erect the bean frame. This involves eight scaffolding poles he’s used for decades, and me standing up a ladder with a 14lb sledge hammer knocking in the three upright poles and their braces. (The other two poles make up the ridge). I’ve worked the soil now for many years, and as a result it’s pretty friable, even when like yesterday it was baked pretty hard. This meant the spade marking an ‘X’ allowed the poles to go in pretty easily, and the whole construction, eyeballed and all, only took 20 mins and looked pretty fabulous if I say so myself.

The spine is the key, your bowl is the lock. Your spine holds the chord and at the bottom of it is the plug, your bowl is the socket, When your spine/key/plug is firmly inside your bowl/lock/socket, you don’t need to brace it. In fact the act of bracing it not only creates clutter, but it can then cause your foundations to go wonky, as its so easy to pay more attention to the external support than the depth and security or that deep, internal connection.

Pulling the story and bowl/socket/lock to a conclusion, when your spine is held deeply and securely inside your bowl like the scaffolding poles are in the ground, you do not need to suck in your belly to help your spine. In fact, the act of this makes the supporting strut of your hip flexor stop working well, which over time leads to less and less support and mobility.

So what are the eight movements of the spine?

We will be covering these in detail over the coming couple of months, yet they deserve an introduction. Again, forgive me as I feel they are obvious, but they are also real, and worthy of some actual exploration. According to this sequence, they are:

1 . a rounded forward bend, or flexion of the back of the spine.

2. bending backward, or a flexion of the front of the spine

3. a front flexed forward bend, which has a lot to do with your foundations

4. twist/spiral to one side

5. twist/spiral to the other side

6. side lean/spiral to one side

7. side lean/spiral to the other side

8. length/all spirals together.

To boil the spine down further, I’d say it is basically the sum of balancing two spirals, but in order to get to this place, it will take some, in fact quiet a bit of visceral discovery. This can only be done in your own body, and is not something which google nor AI can help you with. In fact I theorise that maybe, just in the same way that blindly trusting a teacher with no direct experience of what they’re offering may not lead to the results they say it will, blindly following anything (read AI) without the lived experience, may not lead us to the embodied place it is pointing towards. I am also deeply aware of my own fallibility, and just like my sentence structure, grammar, and teaching come to that, I am very happy to acknowledge when I am incoherent and or wrong.

So before we get to simple spirals, please watch the video of the spinal eight, especially the little bit at the end where I’ve finish the eighth and look like I’m not doing much, as it is here that I glimpse why number eight and eternity are so linked. Maybe it is the sum of all that has gone before? Maybe it is just moving the spine? Maybe it is because the space it creates in the tube of my spine? Maybe it’s the freedom for the cord to feed and receive the world around me? Maybe it’s magic? Maybe I’m imagining it? But in that space after the work is done, this body breathes, expands and receives in such a way that I feel as though I am in the space which never changes. If I were a different man I may say “the eternal now” or something similarly ‘spiritual,’ but I am not. It’s just what happens. Equally mundane and magical, and it feels fab. Which is why I look forward to introducing (or for some re-introducing) the spinal eight.

Did you find any of this inspiring? Leave me a message!