Transcription
There are three muscles that are very influential over your face's appearance and how your face ages. And ironically, these are also muscles that are very responsive to stress and repressed emotions. These muscles are your mass, your SCEM, and your trapezius muscles. And as a bonus, we're also going to work on the platisma because it's in the same area as the SCM, and it also is very influential over the face.
So, we're going to start at our trapezius area. And what you're going to do is purposefully clinch those muscles up all the way shoulders to the ears. Breathe in and clench them up a little more. Full contraction. And on your exhale, you're going to fully release. And you can do that a few times if you are really tense in this area or if you have a lot of anxiety because that is what is going to happen when you are anxious. These shoulders rise up and get in that clinch state. So clenching and releasing is actually going to help the brain shut off the contraction signal by going fully into that clenched mode.
So now that we've done that, we're going to put our thumbs in front of the trapezius muscle. And then you're going to pinch up as much as you can in the back with your fingers. Grab up all of that tissue of the upper trapezius. Because when I'm saying traps, I'm saying the upper ones. There's the middle and the lower traps as well, but the upper area is what we want to focus on. So, we're going to grab up all of that muscle. Thumb in front. And the thumb is pretty firm in there. Get your thumb really down in front of the trapezius muscle into this harder area. So, the trap is here. And then you're going to feel like a harder area here and try to get into that. So, once you're in there, you're going to grab it up and then you're just going to let your fingers naturally slip off as you pinch harder and harder. So, we're increasing our pressure, and that's going to allow our fingers just to naturally slip off. We have no oil, no glide on here, and that is going to fully dig into the layers of muscle, fascia, tissue, and give us that nice release. It's really important that we go slowly and we go at the pace that our fingers naturally slip off rather than just massaging in and just going like up and down, just trying to like work into the muscle. It's really the slowness that is doing the work here.
And now we're going to work on the neck. And you want a little bit of glide here, but not a lot. So, see how my knuckles, they're not really moving easily. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to take a toner, or you can take like a little bit of moisturizer, but I like to use a liquid toner, and just get it slightly moistened, just a little bit, and you can put that on your hands as well. So now I can feel I'm moving more easily, but I'm not sliding right off like I would with something like oil. So then I'm going to hold my hand here. This is going to anchor at the base of this tissue. And then we're going to run the knuckles up and I want you to follow your natural tissue lines here. So we have the start of the SEM. You can turn your head to feel it pop out and locate it. And it's going to run all the way up here to the back to this bony part of the bottom of your skull. So, we're going to work nice and slow, working in with the sharpest part of your knuckle here. And then slowly work your hand into it as you lean into it a bit. Lean the head over. And just like we did for the trapezius, the speed that we are moving at is determined by the tissue yielding underneath the knuckles, underneath the pressure. So, we put pressure in and we think about the tissue moving underneath our knuckles rather than the knuckles moving on the tissue. If you try this, you'll know what I mean. You'll feel it. It's definitely a feeling thing. It's hard to explain in a video, but you want to let the tissue move, and that is what creates a release. As we come up into the back area, we're going to work up here. And we can vibrate in at the mastoid process, that connection here at the back.
And now finally, our massitor, our jaw area. One of my favorite techniques to release this really strong muscle that clenches down when we are stressed, when we're angry, and even when we have repressed emotions, things that we are not fully getting out or processing, it's all going to get stored right here. So, we're going to take our knuckle and we're going to focus on one small area of this muscle at a time because the muscle is not just like a flat sheet. If you look at an anatomical chart, it looks a lot less complicated than it is. And there's other things going on. There's other tissue layers and structures, fascial layers. So, we want to work in a really localized way. So I take the knuckle and we just go up and down in one little area until you feel a little bit of release, a little bit more movement, fluidity, softness. And we are also visualizing the muscle unclenching, unpeeling, unwinding, getting softer, getting more relaxed. And that visualization is going to help you. I swear to you, it will. It makes a huge difference. Your body is listening. After you work on one small area, you move to the next. So, not all areas are going to take the same amount of time. Some are going to be a lot quicker than others. So, that's why we do this in a very focused way. And I find that this whole area of the mass usually is about six movements. So, 1, 2, 3, four, five, six to get all the way across using this part of your knuckle again, the sharp part of your second knuckle. And you will feel a huge difference after you do that.
And my final tip to you is to also practice facial and bodily awareness. So with the people I work with in True Face, in my app, in my programs, on my page, the people who are most successful are the people who are also tuning into their bodies, learning their bodies, learning their triggers. What makes me tense up? When do I tend to do it? At work, at home, when I'm ruminating, whatever it is, and then consciously letting go and relaxing. That way, you're not undoing the work of your routines.