The Shoulders

Your shoulders are the place where carrying becomes visible. Purely physically, they connect your arms to your trunk — that is, what you use to reach, act, embrace, and grasp, with what you are. They are the transition between being and doing. And at the same time they are the place where language knows exactly what the body means: something weighs on your shoulders. You have a responsibility to shoulder. Someone is carrying a heavy burden.

When your shoulders are tense, raised, painful, blocked, leaden, immobile — that rarely describes only a mechanical imbalance. It almost always describes something about your inner state too. You are carrying too much. You are carrying the wrong thing. You are carrying something that isn't yours. Or you are trying to hold a weight that can, in truth, be put down.