Your brain and spinal cord are wrapped in one big continuous piece of leathery tissue called your dura. It is a protective layer between the bones of your skull, the vertebrae of your spine, and the delicate nerve tissue of your brain, spinal cord and nerve roots that extend out to your body. It starts around your brain, anchors around your sacrum, tail bone area and is commonly responsible for a subtle tug-of-war between your upper and lower body that can generate headaches, referred pain and tension in seemingly distant areas. When you look down and flex your upper body forward, your dura needs to relatively slide upwards in the spinal canal, conversely, when you stretch your hamstrings, or perform a downward-dog, type movement, your dura needs to slide downward in the spinal canal. For a variety of physical, postural and emotional reasons, the mobility of a person’s dura can get restricted and the result is typically a subtle irritation of the person’s nervous system that can create tension and pain far from the source.
The most common examples of dural tension in people’s bodies are chronic hamstring tightness and calves that are full of sensitive muscles knots. The muscles down the back of your legs are innervated by your sciatic nerves, which are strongly influenced by tension in the dura in the spinal region all the way up into your mid back, so poor postures, jarring traumas and emotional holding patterns that affect your trunk, can in fact be responsible for the stubborn tension you may experience in your lower body. All the stretching, rolling and massaging in the world is unlikely to have a lasting impact on the flexibility of your calves and hamstrings if the underlying cause is dural tension in your mid-back irritating your sciatic nerves and in turn creating the increased tone in your muscles. Dural tension in a large contributing factor to persistent plantar fasciitis, heel pain, Achilles tendonitis and nagging hamstring injuries.
The upper body manifestation of dural tension is usually headaches and neck strain. Try to imagine that your brain is wrapped in a tight swim cap with strong attachments to your eyeballs, the wrapping comes together around your brain stem, extends into your body and anchors around your tailbone. Now imagine that some mysterious force in your body is pulling down on the dura and trying to suck your head into your body like a turtle; your swim cap is going to feel way too tight and you will probably experience some form of headache and strain behind your eyes. That mysterious force is usually a product of your posture, your level of hypermobility and the emotional tension you may be holding around your heart and lungs. As I have previously mentioned, our bodies hold emotional tension in and around our organs, and our nervous systems are electrical grids that connect everything in a series of sensory and motor feedback loops. The nerve roots that pass into and out of every level of our spine need to pass through a dural sleeve and hold the capacity to generate dural tension. Irritation in the body can create a tugging strain on the dura, and irritation in the dura can result in tension into the periphery of the body.
People that are relatively hypermobile tend to have a harder time stacking up all their vertebrae into biomechanically efficient postures because they have so much more mobility in every segment. The dura lines the inside of the spinal canal formed by the structure of the twenty-four vertebrae, so poor postures, bracing strategies and hinge points in the spine all hold the capacity to create some level of tension in a person’s dura, which can then be responsible for dysfunction elsewhere in the body. A person may come in for physiotherapy for help with their persistent heel pain and I would end up treating their mid back, teaching them about how loose jointed they are and helping them understand that their heel is probably hurting due to the way that they are sitting all day.
It is important to understand some of the basic functionalities of how you experience the world to help you better understand and interpret the messages of your body. We have the capacity to feel hot, cold, sharp, dull, tingling, squeezing, pressure, pins and needles, burning, cramping, and aching sensations anywhere and everywhere in our bodies. Most of those sensations would not be considered a pleasurable experience and can easily generate fear in people if they don’t understand the reason why they are feeling them. Fear is a form of stress, and stress is an irritant to the nervous system, so you can see how our analytical, anxious minds can get caught in a viscous cycle of creating discomfort in our bodies. The dura is one of the interfaces in the body between the physical and emotional forces that we subject ourselves to. Biomechanical postures and visceral-emotional holding patterns can create tension in the soft tissue that is the wrapping of our central nervous systems, the wiring of everything.
To learn more read or listen to my new book Why We Hurt: Understanding How To Be Comfortable In Your Own Body
