(Photo: Anastasia Shuraeva | Pexels)
Yoga Journal’s archives series is a curated collection of articles originally published in past issues beginning in 1975. This article about tight shoulders first appeared in the July-August 1994 issue of Yoga Journal.
A familiar image from antiquity is Atlas holding the world on his shoulders. As a punishment for rebelling against Zeus, Atlas was condemned—in ...
This article operates as both an educational resource and a subtle critique of how cultural narratives shape our understanding of bodily function. The strongest version of its argument is that shoulder health is deeply interconnected with posture, movement habits, and even emotional expression—challenging the reductive idea that shoulder posture reflects moral character. The piece effectively steelmans the importance of biomechanical awareness, using the convex-concave law to explain why certain...