When you hear the term 'somatics' people often relate it to a therapy. This is not always wrong as Somatic experiencing is a form of therapy relating to trauma, PTSD and pro-longed exposure to stress.
Clinical Somatic Education, however, as created by Thomas Hanna and continued with Essential Somatics.. is a form of learning. I am not talking classroom style learning but a moving learning. We take a habituated pattern that your body has 'learned' to do over time, which could come from they way you work, how you have compensated for injury or pain or even from postural reflexes like stress or grief, and we re-train your nervous system to re-learn how to move again, in a way that you once did before the habits set in, and in a way thats more efficient and beneficial to your body.
AWARENESS
Allowing yourself the time and space within a clinical somatic session, helps you to become aware of what you can move and feel, and what you can't. Basically what parts of your body you can control or not. When we discover what we can't move - ribcages and obliques are often a great source of feedback for this- we can begin to get those parts of the body back online with the brain so that you can both move them again but also feel them moving.. this changes the neural pathways the sensory and motor neurons take, that make movement happen.
Because of these neural changes, you learn to move better and so Clinical Somatics is a form of education. The best part of this is, because your learning how to control your muscles yourself, the effects last, as your not relying on someone else to manipulate your body or do something for you.. you get to do it yourself.
SMA & WHAT IT IS
So how do you lose the control over certain aspects of your muscular system in the first place?
When we use a certain set of muscles more regularly then others, we are creating a movement pattern. We use these patterns most days in order to achieve an outcome we need, like a weightlifter always engaging their bicpes to lift a heavy weight and triceps to lower it. An electrician may spend a lot of time with their hand gripped around a tool with their arms held up to perform a series of tasks, using their back and neck muscls heavily Even sitting at a desk arms reached out and poised with some tension in the shoulders to be able to type effectively is creating a pattern.
These are all habituated patterns that we create. We add more in when we get injured or start to experience the onset of pain so that we can move with less pain.
While all this is going on day to day, the muscles you're using regularly are going from contraction to relaxation, back and forth. At some point you relax out of these contractions a little less.. possibly because you don't have time, or you don't notice you haven't relaxed. Over time your nervous system 'forgets' to let these muscles fully return to their resting state, so the muscle shortens. This means the motor neuron that moves the muscle has less range to move within and so the sensory neuron that detects what the muscle is doing and bascially feels , has less feedback to sense. This leads to something called Sensory Motor Amnesia, or SMA.
SMA means you lose the ability to feel or move the muscles that are affected by it, to varying degrees.
In order to get your nervous system and those neurons back on line and connected to your musculoskeletal system again, you need to bring more awareness to the area, and slowly begin to move it, gaining back the control. The best way to sense is to contract, as this sensation is strong, so in Clinical Somatics we would see if we can contract in to the exisiting tension a tiny bit more.. just enough that you can feel that muscle tighten... the magic lies in then gently controlling the letting go or lengthening of that same muscle, slowly allowing your sensory neurons to experience what its like to reverse the contraction and the motor neurons to experience a longer range of movement, and then completley switching off and relaxing the muscle(s) at the end when you have finished, so that your nervous system can sense relaxation and rest.
This sequence is called a pandiculation, devised by Thomas Hanna, to help people regain control back over their muscles and their soma ( their internal awarenss of movement and sensations).
This re-setting of the nervous system and addressing the SMA in a persons movement helps to free up their ability to move in general but it also helps to reduce pain, stress and improve your breathing.
Often when muscles are overly tight they can be responsible for pulling nerves out of their natural pathways, causing a trapped nerve. Allowing the softening of the musculoskeletal system can help to relax a trapped nerve back to where it should be, reducing nerve pain. Sciatica is a common example of this.
When it comes to nerves this is not always the case as spinal conditions and nerve damage can have a huge bearing on this along with other nerve conditions, so I would always encourage clients to discuss this issue with their Dr or medical professional as well.
Creating a space for somatics within your lifestyle can be the key to maintaining great mobility and ensuring you remain pain free and supple. Because you are working with your nervous system within this practise it provides longevity of results... our brains are so clever, and it also means we don't need a particularly long practise every day.. 5 mins can make a great deal of difference.
If you want to try a short video to feel and experience how somatics works, try ths pandiculation for the chest, shoulder and abdominal muscles.
Let me know what you think and we can build a more somatic lifestyle together.
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