I have just returned from a three-week trip to Australia. After experiencing the rainy, chilly winter there, it’s great to return to the long, lazy days of summer. It’s traditional vacation time and to me vacation has always been one of activity: mountain climbing and swimming. This year the next three weeks will involve a different kind of vacation for me. My daily life is one of travel and movement and different time zones.
So this year August will be a month of no travel, plenty of rest, walking, and doing something most of us don’t give enough attention to: integrating.
Rushing from one thing to the next leads to burnout and prevents us from sensing our bodies, how we relate to them and how our actions affects them. We don’t want to be surprised by a body that seems to suddenly work against us. We all need time to integrate. Take the time; it’s worth the rest of your life.
Janet (not her real name) came to my office this week complaining of hip pain. Walking upstairs was painful and laborious – and she was only in her 30’s. She had, as she put it, “a list a mile long of things I’ve tried” in her search for long term pain relief. “I’m told I have piriformis syndrome. If I could just get my right buttock to relax, I think I could finally begin to feel better,” she said.
In a Clinical Somatics session that focused on the Trauma Reflex, Janet learned – very quickly – to release her tight waist muscles, ribcage and trunk rotators.I taught her to release the entire pattern of contraction that was causing her buttock to spasm: her tight buttock, abdominals and abductor muscles. Working with sensory feedback from my hand, she contracted these muscles as a pattern, then slowly released them into a fuller, more relaxed length. This technique is called assisted pandiculation – it resets the muscle control, function and length at the level of the central nervous system. Twice more she pandiculated those same muscles, until she reached her own comfortable limit, flopping her leg inward easily. She also learned the Back Lift to begin to relax her tightly contracted back muscles.
“Are you alright? Does anything hurt?” I asked. She’d scared me!
Janet left the office with an ability to move her hips in a way she hadn’t been able to for eight years.
Why did this clinical Somatics session help her when years of physical therapy, trigger point therapy, massage, acupuncture and medical treatments hadn’t? Because Janet’s problem wasn’t structural; it was functional. She suffered from Sensory Motor Amnesia, the habituated compensatory response to two traumatic accidents. Her muscles had learned to adapt, resulting in a twisted pelvis, altered gait and tight hip joint. As Janet learned to release the entire pattern of tightness on her right side (and compensatory tightness on her other side) and improve the function of her muscles, her hip pain abated, and her muscle coordination and balance improved.
Janet wasn’t completely out of pain. She has more to learn and practice in order to change her old way of holding her body to a new, more free sense of movement. Her brain’s “new normal” will take time to integrate. In addition to a few more clinical sessions I told her to attend every Hanna Somatic Movement class and workshop she possibly could. Being free and in control of your movement involves life-long learning. I give this same advice to every client I work with. While private clinical sessions are profoundly and rapidly effective, attending only a few sessions is like taking a few piano lessons and expecting to perform like Chopin or Mozart!
People often ask, “why do I need to come to class if I’m doing private sessions and feel much better?” The answer is simple: life is dynamic, as is movement. Every day there is the possibility of change and stress. Classes gives you the opportunity to learn more, differentiate your brain and movement, and become more skillful. Learning to override old habits and takes time! The more you sense and feel as you move, the more you can learn. The more you can learn, the more you can master. The more you master an awareness of yourself, from the inside out, the more adaptable and resilient you will be throughout your life. Eventually efficient movement will become your brain’s default mode as you become more self-monitoring, self-correcting, and self-healing. Varying your daily Somatic Movement routine with classes and workshops and fun, functional movement makes your brain smarter and keeps you out of pain.
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We will explore what Thomas Hanna, Ph.D called ““The Myth of Aging.” This is the commonly held belief that limited movement, disability and decrepitude is the inevitable result of aging. In reality, it is the way in which we unconsciously adapt to the physical, psychological and emotional stresses of our lives – the accidents, injuries, surgeries, traumas, adaptive behaviors – that determines whether we will become “creaky and old” or maintain our physical freedom, self-awareness, and independence. Participants will experience why it is time to turn the page on that perspective.
I recently taught Somatic Exercises online to T.G., a woman suffering from sacroiliac pain, commonly referred to as SI joint dysfunction or SI joint instability. When we began our sessions, she stood tilted to one side, clearly stuck in a Trauma Reflex. She was unaware of the severity of her tilt; she told me that her posture although technically out of balance, felt normal to her. She knew from reading my book, Move Without Pain, that her tilt was an unconscious habit that her brain had set as “normal” because she’d been standing like that for a very long time. She had a few falls, accidents, and a particularly difficult childbirth and labor.
After working with me and watching me move, do you think the SI joint is the issue? I’m so amazed at the changes taking place in my body after learning Somatic Exercises. The psoas release you taught me made me feel so much more relaxed in my torso.
To answer her question: her Trauma Reflex – not her SI joint itself – was causing her pain. The painful joint was merely a symptom; the underlying cause of her pain was Sensory Motor Amnesia (SMA) in the muscles that attach into, and move the pelvis and SI joint: the extensors of the back, the quadratus lumborum, the iliopsoas, the obliques, the rectus abdominis and others. They were all pulling unevenly on her pelvis so that whatever activity she did caused pain in the joint. Her hamstrings were also very tight because she had begun to use her legs differently to compensate for the tilt in her center. Because her muscles were in a state of chronic contraction, her movement was inefficient and painful.
One-sided SI joint pain suggests that the muscles that connect the SI joint and the center of the body are pulling unevenly on the joint. An asymmetrical muscular pull often rotates one side of the pelvis. There is an feeling of being “jammed up” in the sacroiliac joint because the Trauma Reflex puts a painful torque on the pelvis, inhibiting it from moving up, down, forward, and back.
Bilateral SI joint pain suggests habituation to the Green Light Reflex, which creates excessive contraction through the muscles along our spine; this puts excess pressure on the SI joint and lumbar spine. If the Red Light Reflex is habituated, the pelvis doesn’t move freely when walking; the iliopsoas is tightly contracted and the joint feels stuck.
These are all cases of Sensory Motor Amnesia and can be eliminated through Somatic Education, pandiculation, and a daily practice of Somatic Exercises.
When you no longer move with ease, and cannot sense or control the back, front, and sides of your body, you may feel unstable and lose the ability to walk smoothly and move easily. A critically important aspect of reversing SI joint instability and pain is to learn to move the pelvis freely again. It is precisely that lack of freedom in the pelvis that is absent in those with SI joint (as well as hip and pelvic) pain. In order to regain stability and mobility, you must be able to sense, feel, and control yourself fully from within.
My client learned quite a few Somatic Exercises: arch and flatten , arch and curl, back lift, arch and curl with psoas release, cross lateral arch and curl, side bend, washrag, and the walking exercises. Through repetition of these movements she learned to slowly and intelligently reduce muscle tension in the muscles of the back, waist and front of her body so she could extend, flex, side bend and rotate her body with ease and comfort. She pandiculated these muscles and began to reconnect her brain to her muscles, resetting muscle length, function, sensation, and control.
By the time her session concluded, the uneven muscle tension that had pulled her sacroiliac joint out of alignment had greatly diminished. She found a relaxed and accurate “neutral” in the center of her body. Best of all, she had begun to regain a true sense of herself, from the inside out.
Have you ever found yourself asking: Why does my pain keep coming back? Why do I feel as though I’m falling apart? What am I doing wrong? Why can’t my doctor get rid of my pain? What should I do now? Is something wrong with me? Is this what aging feels like? If so, Hanna Somatics can help you answer these questions.
The Fundamentals Immersion Course is for anyone and everyone interested in Hanna Somatics – no prior experience or training necessary!
finding a long-term solution. Some people come to me with no recurring muscle pain – they feel pretty good, but want to learn to keep it that way. Hanna Somatics gets to the root of most muscle pain and the gradual stiffness that many people experience as they get older.
These five benefits are something that can improve the quality of life for everyone – not just people in pain. You will learn to restore precision, efficiency, and skill in your movements, through improved proprioception and internal awareness, so you can create a base of control, strength, coordination, and balance. Reducing muscle pain is simply an added benefit.
Somatic Education pioneers as Elsa Gindler, F.M. Alexander (“the Alexander Technique”), Moshe Feldenkrais, Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen and Thomas Hanna, PhD, have known for decades that by turning our attention inward to the sensations, through movement, of our own bodies, we can affect profound improvement and change our ability to function in an efficient, balanced, coordinated, and controlled manner. We can reverse the adverse effects of stress, relieve our own pain, and improve life through reeducating our brains and our movement.
This is something I hear every day when I work with clients: “I’ve tried everything to relieve my pain and only gotten short-term relief. There is something I’m doing – or have done that is causing the pain.” I have written previously about the questionable use of MRIs as a diagnostic tool for back pain, as well as why muscle pain is not a medical problem, but a functional problem in need of reeducation.
Until the day that researchers pick up the books and research of Thomas Hanna and begin learning about Sensory Motor Amnesia (SMA), brain reflexes, and pandiculation, nature’s “reboot” for the sensory motor cortex, they will always come up short in their quest to help those in pain. SMA is what researchers and practitioners the world over are looking at when they study back (or neck/shoulder/hip) pain – they just don’t know it.