Somatics
/sə-ˈma-tiks/ noun
Understanding your body from within
Somatics
Somatic Movement Education uses slow, mindful movement to help you become more aware of how your body feels and how you move.
Whether you're experiencing persistent muscular pain or tension, recovering from injury, or simply finding that your body no longer moves as freely as it once did, Somatics gives you an opportunity to slow down, notice habitual patterns and learn how to change them for yourself.
Rather than simply asking “Where are you tight?”, Somatics encourages us to explore a different question:
Why does that tension keep returning?
Somatic Movement Education
Soma — from the Greek, meaning the living body experienced from within.
Somatic Movement Education is based on the work of Thomas Hanna and is a form of neuromuscular re-education. It uses gentle, specific movements together with sensory awareness to help you recognise habitual patterns of muscular tension and develop greater voluntary control over how you move.
Our nervous system is continually learning from everything we do. Repeated movements, posture, stress, injury and the ways we respond to everyday life can gradually become so familiar that we no longer notice them.
You may know that your shoulders always feel tight, for example, but be completely unaware that you are habitually contracting the muscles around them — even when you don't need to.
Somatics helps bring these patterns back into your conscious awareness.
The movements are deliberately slow and exploratory. Rather than forcing a stretch or trying to achieve a particular shape, you learn to notice what happens as you move: where effort begins, where tension is being held, what feels easy and what doesn't.
‘with awareness comes the possibility of change’
It is important to understand that Somatic movement isn't something I do to you. It is something I teach you to do for yourself. Which means that you become more in control of your own body.
Sensory Motor Amnesia
Stress, injury, repetitive movement and the ways we repeatedly hold or use our bodies can all influence these patterns. Over time, a certain level of muscular contraction may begin to feel so familiar that we no longer recognise that we're doing it.
Thomas Hanna used the term Sensory Motor Amnesia (SMA) to describe the gradual loss of awareness and voluntary control that can occur when muscular responses become habitual.
This can contribute to feelings of stiffness, restricted movement, altered posture or coordination and, for some people, persistent muscular discomfort or pain.
The important word for me is awareness.
If you can't feel what you're doing, it is very difficult to consciously change it. Somatic movement therefore isn't about someone else “correcting” your body. It is about helping you sense your own patterns more clearly, giving you the opportunity to explore different ways of moving and responding.
Pandiculation
The movement may be small. It may look very simple. But slowing everything down gives you an opportunity to notice things that can easily be missed when you move quickly or automatically.
Pandiculation is one of the key techniques used within Hanna Somatic Education.
You already know the movement instinctively. Watch a cat or dog when it wakes: it contracts through its body, slowly lengthens out of that contraction and then releases.
In Somatics, pandiculation is explored consciously and with awareness. A muscle or group of muscles is gently contracted, followed by a slow, controlled lengthening and then complete release and rest.
This is quite different from passively pulling a muscle into a stretch.
Rather than someone else moving your body or you forcing yourself further into a position, you remain actively involved throughout the movement, paying attention to what you can feel and learning to regulate the muscular effort yourself.
Pandiculation
/pan-dik-yuh-lay-shun/ noun
A gentle process of contracting and lengthening muscles to release tension and restore natural movement.
Pandiculation
/pan-dik-yuh-lay-shun/ noun
A gentle process of contracting and lengthening muscles to release tension and restore natural movement.
My experience of Somatics
I discovered Somatic Movement Education following a bad fall in which I herniated a disc in my neck. I was experiencing severe pain together with numbness and tingling down my right arm, and an orthopaedic surgeon advised me that surgery was the route to becoming pain-free.
I wasn't ready to make that decision without exploring other possibilities.
Somatics introduced me to something I hadn't previously experienced in quite the same way, despite decades of studying movement, Pilates, yoga, massage and exercise: how much muscular tension I could be holding without consciously knowing I was doing it.
That principle now sits at the heart of my work, and I am currently furthering my Somatic education by training as a Clinical Somatic Educator which is the ‘hands on’ application of Thomas Hanna’s work.
Through slow, gentle movement and increasing sensory awareness, I began to recognise patterns of tension and restriction that I simply hadn't been able to feel before. Gradually, I learned how to respond to them differently.
Somatics is now a daily practice for me and continues to teach me about my own body. No two days give me exactly the same feedback. Some days I discover greater freedom of movement; on others I become aware of restriction or muscular tension that I hadn't consciously noticed.
This daily practice has made me increasingly aware of the relationship between stress, the nervous system and muscular tension. When the demands placed upon my nervous system change, I can often feel that reflected in the way my muscles contract, the tension I hold and the way my body moves or rather how my movements including walking are restricted.
For me, this is one of the most valuable lessons of Somatics: your body is continually giving you information. Learning to notice that information gives you an opportunity to respond to what you need on that particular day, rather than simply overriding it.
Somatics has taught me to notice, to listen and to respond to what my body is telling me.
