SOMATICS
I discovered Somatics six years ago and it has played a major role in my journey out of chronic tension and pain. I’ve recently qualified as a certified Somatic Exercise Coach with master teacher, Lisa Petersen (a long-time direct student of Donna Farhi, Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen and Amy Matthews). I offer one-to-one Somatics sessions from my garden studio in West Acre, Norfolk and group classes at Great Dunham Village Hall. My yoga classes at Castle Acre Village Hall contain many elements of Somatics and increasingly I’m finding the distinction between Yoga and Somatics blurring in my own practice and teaching.
Somatics is a gentle, therapeutic movement system devised by Thomas Hanna, PhD (1928-1990) in the 1970s, belonging to the same lineage as the Feldenkrais method and the Alexander Technique. It is a toolkit of very slow, focused and conscious exercises designed to release chronic patterns of muscular tension, helping us to get out of pain, stay out of pain and to recover and maintain easeful movement for the duration of our lives.
The exercises, which are mostly floor-based, and practiced very slowly and consciously, calming the nervous system and helping to cultivate moment to moment awareness of our sensory experience. In this way, we gain insight into the root causes of our tension and pain, which can be both physical and emotional/ psychological in nature. Instead of relying on an external therapist to ‘fix’ our issues, Somatic movement teaches us to sense and feel what is happening inside our bodies so that we are empowered to make changes to our patterns from the inside out.
Most people report finding the practice profoundly soothing and grounding, rather like a deep internal self-massage.
What is Somatics?
Thomas Hanna developed the concept of Sensory Motor Amnesia. SMA occurs when our muscles become so tense that they never relax. They become stuck in a state of chronic, habitual and involuntary tension due to repetitive patterns of use (think of sitting hunched over a computer for hours every day or always carrying a bag on the same shoulder) but also due to life stresses, such as injuries, surgery, illness and emotional stress and trauma. Over time the brain loses sensation of the affected muscles and actually ‘forgets’ how to release them.
The Somatic exercises teach the nervous system how to release this chronic muscular tension and to move, sit, stand, walk and lie with ease and efficiency in our daily lives. They are practiced very slowly and consciously so that the brain and nervous system are actively engaged in the learning process. Most of the exercises involve a specific technique called Pandiculation.
SENSORY MOTOR AMNESIA
Have you ever watched a cat or a dog get up from its bed, stretch out its front legs and arch its back, often accompanied by a yawn? This is what Thomas Hanna termed a pandiculation (from the Latin pandiculare: ‘to stretch oneself’). Think of it as a full body yawn and stretch, but unlike passive stretching a slight amount of tension is retained in the muscles even as they lengthen. We often do this instinctively ourselves first thing in the morning. In fact all vertebrate animals tend to reflexively pandiculate in this way when transitioning from sedentary to active because it wakes up the sensory cortex, the part of the brain involved in co-ordinating movement. It is our innate response to lack of movement and the accompanying build-up of tension in our muscles.
Most of the somatic exercises engage a form of voluntary and targeted pandiculation. There are 3 stages to the movements:
Rather than ‘stretching’ a tight group of muscles, we voluntary tighten the muscles even more than they already are.
Then we very slowly release the contraction, engaging the brain in the process (in order to rewire the ‘amnesic’ muscles.)
We completely relax the muscles (sometimes referred to as the ‘moment of melt’)
PANDICULATION
My Journey into Somatics
I was introduced to Somatics about six years ago when the ever present tension in my shoulders, neck and back started to tip over into chronic pain that had become distributed throughout my body. No amount of yoga stretching was helping; in fact I had to admit that yoga, at least the way I was practising it, was making it worse. The only time my body felt good was when I was practising the strong, dynamic vinyasa flow style of yoga that I loved. In between practises, however, I felt like a tangled knot of pain and tension. I constantly told my students to listen to their bodies, unaware that I was unable to truly access my own inner sensations.
My first Somatics session was an eye-opening and humbling experience. As someone who’d been practising yoga daily for many years, I believed myself to have an exceptionally high level of body awareness. So I was surprised and intrigued to discover that when it came to these slow, infinitesimally small and subtle movements, I had next to no sensory feedback in many parts of my body. Other parts would jerk and shake as I attempted to slow down and smooth out the movements. My brain simply couldn’t connect to the sensations I was being invited by my teacher to feel. I also noticed that in areas like my hips, where I had always been very ‘flexible’ and able to do fancy pretzel yoga poses, even the simplest Somatics exercises, when slowed right down, triggered strong, almost painful sensations throughout my body, that I’d been unconscious of until now. With the instruction to end the range of the movement just before pain begins, I quickly learned, when completely honest with myself, that I was going to have to keep these movements very small indeed!
It wasn’t until a few years later, after the birth of my son, that I started practising Somatics in earnest. On the rare occasions I found time to do yoga (at least in the way I’d always practised in the past) my body simply rebelled with flare ups of pain and tension after the practice. This is when I found my way back to Somatics. I discovered Lisa Petersen’s online offerings during the pandemic and under her exquisite guidance I began the process of deep diving into the internal landscape of my body and my self. Slowly, slowly, with patience and trust, deeply-held patterns of tension began to unravel throughout my whole body. The practice allowed me to hone my interoception (awareness of the internal nuances of the physical body) so that I was empowered to heal myself from within; a very different thing to relying on an external therapist to ‘fix’ me. But it did more than that. The practice began to facilitate an ongoing enquiry into the nature of my relationship with myself and others and the way I inhabit the world. This is perhaps one of the greatest benefits of a somatic practice but also one of the hardest to explain to others. It has to be experienced first-hand to be understood.
The process is ongoing. I still see a wonderful massage therapist although less and less frequently and have been helped by a couple of highly skilled osteopaths along the way. But with Somatics I’m now confident I have the tools I need to help myself live without pain caused by chronic tension and to move with greater ease and freedom. The enhanced interoceptive awareness has allowed me to rebuild my yoga practice, but this time on strong and healthy foundations. I always used to tell my yoga students to listen to their body. Somatics has taught me how to truly do this.
find out more
No amount of theory can convey how blissful Somatics can feel! To really understand it, and to appreciate the depth of insight it can give you into yourself and the way you inhabit the world, you need to try it.
Please get in touch if you’d like to book a one-to-one session or check out the class offerings page for upcoming group Somatics classes.
further reading:
Thomas Hanna, Somatics, reawakening the mind’s control of movement, flexibility and health (Lifelong Books, 1988)
Martha Peterson, Move Without Pain (Sterling, 2011)