Somatic education is a little known, highly effective treatment for chronic pain resulting from a wide range of conditions, including back pain, foot pain, frozen shoulder, migraine and tension headaches, hip pain, joint pain, knee pain, neck pain osteoarthritis, sciatica, spinal stenosis and more. The kind of pain this approach works with is pain associated with movements and position -- usually from injuries, sometimes from stress, alone -- not from cancer, an autoimmune or genetic disorder, or a disease entity. It’s mechanism of action is unique—it can work when nothing else has, or when you’ve reached the limit of what your current treatment can offer.
THE LIMITS OF MOST THERAPIES
Some therapeutic approaches can take you farther than others -- quite apart from the proficiency of your practitioners. Working on muscles, joints, tendons, ligaments -- the standard approach of therapy -- leaves untouched the changes of brain conditioning that keep muscles so tight that they hurt, restrict movement, compress joints and trap nerves.
THERAPY vs. EDUCATION
The term, "therapy", implies something done to you, an intervention -- external manipulation of joints and soft tissues (e.g., muscles) by strengthening, stretching, drugs, "energy work", electrical stimulation, ultrasound, or surgery. Many therapies work on symptoms, rather than on underlying, causative conditioning that keeps you the way you are. That approach is akin to looking for the problem in your computer's hardware, when it's a software problem.
The term, "education", implies something else. It implies that if you have a chronic problem, the cause lies within you and within your reach, that you have to change in a way that you presently don't know how to do. Education fills that gap and empowers you to change in a way that may never have occurred, to you before. Education is akin to finding and correcting "bugs" in the "software" (your conditioning) that runs your body.
The software "bugs" that keep injuries chronic affect your brain's movement memory (commonly mis-named, "muscle memory"), which includes the sensations of movement and position. It's movement memory that gets altered with injury and long-term stress. Muscles tighten. Joints get compressed, nerves get pinched. Pain and/or numbness associated with movements and positions results. While it's not "in your head", it is in your brain.
Clinical somatic education, by clearing out the "bugs" in your movement memory, is radically different from conventional therapies. It promotes the kind of learning that occurred when you learned to walk, to ride a bicycle, to play a sport -- movement learning -- and along with that, the ability to sense and control movement, position, and muscular tension in the moment and accurately.
Clinical somatic education produces lasting improvements very quickly.
HOW MOVEMENT MEMORY GETS ALTERED
When a painful injury occurs, we cringe instantly and automatically to pull the place that hurts out of danger ("guarding"). A memory instantly forms of the injury and of the movement of cringing, which we continue as long as the place hurts. A tension habit forms -- whether suddenly at the moment of injury and pain -- or gradually during the period of self-guarding that continues during the weeks of healing. Symptoms (susceptibility to muscle spasms and pain in certain movements) develop that may -- and commonly do -- persist for decades -- or that may emerge after years of guarding.
That's how people's movement changes and chronic pain appears.
HOW MOVEMENT MEMORY GETS CORRECTED IN CLINICAL SOMATIC EDUCATION
Every one of us does something that makes us feel more comfortable: yawn and stretch. In Hanna Somatic Education® we have developed a process that converts instinctive yawning into a deliberate action that removes the "bugs" from movement memory. This action is called, "pandiculation" -- and in the setting of clinical somatic education, we call it "assisted pandiculation".
Pandiculation relaxes muscles, decompresses joints and trapped nerves, and restores freedom of movement and the feeling that it's safe to move freely.
As a result, it's not necessary to continue to limit your activities or to adopt "therapeutic" habits -- like keeping your belly muscles tight to protect your low back, minimizing bending, maintaining "good body mechanics", or avoiding certain activities. Your brain's movement memory software has been debugged, so that you need not continue these protective activities any more than you did when you were in your youth. It's natural freedom.
WHO CAN BENEFIT?
Clinical somatic education is for people ready to participate actively in their own healing, ready to learn -- who have lost faith in, or patience with, the medical system and are taking matters into their own hands. It’s also for health care practitioners looking for something more than the standard modalities to help their patients.
SOME CONDITIONS HELPED -- HOW AND WHY
As noted above, Somatic Education can help with back pain, foot pain, frozen shoulder, migraine and tension headaches, hip pain, joint pain, knee pain, neck pain osteoarthritis, sciatica, spinal stenosis and more. Find more information about treatment of specific conditions at https://somatics.convertri.com/pain-relief-learn-about-your-condition
WHAT HAPPENS IN SOMATIC EDUCATION TREATMENT
There exists a well-defined process in which clients actively participate in clinical somatic education, with tangible improvements accumulating at each step until pain is eliminated and movement restrictions are resolved.
This process involves (1) identifying locations of pain, patterns of restricted movement, and the injuries that caused them, (2) "debugging" movement-memory, undoing alterations of movement formed by injury, by means of pandiculation, and (3) replacing those injury patterns with pain-free, healthy patterns of movement natural to everyday life -- all without stretching or tissue manipulation. Pain gone. Movement restored.
Pandiculation action patterns are always done in slow motion and under your control, so you remain within your comfort-safety zone and never cause yourself additional pain. You do them in the patterns of muscular tension in which you're stuck so that you regain control of them and can relax them, instead of having to stretch them out.
Typically, five-to-ten clinical sessions are needed, about once weekly. If you're working with a self-relief program of somatic education action patterns, results come more gradually.
VIDEO EXPLANATION OF PANDICULATION
People who have had only partial success with physical therapy, chiropractic, acupuncture, massage therapy and various forms of bodywork, osteopathy, neurosurgery, etc., have usually found clinical somatic education to be a successful last resort for relief of pain and recovery of free movement.
SOMATIC EDUCATION ACTION PATTERNS
Somatic education action patterns may be categorized as "functional exercises" -- but of a special sort: they emphasize coordination (rather than strength) and control (rather than stretching). We use them both (1) to "own" the improvements that occur during hands-on clinical somatic education sessions and (2) as a substitute for hands-on clinical somatic education session, when a client lives too far away for weekly in-person sessions.
Somatic educators recognize that muscular conditioning results from three things:
1. SENSATIONS OF MOVEMENT
Before you can control it, you have to feel it. We guide our actions (such as typing or pushing the button of a doorbell) by feel. We walk by feel; we're not always watching our feet (unless we are on a hazardous path or have mobility problems).
2. BASIC CONTROL OF MUSCLE TENSION
The ability to regulate how much strength (i.e., how much muscle tension) we apply to any movement. Careful movement requires careful control.
To have that control, we need two things: (1) basic sensory awareness of movement, and (2) the ability to activate and to relax muscles at will.
3. COORDINATION
Awareness and basic control are not enough. In the balancing act of life, it's how everything works together that determines the outcome. The same is true of muscles and movement. Every Olympic athlete knows this.
Coordination incorporates many muscles and movements into a single integrated action with such good regulation of strength and timing that we get the intended movement. It's well-regulated strength and coordinated timing.
COMBINING AWARENESS, CONTROL AND COORDINATION
Somatic education exercises use movements to create sensations that the brain can learn and recognize as familiar and associated with a particular muscle and movement. That's the "awareness" part.
With repetition of somatic education action patterns, you develop the ability to regulate the build-up (strength) and decrease (relaxation) of muscle-power in a movement. That's the "control" part.
By combining smaller movement elements into larger movements, first movements of individual muscles (and movement elements) and then of multiple muscles (and movement elements), somatic education exercises develop coordination.
STRENGTH AND LENGTH -- PLUS COORDINATION.
With these three elements, somatic education action patterns develop both the ability to exert strength and to decrease effort all the way to full, soft, relaxation, true rest -- solving both the problems otherwise addressed by strengthening and stretching exercises.
Because somatic education action patterns train the brain (the master-control center of the muscular system), they are sufficient to free a person from protective muscular guarding tensions that have outlived their usefulness and cause pain. Comfortable freedom of movement returns.
Somatic education action patterns accomplish and go beyond the benefits of strengthening and stretching.
VIDEO: RESULTS
Even if you've had a problem for a long time, you can get your life back in recreation and athletics, at work, at home and in the bedroom -- in any situation where you need free and easy movement. You can regain your ability to lift and carry a heavy box with confidence, get into a car, sleep comfortably, or move comfortably from awkward position to a comfortable position.
If you've been getting treatment for pain related to an injury for a long time and aren't getting better, aren't getting better fast enough, or if different doctors have given different diagnoses and you've "tried everything" without satisfactory improvement; if you fear that you may have to live that way for the rest of your life (and you haven't given up), learn more about Hanna Somatic Education®. As a start, get the book, Somatics: ReAwakening the Mind's Control of Movement, Flexibility and Health, by Thomas Hanna.
SOMATIC EDUCATION RESEARCH and APPLICATIONS
For more than a century, researchers into mind-brain-body development have investigated ways to recover from stress and trauma. F.M. ALEXANDER (movement educator), M. FELDENKRAIS (somatic educator), H. SELYE (stress researcher), A.F. FRAZIER (development researcher), T. HANNA (clinical somatic educator), and others have developed ways to relieve pain and to restore mobility and resiliency to traumatized people. Using the brain's capacity for learning ("brain plasticity"), the field of somatics has achieved definitive breakthroughs in pain relief, movement rehab, athletic training, and reversing aspects of ageing.
A KEY TO RECOVERY -- GET YOURSELF BACK
The key to recovery from a lingering injury is to recapture control of muscles tightened in pain and to relax where you could not relax -- or didn't realize how tense you were. As you relax, pain fades. You'll feel immediate changes in your ease of movement. You'll feel different -- and more like yourself -- or (more often) better than you did, before injury. You'll gain your independence from therapy, therapists -- and from the clinical somatic educator you've worked with!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Lawrence Gold is a certified practitioner of Hanna Somatic Education® who began practice in 1990. He commonly works with "difficult cases" -- multiply injured people (athletes, the elderly, and victims of accidents) whose symptoms have persisted despite previous therapy. His practice is located in Beaverton, Oregon. He can be reached at https://somatics.com/wordpress/contact
Comments