The future is now, plan well

Hi, happy holidays. I'm taking a break from clients to recharge on the east coast. Get back to my roots in the snow covered suburbs of central mass and let me tell you, environment effects you!

But anyway, with the new year coming up, people are often into making resolutions so I wanted to talk a little about visualization and future planning from a somatic standpoint. I lately have been using a lot of visualizations in my own life and while working with clients. It's a powerful thing indeed. And I think that something needs to be acknowledged and that is, thought is action. On a scientific physiological level, thought has an effect.

Movement is a great example. In the conscious motor area of your brain there is the motor cortex which initiates voluntary contraction. But right in front of that is the premotor cortex. This part of your brain is active way before your motor cortex starts actually moving your arm or leg. So in effect it is the premotor cortex that is initiating the movement. The premotor cortex also helps by selecting appropriate movements and discarding innaproriate movements and since it connects into spinal tracts, motor planning is stimulating the motor nerves even before you start moving.

So if you were trying out for a tennis team, it may benefit you to consciously visualize the various strokes you will use, visualize the side to side maneuvering your legs and body will go through, visualize that smooth kick serve. By doing so beforehand, you are priming the muscles for the action. In effect you are already playing tennis even before you step onto the court.

I see this with my clients, just the focused thought of muscles releasing and blood flowing freely through tissues starts the release and healing process. The thought of the release essentially becomes the release.

Think about that in the new year. If there are particular changes that you want to make in your life or things that you want to tweak or improve, start by visualizing them first. Don't just think about them, but really go through them in detail what you plan to do and the desired outcome of that action. If you have a specific outcome in mind, you'll be priming the steps needed to achieve that goal and will be much more likely to follow through to completion.

Here's to having the year you want to have!

Armsrock/creation

So, an extension of the idea of consciousness and control is creation. Our lives are a creation, and somatically, we can look at that creation as an externalization of our internal state. Creation is how we express ourselves, through words, through movement, through the arts. And creation is how we construct not just physical structure or buildings, roads, infrastructure, but creation is also how we construct abstract structures of thoughts, ideas, truths.

Art holds a very valuable place as not just reflecting where we are at as a people, but where we could be as a people. Through imagination and artistic creation new realities start to unfold. So here is a particular artist that I've been drawn to recently, a progressive 'urban artist' named Armsrock talking a bit about that creation, enjoy.



http://www.armsrock.blogspot.com/

Danger and opportunity of awareness

To diverge for a minute, there is an interesting side effect of increased somatic awareness. Many of my clients experience this and I'm sure many of you have experienced this. You go in for a massage or other bodywork session for a particular complaint and walk out feeling more sore than when you left. Or you walk out feeling great and wake up the next day wondering if you were in a drunken brawl the night before. Assuming you didn't drink heavy amounts of whiskey and piss off a bouncer, this is an affect of the bodywork.

And this is truly a wonderful affect of the bodywork. There is a term we use in Hanna Somatics called Sensory Motor Amnesia(a forgetfullness of how to move and feel a muscle). What this means is that due to increased tension or repetitive movement, an area of your body has become stiff. When that area of the body becomes stiff the muscles no longer contract and release to their full ability and become fixed in that position. As you no longer move that area as much your brain stops actively connecting with it, and like the much loved instrument that used to take up so much of your time and energy that now sits in the corner, your muscles start to be forgotten.

Supporting this you have tension around arteries, veins, and nerves that blocks circulation and inhibits communication with the nervous system. The tissue starts to dry out, the nerves dull and overtime the body part becomes more rigid. At some point, if the tension impacts a major nerve you'll feel numbness or pain and will either get pain killers to mask what's happening or seek treatment to fix the problem.

With Hanna Somatics, we view this not as a problem, but a natural conclusion to months, years of sensory motor amnesia. Further, because this is a function of a healthy nervous system, it is reversible. One goal of Hanna Somatics is to turn that area of Sensory Motor Amnesia(a forgetfullness of how to move and feel a muscle) into Sensory Motor Awareness meaning increased ability to move and feel the muscle/area. So when you wake up the next day feeling sore and achey, this is a sign that the sensory nerves in that muscle have been reactivated, woken up. And if the sensory nerves have been woken up and you are able to feel what's happening in there, then you are in a great position to move and release the tension that caused the pain in the first place.

Pain killers will have an opposite affect. Yes, they may bring you temporary relief but they do so buy further dulling somatic awareness and sensation which will further disconnect you from your muscles. In an earlier post I talked about how conscious controlled movement as the ideal way to lengthen a muscle and inhibit stretch reflex. If you are actively dulling yourself, then not as able to actively heal the pained area, and are potentially creating a situation for more tightness and pain.

The point is not really to feel the pain, but feeling the pain means that you are feeling more and are fostering more internal consciousness and more internal control. You can use that increased sensation to dwell in discomfort or seize the opportunity to change and recover.

I feel this is applicable in the economic scene we're in right now. With the economy struggling, we are feeling the pain of lost jobs and decreased production. The credit surge of the last twenty years served the purpose of masking these problems and now that credit has dried up we are actually having to deal with the economy that we have. Increased injections of capital into credit markets will only serve to further dull and block us from progressing out of this painful moment. Instead this could be a great opportunity to redirect growth and production, fixing the problem.

As JFK noted

"When written in Chinese, the word 'crisis' is
composed of two characters--one represents danger,
and the other represents opportunity."

Similarly I would say with awareness there is possibility
for increased discomfort,but there is also an opening for
increased joy and graceful movement.

Thoughts? Criticisms? Questions?