Exercise like your life depends on it.

Saw this article in the NYTimes and I thought, well duh. Don't we know this? Don't you feel that in your soul? Our bodies were meant to be moved, we are engineered to walk, to swing from trees, to swim in the oceans. Within all of us is our ancestors, the Savannah people of Africa. Within all of us is our ancestor, the Great Apes. Within all of us is our Ancestor, the reptiles who crawled out of the ocean. Within all of us is our Ancestors the fish. Within all of us is an organism that is one or two celled, dividing and uniting to form more and larger organisms.

You can see this in our brain. As Carl Sagan writes about in Dragons of Eden, we have the reptilian brain, the mammalian brain and most recently the neocortex: Consciousnes is thought to be a result of the neocortex. But the neocortex is on top of the other two levels of brain which developed first and which in all of us develops first. In fetal development we all go through stages where we are first a single cell, later a fish, later a mammal and finally human. All of these stages are necessary to go through to develop into a whole functioning human. Similarly all of the stages in evolution were necessary for the Human species to come around. The Universe had been around already for billions of years before humans came around. You can not rush something as magnificient as us, you can not skip steps and you cannot cheat biology.

All of our ancestors are creatures of motion, just as we are creatures of motion. It's wonderful that we have developed elaborate cultures, arts, architecture. We have used our immense capacity for imagination, creativity and problem solving to build and change and inspire future generations. But never foroget what we are and how we got here. Never stop moving. The moment you stop moving is the moment you begin to die.

Stay mobile, completely mobile, stay fluid like water, stay flexible like a blade of grass, swing like a monkey, swim like a fish. Exercise like your life depends on it, because it does.

How Sensory Motor Awareness Can Change the World.

In my last post, I talked about Sensory Motor Amnesia, a forgetfulness of how to move and feel an area of your soma. When Amnesia sets in, that area of your soma become unconscious and inaccessible to you. The word Soma refers to the Human Body experienced from within. In another sense, it refers to the universe experienced from your specific location. And so if there is a disconnection and loss of awareness within yourself then there is also a diminished ability to sense and move through the world around you. For this reason, SMA often leads to stiffness, inflexibility, discoordination and clumsiness navigating through the universe and through life. And not just in terms of the physical. From a somatic viewpoint we see that the whole person, including spiritual, ideological and personality development will become stiff, rigid, clumsy and inefficient. The person will become afraid of change because their ability to adapt is diminished. This is reflected in how as people age in modern society, their worldview often becomes more focused/limited and they lose the capacity to see other points of view, ways of doing things. The old adage you can't teach a dog new tricks is indicative of an "old dog" who has acumulated a great deal of Sensory Motor Amnesia. So much of what that "old dog" does is unconscious, involuntary and lost to them.

But you CAN teach an "old dog" new tricks. More importantly, you can teach a human Soma to overcome Sensory Motor Amnesia and turn it into Sensory Motor Awareness. And Because this Amnesia, this forgetfulness of how to sense and move is a Sensory Motor event, it can be addressed quite quickly through sensory motor activity, namely, slow conscious movement. Every event not just in human activity but in the universe is a sensory motor event; feedback loop between information and response. The push and pull between masses of energy, the swaying of a tree branch, the coordinated attack of an alligator, the leaping of a kangaroo, and the walking and talking of human somas. What's unique about human somas is our ability to be conscious of this sensory motor feedback and influence it.

It's this ability that got us into this mess. We have taught ourselves inadvertently, and sometimes quite actively, patterns that have led to disease, pain, and have set a path of destruction to nature and other species. These patterns have been in place for centuries, are in the very foundation of our society and, just like the back tension that we don't feel until it "goes out" with a painful spasm, we don't sense the destructiveness of these patterns until species start disappearing, economies collapse and people start getting sick on mass levels(notice the elevated rates of drug dependency, chronic illness, cancer, obesity). In a sense, society itself is a product of and an instigator of Sensory Motor Amnesia. We must now use this conscious ability to deconstruct those old patterns, reverse the damage we've done and start building more sustainable patterns within our own life and within the larger universe that we share.

As I said before, this must be a conscious process, creating Sensory Motor Awareness individually and globally. Individually, by moving slowly and gently, you force the conscious part of your brain to spring into action, finding the connections between body parts and coordinating movement through space. As your movement becomes more coordinated, all of a sudden your sensation throughout your Soma starts to improve. In this process of Sensory Motor Awareness; pain, imbalance and disease begin to disappear. As you become much more sensitive to what is happening throughout your system, your internal mechanisms of homeostasis take over, returning you to health and balance. Similarly as more of your soma becomes incorporated with movement; circulation, lymphatic drainage, blood pressure, and your immune system starts working better because all parts of you are now receiving adequate blood flow and nutrients. Your posture and temperament become more flexible, more dynamic. Your emotional range, capacity for joy, sadness and everything in between, increases dramatically.

Not only that, but as you become more sensitive internally and coordinated, you also will become more aware of your position in the world and your relations with other people. Your movement through space will become graceful, efficient, and responsive. You will have less injury and be less afraid of change because you will have faith in your innate powers of adaptability and healing. On a larger level, you will start to feel more your relationship with nature and other species. In my estimation, a populace that is engaged, aware and connected will automatically stop poisoning and destroying our planet. people that are pain/disease free will be more compassionate and joyful towards other Somas. The mass Sensory Motor Amnesia of Somas in a society is an inability to change the path of destruction we're on. And as the pains of what we're doing to the world are reflected in our own disease and suffering, so too are the joys and changes we make. What society would you live in if you felt you could do anything, and were unafraid of change? It's not that awareness in itself will be that change but mass awareness opens the door to proactivity, sustainability and successful cohabitation between all Somas; human, animal, plant, and other.

The point is to be aware, to be sensitive, to enjoy your Soma for all that it can offer you and all that you can offer the world. This is our place of control and reflection, this is our place of change. I welcome you to come and explore this with me in my regular Tuesday evening class, 6:00 at 3380 20th street or come in for a one-on-one session. That's all for now, feel free to comment and respond or share this in anyway you see fit.

Somatic Storytelling: the bunion

A case Study:


I saw a woman this week with a bunion, a bony growth on the inside of her big toe. She had suffered pain in this foot for twenty years and was contemplating surgery. Now, what can one do about someone else's body growing extra bone on their foot? Thinking about it from my perspective: as a somatic educator, my question is Why would someone grow extra bone in their foot in the first place. Structure over function. Structure means your bones and nervous system. Function means what you do with the structure, how you carry it through the world. It seems quite unlikely that someone would just happen to grow extra bone in their foot. There must have been a functional imperitive, the way she was using her body demanding that the structure of the foot shift.

In fact, bunions are very common among women(another plague of patriarchal society perhaps). There's speculation that it is caused by squeezing the foot into tight, constricting shoes. I think quite simply what is clear is that it means the person's center of gravity, which should be spread out evenly throughout their whole foot has been shifted, perhaps narrowed or set off center. If this happens long enough the structure will compensate.

When you look at her whole soma, indeed there is a great deal of compensation. For one thing, her weight is shifted onto the other leg. This could be so that she doesn't bear weight on the painful foot or it might be that the imbalance in the foot leading to the bunion started from this weight shift higher up in the center. Potentially from an earlier trauma. Two, there is a great deal of tension in the hips that seems to lock the pelvis and corresponding legs in their position, diminishing her capacity for comfort and healing.

So, my focus is on comfort. At this stage, there is nothing I can do to get rid of the bunion, all that I can do is help her refind her center of balance and release the tension around her pelvis letting the legs move freely and restoring ease to her gait. As with most problems, this involves keeping focused on the center of the body. This is where real change has to come from.

And I'm happy to let you know that it seems to be working. After just one session of lengthening and balancing the muscles in her waist, she felt a great deal of comfort in her body and actually noticed that the foot pain went away. As long as she continues to remind herself how to stand in an easy, balanced way, the bunion pain should go away. And I'm very curious to see if, once natural, balanced function is restored, the bunion might actually start to diminish. If the extra bone is no longer needed for support, will her Soma start to absorb it back? We shall see. This is just another example though of our amazing capacities for self change and healing, at any point in our lives.

modelling:how we learn unconsciously from our surroundings...

I spent a beautiful couple of days up on a hillside overlooking the pacific ocean this past weekend. I set up my tent on this ridge just above the fog line, and at times it felt like I was floating on clouds. I did a bit of hiking but mostly just sat; observing, thinking, feeling, feeling, enjoying and I came back revived and inspired.

Something I often come back to when considering how we Somas develop and interact is the Mirroring reflex. Like all reflexes, the mirroring reflex is hardwired into our very structure. What it does is causes us to mimic, to reflect what we see around us. This is helpful when learning how to walk, talk, dance, run because we don't have to ask somebody how they do something, we can just observe and repeat. In fact, we don't even have to be conscious of it, we just naturally do it.

But does that stop at human mirroring? What needs to be considered is not just how we mirror other human somas, but how we mirror other animal somas and in fact, how we mirror our environment as a whole. It's nice to think that all the world is a stage and we are merely players, but that neglects the obvious fact the world, the universe, our environment is the biggest player of them all.

With modern civilization we have done a great deal to shift of surroundings, manipulating and suppressing nature. We have built stronger and stronger fortresses to live in with rigid straight walls and hard cement roads. What can one learn from cement and tall rigid houses but to become stiff, rigid and hard?

Watching the grass this weekend, I was reminded of the strength in flexibility. In order to survive through the seasons, grass, even in its dried state has to maintain an enormous amount of flexibility. As the winds gusted the tall tan grasses bent and swayed far away from their upright position and as I walked through them, they seemingly cleared a path, sharing the space with me. In this same way, in order for us Human Somas to survive in a world that is often unpredictable, definitely more crowded and sometimes quite gusty, we would do well to model these grasses and be more flexible, less rigid, more able to share our space, bend with the changes and stand up tall with the sun.

So I'm positing two things.

1 I think we all need to spend a lot more time out in nature away from the hardness, rigidness of our modern roads and buildings and

2 If we insist on continuing to create and distance ourselves from nature, can we do it in a way that will reflect growth, efficiency, flexibility, and sustainability?; inspiring ourselves with our imagination and letting the power of reflexes and nature guide us to a better place.

experimenting with the malleability of attention

Sometimes an understanding of neurophysiology really comes in handy when you come upon an unexpected situation. I wanted to share with you an experience I had with an interesting road block that required some thinking outside the box.

I've been working with this particular client pretty steadily for a few months now, helping her resolve a chronic vertigo and migraine problem. The focus for the first month or so was on simply unwinding steady tension around the torso. If you are rigid and tense all over then the shocks and jolts of the modern world will violently shake you with every step you take and bump you drive over. A relaxed, responsive Soma can easily absorb and diffuse tension throughout their system keeping them from getting jostled too much. So this was our focus in the beginning and she had been making slow and steady improvement with the home exercises and hands-on sessions.

A few weeks ago I tried to bring in more twisting to our sessions. Twisting of any sort had been quite uncomfortable for her and would trigger flair-ups in the migraines and naseau. Twisting; such an integral part to comfortable, relaxed walking, is something that needs to be comfortable.

So we began to do some very gentle twisting movements, differentiating the movement of the neck and eyes from the movement of the torso and shoulders. We moved slowly, finding comfort in every step of the way so that she could feel that twisting could be a positive experience. *Contact me for the specific technique of this movement*
And as she began to find ease and comfort through this twist she became acutely aware of a very deep tension around her esophagus, almost as if something was choking her. This is something that happens quite frequently, when you start unraveling layers of tension. In particular, this is something I've come across with trained ballet dancers. Although they are quite flexible and don't seem to have a great deal of superficial tension, there is often a a lot of deep stabilizing tension. And so at this point I asked the client if she had been trained as a dancer and indeed, as a child she had.

So what do you do with these deep muscles that don't seem to bend the joint in one particular direction but instead seem to lock around the joint, stabilizing it in all directions? You have to get a bit inventive. And so I thought back to a story I heard once of famed Neurologist V S Ramachandra helping patients with phantom pain in amputated limbs. The limb was clearly inaccessible, but through a creative use of a mirror box and the still attached limb, patients are able to release the phantom spasm and subsequent pain. Go here for a great video of him talking about this and other neurological stories http://www.ted.com/talks/vilayanur_ramachandran_on_your_mind.html

The reason for this is that all sensations of the soma occur in the sensory motor cortex, an area of amazing malleability. So to activate this part of her Soma, I had her concentrate on the tension surrounding her esophagus, and imagine it as a fist that was gripping around her throat. I've found imagery to be incredibly useful for turning something intangible into reality. So then, to attach the imagery to something useful, I had her clench her own fist on the right side; her dominant and more contracted side. So there was now a simultaneous contraction around the throat and in her hand. Through imagery these two contractions were linked together. As her fist tightened, the grip on her throat tightened and then, as the tension in her fist lessened, the tensions around the throat lessened. With the tension around her throat lessened, we could proceed to more freedom of movement and ease in twisting.

The gripper muscles of the hand just happened to be a very appropriate connection to make 1 because their action is quite similar to what was happening to her throat and 2 Because it was a very easy image to visualize, that of a hand gripping the throat. For sure, not a pleasant image, but then again there is nothing pleasant about tension around the esophagus.


I'll update you as our work together continues if anything else of note comes up. And please, if you have any commments, thoughts or suggestions, I would love to hear it.

Thoughts from a personal trainer - Mike Luque

Form matters for your body to function well.
Friday, April 24th, 2009

“Habituation is the simplest form of learning. It occurs through the constant repetition of a response. When the same bodily response occurs over and over again, its pattern is gradually “learned” at an unconscious level. Habituation is a slow, relentless adaptive act, which ingrains itself into the functional patterns of the central nervous system.”

*

Thomas Hanna “Somatics” 1988

It seems most people understand the obvious when they are at the gym, that they are working on strengthening their muscles (and hopefully stretching them out as well). But one not so noticed aspect of everything you do at the gym is that you’re training your body and nervous system to deal with all the movements you’ll do the 23 hours a day you’re not at the gym. That’s why proper form is so important. If you’re doing your exercises with poor form, when you use those muscles/movements outside the gym your body will follow the same patterns. Habituation, as Thomas Hanna puts it so clearly. So with that in mind, I want to discuss the big three most common postural/functional mistakes I see people making when working out. All three relate to the same postural distortion.

Now days, most people’s jobs involve sitting. Lots and lots of sitting. Lots of typing, staring into a computer screen. Unconsciously, most people will sit with their head forward of their shoulders. This unconscious behavior causes the strong muscles in the back of the neck to shorten (cervical extensors), the muscles at the base of the skull (sub-occipitals) to tighten (a cause of tension headaches) and the big muscles on either side of your throat (sternocleidomastoid or SCM) to shorten. This then habituates into a postural distortion called “forward head posture” (FHP). FHP can be the root of everything from headaches, neck and shoulder pain, dowager’s hump (lump of extra tissue at the base of the neck, just above shoulder blades), poor breathing patterns, back pain… the list goes on. Quite simply, it isn’t good for you. So motions in the gym that accentuate and even more strongly habituate this postural distortion have to be avoided.

1. Lat Pull Downs behind the head
Oi Vey! This one drives me up a wall. I cringe every time I see someone pull the bar down behind their head. I will frequently go to the person and suggest the correct form and explain why, but after a while its like trying to brush back the ocean with a broom. The tide of poor form is overwhelming!
If you’re doing a lat pull down behind your head, the bar needs to have space to go. So if you’re pulling it behind your head, you have to move your head forward, into FHP. Not only are you accentuating FHP by forcing your head into this position, but you’re teaching your body that every time you use your latissumus dorsi mucles, your head should move forward. You’re teaching your body to continuously reinforce this postural deviation.
When doing a lat pull down, the correct form is to lean back somewhat, looking up about 30 degrees and pull the bar to the top of your sternum, or breastbone, just below the collar bones. Your spine should also be fully upright, no rounding of the low back. This will emphasize the lat muscles to act as the primary movers and keeps the head in line with the rest of the spine. This will habituate a good, healthy standing and moving posture, reducing the effects of FHP.

2. Head popping forward (in varying exercises)
Related to the forced head motion of bringing the lat bar behind your head is an active FHP when using the arms and shoulders. I see this mostly when people are doing bicep curls or shoulder press. Whenever they reach the apex of the motion, either full flexion of the elbow in curls or arms fully extended overhead with shoulder press, their head will move forward, into FHP. When they return to the “resting” position their head travels backwards, closer to posturally correct. You see this a lot when people are really working hard and using weights that are relatively heavy for them. Again, you’re teaching your body a motion, that every time you use effort to bend your elbow to lift something, or reach for something over your head, your head will move into FHP. And if you pay attention to your body for even one hour a day, you’ll realize you do those two motions many many times throughout a day. So once again, it is very important to focus on how you’re moving. Mirrors in the gym aren’t there for you to admire how sexy you are or how big your guns are. They are there to assist you in maintaining correct form. So as you’re doing these motions, watch your head. Is it moving forward? If so, every time you do these motions, give yourself a slight double chin feeling to activate your cervical flexors (the smaller muscles in the front of your neck that tend to be weakened by FHP). This will help keep your head over your shoulders and habituate healthy functional movements both in and out of the gym.

3. Spotting on the ceiling when doing abdominal curls/crunch/sit up.
This also drives me up a wall, mostly because I know there are still trainers who teach their clients this in the mistaken belief this is posturally correct. When you’re doing an abdominal curl/crunch, your spine is rounding forward, into flexion. If you’re spotting on the ceiling, your head and neck are not moving with the rest of the spine. So while your spine is going into forward flexion, your neck is going into extension. When you’re supine (face up) and going into neck extension, you’re very strongly using the same muscles that cause FHP, the SCM, the cervical extensors and the sub-occipitals. Once again, you’re strengthening these muscles, which will only increase and reinforce FHP.
The correct head/neck motion when doing abdominal curls is to feel a double chin feeling, activating the cervical flexors, lengthen the back of your neck (taking force off the three FHP muscles mentioned) and move your head with the spine, looking toward your knees as you come up. What you don’t want to do, however, is use your hands to pull your head upward. There are good reasons to actively use your hands on your head, but to simplify the details, keep your fingers on your head but do not use your hands to lift your head. Make your cervical extensors do the work. They need to be strong too.

So remember, working out is also teaching your body movement patterns. You can either teach patterns that will benefit your posture, ensuring healthy neck, shoulders and spine, or you can help break down your body and worsen the effects of today’s computer based, high stress lifestyles. Really seems like an obvious choice, huh? Form matters. Posture matters. Keep it in mind in all your exercises.

As always, I welcome your questions and feedback. Until next time, Let’s Move!

Mike Luque is a certified Gyrotonic Instructor and Personal Trainer in San Francisco with 10 years of experience and a passion for helping people improve their lives by improving how their bodies feel, look and move. For more information on Mike, go to www.strengthofaspiral.com or call 415.225.2405

The here and now of it

There is no here other than your own personal location. Everything else is there. Meaning that everything that happens in the world, in the universe, for us is happening within us. The singing of a bird is sensed, heard, from within, so sound itself is something that only resides within your soma.

and there is now time but the present. The present being an undefinable moment in time that is infinitely small and infinitely large. The perception of time seemingly limited to how long you are able to stay consciously engaged.

In modern physics, this is a crucial element of relativity theory. Every object in the world is in constant motion and that motion creates the sensation of mass, heaviness. Similarly, every object has a sensation of gravity, attraction, love. So that as we cling to the surface of the earth and as the earth clings to the energy of the sun, so too do the earth and sun cling to your personal internal sense of energy. There is an equal, balanced pressure from you to the earth and from the earth to you. The balancing point is contact. So for all of us, we have a center, a here that is the focal point of all the universe.

And for time, we understand now that time is truly related to the speed of an object and our current perception of the present reflects our motion around the universe. As we as objects move faster, the present moment will dilate, expanding to encompass more, past and future mergeing into one... present.

For each of us, the universe truly only exists within the scope of our perception and function. We are interdependent upon each other and seemingly our existence is necessary for the continued expansion and growth of the whole universe just as the continued expansion of the "big bang", a process still happening, inevitably led to conscious organisms that can experience and accentuate the exquisiteness of that event.

As the universe continues to expand, we are all accelerating, moving faster, dilating our present moment and becoming, as a whole, more conscious. It is inevitable, it is happening. Know it, experience it. Becoming more sensitive to your own hereness and nowness will help you to truly start to create and expand your own potential.

hurts soo goooood!

Well, I'm feeling it. I really pushed myself this weekend trail running, swimming and engaging in various park activities. Who knew Bocce could be such a workout. So it seems like an appropriate time to address a very universe experience.... Muscle Ache

Question: Why do muscles ache?

This is an interesting one that I’ve only recently discovered a good answer for. Muscles ache for a very simply reason… they are being burned. When we move, contract a muscle, a complicated reaction happens that can be simplified by saying glycogen is converted into Lactic Acid.

Everytime we bend our arm, stand up, walk, eat, twist, dance, snowboard or play wii tennis we convert glycogen into lactic acid.

It is this lactic acid that actually causes the pain because being an acid, it literally burns the pain receptors in our muscles causing an acheiness. This lactic acid will stay in the interstitial areas of our muscles, between fibers and cells, waiting for the lymphatic system to come through like a janitor and clear things through.

During normal activity, this isn't a problem because there is plenty of time for the lactic acid to get cleared through the lymphatic system. In exercise terms, this is considered aerobic, meaning with oxygen.

It is during high intensity activity that this becomes a problem. Trying to climb 50 flights of stairs will trigger a burning sensation in your quads because the intensity has now pushed beyond the limits of aerobic contraction and has become anaerobic, meaning without oxygen. At this point, you are said to have passed your aneorobic threshold. What that means is you are not able to clear out lactic acid as quickly as you create it.

Performance athletes are well aware of these thing because succeeding in sports depends on being very sensitive to your anaerobic threshold. A marathon runner knows that if they are going to last 26 miles they need to make sure that they stay below their anaerobic threshold. on the other hand, a sprinter will be able to time their exertion so that every single ounce of energy is put into running those 100 yards and they will go far beyond the anaerobic threshold and be quite spent after just a short time of exertion.

Some of you might think, what does this have to do with me? I'm not a performance athlete, in fact, I haven’t moved from my desk all day? The truth is all of us, we are continually involved in movement. If you're going to yoga regularly or hiking on the weekends, this movement is active. If during the week though, we stop actively moving it does not mean that are muscles have stopped working. If you are driving for a commute, or sitting upright at your desk, if your posture is slouched or arched or tilted, if your shoulders are way up by your ears or your belly is tucked in to hide a beer belly, there is a muscular event happening. That muscular event is happening continually at an unconscious level. When you look at your posture and think, well that’s how I’ve looked for quite awhile, that means your muscles have been engaging in this way for quite awhile. And every time a muscle contracts or every second that a muscle stays contracted, it burns glycogen and creates lactic acid that needs to be cleared by your lymphatic system.

Not only does this cause a continual production of lactic acid but it also inhibits the action of your lymphatic system. By tightening a muscle you effectively create a tourniquet around the bone, joint, and arteries. The lactic acid gets stuck and cannot drain efficiently. One of the most common recommendations you’ll hear from me and other massage therapists after a treatment is to drink plenty of water because toxins have been released. Toxins can only be released if they were at one time stuck, trapped inside the grip of a tight muscle.

When this tourniquet tightens it also blocks the entrance of oxygen so that if continued, even a mild, innocuous contraction can start to pass the anaerobic threshold, creating lactic acid faster than you can clear it through. When this happens, fatigue sets in very quickly and your shoulders, back, neck, stomach become very sore and tired.

When someone's back "goes out" or they tweak their neck, what is typically happening is that the muscle goes into a spasm(100% contraction) and begins to anaerobically create lactic acid at an extreme rate, the equivalent of holding a 90lb dumbell in your bent arm for 30 seconds. The muscle will scream in pain from this rush of acid to the pain receptors and will continue to burn as long as the spasm is present. The spasm must be dealt with before the pain can start to diminish and even afterwards it can take some time for all of the lactic acid to dissolve.


Interestingly, the lymphatic system also depends of muscle contraction to push waste through the system and clear it out through digestion/elimination. So the key is not stuck movement but slow and steady contraction and release to literally pump the muscles, squeezing blood and oxygen in, lactic acid out. Simply put, a strong continual contraction will become anaerobic, depleting oxygen access and flooding the muscle with lactic acid. A continual process of movement, corresponding with balanced contraction and release gives the muscles time to rest and move through lactic acid to prepare for the next contraction.

Once again, Hanna Somatics provides the answers because not only are these techniques ideal for getting a person out of acute spasm but they are also ideal for gently and efficiently moving through the lactic acid :-)

Stay tuned because I will follow up on this with how anaerobic/aerobic contraction relates to sympathetic/parasympathetic states and how you can modify these states for better efficiency and performance on the marathon course or at your desk.

what's love got to do with it?

Excuse me if I get a bit mushy and sentimental but I'm going to talk about the "L" word: Love.

Words are just metaphors for reality, an attempt to explain the unexplainable so why not talk in terms that are simple, understandable to all humans.

I'm interested in love as a metaphor for that intangible force that bonds us together at a collective level and at a cellular level. As young babies we are unable to do anything except curl and flex with the muscles of our abdomen, chest, hands etc. Alone, this curling constitutes a protective stance, the "fetal" position. In yoga, they refer to this as child's pose because it is the first posture we develop. But put a teddy bear in the arms of that child or a parent and see this pose for what it is. An Embrace.

Thomas talks about love being the force of gravity. It is love that holds the cosmos together, swirling around in the seeming infiniteness of space. Why do the planets not fly away from each other, what keeps the universe in it's beautiful spiraling form? Love.

He talks again about love at the cellular level, bonding atoms together to form chromosomes, chromosomes together form organisms, and organisms together form societies, culture. When you get down to it, there is no "me" and "you", we are just swirling masses of energy with no more structure that a stream of water or the air around us. So how do we have arms, legs, minds. How do distinct Somas develop and flourish in this world? perhaps that unifying, structure enabling force is love.

And why not, is love any worse a term for that force than gravity?

Someone conveyed a story to me the other day. A group of sled dogs came in close proximity to a polar bear. The polar bear went into an aggressive stance and the world wisened dogs, responding in kind, started barking. But before an altercation took place, a young puppy, new to this world bounded towards the Polar Bear. Fearless and joyful with curiosity and love, the dog ran up to the bear. And they didn't fight, instead the bear and dog began to play, rolling around in the snow.

We assume that because war and aggression are so prevalent in modern and past societies that we are inherently aggressive and warlike. But I propose that aggression and competition are learned things, taught from society. When children first begin to move it is not out of fear, it is out of curiosity. Early Somatic thinkers referred to this as a joy response. At a young age we move towards something because deep down we are all driven by love.

The need to protect, the need to distance ourselves, create boundaries, assert our individualism, fight. These are all things that are taught to us, consciously and unconsciously and are very much in opposition to what I view as our true and most basic instinct... to love.

Story telling -Somatic Case Study

So, piggy backing on the last blog I posted talking about why we use the words Soma and Somatic let's look at a recent client I helped.

This client, let's call him Dan, came to me for a lingering shoulder pain. His range of motion was limited and the Physical Therapist suggested that there was a slight, unhealed tear in his rotator cuff. From a traditional western view, I'm sure that this is correct. He feels the pain in his shoulder and the pain may very well be from a slight tear in his rotator cuff.

But in the Somatic view, my job is to understand the experience and function that could have led to this tear. And, considering that the pain has lingered for about a year at this point, there must be something happening to perpetuate the situation that got him into and maintains this pain.

So, we say forget the shoulder. The shoulder is a dead end. Looking at him as a body with a pained shoulder will do nothing to fix the problem because the problem is a Somatic one. And truly, unless there is something structurally broken, meaning the nerve is cut, or the bone is fractured, the problem is always Somatic and therefore requires a Somatic intervention.

And looking from a Somatic, whole living organism perspective, a story starts to develop. What I saw was a person who was cringing to the left. Meaning, his left shoulder was quite significantly lower than the right and was being drawn into his side in a protective position. This is a very common position that happens after injury or trauma. We all do this, it is an unconscious reflex that is present in all organisms and is a position that displays itself in various lopsided postures. If the trauma/injury is severe then the cringing will be severe and the organism's posture will reflect that. Also, their physiology will reflect that and many of the problems we deal with, scoliosis, sciatica, frozen shoulder, are a natural result of this reflex.

So probing a bit to find out if there had been any incidence that happened before the shoulder problem, I discovered that he'd snapped his achille's tendon running through an airport and had had a long process of rehabilitation. But how could that be related to what's happening way on the other side of his Soma? The answer is in the Somatic center, the waist muscles.

It is the waist muscles, between the ribs and hips that hold our pelvis/legs and allow us to walk in an even graceful manner. And it is the waist muscles that hold our shoulders and neck, allowing us to reach, twist and bend. So if we have an injury, it is the waist muscles that will hold up that hurt leg to keep from reinjuring it. This is why so many people think one of their legs is longer than the other; an imbalance in the muscles of the waist resulting from some injury or trauma.

So if the waist muscles are tight, drawing that leg up into the pelvis, very likely the shoulder will become compromised. Contraction, shortness in the waist area on the injured side will lead to shortness, contraction throughout that entire side and the person will become clearly imbalanced. And, in fact, upon palpating the waist and back muscles on the injured side, I noticed that they were quite hard and contracted. Once the waist area is hard, shoulder mobility will be limited and the rigid muscles are much more prone to tear. They lose their elasticity and will tear under stretch or aggressive movement.

No matter what we tried to do to fix the shoulder, we would not be successful until the Somatic problem of protective cringing, a trauma response, was addressed and released. But, by addressing the issue at its' core and releasing the pattern, very quickly we were successful in ending his pain.

In five sessions, with the help of home exercises, he began to once again move those hard, overcontracted waist muscles with control and awareness. He was able to voluntarily contract them and he was able to voluntarily release them until they became very soft and all of a sudden the shoulder starts to move freely again, his left side opens up and that pattern of cringing goes away. Quite a magical thing to see and if he continues to move and release those muscles in an active way, there is absolutely no reason why the pain would return.

This is the power of Hanna Somatic techniques, but it requires first an understanding that we are in fact Somas, not bodies and shoulders.

body mind connection-the soma

So, I was in conversation with someone earlier and a familiar question came up about Somatics; "is it about the connection between the mind and body?" I happily get this question a lot and there seems to be quite a buzz around this idea of mind body connection which means that people are curious and are open to the idea that our conventional truths are flexible.

My simple answer is yes, it has to do with a mind body connection. But in truth, the idea of the mind and body being somehow connected is as false as saying the mind and body are separated. Simply having separate words for mind and body implies difference, separateness and is indicative of a culture that likes to compartmentalize things unnecessarily.

Long answer, in the somatic viewpoint, there is no connection between the mind and body because they are one in the same. They are both you, a soma. You are a mind just as much as you are a body and so anything that happens to your soma is just happening to... you.

In a similar way there is no connection between the emotional, physical, spiritual because anything happening to you is simultaneously and equally affecting you emotionally, spiritually, and physiologically.

The idea of a split was a construct, designed by Rene Descartes as a way of separating science(the body) from religion(the mind). It is a construct unique to modern western civilization and I would say has been a very dehumanizing construct because what that construct defines is that we are not whole, but rather separate parts working together to a better of worse extent.

So when I use the word soma, it is a way of redefining us as people. A way to bring back the wholeness that we gave up a few hundred years ago. Don't worry so much about how the mind, body, spirit, soul connect because they don't connect. They are one, they are you and you are a soma. It's a lot simpler that way, don't you think?

go man go, but not like a yo yo fooool boy

I'd like to describe today one of the major advancements Hanna Somatic Education offers the field of medicine and offers to all who suffer from back pain. It is called the greenlight reflex and through mastery of it, back pain can be understood for what it truly is; a completely avoidable learned response to stress. In some parts here I am paraphrasing Thomas Hanna and for a clearer sense of what this is, I suggest you check out the book Somatics.

The green light reflex, often called Landau’s reflex begins occurring at three months of age and is typically fully developed at 6 months. The green light reflex is what initiates forward movement. It starts slowly, a minor movement of lifting the chin to begin looking up. From a psychological viewpoint this can be seen as a joy response; a desire to seek out. For this reason, we call it the green light reflex. It compels the young child to “go” “explore”. Although we may be trained later to run away from pain, in these early years, within the safety of our parents love, we run curiously towards pleasure. And so we see that as the child develops, the response to go and seek out quickly gets them into a crawl and then clumsy standing and walking. The green light reflex allows us to balance on two legs and from there to explore the world with the benefit of free arms and hands. Other organisms come out of the womb already programmed for forward mobility and therefor spend less time learning and exploring. Humans, on the other hand are born knowing only how to do one thing which is flex and grasp, clinging to their mother and suckling. For humans standing and walking require years of exploration and learning to master. Interestingly, it seems that the ability to stand on two legs is one of the few, clear, defining features of human beings.

I will argue that two legged movement is actually a more complex posture than staying on four legs and is what initially demanded the large development of our cortex. To be able to balance your weight over two legs in varied terrain; jumping, running, dancing. Skiing while playing football(not recommended)! The enlarged cortex is what then allowed us to use our arms and hands for the purpose of building, creating, and exploring in ways that other species have not done. Ever seen a turtle use a Keyboard? It’s quite embarrassing.

But, as they say, curiosity killed the cat. As the human soma develops in industrialized nations, the greenlight reflex shifts from a joy response to a more general call to action. As a child, it responds to the recess bell ringing, the sound of a friend’s voice calling you to come play, a curious noise in the backyard. Soon though the less joyful calls begin to happen more and more. The telephone begins to ring now with other demands, demands for project completion and calls from business associates and creditors. The alarm clock rings each morning impelling us into action. Keep going it says!!! Get up and Go Go Go!!!! And each time we are called into action that little reflex that started way back at three months of age gets triggered.

By now we are in are twenties and have had many years of practicing this slight arching of the back. We have gotten so good at it that we don’t need to even think about it, it is in fact unconscious and involuntary. And for those of us who are real go-getters and have accomplished a great deal in those decades, we start to feel the effects. We go to bed with an aching back and sleep restlessly because, although mentally, we know that the day is over and tomorrow will have to wait, the green light reflex is still going. Nothing has been done to turn off the response and so while all day we ride our back like the trusty horse we know it to be, at night that horse is still running and running and running right into the ground. We may even feel mentally fatigued, unable to put aside the worries of yesterday; the as-yet-uncompleted task lingers on the mind. The now constantly engaged back muscles telling us that we should not be resting.

It is no surprise that well over 50% of people in industrialized nations suffer from back pain every year. In fact, it is inevitable. These back muscles are so strong by now that the intervertebral discs even start to be crushed by their grip and as the back becomes more arched, the disks slip out, buldging through the front of the spine. Also, the muscles in the lower back have now become quite overtired from continual contraction and ache constantly. Think about the last time you went to the gym and lifted weights. Remember that burning sensation you felt as you pushed through the last few reps reaching muscle fatigue. That was just after a few minutes. For many of us who have spent years tirelessly efforting, our backs have been continually tightening for hours, days, months, and even years.

But as I said, this contraction has been involuntary. And that which is involuntary is unconscious and is not felt. So our ability to even sense what is happening in these muscle becomes diminished until one day we bend over to pick something up or we reach to grab something off the top shelf and our back just ‘goes out’. We say, “how could this happen? I’ve never had any back problems before.”

The truth is the back problem has been developing for years. Back pain is as American as apple pie, as French as a croissant and as Chinese as a dumpling. The same drive that allows us to build skyscrapers and commands us into battle to dominate and exploit leads to our eventual structural collapse.

Okay, so excuse the theatrics, but it’s necessary that people get a clear idea of what is actually happening in their bodies because currently the medical profession is clueless. When you look at an xray all that is visible is the curved spine, leaving most doctors to assume that the spine has simply collapsed. Sometimes they will even prescribe physical therapy to strengthen the back muscles, leading only to increased tension on the disks. A huge percentage of emergency room visits every day are the natural result of just what I’m talking about and what the medical world fails to acknowledge is that it is all the result of a natural, unconscious action of the motor system.

And for that reason, there is cause to celebrate. We should celebrate because muscular problems are all learned problems and therefore can be unlearned. Every single person who suffers in this way can get better and they can get better through a very simple retraining and releasing of the greenlight reflex. This is done through activating of the cortex and the sensory motor system. And this is the major addition that Hanna Somatics offers the medical field.

To feel the action of this reflex try this simple exercise.

Lie on your back with your knees bent and feet about hips distance apart. I want you to do is something very simple, namely, press your pelvis down into the ground. Not your back, but your pelvis. If you put your hands on your hips they are resting on the top of your pelvis. So just press your pelvis down into the ground. And release. The releasing is critical. Do this a few times, pressing your pelvis down and then release. See if now you can press a bit lower down your pelvis until your tailbone starts to roll down into the floor. The further down your spine you press the more your back will start to contract and arch. Relax and notice what you feel. Is your back lieing a bit flatter on the floor?

Now, do the opposite. What I mean is, as you exhale press your back down into the floor so that your tailbone and pelvis start to tip up towards the ceiling. And relax. Do this again, feeling that if you keep your legs and feet relaxed, your stomach has to initiate this movement. The more you press your back down, the higher your tailbone will tilt and as your stomach muscles tighten your back further releases.

What you can then do is alternate. As you inhale, press your pelvis down, rolling your tailbone into the ground to lengthen the front of your body and gently arch your back. As you exhale press your back down to flatten and further turn off this greenlight reflex, lengthening and then rounding your back as your stomach contracts.

Done daily this way you will discover something which until recently has been thought of as impossible without painful surgery or other types of 'corrective' treatments(treatments that are proving to be ineffective). That is you will be fixing the problem of an over arched, hyper contracted back. This is effective not only in stopping the advancement of back pain but will actually reverse it. At any age.

Please, if you have any difficulties doing this or find that it is causing you pain give me a call or come in for a session. 415 385 0798. And if you find this interesting and useful, please share this link with others.

Much love, Gabriel

the clear path, futuresight, scattered focus

I'm taking it personal today. Sitting in a cafe, watching the pages of my book flip around in the wind. Losing my place in the book as my mind drifts away. So this posting may show some of my scattered state, flipping back and forth with the whim of the wind or the next song on the 'jukebox'.

I've been trying to do the impossible lately. Or maybe just the not yet possible. That is, time travel. i want to see the future, to know that the decisions I'm making today will have the outcome that I want. But sadly, as Milan Kundera points out in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, there are no dress rehearsals in life. It's always Showtime!

Then again, maybe it's not all that sad and maybe even things are much more predictable than we think they are. Anyone who follows the new age scene is familiar with The Secret and the idea that you can manifest your own destiny. Or really, that we are manifesting our destinies whether we want to or not. It's not a question of is it happening but are we an active participant in the process.

The opposite of action is not inaction but involuntary action. You just breathed... did you notice? Now do it yourself, make it a voluntary action. take in oxygen as the fuel for your dreams so that they do not stagnate and drift into the unconscious. Either way, the breathing will continue and either way your life will continue until...

Back to me and seeing the future. I'm in the process of creating something that will potentially reach many people and help them get access to Hanna Somatics. I've always been drawn to this work because ultimately, it takes me out of the equation. What's real is the ideas and movements. Those ideas and movements can be conveyed through hands-on session where I'm physically engaged with someone guiding them to their areas of unconscious contraction. It can also be done in a group setting, using auditory feedback to create an internal experience. Can it be done through technology? More importantly, am I doing it as effectively as possible because in the end I will have invested time and energy and it will either succeed or not.

So, I'm trying to clear my head to discover the true path. This is one of the big underlying themes in Somatic Philosophy that there is an Authentic, in Feldenkrais' words, Potent Self. This Potent self acts with spontaneity and clarity because they are unblocked from external or imposed motivations. To act otherwise would be compulsive meaning not inline with your true desires but rather forced for various reasons. In this way the tensions that we feel are caused by the battle between spontaneity(the authentic) and compulsivity(the inauthentic). Maybe you understand what I mean when I say this, I'll elaborate at another time.

flip flip flip, scattering off... gabriel

regarding somatic weight

Here's an interesting thought experiment that might be a more interesting real experiment that might actually blow open the doors to weight loss. Does muscle tension effect your weight?

This thought stemmed from my noticing that one of the common responses people have after a session of hanna somatics is that the released body part or their whole soma feels "lighter". At first, I just cataloged this as an interesting sensation to have but slowly, it started to occur to me that actually, the perception of body weight has a great deal to do with muscle tension.

Think about it...

For example, if you were to pick up a twenty pound weight, your muscles have to contract a certain extant. and not just the muscles of the lifting hand, but the muscles throughout your soma as you refind balance with this added weight. How do we know that we've picked up twenty pounds? The sensors in our fingers and hand send information to the brain that we are holding something and the muscles that tense to compensate for its weight send the message that the something is heavy. Let's quantify this a bit and say that maybe your muscles on that side increase their contraction to 20% of their maximum contractile ability.

What happens though if we tense our muscles without having that weight? When your posture starts to firm up over the course of development, something once thought of as the inevitable outcome of aging, that rigidity is linked to an increase in the resting level of your muscles. In an earlier posting, I discussed the stretch reflex and resting levels of a muscle. So, as we habituate certain postures and contractions, the resting level of certain muscles raise to 10, 15, 20, 50% of their maximum capacity.

With Hanna Somatic techniques, we use the engagement of the sensory motor cortex to inhibit muscle contraction, effectively lowering a particular muscle's resting level. The fact that people feel lighter as this resting level decreases seems to imply that whether we are lifting a barbel or simply tightening our muscles continually over time, the sensing of weight is the same. So when the muscles around our arm are looser, we sense that arm as lighter than before.

Part 2

So, I was chewing on that thought for awhile and I mentioned it to a colleague. She told to me that an interesting thing has been happening... Her weight has been slowly and steadily dropping over the past few months. As she continues to do Hanna Somatic exercises, shedding deep layers of tension, she has also been shedding pounds. This could also be explained by changes in diet and aerobic activity, but as a personal trainer, her intake/output is pretty well regulated.

So anyway, what if this were true and actually had an effect on how we store calories? Think about it. If your muscles are relatively tense, your internal sense is that you're actually heavier than what the scale shows. Your metabalism which regulates the storing and burning of calories is set not to what that scale says but to what your soma perceives unconsciously. So someone could diet all they want to but if their body is regulating itself for more weight than they actually have, it'll be an uphill battle.

If on the other hand, they focus on releasing and lowering tension, their muscles will become more relaxed, and their soma will sense that they are now "lighter". Once they are sensed as being lighter, there will be no need to hang on to those excess calories and I imagine that, still exercising of course, the weight will easily start to fall off...

I would sat that I've felt this myself but its harder for me to pinpoint. I have lost about 20-30 pounds in the past few years but have also greatly improved my diet and exercise routines. Anybody else have personal or secondary experience with this?

point of view

Hi everybody, if you like what you read feel free to comment, if you're confused or disagree with anything you read here, please feel free to comment as well. Through contructive dialogue we can flush out some of these ideas further...

Anyway, today i wanted to fill everybody in on an experiment that I'm starting. This is a non scientific experiment, there will be no null hypothesis, no control group, no sugar pills. It's just going to be me and there may be a whole lot of experimentor error. What I'm trying to do is explore the boundary between what is fixed, structural and what is mutable, function. So often when dealing with western science, we come across things that seem permanent unchangeable, broken.

for example, the way we look at posture and aging. Contemporary thoughts on aging suggest that as we age, our bodies go through a predictable rate of decline and start falling apart. We cannot stop this, all we can do is slow it down. In that way, aging becomes a structural element, fixed.
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On the other hand, through Hanna Somatic Education, I've learned that in fact, we have the ability to control the way that our body ages and at any point can be learning better and more efficient ways or moving through the world.

I've seen 70 year olds successfully reverse decades of constant back pain, I've seen scoliotic curves change and the discomfort disappear, and I've seen arms that hadn't straightened in years, "magically" straighten. All this suggests that problems once seen as structural are not, rather they are a symptom of function.

So we get to me and my experiment. If you've known me after the age of five, you've probably seen me either with glasses or contact lenses. I've had awefull vision my whole life and I'm tired of it. Don't get me wrong, I'm quite thankful that I've been able to "correct" my vision through the use of lenses, but I also sense that these lenses serve as a crutch and that as my eyes adjust to the lenses, they shift and become weaker. And so, my prescription has become worse and worse and worse. For what it's worth, currently my left eye is a +5.75 and my right eye is a +6.00. I also have astygmatisms, meaning my eyes are lumpy. Whatever.

I've decided to put Hanna Somatic theories to work and try to "fix" my vision.

Here's what I intend to do.

For the next 4 weeks, I will, once a day without glasses do the following exercises to help my eyes learn to focus without the aid of lenses.

-tracing: picking a line on the wall, horizontal and then vertical, I will follow the line visually without moving any part of my body other than the eyes. I will then follow the line keeping my eyes still and just tipping my head. Lastly, I will fix my eyes on one point and move my neck back and forth.

-focusing: To get my eyes used to focusing more quickly, I will pick a point that is relatively far away, a point that is close up, and a point in between. I will then alternate, focusing on one point until it becomes clear, holding my focus there for a few seconds, and then moving to the next point.

Feel free to follow along at home without me and then when I go back to the optometrist, I will let you know if there has been any shift in my vision.

neurophysiology and somatics

So, here is a paper I've been working on for awhile now and was one of the graduation requirements for the Hanna Somatic certification I just completed. Thought I'd share.

With Hanna Somatic Education, we have wonderful techniques for focusing on the first person experience and our relations with the surrounding world. In many ways, Somatics is a framework for study, a way of processing and searching for information, not just a thing to be studied by its self. Yet within the framework of Somatics, many things are worthy of being studied and aide in the understanding of human somas. Of particular interest is the field of neurophysiology. Neurophysiology is the functional study of the nervous system, how our brain and spinal cord receives and responds to stimulus and how the varied parts work cohesively to create a human soma. Studying neurophysiology allows us to engage our clients and the larger healthcare field with confidence. Most importantly, a thorough knowledge of neurophysiology from a scientific perspective bridges the gap between the objective and subjective, ensuring that the work we do is valid and reproducible.


If the sole purpose of Hanna Somatics were to reduce tension and help clients change their posture, then a simple understanding of the sensory-motor system would be adequate. It is through our sensory motor system that we interact and connect with the world around us. Stimulus comes in through the peripheral nerves that send messages to the central nervous system. In response, commands are sent back to the peripheral nerves and movements are initiated.


Much of this is done automatically. Although the lifting of an arm requires complex coordination of the body, it appears to us as a simple task. The simultaneous contracting and releasing of various muscle groups is programmed by the cerebellum, so that all we have to do is think ‘lift the arm’ and it is done. But really, it’s quite complex.

To start, a neuron in the brain fires sending a wave of energy down the spinal cord. This action innervates nerve groups that branch off from the spinal cord heading out to the limbs and skeletal muscles. This is referred to as a motor unit, the neuron and the muscle fibers it innervates. But that is not enough. Stimulating one set of muscles and causing them to shorten would do nothing if the other muscles were still engaged. So, as one set of muscles is being shortened, a signal is sent out to opposing, antagonist muscles to release. More particularly, the antagonist muscles release only to the extent that the agonist muscles shorten. Done this way, the movement is controlled and smooth. The balance of muscle contraction and release allows us to know exactly where our body parts are at any moment and to change direction mid movement if necessary.


All the movements of our body happen like this. The decision is made to move a certain body part and instantly the whole soma is organized towards that action. Essential to this unconscious process is the functioning of our spinal reflexes.


Two primary neuro-physiological reflexes that are useful to Hanna Somatics are the stretch reflex and reciprocal inhibition. The stretch reflex is involved in the maintenance of balance and prevention of muscle injury. With our world in constant motion, maintaining a muscle or limb’s position is blessedly an unconscious, reflexive event. Stretch reflex is triggered when a muscle is pulled or involuntarily moved beyond its resting position. Sensory, intrafusal muscle fibers are stretched stimulating 1A afferent motor neurons. 1A afferent neurons send sensory input to the central nervous system. There, in the spinal cord, they create a loop with efferent, Alpha Motor neurons that carry energy back to extrafusal muscle fibers causing the muscle to shorten and contract.


Simultaneously, as they innervate the alpha motor neurons of the stretched muscle, alpha motor neurons connected to antagonist muscle are inhibited. The effect of this is reciprocal inhibition. Reciprocal inhibition is necessary for any movement to happen because attached to every joint are muscles that bend the joint in not just one, but two or more directions. If multiple muscles are contracting simultaneously, bending a joint in opposite directions, the joint will not move, the muscles simply tighten and constrict around the joint. Range of motion becomes extremely limited and painful.


You often find this decreased mobility, as people get older. In fact, traditional views on aging see this as inevitable. Physiologically, what might be happening is that these two primary reflexes of stretch and reciprocal inhibition are acting at the same time. For instance, if you try to flex your elbow the agonist muscle for that action is the biceps. Contracting the bicep will reciprocally inhibit the antagonist, triceps muscle. To the extent that it can, the triceps will lengthen. At some point, the triceps muscle will reach its max passive length and further lengthening will trigger stretch reflex causing the triceps to contract. In this way, both muscles that bend the elbow are contracting and movement stops. For people who have strongly habituated alternating stress responses, their whole soma can become tight and pained. Signals are being sent to pull the body in two or more directions at once, and movement becomes quite stiff and painful.


This happens due to the setting of our resting levels. The resting level of the muscle is a subconscious program that our body uses to maintain a consistent length when a muscle is not being actively used. It is a part of our proprioception and is constantly being regulated to maintain our position in the world. If we had to think about the length of all our individual muscles at every moment, it would be almost impossible to get anything done.


Neurophysiologically, the resting level has to do with the sensitivity of the gamma motor neuron and the Intrafusal muscle spindle. The gamma motor neurons set the tension level of the muscle spindle making it more or less sensitive to stretch. By increasing activity in gamma motor neurons, the spindle cell is more likely to be stretched stimulating afferent neurons and the activation of the stretch reflex. Alternately, by lowering the activity of gamma motor neurons we can make the muscle less sensitive to stretch and therefore less likely to contract and tighten.


One of the main benefits of Hanna Somatic techniques is that they change the activity level of gamma motor neurons. Gamma motor activity increases proportionately with static load. Stretching a muscle excites the gamma motor neurons and increases alpha motor contraction. On the other hand, consciously contracting a muscle blocks the gamma motor neuron, easing the tension on Intrafusal muscle fibers. When we help our clients do a pandiculation, they are contracting the muscle to inhibit gamma motor activity and then maintaining the muscles contraction while slowly lengthening and decreasing alpha and gamma motor activity. This leads to a longer, more relaxed muscle that is not as sensitive to stretch reflex.


We are also working with the gamma motor neuron when we use kinetic mirroring techniques. By bringing the ends of a muscle together, the spindle cell is shortened, and Gamma motor activity decreases which then allows for a reduction in Alpha motor activity. The risk of stretch is decreased and the muscle becomes slack and rests.


The resting level is also affected by reflexive muscle contraction and stress response. Types of external stimuli have been shown to illicit predictable responses over and over again. We flex from negative stress, protecting our organs and vulnerable areas of the neck and abdomen. In response to opportunity and joy we contract our extensor muscles, lifting up from gravity and opening to receive the world. When injured, we contract the muscles around the point of impact to stabilize and prevent further injury. The postures we take on during development and the forms our bodies go through show us the stressors and injuries that we have had through our life. If we are repeatedly exposed to a similar stressor, the resting level of our muscles increases to hold our soma in the position of that response. Either the stimulus lingers and reoccurs often or the stimulus was so strong, the lesson learned from the stimulus so important, that our soma holds the position as a memory. In this way, posture develops. Over time, contradictory contractions of flexion, extension, and protection can lock our body in a rigid, painful pose. The resting levels of opposing muscles are so elevated that we get stuck in a physiological tug-of-war.


It is the lower, unconscious functions of the nervous system that are responsible for carrying out these reflexes and maintaining our somatic position. To change these we must use the higher brain functions, including the frontal lobe and the sensory motor cortex. When we ask a client to consciously contract a muscle, what we are really asking them to do is engage and stimulate these higher functions. We are teaching them to focus on a particular muscle. This has two effects. The first effect is that it focuses attention, drawing neural resources that are often scattered towards a singular goal. Secondly, this serves the purpose of strengthening our ability to feel and move the targeted muscle, reaffirming the connection between muscle and brain. As with anything, this is a skill that can be cultivated and improved upon. Awareness and internal sensitivity will increase and deepen the more that we do it and with that awareness comes improved control and understanding of ourselves.


This is what we are doing with means whereby. Simply asking a client to notice how they are functioning will improve that functioning. By making movement and posture more active and conscious, the subconscious, reflexive actions will be subverted. The movement does not need to be anything specific, awareness is the goal and benefit of awareness.


With the Hanna Somatic techniques of pandiculation, we are essentially combining the active movements of a means whereby and the physiologically altering work of kinetic mirroring. Kinetic mirroring loses lasting effectiveness because it does not happen in the higher processes of the brain. When you add the consciousness of means whereby and focus on the active lengthening of a muscle, you bring the effects up to the motor cortex and frontal lobe. This ensures that the effect lasts. It also ensures that the more you do it, the easier and more effective the movement will become.


The reason for that is due to the motor cortex’s allocation of neurons. As mentioned earlier, every muscle in the body is represented in the sensory motor cortex. Muscles that have more motor neurons have more representation in the motor cortex. Muscles that have more sensory neurons have more representation in the sensory cortex. As we grow and develop, these representations change to conform to learned skills. When fine motor skills are learned with particular muscles, they get more representation in the brain and our ability to sense and move them increases. If certain muscles however are not focused on, they start to lose their representation in the brain. Decreased representation leads to decreased sensitivity and control, a term we call sensory motor amnesia. When a muscle is neglected for a long period of time we in effect forget how to use that muscle because we can no longer feel it. By bringing a client’s attention to these dulled, forgotten muscles, the brain wiring changes. The more they move a muscle actively, the better sensation they will have in the muscle making it that much more controlled and movable. This is then termed sensory motor awareness.


So with Hanna Somatics we are applying this elaborate knowledge of neurophysiology to the benefit of our clients. As a practitioner, I can help a client understand why they are feeling pain, affirming the experience that they are having in their soma. Although I cannot actually feel what is going on inside of them, because their somatic structure is similar to mine and I have experienced pain, I can imagine what they might be experiences. By feeling muscles and visually assessing areas of hypertension, I can make assumptions about their internal state.

Using this knowledge of neurophysiology, I can then explain to them, scientifically, what is probably happening. Through this thorough study, pain is no longer a mystical problem of a broken body, but rather a natural reaction of their soma to stress and tension. The fact that a client feels pain and has muscle tension is an indicator that they have a healthy and active nervous system. Furthermore, if they have a healthy and active nervous system, then there is no reason that their tension cannot be reversed and pain lessened. The rigors of scientific method allow us to make those presumptions and move forward confidently with treatment.

As educators, we are able to then bridge the divide between what we view, feel and know objectively and what the client is experiencing subjectively. As the field of Somatics grows, we will most likely see a continued softening of the border between subjective and objective. The subjective is thought of as our own personal experience of the world and as such is thought to have little relevance when it comes to scientific theory. But as somas we are constantly engaged with and responding to other somas and the world around us. Our internal states shift continuously as we grow and as our environment changes. The objective, on the other hand, is what we would think of as truth, undeniable facts that everyone agrees on. The objective is rigid while the subjective is fluid.


With Somatics, it becomes clear that maybe the subjective is not always so fluid and the objective is not quite so rigid. As somas that respond to their environments, we tend to have very similar responses to stimuli. This is what the somatic postures are based on. We have these similar reflexes because structurally and genetically we are quite similar. If we are quite similar and are sharing these physical attributes and reactions, then it is very likely that we have also similar subjective experiences. Of course no two people are exactly the same and you never can truly walk in someone else’s shoes but to a certain extent there is an objective experience within a shared environment and shared structure


Looked at from another angle, if we are subjective somas living varied and mutable existences, then our lives are growing and changing while we move and adapt. As creators of physical and societal structures in the form of buildings, governments and art, we are actively changing the world around us. What is real and tangibly truthful at one time will eventually be rebuilt, destroyed or become passé. In this way objective reality is not actually as formal and rigid as we would like to think.


By combining somatic principles with scientific study we start to get a better sense of how these two ideas converge and influence each other. We subjectively experience an objective reality and then respond to change that reality. We do this without even trying to and we do this so reliably that the mutability of fact becomes fact itself.


Without neurophysiology, all of these ideas would be just ideas. With science behind us, we can confidently talk to our clients and the medical world. Without Hanna Somatics, all of these scientific theories would be just theories. We need the application of these theories to help grow as a people and expand what we can be as somas. Each can exist separately, but together, there is a greater power. Together, as Reebok says, “impossible is nothing.”

resisting resistance...releasing release

I'm trying to improve my vocabulary, understanding that words have power and are a structure of society. I'm sure you're all familiar that eskimos have a hundred words for "snow" and americans have two zillion words for "money". We work with what we know and we focus on what is important to us. In this way, we strengthen the structural supports that create our reality and direct our lives. Language is no different. And so here I am, trying to write a message about change and am having a difficult time finding vocabulary that is not routed in the structures of struggle, aggression, and conformity that support our world.

How do you talk about change without implying that the current situation is harmful. Subtle differences may seem inconsequential, but realistically, struggle reinforces struggle and ease reinforces ease. Are the words, no, don't, stop, resist, tied to pain, tension, stress?

I'll attempt to evoke without inciting. What I want for you is to let go. Embrace loss of control. Lose control, because control is one way that we struggle against the ways of the universe and against ourselves. As Humans, we are a part of a giant mass of energy that flows and ebbs continually like waves in the ocean. We cannot control that, all we can do is try to enjoy it and allow ourselves to be not like pillars supporting a pier, firmly rooted deep into the ocean floor struggling to hold their ground. And not like a buoy floating lazily from side to side with a chain maintaining its range of motion, inhibiting it from straying too far. I want you to be like the surfer who realizes that the best option really is grab the best wave you can and ride it.

In a similar fashion, I want to say that living can be a more and more effortless process. Not that it will always be easy, but even in times of strain, there is a path of least resistance. This path is our authentic self. It is through increased effort that we resist that self. The weariness we feel after a long day in the world is that resistance. We effort to sit at our desks for long periods of time when our true self wants to walk and dance. We effort to hold in our emotions and maintain composure when inside we feel and want to express. We effort to 'fit in' 'be' a certain way, "find" ourselves when in reality we are already perfect.

But the truth, as I see it, is that the answers are not found through effort, they are found through release. We do not have to compel ourselves to grow, develop, achieve. This is what we do naturally and have been doing for thousands of years. It is our biological imperative. Just as a flower even in the harshest of conditions will find the easiest way to sunlight and water. Flourishing in human terms is often about getting out of our own way and allowing our natural, authentic selves to develop and thrive. The simple fact that we have evolved and continue to evolve allows me to say that.

Try something: pick an activity, any activity. Maybe something you do regularly. I want you to start cultivating ease and gentleness. In this way, you will slowly be training yourself away from resistance. So pick any activity. Can you do it without struggle? Can you find a way to do it effortlessly, gently, with pleasure. Can living itself be effortless, gentle, pleasurable? yes, yes, yes, yes, yes...