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.