Breath of Fresh Air

I was reminded today of the powerful nature of Hanna Somatics and the importance of breathing. I was calling it productivity-lag, the feeling of slothiness I had upon returning from a 2 and a half week vacation. I was blaming it on the winter and my internal bear commanding me to stay in my bed and hibernate. It wasn't until I laid down today and did an intensive foray into the muscles of my shoulder, trunk, and waist that I realized I was simply feeling the effects of oxygen depletion due to constriction around my rib cage. After 6 years of practice, I'm still regularly amazed at the power of Hanna Somatics to open up possibilities I wasn't even looking for. I had become victim to my own body, as I know many do all the time. And as is so often the case, I wasn't aware of it until it was gone.

Such is the nature of Sensory Motor Amnesia. Such is the nature of normal. Normal has no judgement of good or bad, normal just maintains. Sensory Motor Amnesia, the forgetting how to feel and sense areas of the body that become rigid due to chronic contraction and injury leaves us blind to our own issues. In this way, as my chest and torso muscles tightened - from the plane rides? or perhaps from too much swinging of my Kettle Bells and pushups? - and my oxygen intake slowly decreased, I was simply aware of the foggy head and lethargy that plagued my days rather than the tight band of muscles that surrounded and impeded my ribs from opening and my waist/vertebrae from expanding.

All this is to say that as I laid down and moved into bending, twisting, and arm rolling movement, I began to notice an ease and lightness to my breath. Standing up, my shoulders and arms moved smoothly around my ribs and hung nicely on my chest. Feeling refreshed and energized, I jogged excitedly back to my office for my last evening client.

I find these moments really helpful. They remind me how much room I still have to improve and confirm the theories behind my practice. If your curious about your own oxygen intake and what a deeper, easier breathe might feel like, try these movements.

movement 1

Lie on your left side with your hips and knees bent to 90 degrees. Reach your right arm over the top of your head and hold your head near left ear As you inhale lift your head and right foot towards the ceiling feeling the center of your body shorten and contract. Keep your knees together so that the leg rolls as your right foot lifts up. Also, let your head be really heavy that you you're not straining your neck. Think about bringing your right shoulder and hip towards each other like your going to tuck your hip into your shoulder. Slowly exhale and let your body gently open up and lengthen as your head and foot lower back down. Make sure to rest completely at the end of each movement before moving on. Do this 3-5 times on the right side and as you finish the last repetition, lengthen your leg straight out beneath you and reach overhead. Then relax, roll onto your right side and repeat.

movement 2

Lie on your back with your your knees either bent or straight out on the ground. lift your right arm up towards the ceiling and then turn your palm away from your side and turn it in towards your side. Start this movement slowly/gently and as you get the hang of it, make the movement bigger, letting your shoulder move with it and then ultimately letting your whole spine, head and hips move with it. Feel how your whole body gets involved in the 'simple' turning of your hand

*if you're trying this at home, please move carefully, slowly and if it is at all painful, do it less even to the point of simply visualizing the movement.

Awareness is Action, a practice in the occupied

What I love about what I do is that it is a laboratory of sorts for testing theories of who we are and how we work. One theory I've been exploring is that awareness is an action unto itself. I find this repeatedly to be true. This is as the buddha taught. The process of non reaction is the process of simply noticing what is happening to you and just breathing. When I learned that technique at a vipassana meditation course it was about sitting, breathing and not moving no matter what happens. Inevitably, things happen. The aches and pains of accumulated hurts and tensions rise up to the surface. But the theory says if I just watch it and pay it no more attention than watching a leaf fall from a tree then it will continue to move. In practice this is true. To move and shift would be to blow that leaf back up towards the sky, delaying its passage. Sitting, breathing, watching whatever is happening in my soma moves through and the pain dissipates.

This experience fundamentally shifted my thinking and the way i approached massage and somatic work. This helped me to understand the mechanism behind why people feel better after a massage because what bodywork does is create awareness. If it's swedish, that awareness is at a somewhat superficial level. If it's deep tissue, that awareness can happen at a deeper level of muscle. If it's through Hanna Somatic work, that awareness can happen at any point, depending on how you position the client and how you direct their action and attention.

But the effect is happening not through the pushing and rubbing of tissue but through the awaking of awareness and the directing of attention. Or to put it in a different way, the awakening of awareness and directing of attention triggers the slew of mechanisms that allow change in the body. As Human Somas we are innately self healing and self regulating. That self regulation and healing happens quickly and effectively in an environment that is connected and aware.

I have seen this effectively happen again and again with myself and my clients. Pressing on a sore point, that point loses it's soreness. Breathing into a tight muscle, that muscle unwinds. Moving an area of disconnected/lack of sensation, that area becomes aware and connected followed by relaxed and free. The theory is confirmed again and again. It is not even neccessary that I know what is going to happen. I just trust that my client's system will work itself out.

So why should it be any different at the social level? I've been thinking about this a lot with regards to the current Occupy Wall Street and it's related Occupied movements. At it's simple level, it is an organizing of various peoples coming together to draw awareness to the dysfunctions in our society, dysfunctions that are leading to large rates of unemployment and larger rates of employed but struggling. For example median income fell 2.3% to $49,455 in 2010 according to the us census bureau and the amount of people living at or below the poverty line increased 17%. You might say then that the poverty line is getting closer and closer to the median income... That's a problem, perhaps one of the fundamental problems.

For the most part, there has been general support for the Occupy movements and although there have been various interactions with police, the protesters have been allowed to camp and have been growing in numbers and in area as solidarity protests spring up all over the U.S. and the World. The opposition comes in the form of frustration and questioning of the protester's intent. What do that want? What are they protesting specifically about? What do they suggest we do to fix it.

If the theory of "Awareness is Action" is correct, then the protesters need not do anything other than exactly what they are doing. Simply by being there, there are putting into action mechanisms of change and that change is already beginning to unwind the dysfunctional system. More over, by not acting violently and demanding that change happens, they are creating an environment where the very large living organism that is our collective society can find it's easiest way towards balance. Balance is not achieved overnight and potentially may never be reached. It is the process towards balance that is important.

What do we need to do? we need to do nothing more than pay attention and watch the shifts happen. What will the shifts look like? That will be the interesting part and I'm very thankful that so far the movement has not tried to dictate that.

What I have seen is that there has been media shifts. Not only has there been a large amount of coverage of the actual occupations but there has also been more discussion in the media about the things the occupied are protesting. Articles about poverty rates, about bankers and hedge fund managers being indicted for wrong doing. General strikes and people moving their money to credit unions and smaller banks are hot topics these days. Every day as I check my facebook feed, there are not only messages of solidarity, anger and hope but people are talking and thinking about this in a larger way than they were two months ago. In a capitalist society, even the media is under the sway of supply and demand and what the people are talking about and thinking about, the media will cover.

This thing we are going through is just that, something to be gone through. Something to watch and observe as it bubbles, permeates, shifts and takes us a along for a ride. The changes that our society will make and the changes that we as individuals will make are already happening. Assuming the theory is correct...

botox:one part neurotoxin, one part psychopathy

I was reading recently about these studies people have been doing looking at the effects of botox on emotions and quite frankly, they are incredibly interesting from a Somatic viewpoint.

Researchers have known for a year or so that when people have botox injected into their facial muscles, besides reducing wrinkles, they feel emotions less strongly.

More recently, researchers at USC discovered that people who have botox injections also have a difficult time perceiving the emotions other people are having. Essentially, when we see someone having an emotion, we reflect it in our own bodies with mirror neurons and also with actually mimicking their facial movements... I am remembering back to my research on Neuro Linguistic Programming which says that if you want to build rapport with someone watch them and match what they're doing...

All of this bodes very well for the field of Somatics, where one of the central theories is that the emotional body is the physical body is the spirit, is just one; Soma. What this says is that the emotion is the movement and if movement is decreased, as with sensory motor amnesia and any type of holding/rigidity, emotional capacity is decreased as well. Or more accurately, the nervous system feels a movement happening in the face or throughout the body and we then label that movement angry, sad, confused, disgusted. If no movement happens, then there's nothing to label.

One thing to consider: does this allude to "the dark vise" or "senile posture" as an indicator of depression, flat affect? The "Dark Vise" is a posture that Thomas Hanna describes as one of habituated tension in multiple motor patterns. The reflexive withdrawal response, tightening the flexor muscles of the anterior body, collides with the reflexive excitatory response, tightening the extensor muscles of the posterior body, and you get a situation where a person's whole body is held rigidly by their musculature. The person experiences movement/life as very effortful and movement/life/emotion becomes very limited. If one is to extrapolate from these recent findings, the "Dark Vise" is most assuredly a posture of depression and diminished emotional experience. Probably much more dramatically diminished given that a person's whole body, not just their face, is 'frozen'.

And if that's true then could Somatic Education be an actual solution to depression? Meaning if someone had free control over their physiology and particularly over the expressive muscles of the face, would they start to naturally have free flowing emotional experiences like the rest of us? I have had the opportunity to work with a few people with clinical depression and have witnessed intense emotional releases with this work but can not speak yet to this being a cure all. I have limited ability to assess such changes given that I am not able to diagnose depression or any other emotional state psychology holds realm over.

The scarier side of what these studies proport is that people are voluntarily diminishing their ability to feel emotion and, perhaps more importantly, understand and empathize with other people. Our ability to empathize seems critical to our success as social organisms. Not because we need to "feel" what others are feeling but that there is so much communication going on non verbally helping us to understand and live with each other. Just as rigidity/sensory motor amnesia(sma) inhibits free flowing communication in the body and creates dysfunction, we can and should expect that a society not communicate freely through non verbal cues will suffer for it.

If you go by certain diagnostic measures, it appears that we are essentially injecting psychopathy into our bodies. Psychopathy is marked by an inability to empathize making it easier for a person to harm someone else. It is also marked by actually harming someone else...

I'm not saying that botox will lead to people killing each other, but a person who can not observe another person and judge whether their having a good or bad day is likely to struggle making friends, keeping a job and otherwise navigating the multitude of social situations they face on a regular basis. Most importantly a person who looks around and is numb to the experiences of others is going to miss out on the complexity of experiences and emotions that happen right before their eyes day in and day out.

But then again, is this part of the draw to botox? A way of escaping from the complexities of life. A person choosing smooth over natural is at the root of the denying, if just a little bit, realities grip on their experience. And is there an appeal for some to mute the colors of their emotional world? Does botox make someone feel less worry, less anxiety too? Certainly there is to be expected a feeling of relief looking in the mirror and not seeing the signs of your years on this earth but perhaps the relief comes to from the muscular numbing. As worry lines fade, how about the worried feelings that come with them? As they inject it into shoulder muscle to cause temporary relaxing again is there an easy of the stressed out feeling accompanying elevated shoulders? An intriguing prospect indeed.

For me, easing the downs does not outweigh lowering the highs or broadening the mids... I'll happily watch my cheeks wrinkle with smile lines and my forehead crease with worry as my life continues with the good the bad, and the not so pretty moments.

Reflections from healing and transformation seminar

Please excuse any innacuracies. The information here is filtered through my limited comprehension and/or inability to express my thoughts.

I took a two-day seminar this weekend with Dan Siegel, an interpersonal neurobiologist and Jack Kornfield, a leading buddhist teacher and founder of Spirit Rock. It was a conversation between these two men looking at the union between Eastern, Buddhist, thought, and modern scientific study. Much was discussed. Much was questioned. Experiences were had. It was amazing. It was quite somatic :)

I was most moved by Jack, who with an open heart, referenced thousands of years old Buddhist texts, told stories/jokes and guided us through meditation to help connect with deep places of healing within ourselves. I appreciated the way he acknowledged humor as a pedagogical method. “Get them to laugh and when their mouth is open, drop in a bit of wisdom”

Dan Siegel on the other hand inspired my western pedantic training and while Jack was thumbing through poetry books for passages by Mary Oliver and Rilke, Dan would cite study upon study that is our burgeoning body of knowledge for mindfulness practices.

He talked about mystery. The mysteries that have held back modern scientific pursuit. The fallacious mind body split that leads to division rather than unification, to rigidity rather than fluidity. The mystery of what exactly is a healthy mind? What exactly is a mind? What is Attention and from there, how do we use attention to help bring someone to a healthy state. From a healthy individual, how do we create healthy culture and society?

We talked about parenting, attachment disorders and how certain developmental failures can lead someone towards developing PTSD in response to trauma. We talked about resource states and helping someone recovering from trauma learn to expand what Dan referred to as their ‘window of receptivity’ meaning how do you get someone to slowly acknowledge the trauma they’ve experienced and let it heal without retraumatizing them?

We talked about organisms as energy and information. We all are descendants of the big bang, right? The brain then, is simply a system that helps organize the flow of energy and information. We can use attention to bring conscious awareness to areas that are stuck or chaotic (Rigidity and chaos being the telltale signs of dis-ease). With modern imaging capabilities, studies are showing that as we become mindful, our brains start working in a more integrated fashion. The parts of our brain that are responsible for and require integration; the limbic system and the corpus callosum for example, repair themselves through mindfulness/somatic techniques. Therefore, it was proposed that a healthy state is an integrated state: a state of wholeness. This is by no means a new idea. This is the oldest idea out there, but how exciting to see Doctors and Academics starting to look at and study this soft t truth.

Also, if we are made up of energy and information then to understand the processes and happenings in our system we need to have an understanding of quantum physics because Newtonian physics stop working at the subatomic level. Dr. Siegel proposed that to understand the workings of the brain; we need to be thinking of probabilities. It works something like this; a healthy mind fluctuates between a state of neutral (rest) and a state of excitability (action or thought). Our past experiences prime us towards certain spikes in action. With trauma, the plateaus or primed states keep us from getting back to a neutral position and predispose us to reliable/limiting patterns of thought and action.

I imagine that moving forward, this will be linked with posture. For what else is posture than a state of probability, or a primed action? I’ve learned to see stuck emotional states, dysfunction, held injuries in chests, shoulders hips and knees that have been held so long the person doesn’t even realize they’re still holding. I suspect and hope that there is room in this new field to look at these connections.

Walking in with a dubious, critical mind, I was disarmed again and again the way both Dan and Jack wisely linked all the necessary parts, answering questions with compassion and a decent serving of humility. There was much talk about a need for language that discharges limiting notions of spirituality and religion. There was also a great deal of time spent showing how studies from across the academic plane are in confluence and therefore strengthen their individual findings. I closed my eyes and could hear Thomas Hanna up on stage talking about Somas and human empowerment. Why did he use the word Soma? Because body, mind, soul are limited/deconstructed/disintegrated. But on the other hand, if you want to reach people, you need to use words that they understand so how about mindfulness, attention training?

I got to share my experience with some beautiful people on the front line in various ways. But shit, who isn’t on the front line? If you live in this world and you interact with people, you’re on the front line, whether you’re a clerk at a gas station, a first grade teacher or leading a squadron of marines into combat. We all benefit from understanding ourselves and operating from a place of centeredness and health.

It was all immensely healing for myself and exciting to see that this is not a resistance or an alternative theory, but rather the natural progression of slow scientific progress. In that sense, there was necessity but not urgency. Whether we want to or not, this transformation of thought and clarity of understanding is happening and will continue to have profound and unexpected results.

this morning, sitting with you

Meditating this morning, sitting, feeling, sensing is nothing more than everything. I am looking for continued life lessons in how to not try so hard, and how to run through walls and not into them. It doesn't get much easier than simply sitting and observing.

I'm a very active person and tend to like my lessons learned hard, through injury and recovery, through speeding tickets, through eyes burned red from jalapeno pepper oil. I'm also realizing more and more that this might not be the easiest path to self actualization and realized dreams.

But in meditation, I find these lessons through healing. This morning, I am reminded of the universal truth that everything is not good or bad, it's simply wonderful in its vacillating state. There's no need to try to create an outcome and clinging to that outcome only serves to perpetuate suffering in myself and others. But by sitting and simply observing, relaxing all necessity and just enjoying the experience inside this body, the unfolding of events can be witnessed, enjoyed even, without judgement, condemnation.

I had this experience before, when learning this meditation technique, Vipassana. There was a feeling of being wrapped in the nurturing warmth of a compassionate parent. There was memory of strong hurts, ages old, perhaps centuries old being eased. There were no tears but just the sweetness of relief that comes after hours of crying.

I'm reminded that the conscious brain, our sensory motor cortices are inhibitory centers. With Hanna Somatics, we use a voluntary motor action to bring up a conscious sensation. With that conscious sensation, involuntary muscular contraction can be eased. Years of built up tension starts to soften.

In my intentional sitting, I feel that inhibitory action. I feel my involuntary compulsions/clinging start to relax. I feel everything and whatever I feel eases. I feel deeper than muscular levels, into the culture, the history and the future. As consciousness expands, the clouds of discomfort, the sludge of personal slights/global injustice and aggression to ourselves and our planet wash away as if from a late afternoon thundershower and reveal underneath the compulsive regenerating force that is always present and patiently awaits inevitable changes of life.

And I'm temporarily calm, and beautiful and loving of the mission and it's hipsters, its homeless, its trendy bars, dingy taquerias, and frenetic youth.

Perhaps the mission, the universe, you are temporarily loving of me too. Or perhaps that love is there continuously and I just have to keep sitting.

Darkness is not the opposite of Light

so the line on the wall said. It is merely the absence of it.

Wise words for a graffiti artist in the mission. But then again, a graffiti artist can appreciate this, the way sunlight or the absence of obscures, changes, illuminates their work of art. Or the way a dark cloud or passing truck temporarily blocks the light; bringing darkness.

There’s an idea I read recently, in physics, about the known unknown. That is, we can understand fully what happens only in the places that light can reach. We can understand what happens on the borders, where light stops. Furthermore, we know that there is something,theoretically, beyond the range where there is light but we cannot know what that something is. Light, vibrating waves or beaming photons(depending on how you look at it), is the thread of space and time. Without light, there is nothing.

I had a personal experience with this recently. I took a course in Vipassana Meditation, a form of buddhist meditation where the goal is insight, deep wisdom about yourself and the world. In this technique,the first focus of your wisdom is yourself. To observe, objectively what is happening within your body. You observe your body as if it were something external from you, arms legs, torso. “no me, no my”. You observe and you observe and you observe curious things. You observe areas or your body that feel somewhat nice, the subtle sensation of vibrations, tinglings, warmth, energy flowing like water passing over rocks in a river. You observe areas where there is intense sensations like pain, burning, stabbing, a leg falling asleep, sharp tinglings where you want to itch and itch and itch. You’re taught that these are distractions, the seeds of misery and suffering. To react would only multiply and further the suffering and misery. So you sit and just observe. and then you notice other areas where you feel…. nothing. A whole section of your face, missing. Some fingers, missing. A whole foot, missing. What a curious thing. You saw yourself in the mirror earlier that day and were sure that you looked whole, complete. There were no holes in your face, you ate breakfast with all your fingers, you walked on two feet. But internally, there is nothing.

And this nothing is not the opposite of something, for that too would be something. It’s not numbness I’m talking about, numbness is certainly something and for sure, there is numbness in places. What you experience is the absence of something and what that absence leaves; nothing.

I wasn’t surprised by this. As a Hanna Somatic Educator, I’m very familiar with Sensory Motor Amnesia;a forgetfullness of how to voluntarily move and consciously feel an area of your body. My intellectual side was fascinated by this phenomenon of my nervous system. What sensory motor amnesia means is that movement and sensation are linked together. Meaning; as movement decreases, as an area of the body becomes rigid, sensation decreases as well. When the flow of energy and movement no longer reaches certain muscle fiber, it’s as if they cease to exist. You can feel the areas around them. If they are rather superficial, lieing close to the surface, you can touch them with your hand. But until sensation is recovered, voluntary movement cannot happen. Until movement is returned, it’s as if they are gone.

and I see this quite often in my work with trauma recovery. A person has been injured, suffered abuse, broken bones, surgery and in a protective reflex has blocked themselves from feeling certain parts of their body. They do this instinctively by freezing the affected area. If you touch a hot stove, immediately, your hand is drawn back into your center and will remain tucked into your side, frozen, until the pain is gone. A soldier, shot in the stomach will reflexively curl up, clutching the wound as they hobble off to safety. A victim of sexual abuse may disconnect from their pelvis, tightening the muscles around their groin and lower abdomen.

In a normal, healthy world, these postures, these reflexes would only last as long as it took the person to get to safety and consciously feel that they are free from harm. But in a world where we are constantly inundated with trauma, stress, sensory overload sometimes we forget to let go. We keep holding on to our wounds, protecting them from further injury.

And in this way, our own bodies become the dark clouds that obscure light. In this way, over time, the borders of where we exist start to draw back and darkness, the absence of light starts to creep towards us.

But also in this way, with understanding or natural process, we can proceed. Venturing forward with the knowledge of what is and what isn’t, we can start to move with the light, knowing that all we have to do is bring light and the darkness will peel away. With the guidance of a Hanna Somatic Educator, trauma victims can recover pain-free movements in areas of their body and in this way recover their sense of wholeness, of light shining throughout all parts of their inner universe.

And so back in my meditation I sat further and observed these borders of my inner darkness. And bit by bit, little waves of sensation start to creep over the borders. And bit by bit what did not exist springs into being with the vibrancy of a young flower breaking through ground cover. Bit by bit, light returned to what was once dark and there was knowledge and there was life and there was intense sensation and deep ache of old trauma, but at least there was not nothing.

And back on that Mural, the sun rises and a grafitti artist’s words spring into being, into action, into the mind of a writer, the research of a physicist and the reality of our universe.

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.