Somatic Bodywork at the Detox Market

Hi there, just wanted to let the readers out there know that i'll be doing a talk and demonstration at The Detox Market on Valencia street, next to Herbivore.  It's coming up Thursday, July 12th at 6:30.  The Detox Market is a completely all natural health and beauty store with a philosophy that matches up nicely with mine so I'm really looking forward to speaking there.

This will also be a great opportunity if you or someone you know if interested in this work to check it out and see the effects live.  Here's a flier for more information.

releasing more than muscles

What if I told you that Hanna Somatics was as good for addressing anxiety as it is for releasing a tight neck muscles? Or that it could resolve nervous breakdowns as quickly as a back cramp? Would you call bullsh#t on me? I’m nervous to make such comments and in fact as the words stumble off my fingers I feel my internal monologue laughing a bit at the absurdity. But maybe it’s not so absurd…

This is where all the theory comes face to face with reality. The theory is that as somas, we are integrated; meaning what happens to one part of us happens to all parts of us. An injury is not just to your hand. It’s to your whole self. Although the pain may be localized on one of your fingers it travels to your spine and brain, and the response from your nervous system travels from your center out to draw your arm into your center. So the whole body experiences and reacts to it. Similarly, the theory is that there is no separation between the emotional and physical. Events in our lives are sensed and responded to and then we tag them with corresponding emotions.

Thomas Hanna, in the developing of clinical somatic techniques, focused around three innate movement patterns and they’re corresponding emotional experience. The red light "withdrawal" reflex corresponds to negative fear, anxiety and grief with a powerful contraction of the anterior muscles of the body. The green light "landau" reflex, alternately, typified by a contraction of the paravertebrals and corresponding posterior muscles to joy, excitement, and effort. The trauma response, a side cringing away from pain corresponds with trauma and aversion to pain by tightening everything on that side of the body.

For example, when something scary or sad happens, we instinctively curl a bit contracting our stomachs and chest muscles, bringing the head forward, tucking the pelvis and turning the legs and arms inwards. If we are continually confronted with fear and sadness we will begin to become “permanently” frozen in this position and people will say “stand up, straight, cheer up!” to no avail. On the other hand, if we actively and continually bring ourselves into this position, we will begin to feel the same emotions of fear or grief. Try it! Go ahead and walk around for three minutes with your head hanging, shoulders rounded forward, spine slumped and feet turned in and try saying “it’s a beautiful day and I feel great!” You’ll probably find that the exclamation at the end of that sentence doesn’t feel all that honest.

In the western medical world of divide, isolate and treat, we curiously already see lots of correlations between emotional and physical challenges. True Story I used to have pretty severe IBS, irritable bowel syndrome. I went through all sorts of tests, ultrasounds and the like and was recommended various things, including… Anti-anxiety medication! To my 16 year old mind, this made no sense, Why would they be giving me medication for a emotional problem to deal with what was clearly a physical issue?

Well, it’s clear to me now that they did this because relieving anxiety tends to ease IBS. I no longer take anything for my IBS and in fact have fairly normal bowels now, thank you very much, largely to the introduction of somatic movements into my life.  The anxiety medication never helped much anyway and I was getting tired of taking Imodium every day. I also no longer use my asthma inhaler as the wheezing and chronic inablitiy to breathe deeply has disappeared. These two largely stress related conditions have been simultaneously taken care of primarily by learning how to control and relax the muscles in the center of my body; strong powerful muscles that flex the spine and bring the ribs and pelvis closer together. This strong and persistent contraction makes deep inhales difficult, impedes the peristaltic movement of the digestive system and triggers a sympathetic stress response similar to what might happen if a pterodactyl flew in my apartment window right now. Robert Sapolsky wrote a great book called, “why Zebras don’t Get Ulcers” catalogs all the effects of a chronic stress response so I will abstain from going into too much here, but suffice it to say, IBS and Asthma were likely the least of my troubles had the chronic tension and stress response continued.

As I began practicing somatics, feeling the relief of my asthma and digestive issues, I came to understand how all of this had happened. I started to regret the sucking in of my gut that I’d picked up as a teenager. This innocent attempt to strengthen my abs and self-consciously hide my belly had inadvertently created a perfect storm for IBS, Chronic Asthma and an undiagnosed Anxiety disorder. Through this discovery process, I was also able to really consider the effect of losing my father at a young age; a strong experience of grief during my major developmental years.

 So although I initially got into this work to deal with “physical” pain in my arms, neck and shoulders, I’ve been greatly surprised by how much benefit I’ve gotten for the emotional problems I didn’t even realize that I had! And while in my practice I primarily see people for physical pain, I hear all the time about the changes they feel emotionally, the subtlety people begin to experience, the old traumas that rear up and finally move on, how much more easily they breath, sleep, and deal with the spontaneous dips and curves that life brings.

It makes me wonder, a lot of things. If we are treating emotional problems, what exactly do they look and feel like? If someone has a back spasm, is there a common emotional experience around that? If someone in in the midst of a psychotic break, has schizophrenia, agoraphobia, bi-polar disease, how does that manifest in terms of their muscles and functional organization? Maybe instead of asking someone how their neck is feeling, I should ask them how their social anxiety is doing? It also forces me to consider, to what extent are there really genetic triggers that “cause” anxiety and how can one maximize most effectively the work they do with a psychologist or psychiatrist to heal all aspects of their troubles. I certainly think that integrating multiple approaches is a really helpful way to address these problems and by no means want to insinuate that there aren’t other things involved. It’s just that, as a somatic educator, I think people should be free from dependance on drugs, therapy and any other outside remedy, including me! I'd also like to know just how much can be avoided and resolved simply through movement and awareness.

As I progress with my practice and with this blog I imagine I'll be exploring this more, so please feel free to message me with any thoughts or feedback you have on the matter.

May we all get better together ☺

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.

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