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 ☺

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...

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.

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?

the clear path, futuresight, scattered focus

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

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

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

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

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

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

flip flip flip, scattering off... gabriel