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.

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.