Hanna Somatics

Has anyone heard of this neuromuscular re-education therapy?
. Or if you do indeed practice it i would be glad to hear from you.

I posted some time ago ( aug 07)about being tight on one side of the body, my left, particularly in the core region at my side/waist. This gives me a slight tilt or lean to that side, with the pelvis and ribicage pulled closer together, so to speak on that side Invariably the hip is often higher, shoulders a different height and , in my case i bear wieght more on my right side.

I stopped asana about a year ago after experimenting with yin/restorative, bolster yoga and aadil’s hip-opening series.

I have been learning somatic excercises for about 6 months now,started back in May. I do struggle with Lesson 3 of the Cat Stretch specially diesgined to give you greater verticality and correct any tilt. Though i have problems sensing this part and releasing this side.

It reprogams the sensory-motor tracts of your brain through the cultivation of sensroy awareness and biofeedback muscle- brain training. I got into this through a program touted’ free your psoas’ but now am working on the ’ outgrrowing the myth of aging’ series aka the cat stretch.

I am trying so the theory goes, change the muscular sytem through unscrambilng and remebering the sensory motor functions of the nervous system.

I would be glad to hear anyone who practices this with their yoga or or on it’s own or martial arts or whatever. It would appear to be relatively unknown. But it is worth learning if you suffer from tight muscles and grappling with a therpaeutic type pratice.

Hi there

I have just completed a vinyasa flow teacher training programme in August and somatics was an integral part of it. We would practice somatics at the beginning and the feeling you get from it is amazing. It allows you to experience movment in your body from the inside out…I have recently started teaching and i use a little somatics at the beginning of practice to relax and help the students connect with their core. If you want to check it out a little further go to http://www.vinyasaflowyoga.ie/somatics.php

Warm Wishes
Justine

While i have made some progress, it seems like whenever i try to practice lesson 3 of the ‘cat stretch’ (though there is no actual stretch involved), freeing the muscles of the side/waist, i just seem to end up tighter.

I can free the perphiery, arms and legs, and the psoas, without too much trouble but i struggle with the core on my left side, and it is quite disconcerting, to say the least! Though I have got release on a few occassions, i’ve had trouble replicating it. So i get wary about practicing it.

It can seem like whenever i get improvements, i revisit lesson 3 and then i just feel tighter again on one side. And so then i go through the movements again i can get good results from, which are practically all the movements from both those series i mentioned.

I’m aware there are trained practitioners out there that use assisted pandiculation and from whati can tell perhaps they provide some resitance when you contract a muscle and use the slow controlled release principle.(For those unfamiliar with the theory of this, i.e pandiculation, ,which you obviously are’nt, it’s said that, At the point of control and relaxation phase of said muscle ,new sensory signal is sent to the brain and the muscle tension or tonus reduces to lower than it was before.)But most of them live in california. (There are only 3 in the uk, and Dr Hanna does’nt live round the corner. Great shame about his tragic car accident a third of the way through his Wave 1- Training lectures. A great loss to this mind-body field- one can only conjeecture what he might be working on now) And there is simply not enough nformation or folk out there that practice this. And i know it’s all about teaching oneself, but i have to rely on self-help resources and the kind guidance of the man i got the audio instruction from, whom i respect a great deal and is obviously verybusy trying to help others. He is one of the leading innovators in the field, i visit his wbsite now and again, www.somatics.com, and i do find the practitioner training at the novato institute very interesting, as well as classical yoga.


I’ll digress here- is a bit about my practice and some bio

I pushed too far one morning 2 years ago follwoing a brief 4 day cure, when returning to my usual ashtanga-type practice. The contractions returned but somewhat stronger this time. And my young normal 10 month old dynamic energetic pratice fell away.
Who knows? maybe my ego, from a yogic perspective:), has had this in strore for me for a while, though i’ve been through heroin addiction which i embraced after personal crisis about ten years ago i , something yoga removed desire for so i’ve not been without my struggles.( i had the great fortune to try out a yoga class 3 years ago a few weeks after quitting a methadone script, and contrinued despite their being more typically more girls in the class than boys, and all that. i had never done any excercise before when i actually felt more energetic afterwards then before. I did find that rather odd, and a new thing for me. So i stuck with it , happened to have a free special pass and almost relgious practice at home, do neti at5-6am in the morning and all that.)

But now i find myelf as if i’ve taken back steps with this mind-body exploration thing and i need to find my way again.

I know there is some biographical info buried in this post, but i find it mildly cathartic just giving you some background info as to where i am, and offloading a little. I’m a 35 year old male to add to that and some of this detail is perhaps why my awareness, period , could be more polished, so to speak.

I hope this i’ve managed to articulate myself with some clarity here and persepctive. I’ve hung around this site long enough but i don’t post here much. Without being too sentimental, there is obviously a very kind warm-hearted and knowledgeable/experienced community here. The learning obviously never stops. I have found this site helpful and supportive and can read that the posters here are sincere and appreciate yoga’s hidden depths.

Feel free to comment on hanna somatics

-when i queried the coach,a noted authority on the subject , who supplied me audio instruction for the Somatic movements designed to supplement the [I]Somatics [/I] book that you should get if you’re interested in this.He gave me this answer when i said i struggled with lesson 3-

‘Allow the tension to stabilize, the sensation to become more vivid. Then relax.’ (or words to that effect)

He also said you are training yourself to relax from habitual tension

I don’t like to bother him as i know his time is precious so feel free to comment about your own experiences, knowledge or insights in somatics or yoga therapeutics. There don’t seem alot folk doing these movements. Indeed when i googled the important keyowrds here, my post came up. I was so impressed.

Perhaps i should move to Dublin.:smiley: As that style of yoga JustyB sounds right up my street.

[B]—[/B]I think this thread might just really open up.
Perhaps me too, i mean metaphorically.Mmmm

I might try to dig out and post it here a .pdf titled .‘Might you be strengthening your pain’ which helped my understanding of somatics and why schools of yoga that emphasized just strengthening and stretching seemed misguided ,or why my own practice seemed to lead nowhere. Why the contractions if anything may have just got tighter.
Otherwise you can read ’ Beyond Stretching’ at www.somatics.com. Hopefully i have the author’s permisson.

In the interest of providing more info. about this therapy or discipline, i’d like to suggest you watch a famous video (around 1990/1 i think), currently posted on u-tube at the moment, which should help one’s understanding of the rationale and principles behind this approach in theory and in practice.

You can look up on U-tube-
[B]
‘Unlocking your body with Thomas Hanna’[/B],
the inventor of this system.

Hanna was a very gifted student of Moshe Feldenkrais and from what i can surmise he took his techniques and principles ,refined and developed them, as he credits, to make a workable system…Earlier somatic pioneers like Feldenkrais, & man called M.Alexander before him, both came to the conclusion or hit upon -self-discoveries to the effect that the muscular system and nervous system were symbiotic and that the key to unlocking the former , and therefore a great deal of human suffering and musculo-skeletal ills, was through the latter, specifically those parts involed in sensory-motor function.

The key to understanding this is that muscles have no control of their own;they’re controlled by the NS or brain ( muscle tonus can be changed through regaining voluntary control of sensory motor functions that have become as Hanna would put it in a state of ‘amnesia’, the brain simply needs waking up to restore this, i hear the neo cortex plays a aignificant role i think though also other areas too involved.

If you look at part 3 of the videos i suggest , you’ll witness a technique used during a session of clinical somatics by a trained practitoner . They call it 'assisted pandiculation

You can pandiculate yourself using special somatic exercises contained at the end of Thomas Hanna’s groundbreaking book, [B][I]Somatics[/I][/B], providing you can decipher the instructions and the pics of the wooden doll figure and can persevere with the learning process involved. I would urge you to be patient and stick with the learning process.A trained clinical practitoner helps/guides/coaches and can get much quicker results… And by learning i mean not the rote kind but the sensory-motor kind ( like playing a piano or the perfect trikonasana or whatever, it takes some patience and time, like anything in life)

I would suggest you complement the book with guided audio instruction ( somatics.ed or .com) or if you’re lucky enough to live in california and have the kind of problems addressed in the book and the cash, go see a skilled practitioner who will be familiar with the spectrum of clinical techniques ,and so i hear, effect much quicker and bigger results.( not tried it myself but it kinda makes sense, can believe it)

As i said earlier in this thread, where my asana practice tended to contract my muscles even tighter and therefore provided only temporary benefits the help Hanna Somatics has offered me has been different. The consolation here , therpauetically speaking, is that the protocls are very clear, the system gratifyingly and beautifully simple, the science solid- firmly grounded in modern neurophysiology( no esoteric explanations for the seeming ‘magic’ effected) and comforting, and the results way more predictable. It’s all about cultivating sensory awareness through bridging the mind-body discord/gap, in my case.

It is a mind-body discipline that inspires the idea that as one grows older ,one can become more supple and outgrow the usual destiny of ageing we tend to resign ourselves to thinking- decrepitute and becoming stiffer etc.

I refer to the man behind that website i mention,somatics.com, and as he puts it-

The proof of the pudding ( like yogaasana–my words) is in the eating.

Except this can help people that have struggled to find refief through their practice of certain schools of hatha yoga.

The problem with my asana practice in 2007 after i psuhed too far, was i think i was possiibly conditioning my muscles into a higher state of contraction and reifnforciing the patterns that were there already.Certain schools of yoga like iyengar with a skilled teacher and willing student one-on-one could also provide therpaeutic help but there might seem to be more variables invovled to make this happen, and the results i can’t help thinking less predicatable (and possibly slower) These ar just my own thoughts on the subject, though i have’nt tried an asana teacher one-on-one therapeutic-type session, the beauty of this system is it’s sheer simplicity as well as safety and predictablility in terms of it’s results.

As you can surmise i am still still working on becoming my own somatic educator/teacher. And i daresay if iever return to somekind of asana practice in the future it would be a fantastic complement to it. I hear elite athletes can use it to enhance their performance on a mental and phsyical level and, and this gentle approach has a meditative quality to it which suits me.

Whe i first read about the theory behind this approach and how muscles were kept tight behind brain-level conditioning , it just made more sense than anything else i had read before.And i had done a certain amount of research online. I arrived at Hanna Somatics through a search for a way to release my psoas muscle( supta virasana, manual palpation techniques( incl. tpt, atennis ball and all that, Liz Koch’s book the ‘psoas manual’ etc,study of anatomy, hip-opening asana etc), when i found a somatic excercise program after many google searches for ‘psoas’ titled ‘free your poss’ and the guy who created it , a student of Hanna,was just so helpful and his explanations struck a resonant chord with me, intellectually that is they just made so much sense. A kind of eureka moment for me.

I’m now exploring other programs as i now appreciate my whole body was tight, well specifically the left-handside in my case.(It is all integrated after all-there are patternsl and compensations in our musco-skeletal system). I guess Hanna would call this the trauma reflex pattern of muscle contraction as he said that these patterns were held there by postural relexes of which this is one of three main ones ( red light and greenlight he also termed being the other 2- most folk have combinations of these two or the third, the other ones affecting respectively the front and back of the body and the trauma, the sides of the body- the last is they say usually a response to injury or trauma on one side of the body and the contrraction is a cringe reaction that has never relased itself, emotionally( stress particularly, attributed as a main cause as well as inujury/trauma to all these contraction patterns) and physically

As i’ve said already ,If my copy of a .pdf document entitled ’ Might you be strengthening your pain’ turns up which explains this quite well in easy to understand language i’ll post ithere. Brain moves muscles which in turn move bones/joints. All these manipulative therapies done to you by some one else miss this point altogether enitrely.That the body has it’s own innate healiing wisdom and intelligence; one just needs ,to sort of, awaken it. Hanna called it an educational process where one relearns how to move and function etc., sensory-motor function specifically( new neural connections are made, the brain kind of ‘wakes up’ so to speak, colour/sensation, the world becomes more vivid etc)

Hope this makes sense

One really has to try this therapy out to appreciate what it has to offer, especially if other approaches have offered limited or temporary benefits

Not entirely sure what the rules are on posting links (or how removals are arbitrated) but here we are-

This is first Part ,there are three parts thuough,you’ll notice.

[QUOTE=core789;14550]Has anyone heard of this neuromuscular re-education therapy?
. Or if you do indeed practice it i would be glad to hear from you.

I posted some time ago ( aug 07)about being tight on one side of the body, my left, particularly in the core region at my side/waist. This gives me a slight tilt or lean to that side, with the pelvis and ribicage pulled closer together, so to speak on that side Invariably the hip is often higher, shoulders a different height and , in my case i bear wieght more on my right side.

I stopped asana about a year ago after experimenting with yin/restorative, bolster yoga and aadil’s hip-opening series.

I have been learning somatic excercises for about 6 months now,started back in May. I do struggle with Lesson 3 of the Cat Stretch specially diesgined to give you greater verticality and correct any tilt. Though i have problems sensing this part and releasing this side.

It reprogams the sensory-motor tracts of your brain through the cultivation of sensroy awareness and biofeedback muscle- brain training. I got into this through a program touted’ free your psoas’ but now am working on the ’ outgrrowing the myth of aging’ series aka the cat stretch.

I am trying so the theory goes, change the muscular sytem through unscrambilng and remebering the sensory motor functions of the nervous system.

I would be glad to hear anyone who practices this with their yoga or or on it’s own or martial arts or whatever. It would appear to be relatively unknown. But it is worth learning if you suffer from tight muscles and grappling with a therpaeutic type pratice.[/QUOTE]

Yes, it can be done. Erikson was a great psychiatrist. He was paralyzed in bed. He used his mental power to remember the sensory moves. He got again control of his movements. Read about this in the Wikipedia.

Personally, I had a friend who was paralyzed in bed in his twenties. He applied yoga mental techniques for months in a row and recovered, almost fully. He was still slightly limping with his left foot.

After, he was in such a good physical condition that people admired him. He was even exercising at gym rings apparatus.

He learned lot of yoga and went to a trip in India, where he was warmly received by the yogis living in caves. He showed me the pictures with the yogis.

In his country dignitaries often appealed to him to cure them and their relatives.

Thanks for your contribution to this thread,Oak333. I enjoy reading your posts( and your humour) like the one on spiral theory here and mathematics( a stab in the dark here but perhaps you’re maths academic or in that profession)

Your stories of yogis is fascinating, as is your mention of Erickson.

Moshe Feldenkrais was influenced by Milton Erickson,hypnosis pioneer, as do NLP people ( though i’m not too sure about that whole field myself). Thomas Hanna was quite a learned man and i would’nt even have been suprised if he had brushed shoulders with erickson too. Alot of these intellectual and seminal thinkers often tend to attract and feed off each other.

What you describe with Erickson’s dramatic self-healing does sound rather akin to sensory remembering or “body memories”. I did look up Wikipedia :slight_smile: and read the stuff there.

And well done to your friend! Very inspiring story-Sounds like a remarkable individual.A magical healer, indeed.

GOOD for him.

Thanks!

Here i include a hand-out on the ‘Cat Stretch’( though there is no actual stretch involved- Dr. hanna just called it that cos it’s what cat or dog does automatically upon waking; it’s a bit like yawning, as it is done in a lazy leeisurely fashion ) if you’e thinking of trying this , therapy, out.

Also here is a good to tip on how to self-pandiculate most effectively. When you reach the peak phase of any given movement, [B]when you pandiculate you are then tightening the muscles in a pattern than they already are[/B] before releasing, as you relax and come out of the movement, automatic lengthening and relase then occurs. At this point the brain instantly [B]WAKES[/B] up, as if by magic ,so to speak.
[B]YOU[/B] are doing this- no-one else, not an outside therapist etc. Although you can get better much quicker results by consulting a trained practitioner who can give you the cues through palpation and what you should probably be sensing to bring around bigger results much quicker.

www.hannasomatics.com/practitioners/

Alernatively you can read more here-

www.somatics.com

& get the book [I][B]‘Somatics’[/B][/I], and order accompniying guided audio instruction as the hand-out i’ve given and the book, i feel may just not be enough to gain some handle on the movements involved and , their primary technqiue, self-pandiculation.

My body was in a bit of a state before i discovered this,done when i pushed too far one morninig during a yoga practice( that’s a another story in itself however, i just was’nt ready for the changes that had occirred and my body/muscles went into protective reflexively-tight mode, as it thoought it had been traumatised i guess), but i’ve had useful advice from a few practitioners, all the useful stuff of, which is contained within this thread.

The cat should be out the bag.

Looks like someone pulled that u-tube link, a link that could potentially ease human suffering.That is understandable-issh,Though folk might want their own copy, and it could promote Hanna Somatics better.Rather than remainstill obscure and uknown and the millions whose lives are affected by back pain or whatever,& are not currently being helped by modern medicine and most scientific doctors out there who really don’t have an answer( or a clue,even- this vertebrae is subluxated for example-it needs yanked )-rest, take this pill,don’t worry, meaning there is nothing i know of to suggest what I can do for you etc.Mainstream mediciine usually has no answer for this one continuing to scratch their heads on the most comon affliction of modern man.-musculoskeletal ills,andback pain primarily…Mainly because they ignore the role of the mind and the person doing the healing within… , to themself.You have to change your own physiological processes from within, i feel, otherwise that adjustment from say your chirpractor or whatever may not hold long-term say.And then you have to go back.And they make more money off you and so on.

Hope this helps!

hi I come across some of your comments about hanna somatics and was just wondering how did you get on with them. I’ve been practicing for a few months now with back pain and myofascial trigger points all over my back. It’s the only thing that makes sense to me but still waiting for improvement. I also got some material from lawrence gold at somatics.com and also DVDs from Martha Peterson. I live in the Uk I wish there was more practitioners.