What is SoMA Somatics?

Put simply, it's a gentle, powerfully effective approach that uses movement and self-sensing strategies to help you move with more suppleness and ease - enabling you to combat stiffness, soreness and pain, in the long term and without relying on therapists, medications, or other external aids to move efficiently through life.

The basics that Certified Clincial Somatic Educators like me work with are:

(1) The insight - supported by neuroscience - that at least 50% of human stiffness, soreness and pain is caused by our neuromuscular system (your brain and muscles) literally forgetting how to move efficiently.

This is most often due to unconscious, automatic and natural responses to stress and trauma getting STUCK in your body. (Everyday stresses and strains cause this, as do more obvious shocks and traumas, such as an accident, injury, or attck you experinced.) 'Bad habits' (from e.g. working at a desk, carrying a bag on one shoulder, pulling yourself up straight) can also cause your body to forget how to move efficiently and comfortably. This is what in Somatics we call SMA, or 'Sensory Motor Amnesia'.

(2) A movement technique designed specifically to release stress, trauma, and tension froom the human body - a three-part process called 'pandiculation'.

To GET RID OF pain, soreness, and stiffness, you need to teach your brain and muscles (as a combined, neuromuscular unit) how to better sense itself, and how to break bad habits and 're-learn' how to move more efficiently - without pain, soreness, and stiffness. This is what pandiculation enables you to, combining specific movements and self-sensation that allow your brain and muscles to move from Sensory Motor Amnesia to SensoryMotor Awareness!

(3) Knowing that when stress, shocks, and traumas get stuck (or habituated) in the human body, they 'show up' in specific patterns of muscle tightness. And, so, focusing movements in SoMA Somatics classes, lessons, and clinical sessions on easing out of those specific patterns.

This is why Somatics movements (based on the original work of Thomas Hanna, the founder of Somatics) are very focused, and specific. This focus gives you a clear framework to understand how and why pain, soreness, and stiffness show up in you the ways they do - and, a clear framework of how to best go about using SoMA Somatics movements to get out of pain, and to learn to move with far greater efficiency and ease.

These 3 basic insights from Thomas Hanna's work in the 1980s, underlie what SoMA Somatics is, and why it works so well to address stress, pain, soreness, and stiffness that doesn't seem to respond well to other approaches.

Why? Because Somatics acknowledges that while medicine, surgery, and various therapies do have their place, and do help people, they offer only a 'third-person perspective', where someone or something else does something to you (e.g. a therapist gives you a massage; a doctor gives you a prescription).

In contrast, Somatics works with you from a first-person perspective - by empowering you to make changes to yourself. This is important, because as neuroscience clearly shows us, it's simply not possible for anyone or anything else to make long-term, genuine changes to how your body lets go of stiffness, soreness, and pain - however skilled they are. For your muscles to truly release, your brain must make the changes to your nervous system, 'from the inside'.

This is what Somatics enables you to do.

How to get started

So, why take SoMA Somatics classes, online programmes, and one-to-one clinical sessions?

IT WORKS! SoMA Somatics classes and sessions teach you how to move more easily and feel more comfortable in your own body. Importantly, you figure out how to eradicate pain and keep pain away - even if you feel like you've 'tried everything' with little success, and feel like giving up hope that things might change.

IT'S FOCUSED! Somatics in the tradition of Thomas Hanna's work -  unlike other practices that use the term 'somatics' - focuses on very specific ways to address pain, & move better. It addresses YOUR needs, YOUR body - and as a guide to get you there, focuses on three main stress reflex patterns and how to overcome them. This focus makes it efficient, effective, and fast-acting.

IT LASTS A LIFETIME: Combatting the 'Myth of Ageing', SoMA Somatics works whatever your age, & equips you to keep pain away in the long term. The basic movement strategy and exercises you learn give you life-long tools. As well as being a fantastic self-healing and self-regulating resource, this also makes Somatics extremely cost-effective.

SoMA Somatics in more detail

SoMA Somatics is neuromuscular (sensory-motor) movement and awareness re-education based on the insights of Thomas Hanna, Hanna Somatics^TM, and developments in neuroscience.

My particular approach is in the tradition of Hanna's work as developed by Martha Peterson at Essential Somatics® (where I trained as an Essential Somatics Movement Teacher and Certified Clinical Somatic Educator), and informed by my professional background in philosophy, anthrozoology, and psychotherapy, as well as my experience and ongoing training in Somatic Experiencing®. 

Thomas Hanna identified Sensory Motor Amnesia as the cause of most human stiffness, aches & pains, and chronic pain - as well as the underlying cause of many other health problems and ailments.

This condition of Sensory Motor Amnesia - "SMA" - refers to your chronically tight muscles that stay over-contracted, thereby causing strain, stress, tension and pain. SMA is a largely unconscious phenomenon.

Why do your muscles stay contracted, when they don't need to be? Because they've got into the habit of being contracted - usually from repeated, reflexive responses to everyday stresses and strains; from repeated movement patterns you get "stuck" in (such as RSI, desk work, or carrying your bag on the same shoulder for many years!), or in response to a specific shock, trauma or injury that stayed "stuck" in your muscles. Your brain literally forgets how to release muscles that are "stuck" in patterns of contraction. (Your brain thinks it's normal, because it's a habit.)

The result of SMA is that you have full-body patterns of unnecessary (and often unconscious) tightness and tension "stuck" in you, which show up as "symptoms" like stiffness, posture problems, and areas of discomfort and pain such as neck pain, back pain, hip pain, shoulder pain, stiff and sore joints, and more. These full-body patterns of unnecessary contraction and tightness are the cause, more often than not, of conditions and pains often blamed on "ageing" or structural "defects" - including, just for example, forward-head posture, scoliosis, shallow breathing, SI joint pain, RSI, leg-length discrepancy, long-term whiplash injuries, and tension headaches.

SoMA Somatics teaches you the key movement and awareness strategy developed by Thomas Hanna to successfully alleviate SMA - turning Sensory Motor Amnesia into Sensory Moteor Awareness. This in turn alleviates pain and tension, and allows you to move with far greater suppleness and ease.

This key strategy is called pandiculation. It's based on what all mammals do naturally to relieve tension (but which most of us humans have long forgotten how to do, in modern society, where we tend to ignore the body). Pandiculation's a bit like yawning. It's gentle and - unlike stretching - works with your body, not against it, so is powerfully effective in releasing and lengthening tight muscles. 

Pandiculating effectively - with conscious motor control, and awareness of how you feel from the inside - is what gets the impressive, often life-changing results of SoMA Somatics practice - that is, not just relief from pain, but far greater ease and efficiency of movement and a greater sense of comfort in yourself - whatever your age, and even if nothing else you've tried has helped you feel truly comfortable.

In SoMA Somatics classes and 1-2-1 sessions, your pandiculations are guided, and you pandiculate in and out of specific movement exercises to identify and release the fundamental full-body patterns that get "stuck" in human bodies.

You start off learning the three main patterns that cause aches, pain, stiffness and tension, and as your practice develops - as you take more classes, and learn more at home - you learn more variations, and ultimately learn more about yourself. You start to understand your patterns of tightness and tension, how your body gets stuck, and which movement and awareness exercises work best to get you out of pain, and moving with ease.

A note on terminology and names! The basic strategy and fundamental movements are based on those taught by Essential Somatics - in the tradition of Thomas Hanna, who in the 1980s created "Hanna Somatics". But, you will see different terms - Hanna Somatics, Clinical Somatics, Essential Somatics, Clinical Somatic Education, Hanna Somatic Education, and more! In essence, "Somatic Exercises" were created by Tom Hanna, and those trained in the tradition of his work will teach about SMA, stress reflexes, and pandiculation.