Somatics Book

Complete honesty: Somatics and Hanna Somatics in particular is one of the most important discoveries of my adult life. I'm 28 now and had incured a series of small muscle pulls in my lower body and then a groin pull (combined with horrible posture and alignment) that eventually threw my whole body into a cycle of degeneration and discomfort. Somatics is the one discipline that is helping me to unravel these patterns. I literally feel 10 years younger.

Hanna's greatest insight is that we are both an interior sensing and feeling being as well as an exterior organism. We have a double sense of our physical nature -- inside we feel ourselves as a soma, outside we see and observe ourselves as a body. Most medicine obsesses over the exterior body and denies or supresses the soma. This is unfortunate because the soma, and our inner awareness of our sensations, feelings, pains, and sense of balance, has tremendously useful healing capacities. These are activated by unlocking the potential of our brain and nervous system, which control so much of how well our bodies function and how we hold onto muscular tension and pain
By accessing and working with (rather than against) our nervous responses and muscle groups through simple movement exercises, we can allow our bodies to let go of painful patterns and habits of how we hold ourselves. This is accomplished primarily through pandiculation, a method of slowly contracting and relaxing the tight and unresponsive muscles in order to gain better control over them, thereby increasing their strength and flexibility, or their ability to contract and relax. This overcomes what Hanna calls sensory-motor amnesia, or a loss of control and feeling of our musculature. This loss of control can develop over time by poor postural patterns or acutely through injury. In either case our brain rewires the neural connections to the area through reflex patterns that need to be unlearned in order to restore healty functioning. This is only possible if we go slowly and develop an inner awareness of these patterns. Only then can we release them.

This work is highly effective and smart. It seems miraculous, since the mechanism is an interior one. I love the implications -- we are basically computers with a self-correcting diagnostic and repair system. Somatics just teaches you how to activate and utilize it for maximum benefit. We do have control of our own bodies and nervous system. We just have to be clever and inwardly-aware and have the right techniques to unlock it. Truly groundbreaking and paradigm shifting work!