Clinical Somatic Education and How It Works

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The word “Soma” is Greek and its meaning is the living body with first person experience – only you know how it feels to be you from your life’s unique experiences. We are all somas and have the ability to:

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• Self-sense

• Self-guide

• Self-correct based on what you sense, and

• Self-transform – experience freedom from self-sensing, self-guiding and self-correcting

  

Sensory Motor Amnesia (SMA)

 

Your brain is brilliant at adapting to stressors you may be experiencing in your life such as physical or emotional trauma, accidents, injuries, surgeries or performing repetitive activities.  New neural pathways for maladaptive movement patterns are learned to help you get through these stressors.  When you repeat these movement patterns they become habituated and your brain goes into “auto-pilot” involuntarily controlling the muscles that helped you through the stressful experience.   This "new normal” when consistently repeated creates full body habituated reflexes.  The ability to fully relax the muscles will be lost and you will no longer have full control and free movement of your muscles.  This is called Sensory Motor Amnesia (SMA) and produces muscular tension, aches and pain with the following stress reflex patterns.

Red Light or Startle Reflex

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We are born into this world knowing only the Red Light Reflex.  Envision a newborn baby and how they naturally flex into the fetal position.  They have not yet learned how to use the extensor muscles in their back because there is no awareness of those muscles.

 

When we consistently experience movements that bring us into a forward flexed posture such as those used when we text, sit at a computer, work on a puzzle or play a sport that requires flexion we are being influenced by the Red Light Reflex.  However, it can also be a result of emotions such as worry, fear, sadness or anxiety.

 

In the Red Light Reflex our posture may show shoulders raised and rounded forward, chest depressed, trunk collapsed forward, arms and legs internally rotated, head and neck forward, pelvis rotated posteriorly,  inner thighs tight, jaw tight and feet inwardly rotated.

 

Green Light or Landau Reflex

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The Green Light or Landau Reflex begins in the first year of a child’s life.  It brings them into movement or action.  They will move from being comfortable in the forward flexion they were born with to being curious and exploring their body’s movements in order to lift their head while contracting back muscles to move them in to their new world with sitting, crawling, standing or walking.

 

When our lives become stressed with constant demands on our time, meeting deadlines and constant striving our posterior muscles become habitually contracted.  This posture brings the head and shoulders drawn back, arms and legs externally rotated, pelvis anteriorly rotated and belly protrudes as the back arches.  We may also experience the emotions of joy and excitement in this posture.

 

Trauma Reflex

 

Trauma Reflex may occur as a result of one-sided repetitive activities such as using a mouse at the computer, holding a child on the same hip or playing a predominantly one-sided sport.  It may also occur from injuries or surgeries on one side of the body such as a sprained ankle, knee or hip replacement or a shoulder injury.  We cringe and twist away from a source of trauma to protect ourselves. 

 

With the Trauma Reflex an individual’s posture may reveal one shoulder lower than the other, head tilted to one side, pelvis elevated on one side, or imbalance through the feet.  There may also be a twist that occurs through the torso.

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Pandiculation

 

The fantastic news is that because Sensory Motor Amnesia (SMA) has been adaptively learned by the brain we can retrain the sensory motor cortex of the brain to sense and move the muscles to be more effective and efficient, reversing the effects of SMA.  This technique is called a Pandiculation.

Pandiculation requires your active participation and involves three elements:

 

• Consciously increasing the contracted state of the muscle(s) from their current “resting” state

• Consciously slow and deliberate lengthening of the muscle(s)

• Complete relaxation of the muscles

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Key to pandiculation is that the cortex senses and feels the sensations that are present throughout.  What does the contraction of the muscle(s) feel like?  What does the slow deliberate lengthening of the muscle(s) feel like?  What does complete relaxation of the muscle(s) feel like?  The uniqueness of this practice is that it is not the quantity of repetitions of specific movements done but the quality but how much one allows the brain to truly focus awareness on all three parts of the pandiculation. 

 

With Alana’s guidance through hands-on Clinical Somatic sessions reinforced with your own home practice you will learn to bring a beginner's mind cultivating curiosity within the practice and take into account how the Four Stages of Learning are involved:
 

• Unconsciously Unskilled - when you don’t know that you don’t know

• Consciously unskilled - when you know that you don’t know

• Unconsciously Skilled - when you know how to do something through unconscious habit

• Consciously skilled - when you know how to do something through conscious movement

You will shine a spotlight on your movement patterns to discover:

 

• What's moving that should be?

• What's moving that shouldn't be?

• What isn't moving that should be?

 

The following principles will guide you through your movements:

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• No Pain, All Gain - moving in your tension and pain free range of motion from a place of ease through all movements

• Quality over Quantity – it is quality of the movement, slow and mindful, that creates lasting change.  You will notice a difference in 3-5 repetitions with intentional movements.

• Patience, Positivity and Persistence

• Slow is Fast

• Less is More

• Simple to Complex