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
As that style of yoga JustyB sounds right up my street.
and read the stuff there.