Posture: The Result of Active Muscular Holdings

Posture isn’t passive; it’s a living, dynamic, ongoing process run by your nervous system.

Posture is often misunderstood as a passive state—a position your body settles into.
But this view misses the essential truth: Posture is active. It’s a continuous, largely automatic holding pattern maintained by your nervous system. Your muscles are constantly at work, holding your body in its habitual postures whether you’re moving, standing, or sitting.

Bones go where muscles pull them. And muscles have no will of their own—they simply follow the commands of your nervous system. If you want to understand why you have postural issues like pain, tightness, or strain, you have to look at why your muscles are being told to hold these patterns in the first place.

Posture is the learned, automatic, active holding of the musculature.

It’s a reflection of how your nervous system has adapted to stress, injury, and repetitive patterns over time.

Stretching and Strengthening Don’t Address the Root Cause

Many common approaches to changing posture—such as stretching, massage, or even strengthening exercises—fall short because they don’t address the deeper reason the muscles are holding tension. Stretching merely attempts to lengthen a muscle that is actively contracted, but the tightness you feel is controlled by the brain and nervous system.

The brain learns very little from a stretch. Stretching does not change the background holding habit. Pressing on sore muscles is like beating up an exhausted worker—it offers no real solution. Similarly, trying to strengthen to correct posture simply increases tension in an already overburdened system.

Postural Distortion: A Result of Persistent Involuntary Tensions

What we often call “postural distortion”—such as hunched posture, scoliotic asymmetry, or a swayback situation—is not a flaw in your body’s structure; it’s a sign of persistent involuntary tensions. The bones change their shape over time and take on the new shapes of persistent holdings, but the Eric Cooper Somatics Method (ECSM) looks at the functional aspects of the roots of posture.

Postural distortions are the active expression of your nervous system’s attempt to manage the body’s stress load. They are not flaws to be “fixed” by force, but patterns to be gently unraveled and re-educated.

Pandiculation: The Key to Changing Active Holdings

The nervous system has a built-in mechanism for reducing these involuntary tensions called pandiculation. This gentle, yawning-like contraction followed by a slow release allows the nervous system to reset muscle tension and restore a natural balance. But as we age, we often stop pandiculating, and our body becomes locked into these holding patterns.

Eric Cooper has developed very specialized movements to address the tensions that make posture. The tensions of posture boil over as pain. His method focuses on addressing the active holdings that shape posture, providing a pathway to change the posture from the inside out.

By reintroducing pandiculation through somatic movements, you can regain control over these active muscular holdings, effectively changing your posture from the inside out.

Final Thought

Posture is a living, dynamic process. If you want to change it, you have to work with the active nature of muscular holdings. Understanding posture as an ongoing expression of the nervous system, rather than a static state, is the first step in making lasting changes.

– Eric Cooper, Eric Cooper Somatics Method

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The amnesia that keeps us from knowing.

The problem is an amnesia.

The persistent tension, the tonal habituation, is below the threshold of our awareness.

What we are up against is, as Thomas Hanna coined, Sensory-motor amnesia, SMA.
You can demand places in your body to relax, but problematic limits in our somatic self-perception keep chronic tension outside of our awareness. The cerebellum adjusts the “loudness” of tension feedback. We do not sense it.

Pandiculation is THE technique to intelligently recalibrate somatic perception. The problem is hidden. If we are not addressing SMA with pandiculation, we can tell the foot to relax, but the baseline of tension will run outside your voluntary control.

The brain organizes tension based on how it perceives the anatomy. Perception is incomplete. Tension habits are the well practiced patterns of successful adaptations to the slings and arrows of life.
Habits are an efficiency. They can also become our bondage.

Pandiculate. Look for where you cannot sense.

-Eric Cooper
inspiresomatics.com
5.1.2020

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Mastery of emotion.

How do you cross
the crevasse to self-knowing?

5m:27s

-Eric Cooper
inspiresomatics.com
3.13.2020

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Contibuting Influences in
Thomas Hanna’s
Development
of
Clinical Somatic Education 

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Look inward to find what you lost

“Direct the searchlight of your awareness inward.”

-Thomas Hanna, PhD. Developer of Somatics

Look inward to change the threshold of your perception.

Look inward to fill in the missing places of the map your brain has of your body.

Look inward to teach your system to recalibrate so you can sense, at lower tension, the previously un-sensable, forgotten places. This is how to regain control of your musculature.

The sensing of your anatomy is incomplete, distorted, and fragmented because of how your system normalizes persistent tensions. The places that are persistently held become difficult to sense. Your system forgets that the tightly held places are even there. Your system is running your muscles at a level below the threshold of your awareness. You don’t even know it’s happening. Your brain controls the muscle tension based on what it perceives. This tension causes pain, stiffness, and postural distortion and effects mood.

Your nervous system is set up to sense and move, using your sensory-motor cortex, the cerebellum, and both sensory and motor neurons.  As you move, there is a constant interplay, a feedback loop of moving and sensing, moving and sensing. The sensory feedback allows you to control your movement.

The pandiculations of the Somatics process allow you to reset your system. The focused process of looking inward is essential if you desire an experience of freedom, and to feel more whole in your embodiment.

In your Somatics practice, the sensory-motor feedback system is the pathway you use to teach your nervous system that you are in control of your musculature. The auto-pilot has been running things long enough. Give it a good schooling! Masterfully bring the automatic patterns under your voluntary control.

Try this in your Somatic Movement practice:

1. Close your eyes and look inward.
2. Contract softly into the movement. 
3. Move partially into the contraction to develop the feedback sensation with discernment. 
4. Pause. 
5. Concentrate your awareness on the sensation you create.
6. Focus your awareness to look very carefully for here it is hard to sense? Is there a gap in the sensation?
7. Contract that hard-to-feel place a little more, to fill in the gap with sensation. 
8. Use enough effort to hear how that place sings its feedback song. 
9. Open so slowly that the sensing and moving area of your brain (the sensory-motor cortex) can successfully process the entire movement, as you ease smoothly in the descent back to complete rest.
10. Be present. In real time, control the movement all the way to the end, to complete relaxation.

Can you look inward to complete the map? Can you look inward to recalibrate your brain’s perception of muscle tension? Can you look inward to bring what was outside of your awareness, into your awareness?

Look inward to free yourself from the involuntary, hard-to-sense patterns of stress response, and the other patterns your brain has learned to hold you in. How you do the movement, how you focus your awareness in the movement, yields the discoveries that help you build greater self-knowing, making you whole.

Practicing often is the way to make deep changes, to feel at ease, and to help your body heal.  A careful, patient and inward looking practice allows you to bring a greater durability to the positive changes.

Your Somatics exploration is a powerful sensory feedback practice. Perceptive inward-looking movement fills in the map your brain has of your body, and allows you to create a more complete somatic self-knowing. When you develop a deeper connection to your sensory-motor system, you will feel more balanced, graceful, and ready to flow through life.

-Eric Cooper
inspiresomatics.com
11.24.2019

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Durability, and the issue of lasting change.

Why is it hard to make a lasting change?

The patterns run deep.

The patterns, of how our muscles are held in tension, run deep. Your tension patterns have been practiced for years. Like a needle has been skipping  in the groove of a vinyl record. It has worn a deep groove. How much learning does it take to unlearn that much practice, to change a deep habit?

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“Pandiculation is like kryptonite
to a muscle cramp.”

-Sarah Young, my skilled colleague, paractioner of a movement modality called ‘Original Strength’.

Sarah asked me:

“Care to share some about the power of pandiculation [and how it relates to cramps]?”

My reply:

Hi Sarah !!!

Muscles that cramp are giving the brain certain perceptions that they are not tightening. Then, the brain tightens them more. That’s the cycle that quickly spirals into a cramp. It’s a mis-perception.

Muscles that cramp are overworked muscles. Muscles become habitually overworked because the tension perception feedback system between muscle and brain is adjustable.
The brain adjusts to, normalizes, high levels of persitent tension. Soon, (mostly due to habitiation of stress reaction tension, injury reaction tensions, and habits of repetitive motion) we have muscles working 24/7.

Pandiculation, a cycle of gentle, pleasurable muscle contraction followed by a slow smooth release to rest.  A yawn is a pandiculation. Done in an optimized way, Pandiculation (with adequate load)  is the ideal technique to restore the full control of the skeletal muscle system. It restores the full range in both the perception and activation of muscle tension. Pandiculation fills in gaps in the spatial map of the body, and also teaches the brain to reset it’s perception of tension (reclaibration of the alph-gamma motor-neuron co-activation loop).

Learn to pandiculate.

Go have a session with Sarah. She’s brilliant. Her office is in Birmingham, MI syoung3@mac.com or at asimplewellness.com

This is a good video of mine, to start with: https://youtu.be/jana_n1zFUY
It will let you see you have much more baseline tension than you think you do.

-Eric Cooper
InspireSomatics.com

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Understanding the Relationship of
Stress, Posture, and Digestion

Even when the stress events are gone,
if your body is trapped in the background tension of stress patterns,
digestion won’t function optimally.

Your posture reveals these lingering and persistent tensions of stress. These habituated reaction patterns operate at a “background high idle.” Stress runs through the body, occasionally boiling over. It’s the persistence of these stress tensions that so profoundly disrupts how the digestive system functions. Persistent background tension signals to your digestive system that stress is still present, even when the cause is not immediately around you.

What Is Posture?

Posture is much more than being told to “sit up straight.” It’s the physical expression of the brain’s learned reactions to stress, injury, and all the challenges of life. Over time, our nervous system creates deeply ingrained patterns; it falls into tension habits that hold us in certain positions. This runs outside our voluntary control.

These habits form as the body repeatedly responds to stress and injury, becoming automatic, normalized tension patterns that show up as our posture. We get stuck in these well-practiced tension reactions, which run in us day and night. Posture is the outward expression of these persistent, background tensions.

Posture, Stress, and Digestion

With persistence of the tensions of stress, the nervous system believes it is in stress all the time. Of course, with persistent stress, digestion will be inhibited—partially shut down.

• Sadness, Worry, and Fear (Simplified as the *Curling and Hunching of Front Activation*)
• Anger, Impatience, and Anxiety (Simplified as the *Long Arch of Back Activation*)

The body contracts in these mostly symmetrical patterns under stress, which disrupts digestion. It can also get stuck in asymmetrical tensions, further affecting how well the digestive system functions. The tension control centers of the brain run these patterns automatically.

What Digestion Needs: A Body Free from Stress

The organs responsible for digestion are held in the cavity below the diaphragm, in the lower half of the torso. They work best when the body is in a state of rest and ease. When we’re truly relaxed, our belly gurgles, and everything starts moving. That’s when your system is happy to digest.

You’ve probably heard of the state called “rest and digest.” This only occurs when we are outside of stress.

Look at the Big Picture

To understand why digestion becomes sluggish, you have to zoom out and see the bigger picture. It’s sluggish because the system’s autopilot is set to STRESS MODE. When the body is stuck in stress, digestion won’t work well, no matter what else you try.

By learning and practicing the specific Eric Cooper Somatics movements to come out of stress, you can teach your nervous system to let you out of that background high-idle that contributes to your digestive problem. If you are out of stress, your digestive system will be more free to function in a more vital way. The experiment is yours to try.

Bon Appétit!

-Eric Cooper

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People do not normally realize their own ability to self-heal, and self-correct, to notice what has gone un-noticed, to change the threshold of perception to sense what we forgot to sense. Some people set themselves free, they escape from the habit.

-InspireSomatics.com

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Client moved to write:

Finding what was lost

“Somatics Lesson 3 really moved me. And by that I mean literally in my physical body, emotionally, and at a deeper level than either of those. Lesson 3 touches into my personal history patterns, those places in my being where difficult aspects of my life had been gathered from a very young age. And then to do this subtle work of bringing back from amnesia parts of myself that have been hidden, suppressed or disappeared by a kind of Unknowing — this is very powerful indeed. 

Mindfulness practice

InspireSomatics.com

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