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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How do posture, stress, and digestion intertwine?

How can your digestion work if your
persistent, automatic holding patterns of stress
are running?

Stress tensions are mostly front and back.

What is posture?

Posture is much more than the voice in your head saying, “Sit up straight!”

Take a moment to do a body scan. Is your head forward, chest depressed, and shoulders rounded as if in a withdrawal response? Is your low back tight and arched as if you are jumping into action under stress? Sometimes the back can be tight simply because it is holding open the contracted front. These are all elements of posture that can affect digestion.

When someone always stands with one leg straight and the other out to the side, or when one shoulder is low, or the head is tipped to the side, that’s posture, too. The brain also learns the tensions we hold in response to injury, which creates these types of postural asymmetries. Our brain holds our posture day and night without much relief.

Posture is the habit of stress and injury response.

Most of what defines our posture, that involuntary expression of how we hold ourselves, has been learned by the endless practice that our brains get in reacting to stress. Tensions become deep habits that we can’t sense, and these habits hold us in certain positions.

Posture, stress, and digestion

Since posture is the involuntary habit of reaction to stress, soon the system thinks it’s in stress all the time, because it stays functionally in the pattern of stress. Obviously we don’t digest when we are in fear or worry (tight front activation). We don’t digest when we angry or feeling aggressive (tight back activation). The tension control center of the brain runs these tensions automatically. We can’t feel the tensions accurately, but we do know it’s hard to relax.

What digestion needs you to be out of stress.

We have a cavity below the diaphragm in the lower half of the torso that holds our viscera. These soft organs do the hard work of digestion. The system digests well only under ideal conditions. We know that when we are resting and relaxing, that is when our belly gurgles and things start moving, and that’s when your system is happy to digest. We rest and digest.

Look at the big picture.

You have to zoom way out to see why digestion is sluggish. It’s sluggish because the autopilot is set to STRESS MODE. The system in stress will not digest well.

It doesn’t work to “effort” into standing up straight, because that only increases overall tension. Nor does it work to “stretch up straight” because the brain doesn’t learn much form a stretch. Without learning, the system wants to return to the habit. With the pandiculations of Somatics, you can teach your nervous system to be free from the residue of stress. You’ll relax up straight, and your digestive system will be more free to digest. Bon appetit!

-Eric Cooper
InspireSomatics.com

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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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Moving slowly is an essential tool to
teach your nervous system a deeper control in movement.

Slow is part of the process. Slow disarms the nervous system. It takes us out of our of habituated patterns. It makes the experience new. Slow allows full cortical control of movement. This is helpful in the process of creating freedom from habituated movement patterns, tight muscles, and persistence activation of stress response.

2m:59s

 Moving slowly focuses awareness.

Moving slowly is part of the process. It help deepen awareness by focussing the attention of your sensory-motor system. In your practice, going slower and smoother will keep it challenging. What does it take to provide an optimal learning experience for your muscle tension control system?

-Eric Cooper, 2019
InspireSomatics.com

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