Headache and Jaw Testimonials
Your head is connected to
the rest of you.
Learn this easy, profound way to
change your headache situation and jaw tension
by settling the high-idle of bigger tension patterns.
Asymmetrical tension in the torso… Asymmetrical headache/jaw tension issues.
Tight back… The back teeth tend to clench.
Tight front of torso… The front teeth tend to clench. Generally, achiness in back neck.
Jaw tension and headaches are
the boiling-over of the hidden full torso patterns.
Jaw-headache connection.
“I had a headache, and now it’s gone!“ –C., Visionary Artist after a simple 10 minute jaw relax pandiculation sequence
“The clicking sound of my jaw has vanished after this. Thank you.”
Headaches for 4 years
“We had a session a little over 6 weeks ago and I have been doing the exercises since. I realized that over the last 3-4 weeks I have hardly had any headaches and I definitely attribute this to doing the exercises. Thank you so much for that!”
Later writing:
“I am still amazed that the headaches simply stopped.”
-M., Zoom client in Germany
10 years after an auto accident.
“Eric Cooper is a brilliant and kind healthcare provider who genuinely cares about his clients. After ten years of experiencing daily chronic pain, headaches, and migraines, caused by an auto-accident when I was eleven years old, I am finally finding relief and learning to gain control of my pain for the first time. Eric is the ONLY practitioner to ever help me get to the root of my pain problem.
My family and I spent years searching together for what would relieve my pain. I was hospitalized twice, but both times, when I finished the standard 3-day long injection migraine-protocol and I was still in pain, the doctors just sent me home, “sorry, we don’t know why you’re still in pain.” I was in several months of physical therapy (PT) on many different occasions, had cranio-sacral therapy, acupuncture, tried energy healers (Reiki), years of chiropractic work, massage after massage, and despite experiencing temporary relief, a day or two would pass and I was still in pain.
Physical therapy led me to believe that my pain was my fault. If I had done my exercises slightly differently, like spent one more hour strengthening my arms in the morning, or stretching my back at night, then I would come out of my problem. With chiropractic work, I was told that if I could remember to take my multivitamin then the adjustment would hold and the pain wouldn’t return. I had seen countless neurologists, taken prescription pill after pill, had numerous injections, stretched my body in every which-way possible, and was still in pain. The MRIs and cat-scans showed nothing when I desperately wanted an explanation for why my pain kept persisting.
It got to the point that I thought that my pain, tension, stiffness, discomfort and irritability problem was untouchable, if even the best specialists, the MDs and DOs couldn’t figure it out, then who would? Eric and his expertise, care, and devotion would teach me how to heal myself and come out of my tension and pain problem.
Do not be fooled, you will not walk in and be zapped with a magic wand to instantly feel better. For some people, it is a practice that requires time and patience, carving a steady path to undo the neural pathways that hold you in pain, regain body awareness, control, and ultimately a feeling of freedom in your pain. I am not magically being healed but rather am finally on an incredible path to healing myself and crawling my way out of the darkness that is chronic pain. Eric will facilitate you in reteaching your nervous system to release its hold on your muscles and come out of the tension patterns that arise from life, from existing in a world where being chronically stress is normalized.
You don’t have to be in pain to begin to build your body intelligence and somatically move your way to freedom and joy in your being again. Somatics challenges the idea that stiffness and tension are a result of aging, that bad posture and neck pain are inevitable. A session with Eric will bring you hope for yourself and for the future of healthcare.“–H., Translator
A week after the first session.
“The new somatics work is just lovely, thank you! So different!
The headaches have stopped. I am transitioning into “this is not stretching”, having been an athlete as a child with movement tendencies from that time which have persisted into adulthood…I am slowly rewiring.
This has helped me unearth my natural tendency for being happy and balanced in the body. Thank you!”
-S., Program Developer, University of Michigan
Chronic Migraine Headaches for over 9 years since an auto accident.
We did three basic sessions. Client writes:
Dear friends and family,
An important life update:
This winter break my priority is my health, as it always is, yet is very hard to escape my web of chronic pain when in the rush of […] College, and […] in general for me. Recently, I have revisited working with Eric Cooper (Inspire Somatics located in Manchester, MI), who I saw years ago probably age 15, when he was doing much different healing work than he is now. In the month of December (2018), I have spent 6 hours total working with Eric (3 sessions). In this amount of time I feel that I am already jumping leaps and bounds through my healing jungle.
Through [Clinical Somatic] therapy with Eric Cooper, my mind is now learning how to communicate with my body again. I am building connections and pathways for muscles to move that have not been used in a very long time. My alignment has been off in many ways for years, so much so that my body has forgotten that there is a way to realign and escape the stress response that perpetuates the chronic pain that I experience as migraines, headaches, neck, upper and lower back tension— (it spans into the arms, hands, legs, and feet, too, though less often and less aggravating in those areas.)
It has been absolutely liberating to work slowly and steadily to building neural pathways that are enabling full body movements and alleviating pain. Eric Cooper is an excellent [Somatics] practitioner that will teach you how you can heal yourself. This is MY healing journey, YOUR healing journey: Eric serves as the facilitator of your own healing; he isn’t going to do the work for you, but he will work with you to bring the healing practices that you need into your daily life– you can do them in the car, during your college class, lying on the floor at home or the airport. I know that he genuinely cares about my healing, and invests in me. He has found ways to understand and then teach my body how to relax from stress and trauma responses, and relearn stress-releasing patterns that my body has long forgotten since the auto-accident, all through somatic movements.
I truly believe that many people, if not everyone, can benefit from [Clinical Somatics] therapy –- especially because of how prevalent chronic stress is in all of our lives. Experiencing a stress response no matter how small makes waves through our bodies, and as I am discovering, learning simple techniques to do at home to alleviate tension, pain, and stress is vital to healing. The movements that I have learned are pleasurable and not taxing whatsoever. Doing them daily is not a chore, it is relief. I believe that this betters our physical and mental health and can *prevent* a chronic health illness down the road, or mend an existing one.
In the nine years of my life since my auto-accident, I have “graduated” from different physical therapy programs so many times not because I have gotten better, but because my progress plateaued, and the therapist shrugged their shoulders and said “I am sorry, I am not sure if there is anymore I can do for you.” The exercises that I was given at PT were not holistic in healing my entire being (i.e. focused on isolated areas of pain in the body most of the time– not activating the mind), and they were not pleasurable but rather incredibly taxing and chore-like to do; I couldn’t feel or see improvements, I dreaded doing them, yet still always tried my best. For me, PT did not help me build a new mind/body connection to overcome the residual trauma in my body.
I am overjoyed to have found Eric Cooper and Somatic Movement because I have never found something that has brought relief so quickly, with promising longevity to undo these patterns of chronic pain. I am beyond caring if something that might help me is validated or not by a certain method of Western/Modern medicine research. Honestly, I learned how to heal on my own, without reliance on returning to the therapist or doctor for continuous care and compiling costs.
These are the movements and re-wiring that my body has been longing to do for the past nine years, and I never before had the tools or knowledge to make this progress. My healing journey does not end here; yet this is a MAJOR milestone on my own healing journey, and I thank Eric Cooper and the line of Somatic Educators before him, and The Universe for bringing all of this into my life, even if it is 9 years later.
Blessings.” -H. Choreographer, College Student
“By the end of the first session, I felt embodied into my left hip an leg in a new and substantive way. I have enjoyed a daily practice of somatic exercises and over the weeks watched the interoceptive experience of my body change. The experience of a sharp contrast between the left and right halves of my soma has been muted. Somatic exercise provides efficient relief from low back tension; my nocturnal teeth grinding is gone and the symptoms of “rotator cuff injury” are largely diminished.
-M., Retired, Traveler, and Student of Deeper Meanings
Chronic Migraine Headaches
I received this review 4 months after the sessions. Patient with chronic headaches and knee pain.
“Eric is the best of the best. I’ve lived with chronic pain for years and have tried just about everything – massage, acupuncture, physical therapy, yoga, prescriptions, chiropractic adjustments, etc. Eric was THE most helpful practitioner I’ve worked with. His assessments are incredibly thorough, his touch is gentle, and his demeanor is consummately professional. In the first session he figured out (and then explained to me) how my chronic migraines and headaches, my right shoulder tension, and my left knee pain were all related. WHAT?!
He spent an hour taking me through gentle stretches [they are not really stretches, they are pandiculations] and giving gentle massage and my twisty spine lined right up and my pain was gone. The next day my knee felt so much better I sat on the floor cross-legged for the first time in 6 months! Most importantly, Eric taught me how to take care of myself and maintain these improvements through home-therapy. It’s now been 4 months since I had 2 sessions with Eric and my knee pain is completely resolved and my headaches are vastly improved. If I could only ever see one bodyworker again there’s no doubt I would choose Eric.” -K., Graduate Student at U of M, active Acro-Yoga Practitioner