What is Inspired Somatic Education™?
It’s Inspired, because you will gain a new level of understanding.
The root stuckness hides as your breathing constriction.
Inspire is to breathe.
It’s Somatic because you shift your perspective to the inner-view.
The method clarifies inner spatial perception.
The practice takes place where mind and body meet.
It’s Education because you teach your nervous system
out of the hidden holding pattern,
out of the automatic habits.
In the practice you are both the teacher and the student.
It’s done with safe, gentle movements that
re-calibrate your tension feedback system.
ISE works because
it is active, not passive.
The changeable part of the problem is
something you have not been noticing.
How is Inspired Somatic Education
different than
Hanna Somatics and Clinical Somatic Education?
1) ISE addresses 7 real tension strategies, not just 3.
2) ISE is designed to be more adaptable to each person’s limitations and needs.
3) ISE focuses entirely on Sensory-Motor Amnesia, the disconnection we have between moving, and the perception of movement. It focuses entirely on filling in what is missing.
4) ISE is more Somatic. It allows you to look more effectively at the nature of, and the communicative vocabulary of your somatic experience. The techniques of ISE allow you to more carefully modulate the vividness of your movement experience, thus teaching your nervous system more effectively.
5) ISE allows you to more clearly understand how to find your hidden holding patterns. It offers a more efficient way to learn your way out of your patterns.
6) ISE allows you to know the gaps in the map that your brain has of your body, how to seek out the places that are stuck and missing.
7) ISE looks more fully at how we are stuck in the echoes of a lifetime of emotional response. Emotion and tension are inextricably interlinked.
8)
ISE has more efficient methods for overcoming Sensory-Motor Amnesia.
ISE grew out of the work of Thomas Hanna, PhD.
“Often, people come to this practice seeking a solution to pain and the achy stiffness associated with age. The cause of the achy stiffness has little to do with age itself. You feel achy and stiff because reactions to stress, injury, repetitive motion, and trauma have become habits. These habits become outside your voluntary control. This is the easy way to regain control.” -Thomas Hanna, the Original developer of Hanna Somatics/Clinical Somatic Education
“The object of this exploration is to loosen your body from constricted muscles. It is neuromuscular re-education. Done correctly, these exercises restore sensory motor awareness and control to the brain and muscular system.” -Thomas Hanna, the Original developer of Hanna Somatics/Clinical Somatic Education
Thomas Hanna coalesced many influences
into three crucial concepts:
The contributing knowledge.
Hanna’s Three Stress Reflex Patterns of Clinical Somatics:
How your body reacts to stress and injury, how you are most likely to get stuck in persistent tension.
- The Green-Light Reflex, the Landau Reaction, tightening and arching the back, the reflex of forward action. This pattern is practiced as we activate to jump into action under stress.
- The Red-Light Reflex, a full body expression of withdrawal response. Automatic tightening of the front. This pattern hunches us over, rounds the shoulders, and can create the posture of depression.
- The Trauma Reflex, the contraction that results from traumatic injury, usually a contraction of the side, an asymmetry, and often has a twisting expression. It can also be express in front or back. Repetitive motion can create similar patterns of asymmetrical, habituated activation.
Since emotionally traumatic events often create a pattern of front and back activated against each other in conflicting ways, the tensions are further compounded.
ISE addresses 4 additional tension strategies beyond
Hanna’s basic three.
Hanna’s term to describe how our systems normalize and habituate high tension levels: Sensory-Motor Amnesia, SMA
It’s an odd term, but it is apt. Thomas Hanna called it Sensory Motor Amnesia. Habituated tension is like a forgetting, a dis-calibration. It occurs as cumulative stress and injury contractions diminish the sensory feedback of movement. It is the effect of habituation. We lose the ability to control the muscle system when it is persistently activated. The word amnesia is very appropriate because we don’t know our own amnesia. Common expressions of SMA are persistently tight muscles and un-smoothness in slow movement.
3) Hanna’s brilliant use of a special type of movement to overcome the dis-calibration of tension control: Pandiculation.
Pandiculation is the natural reset for high levels of habituated tension. Yawning is a natural pandiculation. Cats pandiculate about 40 times a day to clear their stress tension patterns. You probably have more stress than a cat. Somatic pandiculation is the optimal daily maintenance.
Hanna developed an additional technique to overcome SMA, an even more powerful method called Assisted Pandiculation. Pandiculation is the primary neuromuscular feedback technique that Hanna Somatics/Clinical Somatic Education, uses to overcome SMA. As you learn to pandiculate, you reclaim the spaces and places that are gaps in your internal spatial map. This enjoyable process re-calibrates the nervous system in its of control muscle tension. ISE focusses entirely on advanced pandiculation strategies to overcome SMA.
This is how to find ease in your body,
your movement,
and your mind.
Set yourself free.