“If you can sense it and feel it, you can change it.”
Thomas Hanna PhD., Founder of Somatic Movement Education
With Somatic Movement Education you teach your mind to train your body. The mind learns how to ride a bike or play an instrument. But it also learns negative things: like how to contract muscles around a weak or injured spot. Often, you don’t even realise it.
Our techniques lead you through a sequence of simple movements to help focus your brain on areas of pain and unconscious tension. Once your brain becomes aware of where your body is tight and contracted, we coach you to release your muscles through specific guided movement. The scientific term for this is Neuromuscular Reprogramming. Neuro refers to nerves and muscular refers to muscles.
What Causes Pain and Tension?
Our bodies react unconsciously to life’s daily stresses. Our muscles tighten as we work long hours at our computers or sit in traffic, and we wonder why we have neck and lower back pain ? If the muscles don’t get a message from the brain to relax, they forget how to release. This affects how we move, stand, sit and lie.
Sensory Motor Amnesia
When muscles forget how to relax, they become chronically contracted, painful and sore. They also lose their flexibility and elasticity. This results in poor posture, stiffness, back pain and chronic fatigue. Thomas Hanna, the founder of Hanna Somatic Education, called this condition Sensory Motor Amnesia (SMA).
A lot of the ‘normal’ aches and pains which we associate with aging are the result of SMA. In SMA, the feedback loop between the brain and muscles goes into a sort of ‘auto-pilot’, which makes it difficult to control these muscles freely. Once we lose our ability to sense and feel, we also lose our ability to move the way we want.