About Somatics

Somatic Movement Education is a natural, gentle, experiential approach to reversing and preventing chronic aches and pains as you learn to sense and move your body the way nature intended. The movements are designed to override Sensory Motor Amnesia(SMA) by reawakening communication between the brain and the muscles. Everyone over the age of twenty has Sensory Motor Amnesia - a condition caused by our body's unconscious, involuntary muscular responses to our environment. The brain controls the muscles. The muscles move the bones. Our brain contracts our muscles in response to day-to-day stress, trauma, repeated movement patterns, and injury. When these muscle contractions become chronic, they cause back and joint stiffness, aches and pains, and exhaustion - the symptoms we have come to accept as the inevitable process of aging. This loss of comfort is not aging, it is contracted muscles, and it is both reversible and preventable through Somatic Movement Education.

The body is self-sensing, self-adjusting, and self-correcting. Infants develop their sensory motor self-awareness as they learn to control their muscles. As children grow and life becomes busier, they become more focused on their external environment and they begin to lose this valuable sensory self-awareness, because it requires some attention in order to be maintained. Most people lose significant sensory self-awareness by the time they are twenty years old, if not sooner. It is a slow, subtle process. The irony of Sensory Motor Amnesia is, unless you are already experiencing tension and pain, you can't know you have it, because the very nature of it is the absence of self-awareness. When you cannot sense your body from within, your body's ability to self-correct and move freely has been compromised.

Somatic Movement Education identifies three major reflex patterns which can become habitually held in a state of contraction, and are at the root of most chronic aches and pains. Thomas Hanna, the founder of Hanna Somatics, named these patterns the Green Light Reflex, the Red Light Reflex, and the Trauma Reflex. For more information on these reflexes click on the link below.