How does Clinical Somatic Education work?

Your brain controls all voluntary movement in your body. That means that as you read this, the movement of your eyes, the position you are sitting in, and the position of your hand on the mouse are all being monitored by nerves sending constant messages to your brain, then reporting back to control your eyes, hands, and the rest of your body.

If you do something over and over, (for example, if you sit in a certain position every day at work, or were in a cast for six weeks when you broke you leg ice skating, or if you just have a tendency to brace your shoulders against the pressures of emotional stress), your brain will stop thinking about that position &mdash you'll just ‘naturally’ come to rest in a particular way, or you will always be a little more cautious on that leg. This is called habituation .

Habituation lets us stop thinking about the mundane things like how to sit in a chair, and allows us to concentrate on more complicated things, like reading, talking, painting, drawing, running...

Unfortunately, the down side to habituation is the very thing that makes it so useful &mdash habituation makes things involuntary. When we stop thinking about how to sit, for example, there are signals coming down from the brain that we are completely unaware of. If those signals cause us to move in pattern that still let us function without pain, that's great. But sometimes, those signals can hold us in patterns of tension that make it difficult to walk, do yoga, or pick up our kids. Even worse, those signals can cause muscles to pull on bones in such a way that our spines, shoulders, or hips can come out of alignment and create painful conditions such as herniated discs, frozen shoulders, sciatica, tendonitis, and more. When habituation becomes limiting in this way, we call it Sensory Motor Amnesia (SMA), because it describes a condition in which we've forgotten how to feel and move parts of our body.

Clinical Somatic Education is unique in that you, as a client, are an active participant throughout the session. You will actually learn how to feel the muscles you are keeping tight, and, in relearning how to feel, you will discover new possibilities for motion that you had forgotten &mdash literally! Your sessions combine your own slow, gentle movements with specific feedback from your practitioner to change the habituated patterns that are limiting your movement and causing you pain.