Pause for a moment. Next time you are waiting to cross a busy road, just a bit late for work, pause. Have a look at your feet. Where are the toes facing to? Check in with your back. Does your lower back feel a bit tense? Do you squeeze your buttocks and your shoulder blades? Do you resemble a meerkat looking out for invaders? Now, if your life is firing things at you all the time, and you are a get up and go! person, full of energy and action, you might have adapted to this by accumulating muscles tension in the back of your body. Contracting the muscles of the back of the body lets us move forward. They open the front, you’re ready to face new challenges every day. If however, those muscles stay contracted (even a little bit, barely noticeable), you might end up with back pain, a tight neck, tight hamstrings and sciatica. And if muscles became tight and you lost voluntary control over the state of the muscle, you have developed what we call Sensory Motor Amnesia (SMA). Tight muscles which can’t be released anymore (or return to their contraction after a massage for example), together with a loss of sensation and control.
Time for a Clinical Lesson #1. In a Clinical Somatic Education lesson #1, we address the muscles of the back in order to release a full body tension pattern on the more dominant ( – read tighter) side and gain more awareness for the sensation of tightness versus release.
This first lesson is part of a course of 3, where we release the back, side and front through gentle assisted movement. The lesson is taught on a table (like a massage table, but lower and more firm, so you don’t sink in and get better feedback), lying on the front – we sometimes use cushions if needed to make it more comfortable.
Comfort is a big point in Somatic Movement: we don’t want your brain to be distracted by pain or discomfort, so you can fully concentrate on the learning experience. This is another point that separates Somatic Movement Education from therapies: It’s education, you retrain your brain to control your muscles, rather than a therapist manipulating parts of your body from the outside. This makes you independent from a practitioner after a short while, as you will be equipped with simple exercises you can practice to stay in or regain a state of release and suppleness with muscles ready to work efficiently.
And even if you don’t suffer from back pain, remember the great Somatic Educator Moshe Feldenkrais’ words – Improvement is infinite.
If you would like to book a session, please contact me via email (somadublincity at gmail dot com)
