Using Somatic Education to Improve Movement
Somatics Integrates the Body and Mind to Create Ease in the Body
The goal of somatic education, or somatics, is to integrate body and mind for improved balance and posture, ease of movement, and pain relief. People with restricted movement, chronic pain, and psychological and neurological problems find somatic practices especially useful. Performing artists and athletes also use somatic techniques to improve their performance.
The Alexander Technique
One of the earliest approaches to somatic education was the Alexander Technique, created by Frederick Matthias Alexander, an Australian actor in the 1890s who often lost his voice on stage. Doctors could not solve Alexander’s problem, so he began to study how he used his body. By practicing in front of mirrors, he found he moved his head in a way that compressed his larynx.
He then found a movement that solved this problem; however, on stage he habitually went back to the old movement. Alexander continued experimenting and learned how to inhibit the old pattern and consciously allow the new pattern. He went on to develop the Alexander Technique to teach people to use the conscious mind to change subconscious muscle patterns.
The Feldenkrais Method® of Somatic Education
Unlike the Alexander Technique, the Feldenkrais Method does not focus on conscious control of body patterns; it uses movement to change habitual patterns by providing new learning directly to the neuromuscular system. Feldenkrais lessons reeducate the body and make a person aware of new movement potential.
Moshe Feldenkrais developed the Method to heal his own knee problems, and then taught hundreds of students around the world. His goal was for people to become aware of how they use their bodes and then adopt new patterns that relieve pain or improve physical abilities.
Hanna Somatic Education®
Thomas Hanna studied the Feldenkrais Method and went on to develop Hanna Somatics. He noted that just as the brain can forget unused information, it can also forget unused body movement. Hanna referred to this body memory loss as sensory-motor amnesia, and he considered it a malfunction of the nervous system.
Hanna's somatic exercises are designed to change a person's muscular system by changing the central nervous system. Hanna’s book, Somatics: Reawakening the Mind's Control of Movement, Flexibility, and Health, explains his theories and provides a number of exercises.
Other Somatic Practices
Around the same time Alexander was developing the Alexander Technique in Australia, Elsa Gindler, a physical education teacher in Berlin, conducted classes in Gymnastik, where she asked students to focus on the internal sensations in their bodies as they went through various movements. Gindler's work influenced many later somatic teachers, including Charlotte Selver.
Selver developed Sensory Awareness, which is about developing the freedom to learn using sensitive body explorations. In Sensory Awareness, a person senses what is happening in whatever he is doing. This somatic practice looks at the total functioning person and the development of a person’s responsiveness toward life.
In the 1960s, Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, an occupational therapist and trained dancer set out to explore the possibilities of the human body, leading to the development of Body-Mind Centering® (BMC). BMC is a system of exploration through which a person learns how her body’s anatomical systems support her in all her activities. Using movement, voice, breath, perceptions, and touch, BMC directs awareness to every part of the body.
Another form of somatic education is Continuum Movement, developed by Emilie Conrad-Da'oud. Continuum starts with the premise that movement is not something people do, it's something people are. "The body is movement because we come from water and we're composed mostly of water. We are wave motions that become stabilized in order to function on this planet." More information is available in her book Life on Land: The Story of Continuum.
Somatic Education Continues to Evolve
Teachers of the various forms of somatic education find their students among people seeking relief from chronic pain, people seeking more ease of movement in their daily lives, and people seeking better athletic performance. Somatic practices evolve as the needs of the students evolve.
Whatever a person may be seeking, there's likely a somatic practice that can address the need. Somatic education creates more ease in body and mind, giving a person more ease in life.
Mind-Body Integration
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