Have you tried Everything acupuncture a chiropractor massage prescription meds injections stretching exercising surgery physical therapy infrared heat hypnosis

to treat your chronic pain?

Midwest Somatics & Wellness

Retrain Your Nerves

Imagine Yourself Without Pain -
what would you do?

Learn how to move without pain

Clinical Somatics is the revolutionary way to release chronic muscle contraction and retrain the posture and movement patterns that are causing your pain.

What is Clinical Somatics?

Clinical Somatics is neuromuscular education that uses the groundbreaking technique of pandiculation to retrain muscle memory and relieve pain.

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Find out why Clinical Somatics is the groundbreaking way to get out of pain and stop doing damage to your body.

How can Clinical Somatics change my life?

Even if you don’t have a diagnosed pain condition, Clinical Somatics can have an enormous impact on your health by:

Experience reduced
muscle tension

Experience of pain
relief 

Are able to reduce or
eliminate pain medication

What is Pandiculation?

What is it about a cat arching its back and stretching it’s paws forward or a baby arching its back and stretching its legs and arms after a long nap that seems instinctive? This natural movement is called the pandicular response. Thomas Hanna, Founder of the Novato Institute of Somatic Research who coined the term “somatic education” researched the pandicular response, which is an automatic nervous system response exhibited by vertebrate animals that prevents the buildup of chronic muscle tension.

Think of the many times you’ve found yourself learning too close to the computer monitor at work, or having to repeat the same movement time and again leading to postures, and aches and pains that you didn’t have even a few years ago. Your body is constantly being trained to lean this way or bend that way, regardless of our intentions. These motor patterns are created and stored in the brain. Your level of muscle tone is determined both by your learned motor patterns, which send the messages to your muscles to contract, and by a sensorimotor feedback loop, called the gamma loop, that sense and maintains the length of your muscles. Unfortunately, when repeated muscle contraction is signaled by the brain, the gamma loop can get out of whack. Overactive or imbalanced firing by motor neurons in the gamma loop can increase muscle tension and spasms and even cause severe spasticity or rigidity. This leads to a loss of sensorimotor awareness and control and our natural pandicular response becoming inhibited.   

External manipulation, such as stretching and massage has little to no effect on muscle tone because it does not change the messages that your brain is sending, and it does not have a lasting effect on gamma loop activity.

The GOOD NEWS is that this loss of pandicular response can be reversed! The BETTER news is that you can be trained on how to do this on your own! To change the messages and return the gamma loop to normal baseline activity, you need to reprogram your nervous system with slow, conscious movement.

Hanna found that voluntary movement through pandiculation was the most efficient and effective way to unlearn chronic, involuntary muscular contraction and retrain posture and movement patterns. He created a set of somatic movement exercises that focused on contracting and releasing small groups of muscles and taught them to his students who practiced them on their own. As muscle tension was reduced, he taught them larger movements that integrated their muscle releases into natural, efficient, full-body movement patterns.

Sadly, Thomas Hanna died in a car accident in 1990, while teaching his first professional training program of Clinical Somatics Education. His students were able to continue his method of education by creating training programs for future students. With Hanna’s method of somatics education, thousands of people around the world have been able to get out of pain freeing them from the bondage of stiff, unmovable bodies and replacing it with the knowledge and training they need to take back control and be self-sufficient. 

As your guide in somatic education, it is not only my goal, but also my honor, to give you the tools you need to increase your sensorimotor awareness, to understand the cause of your pain or condition, and to improve your functioning so that you can release yourself from not being able to live the life you truly want to live-the life of being free from pain. Retraining your nervous system requires being “in tune” with your body, which is simply listening to the messages your body is telling you (“soma”) and then actively performing the movements.  Awareness of your muscle tension, posture, and movement is a skill that can be taught. 

You will learn how to contract and release muscles in such a way that the alpha-gamma feedback loop is naturally reset. This resetting reduces muscular tension and restores the muscles’ ability to lengthen. Eventually you will find yourself instinctively returning to those big stretches and arching of the back upon waking that you used to do when you were younger. 

What About Stretching?

Clinical Somatics is neuromuscular education that uses the groundbreaking technique of pandiculation to retrain muscle memory and relieve pain. But you may wonder, “Doesn’t stretching do this?”

man stretching

 

Static stretching activates your stretch reflex by pulling on an already tight muscle, making the muscle contract even further. Pulling onto a passive muscle and expecting it to get longer literally accomplishes nothing. Think of a time that you had a stretch goal you were working toward and you hold a pose for a long period of time waiting for the muscle to relax. You were probably excited that you were able to make some progress toward your goal. But then a few hours later it returned to being tight. In fact, the next morning you realized your muscles had tightened right back up again and you’d have to spend time to get to that same point again. You were not able to immediately get to that relaxed muscle point you ended with the day before.

In addition, stretching will do little for your pain and instead, will likely increase and prolong your pain by triggering your stretch reflex and making your muscles tighter. 

That’s because static stretching does not change the messages that your nervous system is sending to your muscles. No amount of pulling on the muscles will create a lasting change in the resting level of muscle tension that is being set by the brain and the gamma loop.

This must be reset through an active process of relearning driven by slow, conscious movement and the integration of sensory feedback from the muscle. 

Somatic education can bring about a profound difference in reducing your level of resting muscle tension by retraining your nervous system. If you like to stretch, I challenge you to learn somatic movements.