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.