Wondering why you're still in pain, even if you've "tried everything"?

This was my experience - for more than ten years. I had terrible neck pain & spasms, along with tight shoulders & often agonising wrist pain (so intense, my wrist came out of joint frequently for the last 3 years before I discovered Hanna Somatics) – all of which made it painful to work, & meant doctors advised me to give up work for a few months. (That was not possible for me - & I don’t consider it very helpful advice. However, I did take 6 weeks off at one point: it didn’t help.)

Additionally, I had some hip pain & lower back pain – especially after walking for more than 20 minutes or so. I’d been told this was due to a ‘birth defect’ in my pelvis that meant I had one leg shorter than the other, amongst other things.

I didn’t really understand what was happening, not least as I’d spent a good part of my late 20s & 30s living overseas up mountains & on remote islands, not to mention in jungles – doing independent voluntary work & walking a great deal: I had had some pain (hip & neck pain, for sure), but nothing like I experienced within a short time after returning to the UK. I was told – & tended to assume, after a while – this was because I was ageing, because of my ‘birth defect’, & because I’d ‘overdone’ things in the past. (I’ve practised yoga since I was 23, but also practised martial arts & walked everywhere… over all kinds of terrain.)

Like so many people, I felt that yoga was helping – even though it increasingly often made me feel frustrated, as I was slowly getting less supple, which made me wonder if being less flexible was inevitable for some people as they aged.

Latterly, when the pain was so unbearable and ongoing that I had resorted seeing doctors as well as chiropractors, osteopaths and more, I did entire sequences of gentle stretches I was given to ease my neck pain, as well as hip, back & wrist pain. I also tried acupuncture, more massage therapy, Bowen therapy, and more. I mostly refused painkillers as I felt they’d mask the pain rather than help: when I did take them for a short time, I felt no change in my pain levels anyway, which I thought was interesting.

ANYWAY, it was a short workshop on ‘somatic yoga’ that led directly to my discovering the work of Martha Peterson, and in turn of Thomas Hanna in whose tradition she teaches. It was in that workshop I felt release from my neck pain for the first time in years – & for the longest time I’d experienced in years, too. (I had an excellent chiropractor, and he could reduce my pain for a week or sometimes two at a time….) I then learnt a little more – online – and my ‘short leg’ was resolved, as was my hip pain. My neck & wrist pain eased, noticably. My chiropractor was impressed & amazed: he told me to keep doing what I was doing. My doctors were puzzled.

What DID I do? What WAS I doing?!

Pandiculation. Most importantly, I believe, simply NOT stretching – not even ‘gently’.

But more than that, I was, in doing Essential Somatics® Movements, re-training my brain – my entire nervous system – to take back control of my movements, & re-learn how to truly release & rest my muscles so they became less contracted. This lead to dramatically less pain, very quickly.

This bears out Thomas Hanna’s key insight – that is, that a very high percentage of human pain is caused by muscle tension. So, if we (re)learn to ease & release muscle tension, we massively reduce pain – and, also, reduce our likelihood of developing a whole range of not just musculoskeletal but also cardiovascular, digestive and other ‘conditions’, because over-tight muscles also impact negatively on other systems of the body.

The reason that so often pain is not lessened is because we so often focus on the symptoms, and/or the body’s structure, rather than the underlying cause of the pain, which is functional – that is, muscles held tight, in full-body patterns, creating pain & knock-on negative effects...

This is why therapies like massage, chiropractic, PT & more can often seem to be getting ‘results’, but why those results tend to be short-term. The same applies to practices such as yoga, stretching regimes, & pilates: all of these can create short-term feelings of length, ease & reduced pain. But because they all rely on stretching, &/or on external manipulation, the results are not long-term. (For many of us, in fact, they seem to be less effective the more we use or practise them – quite probably because in fact we tense up in response to them, over time.)

The difference – the BIG difference – with Hanna’s Somatics approach is that it works WITH the human body, using pandiculation, & uses YOUR sensations and awareness to make changes. And reducing muscle tension, & pain arising from that tension, is simply not possible other than from the inside: external manipulation, & stretching of any kind (yes, even ‘gentle’!), simply cannot lengthen muscles & maintain a longer restng length over time.

This is why if you do gentle stretches, or have massages or any other physical therapy, you have to keep going back for more – because your body, your nervous system, cannot fully integrate (& often actively resists) changes imposed on it from the outside…

I felt like I’d “tried everything” & was miserable. I’d started to believe that my body was just “like that”, & that also as I was “ageing”, it was inevitable everything would get worse. What I had NOT tried was Hanna’s approach to pain – his use of our naturally evolved ability to pandiculate (not stretch), & to take back conscious, voluntary control of how we move, rather than allowing established, unhelpful patterns of movement rule our lives and get us stuck in pain.

These patterns of tension & pain cannot all be resolved overnight – some of my pain went within a few weeks of starting Essential Somatics® Movements, some took a few months, and some of my deeper muscle patterns of tension are still there, and only a regular Somatics practice helps keep them at bay… But it works. I no longer have a neck that spasms so constantly & so much that x-rays can’t even see my vertebrae; I no longer have lower back pain; I only rarely have wrist pain or hip pain – and even then, the pain is nothing like what it once was. My shoulders are less tight, my ‘birth defect’ is seemingly gone…

Try Essential Somatics® Movement for yourself. It works!

Check out the free resources I have on this website – and sign up for my FREE video series, “The Truth About Pain - and how to get rid of it”. Registration for my full online programme, the SoMA Program, next opens in March 2022: in it you get not only full-length classes, but short video lessons and other materials to give you the tools you need to understand how & why you can get out of pain for good, & develop your own daily practice to fit with the areas of pain you experience, and to fit in with the time you have to address it.