What is DIFFERENT about the Essential Somatics® approach to chronic pain?

What’s REALLY different about this approach to combatting chronic pain & moving more easily, is that in Essential Somatics®, you the client is the one moving yourself - rather than being moved by the practitioner (as in Feldenkrais, massage, chiropractic, & other ‘therapies’). Just as importantly, you are moving yourself voluntarily - using your brain, your voluntary motor cortex, to make the movements you’re guided through, thereby taking back fuller control of not only your movement & sensation, but your own nervous system’s ability to enable pain relief.

How? Well, in the work we do as Clinical Somatic Educators - whether through movement classes or hands-on clinical work - your brain, your voluntary motor cortex, is engaged to tighten and release muscles for yourself. We do not do it for you. It is this voluntary control of your muscles that can and does lead to pain reduction.

The fact that you are your own ‘educator’ - that you learn how to use moving yourself, not being moved by someone else, to ease tension and pain - is a huge benefit both in practical terms (you don’t need a practitioner in the long term; you can learn to combat your own pain & tension), as well as neurological terms (you quite literally teach your own brain/nervous system to move away from pain, by teaching yourself new ‘habits’ & awareness that help you avoid pain).

Practically, this means that as you learn more, when you feel tightness or stiffness or pain, rather than go see a Somatic Educator or other practitioner, you can figure out what to do for yourself - using your own Somatics practice.

Somatics is also, of course, different in its approach to easing muscle tension & lengthening tight muscles never through stretching, but always without strain - through the technique Thomas Hanna taught us, of ‘pandiculating’. This is more effective, and more long-lasting in its results, because it avoids the stretch reflex - a natural reflex that results from even the most gentle stretching, and creates more, not less, tension & tightness in our muscles, especially over time.

The focus on full-body patterns is also pretty different from most other approaches to pain relief and ease of movement: for Essential Somatics®, it really is never just one muscle - we are always aware of how pain in one part of our body likely results from tightness in other areas, and in full-body patterns related to daily stresses & strains, as well as the natural stress reflexes that underpin those responses.

These are part of what makes Somatics not just so different from most other approaches - but also what makes it so powerfully effective in combatting pain.

Want to learn more? Check out my other blog posts & free resources, & sign up for my FREE video series, “The Truth About Pain - and how to get rid of it”, that can help YOU move away from pain, & move with far greater ease.