Smash the Myth of Ageing, with Hanns Somatics!

There is nothing ‘inevitable’ about becoming less mobile or experiencing more aches & pains as you age.

What is inevitable is that you will be told – and will likely tell yourself, at times – “It’s your age”, & that you will believe any decline you experience in health, strength, mobility & fitness is because you’re getting older.

But it’s not.

What causes more aches & pains, as well as many ‘conditions’ associated with ‘age’ (often highly unproblematically, & without much investigation) is the build-up of stresses, strains, injuries & habits in our body that remain unaddressed.

Your brain & nervous system gets used to certain areas of muscle pain & tension, files them away as your ‘normal’, & so you get stuck – habituated into patterns of contraction & tightness that undermine your ability to move, breathe & life live to the fullest.

Through gentle movement that re-trains your brain & nervous system out of unhelpful habits, you can find more ease of movement, relief from pain, & increased flexibility – quite literally, whatever your age!

Essential Somatics® Movement gives you – your brain, nervous system, your whole soma – the tools you need to change, & to access what’s possible for you instead of sticking to long-established, often unhelpful muscle patterns & all that goes with them.

The shock is - & this was a hugely powerful revelation to me, when I discovered Somatics – that your brain is not interested in what is good for you, nor what is most efficient: it is simply interested in getting you from A to B, in getting things done! So, if you have an injury & walk lop-sided while you are (positively) protecting the injured side, your nervous system is designed to file this away as the ‘new normal’ & to only change that information if you consciously, voluntarily provide new information (not through stretching or external manipulation, either: the change has to come FROM YOU – that’s why pandiculation is Somatic Education’s fundamental, & most powerful, tool).

So, as Thomas Hanna would put it, to get FREEDOM, you have to work for it!

In this case, to get freedom from unhelpful, or ‘bad’ habits of posture, walking, breathing & more that we take for granted, we need to consciously take back voluntary control of processes we are so often told are automatic. We have to recognise that some of the most effective healing can take place from the inside – from our ability to ‘educate’ our own nervous system through movement & awareness – & that external manipulations (e.g. massage, physical therapy, surgery) or medication are rarely the best ways to overcome a whole bunch of aches & pains. (This is not to say medical interventions cannot be helpful: my suggestion is, rather, that we’re too often encouraged to resort to medications &/or external manipulations too soon – before even trying to help ourselves out of pain & other problems that might be better resolved “from the inside”.)

So, yes, breathing is automatic: however, the most effective, fullest breathing we’re capable of – the best intake of oxygen possible for us – is not automatic: many of us hold our belly & back too tight to breathe fully (even if we take lessons in ‘how to breathe more fully’, in many cases!), but could change that through pandiculation & somatic awareness. Similarly, walking is an established pattern for most humans (or, other forms of moving forward through space, for those who cannot walk on two legs due to structural issues): that does not mean that the way you walk is the best, most efficient & most comfortable way that you can walk… & so on.

Somatic Education exists to help you breathe, walk, run, sit, stand & otherwise move more efficiently than you do, & thereby to address aches, pain & tension.

Essential Somatics® Movement classes can enable you to notice the patterns & habits that are unhelpful, & that are causing you or contributing to your pain: that is how Somatic Education can help you move away from those patterns & habits, take conscious control over how you breathe & move, & so replace unhelpful habits with new ones – whatever your age.

I talk about the Myth of Ageing, too, in my new FREE video series: sign up for my FREE video series, “The Truth About Pain - and how to get rid of it” to learn more.