What Can You Expect from an Individual Clinical Somatics Session?

At your first session, you can expect to discuss what’s brought you to Somatics and what your goals are. I’ll then assess what will be most beneficial for you, and will give you a hands-on ‘lesson’ in somatic movement - the lesson will be best suited to your needs on that day.

Often, too, you will have filled in a pre-session questionnaire so that I have salient information about your health and well-being, any diagnoses or medications, and the area or areas of stiffness or pain that most concern you.

A Clinical Somatics ‘lesson’ generally lasts between 50 and 75 minutes. It involves being guided, hands on, through gentle movements designed to increase your awareness of where you are tense, and where you likely lack full muscle control and sensation.

The specific movements you’re guided through, coupled with my hands-on feedback, help to bring increased awareness and sensation to the areas you’re moving. This starts to make moving easier and free from pain — and often makes possible movements that you thought were beyond you, for whatever reason.

In most clinical sessions, you’ll also learn one or two movements to do daily at home. These will be designed to help you retain what you’ve learnt, as well as to start to moving more freely and with more awareness. Sometimes one movement is enough to take in (because Clinical Somatics is brain work: it can be surprisingly tiring, given that the mvoements you make are generally quite small and slow and gentle). Sometimes two or three are useful.

It’s important to know that individual sessions can be quite tiring. It’s sensible to make sure either you’re not driving yourself immediately afterwards, or if you have to, you factor in time for a rest before heading off! It’s also a good idea, whenever possible, to make time for a short walk after your session — and to be gentle with yourself. (Note, too, that if you move muscles in new ways, or muscles that aren’t used to moving, the release of lactic acid that results can make you feel like you’ve been to the gym! This is quite a surprise to most people, and it really does happen. When it does, it can take a few days to really settle back down again. There’s nothing wrong with this — in fact, it’s a “good sign” of new learning. But it’s something to be prepared to deal with.)

In the same vein, be aware that sometimes you’ll feel super alert and aware, and sometimes a session — or, often, part of a session — will make you yawny and you may lose focus. This is all fine. In fact, it’s often a good sign — because it means your brain has learned and taken in some new information. And that’s what you want to happen! That is what ultimately creates change.

Subsequent sessions will follow a similar pattern, working from your first session and your experience in response to doing somatic movements at home (and in class, if you also attend small group movement classes or a workshop, for instance).

WHAT SHOULD YOU WEAR TO A CLINICAL SOMATIC EDUCATION 1-2-1 SESSION, OR ESSENTIAL SOMATICS® MOVEMENT CLASS?

In both clinical sessions and movement classes, you should wear clothes that’re comfortable and allow you full freedom of movement — skirts, dresses, and jeans are not usually appropriate. Please just ask me if you have any specific queries about what might be most suitable! Really, anything that enables you to breathe and move fully, and that you feel comfortable doing movement work in, should be fine.

HOW MANY CLINICAL SOMATIC EDUCATION SESSIONS WILL I NEED?

It’s generally beneficial to plan on having between 3 and 5 clinical sessions to get the most from the work. This is partly to allow enough time to address all 3 of the stress reflexes that Clinical Somatic Education works with. But it’s also to give space for you and/as your brain to take in and start actively engaging with the new information the clinical lessons provide.

But whether you have one or more sessions is of course entirely up to you! Everyone really is different. You may, for instance, may wish to try some small group classes before booking a clinical session — or have a session and then a block of classes before coming back for further clinical work. There are no hard-and-fast rules, and you can always discuss options with me.

HOW IS AN ONLINE SESSION DIFFERENT TO AN IN-PERSON SESSION?

This is an increasingly important question, in the days following experiences of lockdown, globally — and also given that you might not live near a Certified Clinical Somatic Educator (or CHSE).

The differences are, in my view, quite considerable.

The inability for me, the educator, to provide you with hands-on feedback is the obvious, and the main, difference. It’s also the most problematic, in some ways, as hands-on feedback is such a big part of what Thomas Hanna created, and it was absolutely the focus of my clinical training with Martha Peterson and her team at Essential Somatics. (Other trainers do now teach it online — post-pandemic, as it were. But Essential Somatics is committed to teaching clinical work in person., and I support that position unreservedly.)

That said, lockdown in particular did enable us as a profession to more fully explore ways to convey movements to clients online, and — very importantly — to guide clients to use their own hands for feedback during sessions. So, there are many ways that clinical sessions can work well online — and they can be hugely beneficial for many people.

In particular, if you’re able to have at least one clinical session in person, I’d say that’s a huge help in getting the very most out of online sessions. To have had at least one experience of a certified educator’s hands-on feedback, really can help you figure out the best ways to create and use feedback for yourself.

It’s worth mentioning that an online clinical session is quite different from a movement class. (And that’s not just because it’s taught by a Certified Clinical Somatic Educator, rather than by someone who’s qualified as an Essential Somatics or other somatics movement teacher!)

In particular, a clinical session has an individualised, clinical focus, and the movements I guide you through will be more related to those I’d teach in a clinical session than in a group class.

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If you have any questions at all about in-person or online clinical lessons, just get in touch and let me know!