What is Clinical Somatics - and why should you care?

Because it works with the brain, central nervous system, muscles and more, Clinical Somatics is quite a complex process to fully explain and understand. What matters, though, is that it works for so many people, and so many types of pain, stiffness, discomfort and stress.

Fundamentally, in movement classes and clinical sessions, you’re helped to feel and change the amount of contraction held in your muscles, as it’s the largely unconsciously held contraction that causes pain, tightness, tension, shallow breathing, and more (including a lot of ‘anxiety’, ‘stress’, ‘depression’ and other experiences often associated with and labelled as ‘mental health’ issues…).

So, for example, through a movement class you may discover that when your shoulders feel ‘at rest’, they are actually something like 50% contracted: your brain has got used to this feeling of contraction over time, so regards it as ‘normal’ for your shoulders. It (you) does not notice the ‘resting’ level of 50% contraction. And your brain is interested in ‘normal’ - in getting you through each day, in a familiar way - rather than what is ‘good’ or ‘better’ for you.

As a result, even when you try to alleviate such tension - e.g. by using heat packs on your shoulders, or by stretching them - your largely unconscious level of contraction means you can’t achieve positive, long-lasting change: you are ‘stuck’ with the underlying 50% contraction level as a starting point, beyond which your muscles will not release and relax.

Why? Because they [you, your brain, your muscles] don’t know how to release, or that it’s even possible for you... So, when you then suffer additional stresses that tighten your shoulders, your contraction increases… and the related shoulder pain, tension and tightness gets worse… and so it goes on.

Clinical Somatics breaks those vicious cycles of embodied stress.

Through bringing back conscious awareness to the areas of contraction in your shoulders, and using voluntary control to ‘override’ your brain’s information about what is ‘normal’ for you, clinical somatics enables you to release, lengthen and relax the contraction in your shoulders below the 50% level in our example: it helps you get ‘un-stuck’, so you can start to fully relax your muscles and use them more efficiently, effectively, and free from pain.

Basic Clinical Somatics movements are actually pretty simple - even if the ‘science’ behind them is not! They are slow, easy, and often small movements: the key is in your paying attention to the movements and to what is going on inside your body while you make them…

This is what Certified Clinical Somatic Educators and Movement Teachers help you learn.

Learn more about my approach - which integrates ‘felt sense’ nervous system work with Clinical Somatics informed by contemporary neuroscience - by taking my free course on the 3 Somatic Keys for Freedom From Stuck Stress, or my 28-day course to Freedom from Embodied Stress, Nurturing Freedom from Stress, Stiffness, Discomfort & Pain.