What Clinical Somatics Teaches You: The Technique to Remember How to Move Freely & With Ease

PANDICULATION

Learning to pandiculate is key to Clinical Somatic Education - and to releasing the chronic muscle tension that creates ongoing discomfort, stiffness and pain, as well as high stress levels and more.

Pandiculation helps you identify and change unhelpful habituated patterns, and so to move away from pain and towards improved ease of movement, and a less-stressed soma.

Pandiculation is the technique used exclusively by Hanna’s Clinical Somatics, and it enables your brain to sense and learn to release tension in your muscles whenever such tension and contraction is serving no positive purpose. Importantly, it works by contracting and lengthening muscles slowly, gently and easily - without stretching, so you don’t damage yourself by activating the stretch reflex.

Pandiculation is a big part of what makes Clinical Somatics unique - and what makes it so effective. Its the main technique you learn to replace Sensory Motor Amnesia (literally forgetting how to move efficiently) with Sensory Motor Awareness.

SENSORY MOTOR AWARENESS

Through pandiculation, Clinical Somatics heightens your awareness of and control over your muscles, thereby diminishing your problematic habituated reflex patterns that cause areas of tension, pain and restricted movement.

Rather than having a therapy or treatment done ‘to’ you, Clinical Somatic Education requires you to be proactively engaged in learning and doing. This ensures that you sense and understand the patterns in your body, so that ultimately you can avoid SMA through increased sensory awareness and implementing appropriate movement strategies to avoid or ease your way out of habitual muscular contractions.

Crucial to increasing your awareness, as well as your ability to pandiculate effectively, is recognising the interconnectedness of every part of your body. In learning Essential Somatics® Movements, you learn that understanding and addressing full body patterns is essential to easier, pain-free movement, and appreciate the importance of the relationship between the centre and periphery of the human body.

Also crucial to remember is that it’s never just one muscle: pain in one area of your body might be caused by SMA in other areas, and by full body patterns. Clinical Somatics recognises and addresses this, and encourages you to understand your own patterns and their relationship to any pain, tension and tightness you feel, and so your ability to improve your physical performance and sense of well-being and ease in your own body.

Click here for my super-short video about pandiculation versus stretching – which includes a short demo of pandiculating.