Creating A Comfortable Space

With a little bit of practice it is possible to create that moment in our day when we know we won't be missed or disturbed, where we can bring ourselves to lying down or sitting on a supporting surface and be completely comfortable. This truly is a real treat we can give to ourself and it can be deliciously restful.

You may like to try creating a new space, different perhaps to what you currently might think is comfortable, allowing yourself to engage in a process of discovery and self-learning. Gather together plenty of large, soft woollen blankets and towels. For hard floors, a piece of carpet off-cut to fit all of you on with arms and legs spread out is great. Layer your blankets wide enough to support your head, shoulders and pelvis with your arms and hands released out freely by your sides. It’s nice to have extra blankets for folding underneath your head to reach a comfortable height, especially if it is not yet comfortable to lie on your back. It may be more appropriate for you to come down to lying on your side. A small towel between your knees is lovely in this position. Firm cushions are helpful for supporting your arms and head when you are choosing to come to sitting and a bolster is nice under your knees for that extra little bit of comfort for both sitting and lying.

Everyone is naturally capable of creating opportunity to notice the subtle changes of breathing, posture and movement when internal quiet and stillness is found.

Shouldering Life

You may have experienced acute pain in your shoulder from a major traumatic injury which prevented you from moving your arm and impacted your breathing. This may have been from a sporting activity, exercise workout or your occupation. Another experience could be a gradual accumulation of micro-traumatic injuries which go beyond acute pain and contribute to chronically tight shoulders and discomfort in your mid back, upper front chest and neck. It may seem to have somehow gotten ingrained into muscles, soft tissues and joints. Simply the weight of our arms and multiple interconnections with our hands, wrists and fingers in our daily activities of computer work and driving brings strain into our ribs and shoulders.

The four rotator cuff muscles of your shoulder are intimately interconnected with the biggest and most important muscles of your arm and which connect your shoulder girdle to your torso in the front sides and in the back. There is a precise arrangement of muscles aligned and attached so that the rounded head of the humerus (upper arm bone) is free to rotate or swing in front-to-back and side-to-side plains and also around their long axis.

The first step in healing and regaining easy balance of movement in our shoulders is allowing our shoulder blades to move as part of our arm and what we do with our hands and fingers. It is possible for you to find a particular direction of movement in your shoulder that is comfortable. This is a learning process guided by your internal sensations of movement.

The Practices Used in Hanna Somatic Education

Kinetic Mirroring is the opposite of trying to force a contracted muscle by stretching. It is when the practitioner moves the client very gently into their movement pattern, into the direction of movement of the contraction, a little bit more. This encourages the muscle or muscle group to stop contracting, temporarily shutting off the firing of the muscle fibres. At this point the practitioner asks the client holds that position, then the practitioner very slowly releases out of the contraction after the hold. Thomas Hanna was personally trained by Moshe Feldenkrais in this technique which was originally termed "Functional Integration". Kinetic Mirroring is a spinal chord response and does not go as far as reprogramming the resting level of the muscle fibres in the way pandiculation does; the client remains passive.

Means Whereby assists the client become consciously aware of a particular movement as they receive sensory feedback from the movement to the voluntary motor cortex of the brain. Previously this movement would have been an unconsciously habituated movement pattern. This practice enables the practitioner and client discover more about the client's particular movement pattern, to feel the quality and range of motion about the movement rather than solely being concerned with the 'end goal'. It was first discovered by F. Matthias Alexander, founder of the Alexander Technique and was embraced by Thomas Hanna. Although Means Whereby engages the voluntary cortex, it is engaged for the person by the practitioner, thus the learning cannot be initiated from the first person perspective.

Pandiculation actively engages the client by inviting them to voluntarily go into a particular movement very slowly contracting a muscle or muscle group against gravity. Most importantly they make a slow release of that contraction to rest. Pandiculation is both initiated and adapted by the person doing the pandiculation. This provides new sensory feedback to the voluntary motor cortex which gets 'excited' and creates new possibilities of movement.
The voluntary motor cortex is the only part of the motor system that can inhibit the firing rate of the alpha motor neuron and all the muscle fibres it synapses with thereby inhibiting hypertonic muscles. Thus the client is learning the refinement of a movement which is synonymous with the process of differentiation in the brain. Brain cells (neurons) reorganise and reform and new connections between brain cells (synapses) are made creating new neuronal pathways and the development of new functions.

Facilitated Pandiculation refers to the practitioner getting used to the timing of responses for a particular client when they voluntarily go into a contraction using the practitionern's hand to make the movement against rather than gravity. It takes very fine sensitivity of the practitioner to feel the very subtle and tiny movements as they wait for the client to respond and provide very gentle resistance. This helps the client to feel the movement however it does not need the client to "feel' the differences for the change to take place.

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Knowing yourself by how you move

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