Knowing Yourself by How You Move
If you want to learn something new about yourself when you make a particular movement you can do so any time you choose to bring your attention and awareness to your internal sensations of that movement.
Only you can feel your internal sensations from doing the movement. Going into and most importantly coming out of the movement, slowly and gradually, gives you valuable information and you can learn to sense into the movement from your own internal perspective. You come to know what it is you know and know that you know it and feel it. Additionally, you can know what you don't feel and don't know yet.
You don't need to be limited by what you already think you know; instead you can move more powerfully into unknown territory because you are learning to slow down the speed with which you move which frees your potential to discover new and interesting possibilities and experience subtle differences.
You may notice perhaps that one side of your lower back area feels tighter than the other and curiously one arm feels heavier than the other but your fingers are clenched. As you provide your brain with more new information by continuing the slow practice of your movement, later, when you least expect it and you are carrying on your daily life, you begin to feel change and you realise you are acting with increasing precision and greater freedom.
Change is a natural process when you give yourself time to feel the internal sensations from your movement and know that you know how you are moving. This process is known as differentiation where more brain cells and connections between brain cells get involved in reorganising your movement making the impossible possible, the possible comfortable and the comfortable elegant.
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.
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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.
The Practices used in Hanna Somatic Education
Means Whereby assists the client become consciously aware of a particular movement pattern by the Hanna Somatic Educator making the contraction more clear to them. As they receive sensory-motor feedback from a particular movement, made for them by the Hanna Somatic Educator, their voluntary motor cortex of the brain becomes engaged and primed ready for change. Previously this movement would have been an unconsciously habituated movement pattern that the client would be unaware they were making. This practice enables the Hanna Somatic Educator and client discover more about the client's particular movement pattern and feel the quality and range of motion of the movement; the opposite of solely being concerned with an 'end goal'.
This technique 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 Hanna Somatic Educator, thus the learning cannot be initiated from the first person perspective. ... Read more
Kinetic Mirroring is the opposite of trying to force a contracted muscle by stretching. It is when the Hanna Somatic Educator 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 client is asked to hold that position, then very slowly and with guidance release 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.
Pandiculation actively engages the person by inviting them with verbal guidance to voluntarily go into a particular movement very slowly contracting a muscle or muscle group against gravity. Most importantly is the second part, where the person makes a very slow release of that contraction to rest. Pandiculation is both initiated and adapted by the person making the particular movement. This provides new sensory feedback to the voluntary motor cortex of the brain which gets 'excited' and creates new possibilities of movement. The new movement pattern is integrated into whole global movement patterns with practice and repetition of the movement. Although the reference for focus is muscle-fascial-skeletal, the blood circulation, breathing, lymphatic systems, all the organs and glands are involved as are the nervous systems.
The voluntary motor cortex of the brain is the only part of the motor-sensory 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 individual 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 Hanna Somatic Educator getting used to the timing of responses for a particular client when they voluntarily go into a contraction using the Hanna Somatics Educator's hand and fingers to make the movement against rather than with the direction of movement. It takes very fine sensitivity of the Hanna Somatic Educator 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 particular movement however it does not need the client to 'feel' the differences for change to take place within their whole Soma.
