Movement therapy to the rescue
Somatics described as exercises that relax chronic muscle tension by re-educating the brain
Debra Denison can stand and move for 30 minutes at a time after two years of intense chronic pain left her on crutches.
Sue French is back to running these days after barely being able to walk for months due to severe back and hip pain.
Jude Ewan can finally move and control her arm after suffering a stroke that left her entire right side nearly paralyzed six years ago.
All three believe they have reclaimed their bodies and their lives because of a treatment called Hanna Somatics.
“I’ve seen many doctors, therapists, specialists in the United States,” says Denison. “I’ve had more X-rays than I can count, MRIs, cat scans, injections, prolotherapy. I used to tell my doctors my body feels unstable, disorganized. I kept complaining of severe lower back and right hip pain but no one really knew what was wrong with me.”
She ended up doing her own research and discovered Hanna Somatics through a chat group on Facebook. That eventually led her to Elizabeth Wakley, a longtime yoga instructor turned Somatics coach.
“I’m incredibly grateful I have Elizabeth,” says Denison.
Unlike Denison, French was skeptical.
“Because she is a good friend, I didn’t want to see her,” laughed French, a former journalist. “But I was so frustrated I decided I had nothing to lose. I only had two sessions with Elizabeth. Within the first week, I was doing the run-10-minuteswalk-one-minute pattern. It was shocking.” Ewan feels the same way. “Suddenly I could lie down on my right side without pain and I can control my arm,” says Ewan. She learned about somatics through her daughter, Anna Ewan, who incorporates somatics in her Pilates classes.
“It creates healthy movement patterns in the body,” explains Anna Ewan. “It’s the awareness piece that’s so important.”
Thomas Hanna, an American philosophy professor and author, based his somatic treatment on the mind-body-connection work of his teacher, Israeli physicist Moshe Feldenkrais, and pioneering research on stress by Austrian-Canadian endocrinologist Dr. Hans Selye. Hanna researched, developed, trained and wrote about somatics until a car accident took his life in 1990.
Self-described as a “philosopher who works with his hands,” Hanna designed a sequence of slow, gentle movements that relax chronic muscle tension by re-educating the brain.
According to Hanna, when a muscle is stuck in contraction and cannot voluntarily relax, it has what he calls “sensory motor amnesia.” According to practitioners, specific exercises help the mind notice and regain control of these forgotten muscle groups.
Hanna believed these exercises reprogrammed the body’s sensory-motor system freeing people from stiffness, aches, and pain.
Wakley says she has seen some positive change in everyone she’s worked with — including herself.
“From the first day, (somatics) made me realize that I couldn’t change the patterns of contraction in my body by working with my muscles,” says Wakley. “I had to work with how my brain was controlling my muscles.”
Wakley had tried myriad treatments for her own health issues and chronic pain she’d suffered over the years since undergoing multiple surgeries since childhood.
“Yoga was a great help dealing with chronic pain but nothing addressed the root cause until I started somatics,” says Wakley.
Medical professionals are quoted praising Hanna’s philosophy in his book, Somatics, but very few in the medical or body therapy communities in North America are familiar with it.
Eleanor Criswell Hanna, director of the Novato Institute for Somatic Research and Training that she co-founded with her late husband in 1975, admits the field of somatics is relatively young but the demand is growing around the world thanks to educators and the Internet.
“I see more people doing
it, more people wanting to enrol in training,” says Criswell Hanna.
Teaching a three-year training program in Calgary are two notable clinical somatic educators: Theresa Evans, a yoga teacher and former critical care nurse from Wisconsin and Martha Peterson, a former dancer and former massage therapist from New Jersey.
“My goal is to see a somatic educator in every town in the world,” says Peterson who, along with Evans, are two of only 155 certified Hanna Somatic educators in the world with 14 in Canada.
For more information, go to hannasomatics.com or essentialsomatics.com.