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5 Well-designed Somatic Education Exercises . . .

For You If You're Ready to Try A Different Approach

Your jaw exercises are a real blessing. On 11/23/2010 8:45 AM, mercedes marchand wrote: Hi Lawrence The session yesterday was spot on! My jaw and head seem much more aligned. I will focus on the seated, less sophisticated jaw release until I become more mobile (with a 1 handed jaw hold). Thanks for the work mercedes

I have organized this program into a series of methodical lessons to eliminate muscular contractions and involuntary actions that constitute TMD, free you from pain, and increase your freedom of jaw movement.

Each exercise leads logically into the next; each exercise prepares you for the next exercise.

Numerous approaches address TMJ Dysfunction/TMD -- splints, electrical stimulation, dental surgery, massage of the jaw muscles, stretching. You're probably familiar, by now, with at least some of these approaches.

As well-meaning as their practitioners or advocates may be, for any of these approaches to work, they must retrain our control of those muscles. If they don't, old patterns of control work against any therapeutic intervention, tend to re-assert themselves throughout the entire course of therapy, and change very slowly. Mechanical solutions or the protection of a mouth guard produce pretty slow changes, don't they? Have you had that experience?

So to change how your biting and chewing muscles function efficiently, we have to change how your brain controls their movement and tension, and that involves movement training, which is brain-level learning.

Our jaws move in three basic directions:

• opening / closing
• right / left (grinding)
• forward / backward (grinding and opening/closing)

First Step: Learn graded control of opening and closing movements.

The muscles of biting and chewing coordinate closely with the muscles at the rear-top of the neck/base of the head. When you reach forward with your mouth to take a bite, these muscles are involved.

Note: This exercise does not address bite deviations or one sided jaw pain. Later exercises in this program do so.

Second Step: Free and equalize side-to-side grinding movements of chewing.

This exercise uses a head-turned position to engage both the jaw and neck muscles, both of which are affected by trauma-conditions that lead to TMD.

Third Step: Equalize grinding jaw movements in the face-forward position.

Having dealt with enmeshed neck and jaw movements during grinding movements, we now deal specifically with the grinding movement in the head position typical of most chewing.

Fourth Step: Develop or restore the ability to open the jaws widely.

Movement of the lower jaw forward is part of opening the mouth widely, as in biting an apple.

Tight muscles of forward-backward movement prevent opening widely.