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Doing pandicular movements, that is,
doing somatic education exercises,
is akin in rhythm and spirit
to brushing ones hair.

In a movement through a wave
there may be a “catch”,
a temporary hold-up,
a glitch,
a halt,
a hitch in your ‘git-along’.

Maybe a brain-fart?
or a string of brain farts,
irregularly spaced …

rhythm interrupted,
mind, derailed,

One adjusts ones “push”
to accommodate the capacity
of the medium,
the hair,
the life,
to change, to move anew.

Snags are re-approached
with good timing
and repeatedly, if necessary
until they come loose
and the smooth wave
the easy move
ensues.

Otherwise,
it’s just smooth sailing
and stylizing —
creative gesturing
in the smooth and rising rhythm
of the wave.

Passing through in repeated strokes,
going deeper,
feeling more,
getting smoother.

The problem comes when we got gum in our hair.

Ah, a pretty pickle, that is.

We have a choice:
clean it
or cut it loose.

Patience is a virtue
and timing determines things.

Sometimes, a little sorting out is needed,
a little pulling things apart,
separating them more finely
so that they are more free to change.

and so on

Let me explain something.  When somatic education “takes off”, it will not do so, “like a gentleman” or “in a ladylike way”, saying, “Here we are, ladies and gentlemen,” like some spawn of academia or science.  It will not introduce itself to polite society, asking for approval and acceptance.  It will not play by the rules.

It will be explosive, viral.
You know how virii spread?  They don’t spread “arithmetically” — by addition: “1 + 2 + 3 …” — not geometrically — by multiplication: “1 x 2 x 3” — but exponentially, like the expanding Universe — the longer it expands, the faster it expands, the only limit being “the maximum speed of information transmission”. If you can imagine it, it’s faster than that.

The difference:  there’s no immunity to somatic education.  It’s a cosmological imperative arising out of The Big Bang (of which Thomas Hanna spoke as our origin and nature). There may be resistance from the old order (as in Chris’ reference to the AMA attacking HSE), but that will “cave in”.  There may be the inertia of obliviousness (as in people not recognizing what it is), but that will be temporary.  Since we dealing in ideas, information and transformations deeper than acculturation, and since the need is cross-cultural, there’s no way of heading it off.  It will not wait for us to keep up — or to catch up.  It will come upon us like a tidal wave, when the time comes.

Think of the spread of cell-phones throughout the world, even to the poorest African nations.  Faster and more pervasive than that.  Think of our technological revolution (in progress and accelerating). Think of the information explosion (in progress and accelerating).  Think of how yawning and laughter spread from person to person, involuntarily: Somatic Contagion.  It’s built in to humanity.

What will “go viral” will not be merely “clinical somatic education”, like some form of medicine or bodywork.  It will be full-spectrum somatic education.   When it catches on, it will be a chain reaction, a wave that transforms everything in its path, every social sector I mentioned in a previous entry and more, every discipline, and from all directions.

I don’t say, “Be ready.”  I don’t think we can “be ready”.  That implies a “gentlemanly” or “ladylike” continuation of the status quo and “the expected rules”.  It will go viral unexpectedly at the moment it reaches “critical mass”.  The operative word, here, is “unexpectedly”.

What we can do is respond with the greatest integrity and competence of which we are capable at the moment when the effects reach us, when the world-wide information network carries the message broadly, starting first as small streams into local backwaters, and expanding — and the onslaught of public interest, fueled by need, begins.  It will change our lives, as well.  It will be “quite a ride” and it’s barely begun.

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross wrote of the five stages of grieving a loss.  Her words are relevant because most people (especially those with a vested interest in conventional methods) are attached to their ways — and to switch to our way entails a loss — a loss of face, a loss of ego, a loss of status.  People avoid “beginner’s mind” and The Zone of Incomprehensibility

Her five stages of grieving:
1) denial
2) anger
3) bargaining
4) depression
5) acceptance

In practice, people who hear about HSE, who are not otherwise desperate for help, first deny our validity by ignoring us.

Then, they ridicule or invalidate us, and if not to our faces, then in their minds. (anger).  This observation applies to chauvinistic “Feldy” types who prefer to think Tom Hanna was an upstart usurper, as well as to most physicans and physical therapists.

Then, they allow a little of what we have to say to penetrate (“They may have a point — but it’s unproven.”), while seeking to maintain an attitude of superiority or seniority — their usual viewpoint (bargaining/jockeying to maintain position/status).  Tom Hanna’s first act, with us Wave 1 people, was to ask us to put everything we knew about bodies and bodywork “on the shelf”.  He knew.

Then, when they realize that they’re screwed (by their own condition and/or the limitations of their approach), they begin to submit, but in the mood of “I’ve lost.” (depression)

At last, when they actually take action and get the benefits, they accept HSE and advocate it — and encounter the same pathetic five stages in the people with whom they want to share HSE. (acceptance)

That’s what’s in the way of mainstreaming HSE.

Once HSE gets a toehold in the culture (we scarcely have that, now), and the mass media are giving us some play, they’ll still have to go through the stages, but they’ll go through much faster.

In the meantime, as we do our work and make our communications, we’ll polarize people:
1) driving the most hard-headed away from us
2) gradually infiltrating the thinking of those less hard-headed, getting their skeptical and unsympathetic attention
3) intriguing the attention of those with some curiosity, drawing them toward finding out more about our work
4) attracting people toward us for one-on-one conversation
5) attracting people to use our services
6) having people advocate our work to others
7) attracting new trainees in HSE

In summary, we’ll polarize people either into running away from us as fast as they can or coming to join us — and every stage in between.

Our best candidates are those those know that they’re screwed and they’re looking for something — they don’t know what.

I’ve noticed that I’ve had scant success getting clients from conversations in public places (maybe it’s my personality), or from advertising. 

For years, friends and clients have wondered why this work isn’t more popular, why friends they’ve told about somatics don’t come to me.  This piece may reveal the heart of the matter: people are attached to what they already know, haven’t realized that they’re screwed without somatic education; they aren’t desperate enough.

The desperate who are looking find me on-line or hear from friends who were clients.  They come and they reach “stage 5”.

Hallelujah.

I need more hands.

But failing that due to my own genetic limitations, I’m asking people to lend me their ears.

We have an opportunity and we face a potential danger — that being the definition of risk.

The danger?  the success of Thomas Hanna’s contribution — in other people’s hands than ours — at a lower level of contribution than we could make.

The opportunity?

The potential to have somatics integrated into mainstream culture with such poise, mastery and assurance as to take our place as a matter of course.

Why now?

2. A need exists beyond the need for people to be out of pain.  

• One school of Pilates has developed enough sophistication about
  movement and coordination that it could incorporate pandiculation.
• John Barnes has said that his advanced training incorporates something similar to pandiculation, if not pandiculation, itself.

1. Feel whether you agree with the gist of this message.

Though it may be taken to be otherwise,
what we call, “body”
is a resonant field
imbued with feeling (sentience)
the property of occupying space
the capability of movement,
and with the ability to move among other resonant fields
living beings.
It is what we mean by, “soma”.

Our minds are not entirely our own,
but resonate with the field of all minds
modulate that field of thought and feeling
through interaction with memory and original activity
and reflect it back into the field of all minds
transformed.

What we call, “body”
is really, “soma”,
sentient,
resonant in the field of all minds,
responsive,
initiatory,
remembering,
intelligent,
changing,
accelerating the process of change
occurring in and as the Field of All Possibility.

Physiology resonates and physically manifests
the ways of mind.

The ways of mind
are not “the” mind,
since there is no fixed identity
no permanent identity
to earn the appelation, “the”
(though personal names imply such a permanent identity).

There is only a persisting and yet changing process
constantly inscribing upon memory
endless moments of time
connected by memory
or disconnected in amnesia.

The amnesia shows up,
somatically,

as awkwardness
both in terms of clumsiness of movement
and in terms of dis-ease or disgrace,
as discontinuity of feeling during movement
as lack of sensibility during action,
of which we are unaware, oblivious,
since a long-term lack of sensation goes unnoticed

as lack of fluidity,
a kind of stodginess in certain movements, such as walking
slowed walking or unsteady walking

as dis-comfort in certain positions

as somewhat crude control of movements,
so that they’re “all on” or “all off”,
but not so well controlled in “the in-between”

This is part of clumsiness.

Elite athletes excel in “the in-between” between “all on” and “all off”,
and not just in “the extremes” of high performance
and so exhibit uncommon grace.

The amnesia, the obliviousness
shows up as habits of behavior and memory
which we take to be ourselves
and which others recognize as ourselves

all lumped into one as our way of moving
and of going into and coming out of rest,

Psychology and the physiology are the same one
perceived from two different viewpoints.

Psychology is the experience of physiology
and
physiology is the play of psychology as living matter.

Experiential memory holds them as one.
Conceptual memory holds then as two.

We, somas, are the musical instruments that play
the Music of the Spheres,
the “music” (and noise) of the centers of influence we all are
resonant fields apparently centered as “selves”
located by others
and experienced by ourselves
as centers of memory

memory, embodied physiologically
memory, resonant with the Field of All Minds
the Field of All Possibilities
ever-changing
ever appearing to persist as a center-self
a resonant field of mind
transforming physiologically and psychologically
as changes of our level of rest or activity
as changes of our state of attention,
as changes of our muscular activity
of our neurology,
as hormonal changes
and changes of our blood pressure and breathing rate.

Thought is the flickering of attention among memory patterns
among arousal states
inscribed upon memory
as things sensed
things felt
and impulses to act or react
to feel or not to feel,
all inscribed upon memory
with gaps of amnesia,
things forgotten

like a Hitchcock tale.

Emotion is the tension set within which thoughts occur.

Emotion gathers related, mutually triggering memories
together

into a state of suspense

that may persist or that may change
over short or very long periods of time.

The physiology gets stabilized at a certain pattern of homeostasis
or “best approximation of ‘home'”
which, as we know
has gaps and deviations

both physiologically (as perceived from one perspective)
and psychologically (as apperceived from another).

The kicker is that apperception (the perception of self-soma by self-soma)
has amnesias and unawakened potentials
and so soma-self’s image
is subject to
“The ‘not-knowing” of all I never knew I didn’t know.” (oblivious ignorance)
and
“All the ‘knowing’ that I’ve forgotten that I know, that’s still running the show.” (amnesia and habit)
— in other words,
incomplete and inconclusive
beset by seemingly hidden influences,
but seeming, because of memory,
to be complete and conclusive,
present as physiological states of readiness
to take actions remembered
toward different things as they are happening, now.

And they call that maturity.

But it’s incomplete.

The perspective of “the other”, another person,
another viewpoint toward oneself that one is capable of taking in,
may reveal the hidden memories and blind spots
that have been running the show from behind the scenes.

And the two somatic perspectives,
from outside
and
from within
give a more complete view,
but still,
always,
incomplete and inconclusive
subject to
“The ‘not-knowing” of all I never knew I didn’t know.” (oblivious ignorance)
and
“All the ‘knowing’ that I’ve forgotten that I know, that’s still running the show.” (amnesia and habit)
— whatever we may know in memory
and mistake for the present moment.

Now, here’s the thing about mainstreaming Hanna somatic education:  It promises to change the tenor or emotional climate of whatever scenario is involved.


Case in point: The Medical Profession

Anyone who’s been involved in mainstream medicine has experienced the brutality of it.  Procedures (and sometimes examinations) hurt.  The examination room contains instruments made of metal that promise to hurt, when employed, and prompt patients to fear, every time the doctor or attending nurse goes to that little table at the back of the room, what medical torture may be about to ensue.  Many drugs have side effects and those taken orally taste bad. Surgeries, however necessary, leave patients with a painful recovery and often, limiting after-effects. Therapy is expected to be painful.  Pain management is part of the speciality, anaesthesiology.  That, alone, is telling:  a person has to cease to feel to feel an approximation of, “ok”.

Enter somatic education.

Our clients actually do feel better.

What would (or will) happen when clinical somatic education infiltrates the medical profession?

Our entry point may be nurses, who experience the brunt of difficulty serving patients.  Lifting injuries are common.  Stress and burnout are also common.

I imagine what happens as a nurse gets the relief from somatic education that she hasn’t gotten from physical therapy.  She actually feels better.  She now knows that there’s something available that can help not only her and her colleagues, but also the patients who come through their care.  The reputation spreads: At the end of the “tunnel” of medical treatment, they know, is a process that can rapidly still the anxiety of their patients, restore their comfort, leave them feeling whole, ready for life.  The medical procedure has resolved into a great calm that leaves them feeling OK, instead of feeling as if they’ve been through a war.  We are first a resource that helps the most beleaguered in that profession, the nurses.  Then, on to physicians’ assistants and nurse-practitioners, who are very influential.

Am I exaggerating?  I don’t believe so.  What do you feel?

Now, what happens within the larger medical profession, as not only word, but reputation and regard for somatic education spreads?  After the initial skepticism and dismissiveness and results have had time to show themselves, some of the emergency mood of medicine dissipates.  A kind of reassurance develops in the background, underpinning mood of the profession.  Why?  Better outcomes.

And what happens in the attitude of the general public?  They come to regard medicine as more nurturing, more humane because even though medical procedures may still be traumatic, the overall outcome is better, calming, reassuring because things actually turned out well — and cost less, too.

Any improvement over the status quo has its beneficial effects.  Someone with vision can foresee them.

WHAT YOU CAN DO:

1. Daydream the scenario I just described.
2. Write to me.

The Inevitable

The Association for Hanna Somatic Education is the organization formally responsible for mainstreaming Hanna Somatic Education.  How is it doing?

There is no Association for Hanna Somatic Education “out there”.  The Association has its home in and as we, ourselves.

THE POTENCIES NEEDED TO MAINSTREAM SOMATICS

To “mainstream” somatics, we need four “potencies”*:

1. integrity
2. relationships
3. communication that inspires people’s sense that something is possible and do-able
4. persistent action (attention and intention)

First potency:  integrity
Integrity isn’t honesty.  Integrity is stable wholeness and completeness — what makes a collection of parts into something organized that produces an intended result.  When we have integrity, we are pleased to be seen.  We’re “playing with a full deck” — complete, competent, proficient.  We have the fortitude to be honest. Without integrity, we’re too shaky to be honest, particularly where it counts — in cleaning up messes and dysfunctional situations — and we’re incapable of living up to our promises.  Integrity is an essential principle that allows something to live.

Integrity is the nature of the second potency:

Second potency:  relationships
We operate as relationships of all sorts.  We connect. We cooperate. We get results. We share the benefits.

Relationships are resources. Relationships are the recipients of our gifts and abilities.  Until we forge and activate relationships, we’re left only with our own resources and stay small.

Relationships are the setting for the third potency:

Third potency:  communication of the advantageous possibilities
Communication isn’t, “talking to people.”  Talking isn’t communication.  Communication happens when someone internalizes what we mean to put across — and when we internalize what someone else puts across.  Communication is the outer form of the intentions we are exercising.

When we’re in communication, people:

• Trust our integrity — so they listen and internalize
• Treat the advantageous possibilities we’re talking about as something new and unique — so they listen with fresh attention, rather than pigeon-hole what we say with what they already know.  (“Is it like chiropractic?”…)
• Feel these new possibilities as something they can partake in.
• Recognize and be inspired (so they are drawn into enthusiastic action).

When others communicate with us, we experience the magic of another viewpoint that may alter and expand our own viewpoint and our potency for change.

Communication is the feedback look that connects us in the fourth potency:

Fourth potency:  persistent action (directed attention and exercise of intention)
That means, do what Thomas Hanna personally told me to do, “Be relentless.”

“Relentlessnes” may mean, to communicate relentlessly until we get the desired result; to develop relentlessly so we can walk our talk (be the result we promise to others) and deliver results to others; to take steps to “mainstream” somatics (the proper mission of the AHSE) until it happens; to “Keep our eyes on the prize”, taking whatever steps necessary to stay on or to get back on track.

So, to have a chance to succeed, we need to enhance and exercise our integrity (both individually and as a group), connect, communicate and persistently take action — relentlessly, in mood of, “success is the only acceptable outcome.

How does that feel?

Here’s the juicy part:  As we further our purpose, the energy we get back fuels us.

What We Can Do

1. Discover and enhance our power by finding (creating) these four potencies in ourselves.
2. Discover the resources we have to tap into the juicy flow that allows Somatics to tap into the world-culture — the five cultural streams, our own clients, our own abilities.
3. Communicate

_______________________________________
* credit to The Landmark Forum-in-Action Seminar

Remember a time when someone tickled you.

You wriggled and squirmed all over the place, didn’t you?

Remember a time when you got hurt.

You tightened up and pulled in the injured place, didn’t you?

The two actions are related and very similar.

Very often, an injury leads to a long-term muscular contraction action.  People think it’s only momentary, as in limping when you sprained an ankle or as in pulling your hand back when inadvertently touching something hot.

But everyone’s familiar with the lasting change of movement an injury can provoke, the limp that never goes away, the postural change that occurs after a whiplash injury.

Physical therapists do their best to eliminate those after-effects, but they tend to persist, anyway.  One reason is that medical practitioners tend to focus on the site of pain or restriction, without taking whole-body patterns of contraction into account. Without dealing with the entire pattern, the parts of the pattern
left untouched by therapy tend to re-create the entire pattern.  That’s
why therapy so often fails to produce a complete result or takes a long time.

When a somatic educator works with such muscular tension patterns, we look beyond the site of pain; we look to the whole contraction pattern, which spreads out from the site of pain the way the fracture lines of a damaged window spread out from the center of damage.

The quandary therapists (and somatic educators) face is, “How do we identify the entire pattern?”

One common way used by somatic educators and therapists to assess patterns of injury is to listen to the client/patient’s report of pain and to correlate it with the report of injury.  They may (and should) go further:  to watch the client/patient walk and otherwise move, to examine by touch (palpation), and to move the client/patient passively to discern restrictions to movement — all useful.

However, there is an assessment technique that goes beyond palpation:  to observe he client’s response to being touched, namely, to wriggle and squirm.

Even with sensitive palpation, touch elicits that response.

It’s very revealing — because the way someone wriggles exactly reveals his pattern of trauma reflex.

Thomas Hanna outlined what I call, The Spectrum of Reaction, in response to touch (found in The Handbook of Assisted Pandiculation, available to Hanna somatic education practitioners). 

It goes like this.

1. ticklishness without pain
2. pain upon being touched
3. intermittent pain without being touched
4. ongoing soreness
5. spasm 

If a person is ticklish, he is contracted (tight) at (and around) the site of ticklishness.  You can’t tickle a person who’s relaxed.  There’s no “tickle” there.

If a person is sufficiently contracted, muscles are fatigued but below the threshold of pain, and mere touch is sufficient to surface them above the threshold of pain.

If a person is more contracted, muscles are fatigued but below the threshold of pain, and mere movement using those muscles is sufficient to fatigue them enough that they hurt.  Since movement is intermittent, pain is intermittent.

If a person is yet more contracted, muscles are sufficiently fatigued to be sore all the time.

And if a person is yet more contracted, muscles are sufficiently sore to trigger a cringe response, which tightens the muscles further, makes them burn more, triggers an even heavier cringe response and the person goes into spasm.

Touch at even the “ticklish” level of contraction is sufficient to trigger the cringe response which, known by another name, is The Trauma Reflex.  At that level, it may not hurt, but the protective movement action is there, the very action that, like the fracture lines of a broken window, spreads out in a pattern from the site of injury.

In assessment, we can use the “tickle response” to show us that pattern.

Therapists may use that information to address the complete pattern using whatever modalities they choose.

Somatic educators may use that information to coach the client to contract in that pattern, deliberately, as part of a pandicular maneuver — the “omni-yawn” we use to free a person from the grip of muscular contractions maintained by muscle/movement memory in the condition we call, Sensory-Motor Amnesia.

What is “Sensory-Motor Amnesia”?

SENSORY-MOTOR AMNESIA

First, let me touch on the “amnesia” part.

When people first react to injury (cringing in Trauma Reflex), we may, if we pay attention, notice the entire way our movements change from that instant.  The limp is obvious.  The pain is obvious.

However, as with all sensations that persist for sufficient time, those sensations fade.  The change of movement, the change of coordination, fades from our awareness.  We may believe we have recovered from the injury.  However, the changes of movement persist, un-noticed.  Meanwhile, we also have forgotten what it feels like to move freely.  The new, cringe pattern has displaced the free movement we had — and we may not (and often don’t) notice it (except for the pain, which may seem mysterious, or seems to portend some serious disease).  That’s the “amnesia” — a change of muscle/movement memory — and it may persist for decades.

“Sensory-Motor” merely means “the combination of movement and the sensation of that movement”.

So, “Sensory-Motor Amnesia” is the loss of the memory of what free movement feels like (and ability to do it) — and its replacement by altered sensation, movement and coordination.

THE “TICKLE RESPONSE” REVELATION

The “tickle response” allows us to recover awareness of how our movements have changed; it’s a first step to recovery from Sensory-Motor Amnesia, recovery of free movement, comfort, and fitness for activity.

Use it judiciously.  Save yourself some trouble in your assessments and get better results with your clients/patients.

an example of multi-contraction Sensory-Motor Amnesia (article on sciatica)

 
an example of a clinical somatic education procedure that involves a multi-contraction pandiculation
Notice the moment of “tickle”.

RESOURCE
EXPERIENCE PANDICULAR MANEUVERS BY YOURSELF

FIVE CULTURAL STREAMS TO THE MAINSTREAM | HANNA SOMATIC EDUCATION (“Hanna Somatics”)

Hanna Somatics can perhaps most readily merge into mainstream culture through five cultural streams:

1. the military (including the Veterans’ Administration Hospitals)
2. elder care
3. public education
4. professional athletics
5. nurses in standard medical settings

There’s a relation among these five that we will eventually formulate.

For now, I just want to delineate each (the “differentiation”) step;
later, we will fit them together (the “integration”) step.  You may participate.

DIFFERENTIATION

The Military
 
Those who most need somatic education in the military are soldiers returning from deployment.  We might expect to see lots of startle reflex, in addition to trauma reflex triggered by wounds.

I envision the Veterans’ Administration bringing somatic education in, at first, in a small way, through some personal connections in the VA and “people who know people” (possibly within the medical community) — at first, to handle Trauma Reflex (effects of wounds) after hospitalization and tissue healing,  being a support to the physical therapists, or after discharge from physical therapy.  For PTSD, positive emotional improvements (in the course of dealing with trauma reflex) might “turn a light on” for someone about the “unexpected” potential of somatic education to speed recovery from PTSD.

Elder Care

I envision somatic education in elder care improving the quality of life of seniors — If you can move, you’re alive! — improving movement and balance, reducing the tendency to have a fall, staying mobile longer, getting out of the wheelchair and on to her feet, off the walker, reducing or stopping use of the cane, out and about, physiologically healthier, not needing many drugs needed by the current crop of oldsters, and less reliant on Medicare, Medicaid, and skilled nursing facilities.  Making getting older more about ripening and maturing than about becoming decrepit, feeble, cold and tired, lumbering and ungainly, heavy, sustained by a diet of drugs, helplessly feeling rotten and taking that “That’s par for the course.”

Certain movement teachers serving the “senior centers” may be interested about the potential of more potent somatic exercises coming out of our field.

As ever, personal connections might make the difference, and then it’s about the senior centers and their movement teachers communicating with each other, passing the word, having somatic exercises take their place for that age group. 

Might be an easy “in”.

Public Education

For this one, I think the “packaging” may be important.  It may be that packaging somatic education as, “somatic education” might just work.  Just might.

I envision Somatic Education (“S.E.”) in the schools providing a sound foundation for “P.E.”, starting with 3rd grade (8 and 9 year-olds learning simple exercises for somatic awareness), continuing to 5th grade, when students learn and practice somatic exercises in P.E. (yes, I know it sounds rather Scandinavian), through the University years, where students learn both the practices and the principles of somatic education as part of a “well-rounded education” supporting the health of the general population.  Health Education.

In this case, it’s the funny matter of “teaching the teachers”.  The key is to identify and locate master teachers — and by that, I don’t necessarily mean the Principals or The Superintendent.  Master teachers are continuously learning, open, curious as to how what you do fits together with what they do.  They use teaching to educate — to draw forth competence, and they recognize it when they see others do it.  They are educators, not just teachers.

Somatic education, done well, can “bootstrap” public education by waking up and integrating that ‘ol central nervous system.  You know — pandiculation is an action done upon awakening.  Think it could help to educate people into greater awareness of their own state?  Maybe wake up superior perceptual and creative capacities?  Just asking.

Good nutrition (“school lunches” and “university food”) is one arm; neurological grooming (somatic education) is another.  Just a thought.

By the way — what’s the other arm?  Sports!

(Does the ultimate athlete have three arms?)

Professional Athletics
where the money is — and therefore the most guarded

The territoriality of athletics is much like the territoriality of the military.  The difference is that money is involved in pro athletics, making it even more territorial.

Somatics has got to be brought in person-to-person — first by one person or another, and then Somatics has got to get “drafted” by a team. Then watch the fireworks fly.

But first it has to catch someone’s attention.  Maybe “somebody knows somebody”, maybe a massage therapist who already works for the team.  Something like that.

I envision members of professional athletics teams, performance-driven as they are, coming to recognize — from seeing someone they know improve — the advantages of somatic education in training, performance, injury prevention, and recovery from chronic injury.  No athlete should have to retire because of a chronic injury unless joint damage is involved — and not necessarily then.

The competititive nature of pro athletics being what it is, once one team starts (and excels), other teams seem likely to follow.  Get out your stick.

Nurses in Standard Medical Settings

In case you didn’t know it, institutional nursing can be heavy labor under stressful conditions.  Good combination for getting tight.  Then, come the lifting injuries.

What’s a nurse gonna do?  Go to physical therapy, probably.

Now, I’m going to be oblique.  Let us say that someone endures a lifting injury, goes to physical therapy, perhaps explores acupuncture, and still has the pain of injury.  What then?

You get what I’m pointing to.

These are a population who would be grateful for what we offer — and, through them, perhaps word could get to physicians’ assistants, and from there, to physicians who acquire their share of physical complaints.  We could infiltrate the medical profession and help it transform itself from within — understanding that there may be some turbulence from “certain others who see things differently”.  Maybe we could present ourselves as “supporters”.  Or maybe we just serve the nurses.

There is the category of nurses, “holistic nurses” — and they have an association.  Just a thought.

GATEWAY TO INTEGRATION

So, we’ve done some differentiation.  I recount them fitting together and one sequence of approach, below. You may see others and compose your own description.

Here’s my question:  How do those five cultural streams interact with each other?

First, my turn.  Then, your turn.  (This could turn into a forum — a sudden thought. Frightening. (or maybe that’s just excitement)

SO.

Of these five avenues, I estimate the Military to be the easiest line of approach, given the population of soldiers traumatized, both physically and emotionally, and the relatively low cost of somatic education and the speed of improvements possible with conditions unlikely to resolve fully with standard therapy.

Next, I think, comes elder care.

Natural sympathies exist for both wounded soldiers and the aged, so stories of success, first in P.E. journals and then in sports magazines, would reflect well upon somatic education and it could go “viral”.

The next two avenues are “protected” avenues:  the young and professional athletes.  Both are the claimed “territory” of standard physical education coaching practices and standard “sports medicine”.

A favorable track record (obtained with the first two groups) can bring the credibility needed to reach public education and professional athletics, to get past the “gate-keeping” (and territoriality) of athletic coaches, trainers, and physical education teachers, who are inclined to the usual “strengthening and stretching” indoctrination of P.E. and sports medicine.  People have to want it.

With somatics pervading these five cultural streams, I envision the mass-communications media picking up on the story of “this new discipline” that has brought such benefit to such diverse groups — a “60 Minutes” segment or somesuch.  (Anyone up for that?)

Pilot programs can be the seeds of those possibilities.

My question is, How do we go about it?  How do we get the “gate-keepers” of those four disciplines (public education, the military, professional athletics, and elder care) to bring somatics in, such that it catches on and “goes viral” (spontaneously expands)?

I’m in no position to do all that with the four cultural avenues I have named; I’m mostly into somatic study and development and I’m not “a mainstream kind of guy” — so, of course, I would ask for your help.  I don’t have the relationship connections, and in any case, I’m best at “development”; others are better than I am in other streams of development.  We need connections into each of those streams.  So, here’s where I would appreciate your input and, God willing, your participation.

Here’s a big idea:  In the 60s, John F. Kennedy founded The President’s Council on Physical Fitness.  Calisthenics took over the world, followed closely by isometrics.  We could check the Council’s current status and see if there’s a viable possibility for us to work together, somehow.  or envision a President’s Council on Somatic Education analogous to President Kennedy’s Council on Physical Fitness — and the direction things would have to go for that to happen.

Now, there may be some who say, “It can’t be done.”  It can be done.  The question is, “How?”

And so, still, I need your help.

MORE TO COME
four capacities “helpful” to mainstreaming somatics.

WHAT YOU CAN DO, NEXT: (options)

1. Apply to be a featured expert answering questions about pain at AllExperts.com.  This is not a big deal, other than you have to know what you’re talking about  — or be OK admitting that you don’t.  It just starts you down a runway.  See if you lift off.
2. Ask your clients to send email to the AARP (American Association of Retired Persons) to send an email message asking that an article about Hanna somatic education be published in the AARP magazine.  The email address to use is: