In this entry, I present some combinations of somatic exercises that have special potency in changing tension-and-movement patterns — preceded by a bit of explanation.
EXPLANATION
Anyone practicing somatic education should be familiar with — and use — the power of synergy.
“Synergy” isn’t some New Age froo-froo concept; it’s the way “a whole is more than the sum of its parts” — it’s organization. It’s what makes a system a ‘system’ and not just a collection of unassembled parts. It’s coordination. It’s integration. For more on Thomas Hanna’s take on coordination, read his book, The Body of Life. He also referred to synergy in his published Wave 1 lectures; whether you are a student-in-training or a certified practitioner, if you don’t have those lectures or haven’t listened to them, get them and listen to them. They are a major part of his functional legacy and will boost your effectiveness.
Synergy is part of what makes the standard lessons of Hanna somatic education so powerful. In those lessons, multiple movement elements, e.g., the steps of Lesson 1 / the Green Light Reflex lesson, combine into an overall action pattern. Those movement elements are “the parts”; the action pattern you are addressing — Landau Reaction, Startle Reflex, or Trauma Reflex in its multifarious forms (see The Handbook of Assisted Pandiculation) — is the ‘whole’.
Piecework — going straight for the painful location to “get at the problem” right away, is never as effective as dealing with whole patterns, in the long run and often in the short run. Sometimes, when a client is insistent that we work in the painful region immediately, I’ll do it. I call this form of client placation, “Kiss boo-boo.” But then I get straight away to the overall pattern and I explain to the client, why, if necessary to his or her wholehearted participation in the way I want to proceed with sessions.
By the same token, combining somatic exercises to address a single location is more potent than addressing it with one somatic exercise, only. Thomas Hanna’s comment on afternoon, leading us in somatic kinesiology — that using more than one somatic exercise to reach a problem region is more potent than using only one exercise (because learning the same thing multiple ways is more potent) — may have slipped by unnoticed by many, but it’s worth noting — and acting upon.
So here are some collections of somatic exercises that are synergistic in this way. You’ll notice two things. That I:
start with gentler somatic exercise and progress to more demanding ones
combine somatic exercises published in different sources
A certain class of somatic educators continually explores for ways to improve his/her own functioning and well-being. Such people have an advantage over those who go only with the basic material conveyed during training: they can understand more forms of Sensory-Motor Amnesia (from the inside) and deal effectively with them, unlike those with less-developed somatic competency.
If, in yourself, you can find new and effective somatic exercise patterns, that’s best; if not so much, various programs exist that can give you a leg-up.
Centering the Sacrum (End Your Own Sacro-iliac Pain)
This is a fairly “minimum” collection of exercises — enough for you to test to feel their synergy. People with sacro-iliac pain almost certainly need more — and I’ve published an entry that explains why and gives access to a complete regimen here.
You notice that this collection of movements is fairly large. That’s because our necks are mobile (and can become restricted) in so many directions. Gotta do it. Neck issues are a big deal (and often involve TMJ issues); a person with pain in the spine, low back or pelvis that doesn’t resolve as expected is likely to be tight in the neck, with the distant pains reflexively caused.
That’s quite enough to get you started. If you have the ambition, it’s an eye-opener.
Lawrence Gold is a certified clinical somatic educator who has been in practice since 1990. His clients are typically people in pain who have not gotten help from standard therapies. Contact Lawrence Gold, here. Read about his background, here.
Recent articles about “sitting injuries” highlight the possible consequences of sitting for too long.
To that, I add, “sitting at a high level of concentration with minimal movement.” The combination sets up a pattern of tension involving the psoas muscles, hip joint flexors (near the front pockets of your trousers), and the low back muscles.
This entry clarifies the “why” of such sitting injuries and how to avoid them.
In the ’90s, I became aware of a fanciful seating alternative called ‘The Nada-chair”.
It consisted of two loops, about thigh length, attached at opposite sides of a back-pad. The loops went about ones knees, the back-pad behind your sacrum/low back. The pull on the loops by your knees pulled the back-pad against you, creating a secure support for your back. All you needed to do was stay balanced.
The ilio-psoas muscles perform a similar function, although attached at your groins, not at your knees. The part that pulls on your back like the back-pad (but on the inside), we call the psoas muscles; the part that pulls on your pelvis from the inside, we call the iliacus muscles. Together, they share a tendon at your groin, and so we call them the iliopsoas muscles. They span the distances between your groin on each side and your low back and between your groin and your inner pelvis on both sides. Their pull on your low back is like the pull on the back-pad, only along more of your back as high as your diaphragm; their pull on your pelvis on both inside surfaces pulls the pelvis top-forward, adding to the support of your back.
In that way, your iliopsoas muscles are like the Nada-chair. When you are sitting in a chair, your iliopsoas muscles shorten to hold you up, especially if you are sit perched on the edge of your chair (as so many do), but those muscles shorten also in those who slouch back in their chairs and hunch forward.
Tight Hamstrings: a Big Deal
When your hamstrings get tight, as happens when you get into — and work in — a high-stress-state too often and for too long, your hamstrings pull on your sitbones (deep to the creases of the buttocks). In the sitting position, tight hamstrings pull your bottom out from under you, forward; they cause you to sit too much on your “pockets” (tailbone). Tight hamstrings are one reason people slouch back in their chairs.
To sit erect, under that condition, people with tight hamstrings
must tighten their hip joint flexors and psoas muscles to counteract
the pull, to bring themselves forward and lift themselves up.
Then,
the same high stress state tightens the back muscles, as part of a
pattern of nervous tension. Eventually, the back muscles tire and the
person slumps.
Please see this article and the embedded instructional video to free tight hamstrings.
So, in closing
If you spend too much time in your chair, particularly at attention at a high level of stress, with minimal movement, in either position, you have successfully followed the formula for creating tight, short iliopsoas muscles. Congratulations.
Not only that, but muscles under tension formed this way and maintained by habit are the first to tighten under stress and the last to let go when the stress is over. That’s one explanation for why people mysteriously tighten up into pain some time after an injury.
We become how we live. We get more and more familiar with being certain ways, more and more ready to be those ways, more and more set in the muscular tension set of those ways, our attitudes and our remembered reactions to everything that’s happened to us in our lives. It all builds up as our “set” — as in “set in our ways” — a pattern of muscular tension as well as a psychological state.
Sit for too many hours all the time, your Nada-chair muscles get set at a shortened length. You can never really stand up all the way. If tension accumulates, those muscles may become too tight even when lying down and you won’t be able to sleep on your stomach. The same thing happens with your hamstrings and your back, only it’s your knees and back that get affected, until you develop groin pain, deep pelvic pain, a deep belly-ache, and possibly sacro-iliac pain.
Then, your massage therapist gets his or her elbow ready. Are you ready?
There is an alternative.
You can do something to change your postural set (which comes from muscle/movement memory) — besides “trying to have good posture”, which doesn’t work very well, you may have noticed.
If you take these steps, you’ll end the pain, be able to stand up and walk comfortably, at last.
If you don’t, you may just stay in the condition you’re in, which brought you to this page.
The Diamond Penetration Technique is a way to get more done with less effort and less time, and more brainpower, in clinical sessions of Hanna somatic education(R) or with somatic exercises. The maneuver enhances or potentizes pandiculation (“Whole Body yawn”) technique.
There’s a lot, here, so as you learn this technique for “supersizing” somatic exercises, learn one step at a time before adding the next. “Learn” means “learn”, not “do once and then move one.” Really. Be merciful to yourself and take bite-size pieces, only.
In his original instruction to us, his students of his 1990 Clinical Somatic Education training, Thomas Hanna showed us how to use The Pandicular Response to free people from the grip of The Landau Reaction, which tightens the back/posterior side of the body and, when excessively activated for long periods of time, causes back pain, sciatica, tight shoulders and tension headaches.
In Lesson One (Green Light lesson) for Landau Reaction, he showed us how to coach our client through a Whole-body yawn (pandicular maneuver), beginning with a lifting action of one leg and its opposite shoulder, arm and hand, and head, as in the video, below — to lower them by stages in steps of relaxation, with a mini-in-breath with each mini-lift . . . . . before lowering some more.
First, the video, so you know for sure the maneuver to which I refer.
somatic exercise | leg lift to activate back muscles
I have found that “staged” or “stepped” relaxation can be made more powerful by a technique that I have named, “The Diamond Penetration” maneuver. The reason I have named it The Diamond Penetration maneuver will become clear to you once you start doing it. For now, I say that it makes use of The Power of Recognition, as I have described it in the linked article, “Attention is a Catalyst“, to amplify the effectiveness of pandiculation, or any other therapeutic or educational technique, for that matter. Assisted Pandiculation is accelerated learning, and learning involves recognition and development, based upon memory. Memory, learning, recognition, function and development are five development stages of a single function. There’s one more.
Memory — the ground function, memory — persistence of pattern, memory Learning — modification of the ground function into a durable pattern of memory Recognition — the closely approximate match of some memory with an experience happening now Function — initiation of action, memory activated and applied to this moment
Integration — facility to move freely and functionally among different remembered patterns Evolution — expansion of attention beyond both memory and the moment — the space of emergence of newness, for patterns newly emerging into the moment, to be remembered into existence.
Take the starting initials of each, and you get MLRFIE! Well, that’s as far as we’ll go with that one, folks — at least for now. We’ll come back to that strange, unpronounceable acronym, later.
In his demonstrations to us, Thomas Hanna had the person on the table lower the leg part way, then lift a bit, then lower some more, repeating by stages, to complete rest. He even commented that that same maneuver was what Joe Montana did, spontaneously, after his back surgery and commented ruefully about to what the rapid improvement was attributed — namely, surgery and physical therapy!
Here’s the “inside” of that maneuver: The lifting action produces a sensation. By re-lifting after lowering part way, the client re-locates the sensation of lifting (contracting the muscles of lifting the leg). To re-locate the sensation activates the power of recognition, which is central to all learning. (No recognition — no learning.)
That’s the central principle of The Diamond Penetration Technique.
Here are the advantages of using The Diamond Penetration Technique. It:
rapidly penetrates Sensory-Motor Amnesia
rapidly awakens sensory awareness and motor control that has never been awake, before (penetrates Sensory-Motor Obliviousness)
speeds integration of multiple “movement elements” into a single coordinated action
increases the result of a single pandiculation — relaxation and control
decreases the number of repetitions needed for pandiculation to get the desired result
shortens the time needed to get a good result from a somatic exercise lesson
Obviously, these benefits are interrelated and just a tiny bit useful when working to transform yourself.
I have elaborated that principle into a very powerful technique that merits the name, “Diamond Penetration”. Very powerful. Clinical practitioners can apply this technique to assisted pandiculation maneuvers; clients can apply it to somatic exercises, and to free-form pandiculations you may do when working out pains or restrictions for which no somatic exercise currently exists.
I have developed several increasingly powerful variations of The Diamond Penetration Technique, which I outline, here.
“The Quick Return”
“The Quick Return and Sustained Hold”
“The Two-Movement-Element Combination”
“Twos and Threes”
“The Diamond Pattern”
“The Multi-Movement-Element Combination Sequence”
As you can see, these variations increase in complexity. The way to learn them is to do and learn them one-at-a-time, not to try to understand them by reading or to memorize them all before doing them.
Now the instruction. I’m going to spread things out in detail, so stay with me.
The Quick Return
Repetition is basic to recognition.
In The Quick Return, we contract into movement and feel the sensation of the end-point of movement (“where we end up in the movement”), then relax part-way for an instant, then re-contract and re-locate the exact same sensation.
Contract and feel what’s tight.
Relax part-way.
Re-contract to feel the exact same thing.
That’s a Quick Return. It activates The Power of Recognition (familiarity). We might call each repetition “a pulse of sensation.”
An example from Lesson One could be,
“Lie on your belly, head turned, with your thumb in front of your nose, your hand flat on the surface. Lift your elbow to the limit. Feel what that feels like in your neck and shoulder.
Now lower it a bit, and immediately lift again. Find the exact same sensation at the same place. That’s called, ‘a Quick Return’. Remember that for use, as we go along.”
“Mini Quick Returns”
During the relaxation phase of pandiculation, you can do “mini” Quick Returns on the way to complete relaxation.
PRINCIPLE
It takes two incidents or occasions to activate memory; prior to that, it’s just sensory awareness or cognition — no recognition. In fact, without recognition, something happening is identical to nothing happening; we don’t know what it is, other than that it’s “something but we don’t really know what”, which makes the experience somewhat evanescent.
Now, the thing that makes one occurrence different from two occurrences of the same thing is the contrast between “happening” and “not happening”. “Not happening” has to separate the two occurrences. That’s the principle, “Somas perceive by contrast,” or “Somas can perceive only changes.” In somatic education practice, the common contrast is between activity and rest — which is why I instruct clients, “Come to complete rest between repetitions.” Without “not happening”, there’s only one long incident.
The Quick Return and Sustained Hold
We know that for a sensation to emerge, and for attention to steady on a sensation, takes time. Quick things escape our noticing.
So, after the Quick Return, we sustain the action (“sustained hold”) to let it “fade into view”. Attention steadies in and on the sensation. The sensation becomes more vivid.
To apply a sustained hold, you do a series of Quick Returns (however many) then hold the final Quick Return; during that holding time, remember the pattern and timing of the Quick Returns that got you there, i.e., brought you into this holding pattern. Then, you slowly relax, taking time at least equal in length to the memory . . . . . or longer . . . . to complete relaxation.
Thus, you
first sense and do the movement, and hold, then
remember the movement while holding its pattern, then
back out (ease out) of the movement slowly and deliberately to complete rest.
You come to know the beginning of the movement, its middle, and its end — initiating it, sustaining it, and letting it go.
How useful do you think that might be for learning to occur?
The instruction would be:
“Do a Quick Return and hold. Now, slowly relax.”
PRINCIPLE
Experience takes time.
Sustain the hold for the total amount of time it took to do all the Quick Returns. For two Quick Returns (three movements into position), sustain the hold for a “count” of three — equal to the time it took to contract and then do two Quick Returns — then relax during a count of three. (That doesn’t mean, “Relax and then count to three.” It means, “Take a count of three to go from contracted to relaxed.”)
Comparing Memory to Action
Integrating the flesh-body and the subtle-body (mind).
Having done a Quick Return and Hold, you now remember the sensation of movement and then do the movement, again, to compare it to the memory. Are they the same?
You might then repeat the movement and compare to memory until the movement and the memory closely match.
PRINCIPLE
Memory is the root of action.
The Two-Movement-Element Combination
Coordination develops when we combine two actions (“movement elements”) into one.
In the Green Light lesson, we lift the elbow-hand-head-shoulder with the opposite-side leg, as in the video. Those are the two movement elements.
Using the Quick Return, the instruction could be:
“With your hand flat on the surface, lift your elbow to the limit. Now do a Quick Return (relaxes and re-contracts) and hold.
Now, lift your straight leg. Now lower it a bit, and do a Quick Return.
Now, do a Quick Return of both, together.” (combination Quick Return)
When doing the Quick Return of both, together, the movements should be synchronized to start and end together. That develops coordination (integration).
HIGHER INTEGRATION
I have discovered another kind of “three” that rapidly integrates two movement elements. It goes beyond The Equalization Technique.
It goes like this.
Do a Quick Return of the first movement element and hold.
Do a Quick Return of the second movement element and hold.
Both movement elements are now active. Now, integrate them with each other in a three-part maneuver:
Pulse the first movement element to firm up the second movement element.
You’ll feel it. If you don’t feel it, you’ve partially lost the second movement element. Bring it back and pulse the first movement element, again, until you feel it make the second movement element stronger.
Pulse the second movement element to firm up the first movement element.
Pulse the first movement element to firm up the second movement element.
You’ve now forged a better connection between the two movement elements. That’s the other kind of “three” maneuver, an integration maneuver.
You can use this “three” maneuver with any two synergistic movements of any somatic exercise (“synergistic” means that the two movements help each other).
Twos and Threes
Now, we get a bit more sophisticated.
Once you or a client have done a combination Quick Return, you’re in a position to do two Quick Returns. That makes for, not two quick experiences of the same thing, but three.
If that’s confusing, lie on your belly with your thumb by your nose and do two Quick Returns. You’ll see it creates the same sensation three times. Just do it.
Here’s the thing: If, with a single movement, you alternate between one Quick Return (to complete relaxation) and two Quick Returns, you alternate creating two experiences of a sensation with creating three experiences. That’s a contrast, in itself.
When done as a combination Quick Return, it’s a very powerful way of creating learning that I have found causes a series of internal shifts of sensory-motor organization.
The instruction could be:
Lift your elbow. Now do a Quick Return and hold.
Lift your leg. Now do a Quick Return and hold.
(two movements at the same time)
Now, do two combination Quick Returns (a “three”). Relax completely.
Now, do one combination Quick Return (a “two”). Relax completely.
Alternate doing two and doing one. Continue until you get better coordinated.
PRINCIPLE
Changes of patterns awaken the Power of Recognition and trigger learning.
The Diamond Pattern
Here’s a “diamond” pattern (number of repetitions:
1 2 3 4 3 2 1
.
. .
. . .
. . . .
. . .
. .
.
The instruction could be:
Do (some action, such as lifting the elbow) and hold. Now, relax completely.
Do one Quick Return (2 experiences of a sensation) and hold. Now, relax completely.
Now, do two Quick Returns (3 experiences of a sensation) and hold. Now, relax completely.
Now, do three Quick Returns (4 experiences of a sensation) and hold. Now, relax completely.
Now, do two Quick Returns (3 experiences of a sensation) and hold. Now, relax completely.
Now, do one Quick Return (2 experiences of the sensation) and hold. Now, relax completely.
Now, do the action without a Quick Return (1 experience of the sensation). Hold before relaxing to complete rest.
The experience “backs a person out of contraction” and gets them able to feel more and more with less and less stimulation.
To see the value, try it with any movement or combination.
PRINCIPLE
Bucky Fuller pointed out that four incidents or occasions of an event were the minimum needed to recognize a stable pattern.
It goes like this:
one incident or occasion:
internal experience: “Something has happened.”|
(capture of attention)
two incidents or occasions of the same thing:
internal experience: “This seems familiar.”
(recognition)
three incidents or occasions of the same thing:
internal experience: “There seems to be consistency.”
(building upon recognition – “There is something to learn, here”)
four or more incidents or occasions of the same thing:
internal experience: “There’s a consistent pattern, here.”
(development of knowledge)
Test this out in yourself by using your imagination.
APPLICATION
The Diamond Penetration Technique can be applied to single movements, to simpler somatic exercise lessons (e.g., those of “The Cat Stretch” or “The New Seated Refreshment Exercises”), to more complex somatic exercises that involve as many as seven movement elements in combination (e.g., “Free Yourself from Back Pain” or “The Five-Pointed Star”), or to inherent action patterns such as those of walking (“SuperWalking”), twisting, or wriggling.
This technique lends itself to The Equalization Technique, discussed in The Evolution of Clinical Somatic Education Techniques. In a combination Quick Return, match (by feel) the effort of one movement to the effort of the others; equalize them. Read the article.
The Multi-Movement-Element Combination Sequence
In general, it goes like this:
Do a Quick Return of the first movement element, and hold.
Do a Quick Return of the second movement element, and hold.
Do two combination Quick Returns of the two movement elements, and hold.
Do a Quick Return of the third movement element.
Do two combination Quick Returns of the three movement elements (with Equalization Technique).
Do a Quick Return of the fourth movement element (if there is one).
Do two combination Quick Returns of the four movement elements (with Equalization Technique).
Keep adding movement elements that fit together (synergistically) until they are all assembled into one Grand Coordinated Movement.
You can do Mini-Quick-Returns with the entire movement pattern, through the relaxation phase to complete rest.
Matching Memory (Subtle Body) to Sensation (Dense Physical Body)
Having done any of the variations, above, you can end a sequence by alternating a single quick return with a moment of rest (or a moment of holding the contraction), during which you remember (or imagine) and compare what you just felt with what you remembered.
You alternate a single quick return with remembering/imagining until your memory matches the experience very closely.
Then, you do a final contraction, hold and remember, then relax very, very slowly.
When the memory matches the experience, you have integrated your subtle and dense physical bodies. Relaxing at that point enables you to come out of contraction much more completely than otherwise.
PRINCIPLE
We perceive by means of contrast; we correct things by making a comparison. We gain control by means of memory.
SUMMARY
The essence of this technique involves repetitive pulsing of movements, activation of memory, matching the sensation you remember with the sensation you experience as you do the movements, and slow, controlled release of muscular efforts.
Each pulse of movement creates a sensation that you locate as your “target” for Quick Return.
In each repetition of a pulse, you locate the identical sensation in the identical location.
In combination Quick Returns, you locate the identical feeling of the whole movement each time you do the combination movement.
Each pattern of repetitions (2’s, 3’s, “diamond pattern”) magnifies the Power of Recognition.
Now you know what MRLFIE stands for!
I know there’s a lot. That’s why you start simply, at the beginning. Internalize (learn) each level of complexity until you have it all under your belt.
If you’re a practitioner, teach your clients to their capacity, but not beyond. If they lost the pattern, have them go back and coach them until they’ve mastered what you’ve covered, before going further.
From your own experience, you probably know that traditional therapies for back pain usually produce only short-term, partial relief or require regular — even lifelong — care. It need no longer be that way. You can end back pain for good and prevent flare-ups from occurring.
A new discipline in the field of health care: clinical somatic education, gets to the root of back pain and brings it under your own control. Most back pain sufferers who resort to clinical somatic education should expect full recovery in a space of days or weeks.
The 3 Biggest Mistakes Made by People
Trying to Get Out of Pain
What Clinical Somatic Education Does
Clinical somatic education retrains muscle/movement memory. Clients rapidly improve their muscular control and freedom of movement through a mind-brain-movement training process. Clinical somatic education affects the brain the way biofeedback does, but with importance differences, one being speed of results and the other being the durability of the improvement. Changes are usually definitive and need no further professional help.
A New Understanding of Back Pain
Spinal alignment and disc condition are secondary to something more basic: muscular tension — muscle/movement memory.
Muscular tensions pull on the bones (that’s their job) and in so doing, move the bones. That’s how spinal curvature changes with movement. Muscle/movement memory sets our posture and the alignment to which we return, at rest — that’s why spinal alignment changes and gets stuck in misalignment.
Tight back muscles get fatigued and sore; they get prone to spasm; they pull vertebrae together and compress discs, causing bulges and degeneration; they cause nerve entrapment, such as sciatica.
Back muscles are virtually never too weak; they feel weak because they’re tired from being tight all the time, musclebound. Spasm isn’t a sign of weakness, but a sign of hair-trigger readiness to contract — a completely different condition; weakness would be experienced as inability to do their job of keeping you upright.
Rest doesn’t help, much. Muscle memory, not disease or misalignment, keep them tight. Resting doesn’t change muscle memory. Muscle memory sets our postural and movement “set points”.
This statement applies as much to people with degenerative disc disease and herniated discs to those who have only a twinge, now and then. The underlying cause is the same: muscle tension.
“If that’s true,” you may ask, “why doesn’t my doctor (or therapist) know about it?”
The answer is that until recently, the connection between muscle memory and back pain wasn’t recognized. Effects are typically mistaken for causes. No method existed that could rapidly change muscle memory enough to be clinically practical. Word takes time to spread and gain credibility. People are attached to their methods and ideas.
You may think, “Back spasms are too painful, too serious to be dismissed that quickly, or that easily.”
That’s understandable — but a misunderstanding of your situation.
Conventional Therapeutics and Back Muscle Spasms
Conventional treatment methods, as you already know, are not effective enough for most people. Most therapies try to strengthen, stretch, or adjust people out of back trouble by working on muscles or the skeletal system. But bones go where muscles pull them, the control center for the muscular system is the brain (not the therapist), and these approaches don’t address the brain’s control of muscle action, so the problem remains or returns. The problem isn’t in your muscles; it’s in your brain, the organ of learning and the seat of muscle/movement memory, which runs the show.
That’s why the relief obtained by conventional therapeutic approaches to back spasms is usually temporary and you remain subject to re-injury and to prescribed limitations to movement, such as “neutral spine position”.
Muscle/memory is acquired, learned. What’s learned can be unlearned, and actually, relearning muscular control is the only approach that works for long term relief of back pain. You must dissolve the memory-based, reflexive grip of musclebound back muscles; it can’t be manipulated away — at least, not for long.
Medical doctors, chiropractors, physical therapists, osteopaths, and bodyworkers use manipulative methods.
But problems arising from muscle/movement memory cannot be “cured” by manipulation because muscular tension is not a disease, but a habit maintained in the brain.
A Correct Understanding of ‘Strengthening and Stretching’
The idea behind the common “strengthening and stretching” regimen for back spasms is usually based on a misunderstanding; it’s a misunderstanding because the muscles involved are almost never weak, but tired; it’s a misunderstanding because the muscles involved are not “short” and in need of stretching, but “in contraction” and in need of relaxation. Sore muscles don’t need strengthening; they need relaxation and a chance to be refreshed, again.
You need to regain your ability to relax, something you can’t regain by being manipulated by someone else; you regain it by relearning to relax — a form of learning, albeit a specialized one for which you will probably need training.
Back Muscle Spasms May be Painful, but Not Themselves an Injury involving any Damage to Spine or Discs
One of the automatic reactions of the body to injury is to tighten up. That’s part of the pain of most injuries, particularly of musculo-skeletal injuries. It’s a reaction that protects the body from further injury. There are cases where the tightening up of back muscles is such a protective reaction, and a necessary one — where actual damage has occurred, such as a ruptured disc or a violent accident. In such situations, surgery may be necessary and changing muscle memory will either not help or produce only temporary relief, at least until after surgery, unhappy news for some, but realistic.
If you’ve seen a doctor for your back spasms, he or she has either discovered that you need surgery or that you don’t. Surgery is a last, desperate resort and most doctors are reluctant to recommend it. If you have been sent for therapy or given drugs, yours is not a surgical situation, meaning that your spasms are not a protective reaction against injury, but chronic activity.
In the majority of back spasms, there is no injury. The back spasms are just a movement malfunction — a tension habit formed under stress. It’s the “tension” part of “nervous tension.”
So, why do back spasms occur? You now have part of the answer. Let’s look a little more closely.
Your muscles obey your brain. Except for momentary reflexes controlled in the spinal cord (tested by your doctor’s hammer tap), that’s the whole story. So, if you have tight, spastic muscles, they’re caused by your brain.
This answer is a “good news/bad news” type of answer. The bad news is that your muscles are out of control, and it’s your brain’s fault! Your brain isn’t broken, just trapped by the memory of stress or injury in your history. The good news is that your brain can be relearn to relax those muscles.
Where do Back Muscle Spasms Come from?
One thing you will almost always notice about people with back spasms, if you exercise your powers of observation, is their high shoulders and swayback. Touch the muscles of their lower back, and you will find the same thing: hard, contracted muscles, not soft, weak, flabby muscles.
The major source of back spasms is the lifestyle of being “on the go” — driven, driving, productive, on time, and responsive to every situation. Tense. This is a new idea for most people, so here’s the explanation.
Our post-modern lifestyle triggers an ancient neuromuscular (bodily) response (known to developmental physiologists as the Landau Reaction); this reaction involves a tightening of the muscles of the spine in preparation for arising from rest (sitting or lying down) into activity (sitting, standing, walking, running). The Landau Reaction consists of the muscular responses involved in coming to a heightened state of alertness in preparation for moving into action. The reaction may be mild, moderate, strong, or extreme; triggered incessantly for years, a muscle/movement memory forms — one that often outlasts the moment (or stage of life) when it was necessary and makes you vulnerable to episodes of spasm.
Many Back Pain Issues Come from the Same Cause
Though injuries from traffic accidents, falls, etc., also trigger muscular reactions that can become habitual, the Landau Reaction is behind most of the back-spasm epidemic in our society. It’s a consequence of accumulated stress.
While you can’t avoid the Landau Reaction (it’s a necessary and appropriate part of life), you can avoid getting stuck in it. If your lifestyle puts you habitually in a state of reaction, you have to “de-habituate” yourself from it, so that your rise in tension occurs only as a momentary response to situations and does not become your chronic state.
To get a preview of the new method referred to, here, click and send the email window that opens, blank.
Cures for include relaxation techniques, hypnosis, massage, skeletal adjustments, electrical stimulation, muscle relaxant drugs, and at last (as at first) pain medications.
Until recently, there was nothing better. Now, an effective way exists to rapidly improve muscular control, freedom of movement, and physical comfort. Once you have gained control of your Landau Reaction, a brief daily regimen of certain movements is sufficient to keep you from accumulating the daily tensions of a driven and overloaded life. You can keep refreshing yourself, as needed.
If you have numbness or tingling in your extremities, your problem is more severe and requires a medical evaluation to rule out serious conditions. Even if you have surgery, you will still need to learn to relax the tight muscles that initially caused the problem. If yours is not a surgical situation, then somatic education is probably viable for you.
The new methods used to de-habituate Landau Reaction are highly reliable and have no adverse side effects, apart from occasional temporary soreness the day after a session, soreness that fades out in a day or two, leaving you flexible, comfortable and stronger than before.
Somatic exercise cycles are sequences of somatic exercises done repeatedly to accomplish a purpose.
Somatic exercises are methodically-done movement patterns that work with so-called “muscle memory” (actually, better stated as “movement memory”) to dissolve habitual patterns of movement memory (implanted by trauma and stress, such as pain and stiffness associated with aging) and to replace them with healthier, more variable and free patterns of movement memory.
Now, if you’ve got that paragraph under your belt,
we may continue . . . . .
If not, better go back and get it, as everything that follows builds upon it.
There.
Now, each somatic exercise works with a single movement pattern — examples being inhalation, exhalation, backward bending, forward bending, twisting, etc.
In life and movement, at least two movement patterns are always involved with any action. Every bending movement must have its opposite straightening movement; every twisting, its untwisting. Without its opposite, we are stuck. Imagine going through life bent over and twisted. Know somebody like that?
That’s a small clue to the use of somatic exercises to undo unhealthy stuck patterns of movement. (What makes them unhealthy is the excessive muscular tension and lack of suppleness that’s involved — leading to nerve impingement, joint degeneration, chronic pain.) Movement patterns assemble into patterns of coordination.
Hence, the array of somatic exercises found in Thomas Hanna’s “Myth of Aging” series and in my own “special purpose” somatic exercise programs. They fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle to constitute patterns of coordination for activity in daily life.
Somatic exercises work two ways:
to undo the habituation we might have in a posture or movement pattern
to develop healthier patterns of posture and better control of movement — generally free-er and better-functioning
To do so, somatic exercises awaken awareness of how we are habituated/stuck and develop voluntary control of those habituated patterns (generally, simultaneously) so that we can either do habitual movements more freely or move differently, freely and at-will.
So far, so good. Still with me?
OK.
Now, just as visual depth perception requires two viewpoints (left eye and right eye), and just as visual depth perception gives us more and different visual information than sight through one eye, more than one somatic exercise can address a habituated/stuck movement pattern or posture, and when more than one is used, we get a kind of kinesthetic depth perception that gives us both more sensory information and more control than we can get by one somatic exercise, alone.
Here’s where somatic exercise cycles come into play.
There exists a way of using more than one (and more than two) somatic exercises to address especially stuck conditions or to get larger changes faster with not-so-stuck conditions.
The steps are these:
Identify two or more related somatic exercises that either belong to the same larger coordination pattern or that address the same muscle groups in different ways.
Practice each exercise until well-internalized (remembered and fruitful in producing its specifically-intended change. (rule of thumb: seven cycles or until “milked for all it’s worth”)
Cycle through the identified exercises, one after the other.
I’ll give you some examples of related somatic exercises that can be assembled in this way.
RELATED BY LARGER COORDINATION PATTERN
example: Lesson 1 of The Myth of Aging series
Landau Reaction is a movement/action pattern involved in sitting, standing, and walking. It involves the backs of the shoulders, spinal erector muscles, buttocks, and hamstrings. Its purpose is to bring the person erect through the action of backward extension.
Lesson 1 of this series, therefore, involves movement elements for each of these places, first done individually, then assembled into a single, larger pattern.
This exercise, when followed by Lesson 2 of The Myth of Aging series (which addresses the movement of curling forward), constitutes a “unit of movement” — straightening and bending.
That understood, I can now identify four entire somatic exercise lessons that, when learned and then put into a cycle, get more done than any one of the exercises can, by itself:
Each of these exercises gets something done that is not done well by the others; each addresses an element of Landau Reaction; each provides its piece of the “jigsaw puzzle”. I’ve noted four movements; you could do three or two, but more movements provide higher integration.
The proper approach is to learn each of these exercises well and to get the result of each, then to cycle through them, (1.) – (4.), repeatedly.
Of course, other sequences of exercises, related by function, exist.
In the program, Free Your Psoas, the first exercise, “Locating the Center of Breathing”, produces system-wide changes in the direction of greater freedom. The second exercise, “Slide and Turn”, disarms muscular restrictions that force legs into a knee-out or knee-in twist that would interfere with the third exercise, Walking into the Floor, which requires that freedom (and awakening of sensory awareness) to reach the psoas muscles. The exercises that follow integrate the freedom resulting from the earlier exercises into a well-coordinated pattern.
So, I’ve just outlined two different approaches to using more than one somatic exercise to accomplish a single purpose.
RELATED BY THE SAME MUSCLE GROUP BEING INVOLVED
There exist situations where the trauma of an injury is so great that a person contracts (involuntarily) a single muscle or muscle group so strongly (with the physiological intention to immobilize), and in entanglement with other muscular actions that no one somatic exercise is sufficient to disarm the situation.
Here’s where two or more somatic exercises that address the involved region can get the job done. It’s a little like having more than one person reassure you that “everything is all right”, vs. having just one person reassure you.
example: The Gluteus Medius Muscles
A condition of having your leg yanked in an accident (such as falling off a horse with your foot caught in the stirrup and being dragged for a quarter mile) provides a protective response of holding on to your leg for dear life. You prefer to keep your leg attached. So you (reflexively) contract all of the muscles around your hip joint.
Well and good. You’ve kept your leg; but you’ve lost freedom, as now those muscles are painfully contracted all the time.
It’s not about any one muscle, but about an action involving muscle pulls from many directions, at once, but all summating/adding together to hold onto your leg.
The glueus medius muscles have several movement functions:
providing stability during walking or running, as the pelvis turns from side-to-side (i.e., active external rotation of the thigh in the hip joint)
movement of the leg backward (extension)
pulling your hip bone and thigh together (hipbone/iliac crest down) in an action that lifts the opposite hip, in walking
(Note that although these muscles can abduct (move sideways) the leg, that’s not their typical function.)
In the situation described, no one somatic exercise addresses all these movements. However, a combination of exercises can address these movements.
You first learn each of these exercises well (memory plus results); then cycle through them repeatedly — according to your energy level, result obtained, and interest.
So that outlines the principles and practices of cycling through somatic exercises.
Let’s get straight to the point: muscles have no memory that controls their activity. Muscle memory (more properly, movement memory) resides in the brain, a product of brain-conditioning, i.e., learning.
Patterns of muscular tension result from that conditioning, acquired by learning and by incidents of injury and/or stress.
Think about it: muscles act in patterns of coordination. How can any one muscle control the activity of other muscles? What would be the mechanism? Willpower? Telepathy? And without the ability of a muscle to control other muscles, how could their activity by synchronized in coordinated movement?
No. Something must centrally control and regulate all muscles to enable coordination, and that something is our nervous systems, the seat of movement memory.
Whether learning to walk or to dance, if you want to change muscle memory, or movement memory, you have to do it by training your nervous system — and if you’re stuck in a tension pattern from an injury, you have to do it by training your nervous system — by un-learning the dysfunctional pattern and learning a healthy pattern of function, i.e., healthy movement.
Ladies and Gentlemen: for your edification and entertainment may I present
somatics
an evolutionary leap
in the understanding of humankind
This kind of stunt happens only every ten thousand years, or so, so listen up. I’m going to lay a metaphor on you.
The early stages of life were little more than separation of inner from outer by a cell membrane, with some chemical exchange and a sense of bouncy motion.
Later came light sensitivity and then, eyes, signifying the entire orientation of the next few hundred million years, or so — the orientation to what is external. Most of evolutionary history has been taken up with that task, at first in the name of bare survival, then in the name of cultural and social development (beyond bare survival). The external orientation shows up today with the use of make-up (which simulates the facial coloring changes of sexual arousal).
Only recently (in terms that changed the face of Western culture) has internal awareness been developing; in earlier times, individuals rarely developed much subtle internal awareness, being more preoccupied, as they were, with challenging living conditions and social conformity pressures (both internal and external). Individual impulses were contained within and by conformist conditioning.
So, the inner is coming into its own, ready to be correlated with the outer.
“Correlated” — what does this mean?
It means seeing the correspondences between inner (subjective) experience and outer (objective) behavior or physical changes as two experiences of the same thing. Not “thinking of them” as the same thing, not thinking “We’re supposed to think of them as the same thing.” Actually experiencing them as the same thing, considered differently.
So, “outer is experienced inwardly” and inward experience shows up as outward behaviors or changes.
Then comes the lie detector test.
Just kidding.
Here’s some examples, instead.
Dreams are inward events, right?
Ever seen a dog dream? The waving paws, the changes of breathing, the barking? See the eyes move back and forth?
They call that REM — Rapid Eye Movement. It’s reliable sign of dreaming. The outer behavior that corresponds to doggie’s inner experience.
Ever watched someone learn to read? The lip movements?
You’re seeing them thinking the words as they sound them.
Ever blushed?
Point made?
So, somatics is based on inner and outer being two aspects of the same thing, not two different things.
First of all, for reasons stated, that alone is an evolutionary leap in the understanding of humankind.
But wait! There’s more.
Those primitive life-forms at the dawn of time, those cells floating in a primordial soup, were very simple. They had three functions: eat, excrete, and reproduce. They enjoyed it, but still, that’s all they had.
Later down the line, they developed a fashion sense.
My point is that as life evolved, life forms became more intricate, more organized, capable of more and different forms of behavior. Most of these behaviors are what would call “instinctual” — meaning intrinsic to the organism and, for the most part, constituting all of its behavior — the behavioral patterns of bugs and worms, a reptile or two, maybe a fish.
The higher we go up the evolutionary staircase (fooled you — you thought I was going to say, “ladder”, didn’t you?), and the more complex life forms are, the more complex their behavior gets, and something new appears — the ability to learn more. Dogs, rats, bankers.
Now, learning is a big deal. It involves self-loading new behaviors and new perceptions into the Automatic Memory Library for use in day to day living. Any life-form can learn by repetitive experiences of something — but how many life-forms self-load new learning? I ask you.
That’s another evolutionary leap.
But wait! There’s more!
Sometimes conditions change to such an extent that previous learning no longer closely applies. What do you do, then?
Learning something new on top of old learning is like playing two pieces of music at the same time. Moreover, one generally finds it impossible to turn off Song #1.
Good grooming suggests an alternative. Learn to turn off Song #1, or at least to modulate it.
How? You’ve got to switch it from “autoplay” to “manual launch”. And to do that, you’ve got to switch yourself to “manual launch” and then manually re-launch Song #1. Now that you know what it feels like to launch Song #1, you also know what it feels like not to launch Song #1 — and there you are. STOP PLAYING SONG #1!! You think I’m being funny? No. I’m using a metaphor to explain a principle. I’ll explain, how, later.
For now, let’s assume that you’ve stopped playing Song #1 and things are quiet enough that you can hear yourself think. You can play Song #2 without interference.
That’s it, in principle.
In other language: Wash before you handle food.
What does this have to do with somatics?
I would think that would be obvious. But if it’s not, here goes.
Our lives are a gigantic recording library of events and behaviors, input from earliest consciousness, grown into maturity, or something similar to maturity.
Life is constantly playing Song #2, while we continue to play Song #1 (to a greater or lesser degree). By time we get to Song #2, Life expects us to learn Song #3. It’s always something.
We’re on a rolling landslide of cultural norms, so Song #1 is definitely on the playlist, as is Song #2 and, of course, Song #3.
Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to bring songs under control, at least some of the time? Maybe clear out a little memory space so we can meet experience afresh, learn the next song more adroitly?
That’s one of the basic understandings of somatics: free the grip of old “songs” so that we can dance to the new songs better. In other language: Out with the old, in with the new.
The question of “How” enters the picture.
Here’s the basic approach:
Whatever a person is doing “wrong”
(causing problems for self or others) —
have him (her) do it more —
and then less.
The “more” part heightens awareness.
The “less” part activates responsibility.
Sounds like fun, huh?
This strategy works with physical pains, emotional distress, and stupid thinking.
It’s a basic strategem of somatics, and if you don’t like it, try drugs — the legal kind, of course. (Oh, no, I would never advocate the use of psychoactive drugs — you know, the kind that expand your reach beyond conventional thinking! oh, no … not I.)
Which brings us to another principle, which I call “The Prime Directive of Somatics”:
Ya Gotta Wanna.
If you don’ wanna, you don’a get so much done.
I heard that, once.
The field of somatics observes certain principles and from those principles develops courses of action that free individuals from old songs so they can learn new ones and maybe a new act or two. Of course, ya gotta wanna.
Yoga, Religion, and Psychotherapy are Based Upon a Misunderstanding.
The words, “yoga” and “religion” have something in common: they both refer to unification or union of two things that are presumed to be un-unified in the ordinary person. But in both cases, those two things are always already in union, or “not-two”.
“Yoga” means “union” and comes from the same root as the word, “yoke”. Agricultural cultures use the yoke to unify the efforts of two beasts of burden — whether oxen, bulls, or horses. In yoga, it is the individual self (you) and the Great Self (God or Brahman or Ultimate Reality) that are to be unified (or realized to be one) through practices outlined in Eastern scriptures — and also “mind” and “body” that are to be unified. Thus, practices exist at the “physical” level (hatha yoga, kriya yoga, etc.), at the emotional level (bhakti yoga), at the “mental” level (jnana yoga, etc.), at the behavioral level (raja yoga, karma yoga), and at the subtle-energetic level (kundalini yoga and siddha yoga). I put those terms into quotes because they represent not actual, separate levels of the self, but soma-self seen and considered from different perspectives, with different phenomena (kinds of events). It’s the perspectives that are different; “level” means “a perspective and its content”.
“Religion” comes from the root words, “re-” (again) and “ligare” (to bind together). “Ligare” and ligament come from the same meaning-root (ligaments bind bones together). In religion, it is the individual self (you) and God that are to be re-united — “God and sinners reconciled”, as the Christmas carol goes — and their separation is the very definition of “sin” — “to miss the mark”.
Yogic scriptures attribute the separation of self from Ultimate Reality to “Maya” or “Samsara” — conditional reality, which the scriptures describe as “illusory”, with Ultimate Reality being the only “Real”. “Conditional reality” is everything experienced through the senses, through memory, and through self-awareness. Maya or Samsara are called “illusion”, while God or Brahman or Ultimate Reality are “the Real”.
These statements apply to the more exoteric teachings of religion and yoga.
Well, the whole thing is wrong.
Self and God (or Ultimate Reality) are always already one and the same, and mind”and”body are always already fully united (or more properly, “not-two”).
The esoteric teachings state that the self and Ultimate Reality (or God) are always already one, but that actuality must be realized (not merely mentally believed as dogma or arrived at by reasoning, but observably recognized).
However, there exists a reason why they appear to be separate from one another, and that reason is, “memory”. The “ten dollar”, Sanscrit word for memories is, “samscaras”. Memory, the carrying forward of impressions of past experience (and our reactions to them) into the present moment, is the nature of illusion called, “Maya” or “samsara”; it is a feature of existence, itself, and it is the very mechanism and meaning of the word, “karma” (which literally means, “action”).
We, in the West, readily accept the notion that some memories are accessible to us and others are buried in the subconscious or unconscious. We accept the notion that subconscious memories affect our behavior. What we may not so readily recognize is that memories are physiologically embodied and are what we regard to be ourselves.
In Western psychotherapy, the idea that manifestations of subconscious (“repressed”) memories “affect the body” are called “somatization”. Somatization always involves physiological effects — alterations of bodily functions — muscle tension, nervous arousal states, glandular and immunological changes. (A related scientific field is called, “psycho-neuro-immunology”.)
Because some memories are subconscious (or unconscious), we feel their somatic effects without recognizing the underlying memory or memories that create those effects; we feel out of control — and so we say that there exists a mind-body split. I will say more about subconscious and unconscious memories later.
There exist two faults with this understanding.
The first fault is the notion that one “affects” the “other”; that they are “two”. And there we are, in the notion of a mind-body split that can (or must), through some efforts, be unified — even though psychotherapy recognizes “somatization”.
The second fault is to fail to recognize that all of our chronic or repetitive stresses and tensions are somatization in action; psychotherapy may recognize “clinical” forms of somatization (as outlined in the DSM manual), but if its understanding were more inclusive, it would recognize that ordinary emotional distress, nervous tension, all speech, and all actions and behaviors are forms of somatization, not just clinical disease-entities.
In Western religion, we accept the notion of “sin” as “voluntary wrong action” that separates us from Divinity. Some branches of Christianity postulate “original sin” — sin that exists by virtue of being born as a human being that can ultimately only be remediated in heaven after death or upon the Judgment Day.
There exist two faults with this understanding.
The first fault is the notion that one can cease to be a sinner by accepting and vigorously reinforcing beliefs and right behaviors. The closest correction to this fault is the notion of being “saved” in Christianity — saved by grace bestowed upon oneself by a religious authority.
The second fault is to fail to recognize that sin comes from deeply entrenched memory patterns that show up involuntarily and without recognition, as our very self. “Original sin” approaches this understanding but falls short of obviousness; it fails to recognize that the body or born self is not the problem, but that the subconsciousness or unconsciousness of the memory patterns that define self is the problem. The automaticity, the automatic nature, the automatic control of the memories of self-identity (and all of our ways, which stem from those memories) — the unconscious automaticity is the problem. The unconsciousness is the problem — and the “sinning” behaviors that come from subconscious memories being secondary effects.
So, let me say it another way. There is no mind-body connection; they are two views of the same thing. There are two ways of viewing the same living process — from inside (“mind”) and from outside (“body”). From a scientific perspective, “mind” is the “field” and “body” is the “particle” — two aspects of the same thing. The two perspectives, together, constitute what we call, “soma” — your experience of yourself as a conscious, living person with the ability to direct attention and to exercise intention. Mind and body are always already “one” (named, “soma”).
The ability to direct attention and to exercise intention is the very basis of the idea of “sin” (because it presumes we have free will or even absolute control of our actions), but our self-control is limited by the unconsciousness of the controlling memories by which we remember “ourselves”, control our actions and make sense of our experiences.
This is a practical distinction that flies in the face of the New Age-y notion that “we are total controllers of our own reality and totally responsible for our experience” — which is nonsense. Personal experience shows it to be so. You should feel relieved. On the other hand, we are not relieved of responsibility; we still continue to suffer until we get a handle on (not just “right ideas about”) the cause of our experience — which doesn’t mean, “understanding” in a mental sense, but the ability to resolve and release their binding, involuntary effects. Responsibility is a practical matter, and for it to be a practical matter, we must be actually capable of perceiving and doing something practical. Otherwise, the idea of responsibility is just an abstraction.
However, that understanding, as it is, is insufficient to relieve suffering, which is the ostensible goal both of Western Religion and Eastern spiritual practices.
Our target is properly the unconscious/subconscious material that, when rendered “fine-tunable” or “adjustable” (instead of stuck or poorly adjustable to immediate conditions), becomes recognizable as our repertoire of activities, not assumed as our somehow “human nature” identities.
There is no “mind-body connection” to be restored; there is no “self-and-God” to be re-united . What there is, are all of the unconscious memories that cause compulsory thinking, compulsory feelings, behaviors that seem to be out of our control, that seem to “happen to” us, the internal conflicts and dilemmas that afflict us in the course of life — the whole mass of which constitute an illusory “opacity” that hijacks and blocks attention from intuiting the formless, un”knowable” ground of being that Western religions call Divinity and that Eastern spirituality calls “liberation”. The “split” is entire conceptual, a matter of labelling and of conventional or learned behavior, but not the actual nature of things. Divinity is being the flow of concepts and sensations that we identify as duality, or split.
The Divine cannot correctly be sought (because seeking depends upon memories that determine “what is to be sought”, and memories are precisely what hijack and trap attention); The Divine can only be revealed in the transparency of memory that occurs when unconscious (unrecognized) memory patterns become conscious (and recognizable as memories), so that they lose their binding attraction (“stickiness”) and attention can “see through them” (external perception) or “fall through them” (internal apperception) — to enjoy intuition of self-source, which is Divinity, or Brahman, BEING them — and which is not some spectacular accomplishment of mind-blowing insanity or weird perception, but merely the easy ordinaryness of the experience of our own most ordinary faculties, unfouled by unconscious memories.
As a practical matter, binding and deluding memories (which may be anything and everything) exist at different levels of the being (or ways of organizing intention/actions and attention/sensations) which we may call “physical”, “emotional”, “mental”, “higher mental”, “intuitive”, etc., according to their content. As a practical matter, my experience is that memories must be addressed on their own terms — or the terms of the level at which they appear — and that certain principles of conscious awakening and change apply to memories at all “levels”. It’s a matter of learning how to apply those principles at different levels.
In my experience, perhaps the most accessible way to learn to exercise those principles is through one form of somatic education or another, which, though it may illuminate any and all levels of the being, approaches through the perspective (or doorway) of embodiment. It’s very easy to tell whether your application of somatic principles is effective; did you feel immediately different after practice? Was the change durable? If so, then so; if not, then not.
Somatic education is a doorway — but not the entire path — simply because people commonly consider the scope of somatic education to be “matters bodily” (or physiological); it’s a fault of the mind-body “split”-concept. Actually, somatic education is a full-spectrum affair that runs from physiological concerns to the highest matters of consciousness, and throughout that spectrum, different means apply for awakening responsibility, some of which may look clinical, others psychological, and others, spiritual/evolutionary. In whatever ways the technical means may differ, the principles are identical.
There is no mind-body connection, there is no yoga, there is no true religion (“binding again”); there is just the uncovering and mastery, freely intelligent use and free release of the patterns of memory by which we define life in terms of multiplicities (of which the minimum is duality) and the logics by which interact in life, even our very own.
When the “stickiness” of memories (Tibetan: dukkha) dissolves, we are more free to relate to experience (relationship), and so the sense of separation so decried in spiritual circles as the affliction of humanity, is recognized not to pertain, and never to have pertained, and the force of it diminishes and dissolves.
But here’s the odd thing: when a back spasm happens, it’s most often been coming for a long time.
The Back Story of Most Back Pain
Back during a period of prolonged high stress — maybe during an employment crisis or facing deadline after deadline after deadline — you got yourself used to driving yourself hard or used to being in a state of urgency. Maybe you listen to too much news or talk radio and get “wound up”. Maybe you stayed too long in a situation you really wanted to get out of, or maybe you put and kept yourself in uncomfortable positions, by sense of necessity, that you would rather have gotten out of, and got part-way used to that, while keeping going. Or maybe you just “trained” badly or trained on top of old injuries. You’re musclebound, whatever the story, with a spasm in your back.
It’s been coming for a long time, your back spasm — you’ve been getting closer to the edge of cramp or spasm for a long time. You got so used to being tense and stiff that, one day, you pulled on that tenseness and stiffness and it pulled you right back, something like an internally generated whiplash action.
What If It Was a Whiplash Incident?
Maybe you were involved in an accident that yanked or jerked or jolted you a bit too much.
Then, you tightened up suddenly, got prone to sudden yank-back, and you knew you were caught — even if, at first, you didn’t realize it was a protective spasm you were feeling.
A Back Spasm Shows Brain-Muscle Conditioning
Caught in your own conditioning– think about that. Your spasm is your conditioning.
We all caught in our conditioning, to varying degrees and in different ways. Had you thought of it like that, before?
However, sometimes, it’s “just enough” (too much), and with just one more challenge we suddenly go hard-line, uptight, tense, caught in the grip of our own conditioning, in spasm, body and mind (two aspects of the same thing). Think about it: didn’t your back spasm stop you in your tracks? mid-step? It wasn’t “a back spasm“; it was a “you spasm“.
The Problem with a “You Spasm”
Not enough reserve capacity, not enough tolerance for additional demand. On edge, trying to be nice, perhaps. Not much more capacity for stress, however. Used up, or close to it, in the grip.
The solution?
Recover much of that reserve capacity by dispeling obsolete tension patterns. Lose the excess tension. Get back to normal. Recover your reserve capacity. Feel like a human being. You may have forgotten what that feels like and you may not have known that you can do it, yourself.
Common Back Spasms are Simple
“Simple When You Know How”
Common Back Pain is a fairly simple condition to master. It’s just a primitive “go” reaction (“Landau Reaction“) turned on too hard and too long. You’re overheated; you’re idling too high. You can learn to turn this reflex (Landau Reaction) down and up again, temper it, recover a bunch of reserve capacity, flexibility and freedom of movement. No more spasm, no more back pain, more reserve capacity, more movability.
Back Spasms from Injury are More Complex, May Take More Doing to Clear Up
Back pain from injury may consist of a number of overlying contraction patterns. However, bending over or twisting and getting a spasm isn’t an injury; it’s a malfunction that falls under “Common Back Pain”. Recovering from a complicated injury isn’t more difficult, particularly; it just takes more steps, some sorting out, and more doing, of course.
The same principle applies, either way.
Recover voluntary (deliberate) control of the muscular grip and let it relax, then deliberately use it freely and so reclaim it. Strength, reserve capacity, free control. Security.
One Right Reason
That’s one very good purpose of somatic education — to get people out of pain. It’s effective, it’s faster than more well-known or popularized methods, and it brings durable benefits under all life conditions.
Different — and More Like Yourself
A larger effect of somatic education is to train people to free themselves from the excessive grip of their conditioning; to re-acquaint people with what it feels like to feel fine; so people feel different and more like themselves.
Relief comes primarily from what the person does, secondarily from what someone else did with the person. If you do sessions of this process, you contribute at least 50% to the change, moving between effort and non-effort (in clinical sessions), or more like 90% if you’re working at a distance from me (Lawrence Gold) following recorded instructional material and taking distance-coaching, as needed.
Because the person is contributing energy, intention, and intelligence to the process, and because they’re changing from within (if guided from out), the change is theirs — theirs to maintain or theirs to re-create, if necessary. More than that, it’s faster than by externally operating methods, whether scalpel, laser, or stretching device (“spinal decompression”), longer-lasting than manipulations or interventions of many kinds. It’s longer-lasting because it covers more of the bases and from the internal control center, the self, oneself, and faster because it works from the inside, out.
In Tibetan Buddhism, the human being is regarded to have three interfitting “bodies”, which correspond to the waking state (“Nirmanakaya” or dense/”gross” physical flesh/genetic body), the dreaming or imagining state (“Sambhogakaya” or “subtle” body), and deep sleep (“Dharmakaya” or “causal/most subtle” or “unborn, unmanifest” body).This entry discusses our experience of them and how they evolve as a given individual develops and evolves.
These bodies are not separate. I consider them “nodes” or octaves on a continuum. This continuum consists of the primal “substance” of existence, which is self-radiant awareness, which gives rise to “soma” (or “living, aware, psycho-physical person”); soma consists of these three “bodies” or nodes.
Of these three “bodies”, two are manifest (limited and defined), consist of changing processes, and exist in time: the Nirmanakaya (genetic body) and the Sambhogakaya (dream body). These two bodies are not static and unchanging, but exist as living, changing processes.
The third “body,” the Dharmakaya, is transcendental, all-pervading, and is the ground of being from which the other two arise and in which they exist, consisting of self-radiant awareness.
This writing describes and explains the interrelation of the three bodies in terms of personal/conscious evolution.
People who are just learning the process of deliberate growth and change, we call “proto-mutants”; people who are actively engaging deliberate growth and change, we call “mutants” — after Thomas Hanna’s usage in his book, “Bodies in Revolt”.
“Pointing Out” Instructions
When the Nirmanakaya (manifested genetic/memory body) and the Sambhogakaya (imaginary dreamed-body) align (or attain a high degree of mutual congruency), as the individual remains consciously awake, volitionally present and at a sufficiently poised state of equanimity or balance (free attention), the Dharmakaya (deep, silent, formless body or field) may be intuited by feeling the content of experience and, while feeling it, feeling beyond it into what is deeper.
By “a high degree of mutual congruency”, I mean that the genetic/memory body is sufficiently free of the grip, or “gravitational attraction” of habituated patterns to be able to transform freely and stably into new subtle perceptions captured by awareness in the dream/imagination body (Sambhogakaya). Otherwise, subtle perceptions are fleeting and quickly replaced by the habits of dense memory seated in the genetic/memory body (Nirmanakaya). They can’t be captured, so subtle perceptions, new insights, and emerging abilities vanish and get missed.
The Dharmakaya is the “clutch pedal”. As the formless aspect of buddha-nature, “resorting” to it (or “taking refuge” in it) is the means of disengagement from, or relinquishment of, the memory-form of the moment. Dynamic balance between the intuition of the Dharmakaya and intuition of the form and feeling of the Sambhogakaya (imaginary dreamed-body) allows the Sambhogakaya to transform. Without that dynamic balance, the Sambhogakaya remains bogged in its current form, anchored by the Nirmanakaya’s tangible memory pattern (present as physiological adaptation, neurological conditioning, and the patterning of the myofascia/soft-tissue), which feeds back the memory pattern to the Sambhogakaya in a self-perpetuating feedback loop. You can’t lift the foot you are standing on; you’re using it.
The Nirmanakaya/genetic body is the densest seat of memory and is slower to (and more resistant to) change than the Sambhogakaya (dream-body), and so introduces a lag into the process of change — which has survival value, but slows re-adaptation.
The “anchoring” of the Nirmanakaya is its habitual pattern; intuition of the Dharmakaya “lifts anchor”.
Ordinarily, the perception of the Nirmanakaya/Sambhogakaya dynamic fades in deep sleep, leaving only the Dharmakaya’s formless nature. This is rest. Upon passage from the deep sleep state (Dharmakaya) into the dream state (Sambhogakaya), residual memories imprinted upon the Nirmanakaya (daytime body) “leak” into the emerging dream-activity of the Samghogakaya. Dreams appear, whose elements are, every one, aspects of the dreaming individual.
The “Ins” and “Outs” of the Subtle/Dream Body (Sambhogakaya)
Though it has been said that dreams are the royal road to the Unconscious, it is better said that they are the royal road to pervading the Unconscious with Consciousness. It is fruitless and misguided to consult “dream interpretation” texts for their meaning. They are indirect, second-hand, and intellectually biased, if not outright arbitrary.
There is a better way: Merely to remember each element of the dream and notice what you feel as you put your full attention on each element — that action reveals the latent significance of the element attended to. It’s a “feel” thing. The feelings are likely to be very familiar. More than that, with recognition comes dissolution of the binding forces of those feelings.
With each recognition and dissolution come both greater access to intuition of the Dharmakaya and release of the physical form (Nirmanakaya) from hitherto unconscious patterns of contraction (or somatic/psychophysical shaping forces). The body changes.
As the process of recognition and release continues, there appears a feeling of “straightening out”. The process gives meaning to a term that Castaneda used, “The Mold of Man”. (I think it was in “The Fire from Within”). The “straightening out” progressively approximates a feeling of more natural wholeness, of “self as you would prefer to be”, which is The Mold of Man.
The process of that straightening out may involve passages through personal distortions, recognized as “damaged self”, dysfunctional patterns or neuroses, some of which may be pretty hairy. It gives meaning to the term, “Lions at the Gate” or “Personal Demons” or “The Dragon’s Lair” or “The Green Knight” (but not The Jolly Green Giant).
As it proceeds, the energy-dynamic of the individual changes — not wholesale and in some general fashion, but in specific ways energetically/vibrationally related to the material recognized and released. A person gets more spontaneously intelligent in various ways.
The Special Function of the Formless or Most Subtle Body (Dharmakaya)
However, without the balancing influence of intuition of the Dharmakaya, transformation is slowed, rather than allowed — hence the value of meditation — and of a good night’s sleep! Paradoxically, as the process proceeds, the person may find (s)he needs less sleep and spontaneously spends more time in early-morning meditation. Or maybe it’s just insomnia. But you can put the time to good use!
Now, as the energy-dynamic of the individual changes, the field of the individual tends to become quieter — that is, less beset by occlusive noise — more “resonant” to processes occurring within and outside. The faculty of intuition becomes more available. With less internal noise, the individual is more sensitive — particularly to subtle forces guiding and shaping the emergence of actual existence. In other words, the person may become spontaneously pre-cognitive, getting intimations of things to come through revery and streams of thought. When those things come to pass, people call it, “synchronicity” or “signs of wisdom”.
It’s a natural result of doing “clean-up” which, by releasing the “glue” of memory patterns, allows the Nirmanakaya to change more quickly/fluidly, and the energy dynamic of Nirmanakaya and Sambhogakaya to be more congruent. (The physiologically-based memory-“glue” of the Nirmanakaya makes it slower to change, and so less dynamic than the dream-body/ Sambhogakaya. They get out of phase, as attention is trapped in memory. Somatic education helps in the releasing of that “glue”.) As Nirmanakaya and Sambhogakaya become more synchronous and congruent, they seem more transparent and attention is more free to penetrate to the deeper layer or node of consciousness: the Dharmakaya.
As both Sambhogakaya and Dharmakaya are simultaneously intuited, spontaneous adjustments in the field of the Sahbhogakaya (dream body) occur in the direction of felt balance and centered wholeness (these words being metaphors for a felt experience), these being how the Dharmakaya manifests through or as the Sambhogakaya. The Nirmanakaya undergoes corresponding evolutionary mutations (at a personal, not species, level).
Transformation
This simultaneous intuition may be fostered by the presence of persons or objects imprinted with the harmonic of “Nirmanakaya/Sambhogakaya Manifesting Dharmakaya”. Such is the virtue of spiritual masters, the localities of such masters, and the relics of such masters, of teachings generated from such intuition, and of groups of practitioners.
What may start out as an idealized state in certain aspects of the individual’s make-up broadens to include more of the individual’s functions, with consciousness of the Dharmakaya progressively pervading the dream-body and its manifested-memory (neural/genetic) body, to the benefit of ongoing mutation or “personal evolution”.
The End
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