Hanna Somatics site | to End Lingering Pain

After reflection upon the nature of self-existence during a time of particularly intense affliction — during and after a period of illness in which I felt particularly vulnerable to suffering, it has at last become clear to me what is the nature of “self-identification”.

To the point:  self-identification (self-contraction) is the feeling of an automatic action of tensing that happens so automatically and so involuntarily as to compel one to accept, “this is myself.” It the sense and assumption that one is “a self” compelled by the inability to “be anything different”.

In that state, efforts to get relief from that uncomfortable state of self-contraction merely use and reinforce that very self-contraction. It seems inescapable and it is this seeming inescapability that seems to make acquiescense to this state of contraction, inevitable, that makes us surrender to the sense that, “This is myself.”

It ain’t.

It’s a sense of self-contraction, a state of automatic self-activity, ongoing habit, that comes from one or more of the faces of the TetraSeed — ATTENDING | INTENDING | REMEMBERING | IMAGINING — operating in the background without conscious involvement.

This “without conscious involvement” entails automaticity — happening by itself, seemingly as an unavoidable feature of existence. This automaticity makes it seems as if it something that “we are” rather than as “something that we are doing — and can stop doing”.

TENSING AS READINESS FOR LIFE
I have referred to, “tensing”. To tense oneself is the first step to readying oneself for action of any kind. It is “readiness for life” — often taken to be “maturity” or “competence.”

This “self-identified” state of contraction has myriad forms. It is a complex “wad” of contraction-activity made of all the memory impressions acquired over a lifetime. These memory impressions form automatically as the “recording activity” of life-experience. This recording activity has adaptive value — up to a point. It equips us to be ready for more experiences of the kinds we have already experienced.

It becomes a problem as this “readiness” piles up from some experiences that seem to repeat themselves — and from many that never repeat themselves, but that have left their mark on us as a state of readiness for “more of the same”. It is a kind of stupid, rudimentary intelligence that is supposed to serve life but that does so without the conscious, deliberate participation of the individual; it is a primitive artifact of earlier evolutionary times, when individuals had yet to become so distinctly different from one another (individual), when they were so much more embedded in “nature” and “tribe”, expected to conform out of survival-necessity, that automatic recording (learnings) of experience adequately served the survival of individual and tribe (or culture).

Again, as this readiness piles up automatically and we remain “perpetually at the ready,” we become more and more self-identified, self-contracted. “Perpetually at the ready” is a kind of attitude. It is also a feeling — the feeling of “self”. People who think they “know themselves” merely know this pile-up of readiness.

Because it forms and plays out automatically and without our ability to stop, it seems to be self.

Like so many patterns of involuntary self-limitation, it entails the automatic functioning of one or more of the four faces of the TetraSeed — ATTENDING | INTENDING | REMEMBERING | IMAGINING. As with all patterns of involuntary self-limitation, the key to release is to bring all four faces “on-line” and awake. When that happens, what has been running “on automatic” ceases to be automatic and becomes subject to observation (non-identification) and voluntary control. Efforts to become “non-identified” without that awakening merely become new, unrecognized forms of self-identification.

When that voluntary control awakens, two things happen:

1. The activity ceases to occur automatically and thus to seem inevitable.
2. One no longer regards it as “self”, but now recognizes it as a mere conditional (or temporary) activity. Activity no longer automatically triggers self-identification/self-contraction. One can act without becoming loaded with self-contraction — without intensifying involuntary self-identification. It’s the capacity for free action without the affliction of inevitable “self”.

A SECRET, UNRECOGNIZED FORM OF ‘SELF-IDENTIFICATION’
It is the sense of “other”. We consider others to be selves like ourselves — but what makes this form of “other-as-self” unrecognizable is what may be called, “the blame factor”. We hold others culpable for their actions, as if they were voluntary, rather than as stupidly automatic as our own unconscious self-identification. We assume a “self” over there to be praised or blamed for behavior. This sense of “self-over-there” IS IDENTICAL to the feeling of “(my)self, here”; it is self-identified self-contraction attributed to “an other” over there.

It is a form of self-identification because we consider ourselves to be “not like that” or to be “like that”. It is “other-identification”. It makes things, “personal.”

Prior to recognition of one or more of the faces of the TetraSeed running “on automatic”, we feel stuck with “the other” and with the dilemma of “blame or forgive” — both of which are ridiculous, absurd, and unworkable alternatives — pretenses, actually, based on idealisms built upon the automatic, evolutionary survival program that records experience without conscious participation and makes us into “robots of the past” (robots of memory).

What’s so pathetic about it is the degree to which the mass of humanity continues to operate in this way — so unconscious, so automatic, so habitual, so entranced, and so unintelligent.

AWAKENING
“Awakening” is not an idealism. It is a functional actuality. It is the one thing we can do, at least partially voluntarily, as human beings. We can inspect our reactions to experience for “asleepness” (automaticity) in terms of the four faces of the TetraSeed — ATTENDING | INTENDING | REMEMBERING | IMAGINING.

By its ongoing trials and insults, the life-process highlights areas of our lives that are running on automatic. The reason it does so is that the sense of “trial” and “insult” is always a trial and/or insult of an identification-as-self. “Someone” is felt to be undergoing a trial; “someone” is insulted by life.

The sense of a “someone” is always some form of automatic readiness, felt as inescapable, to which we acquiesce as if it were,” self”. The “we” who acquiesce are more of the same.

When the four TetraSeed “faces” come awake, the compulsivity of self-identification is over — at least in the area awakened. What awakens is tacit, intuitive freedom felt as adequate in the moment, free of the sense of “self” under the thumb of experience. The sense of “conditions” and creative responsiveness remain — and the uncomfortable sense of contraction (self-imploded, self-implicated readiness) of self-identification eases, and with it, the self-imploded sense of personal suffering.

I recognize that it may be helpful to bring the TetraSeed into more familiar terms by looking at each of its features.

However, I will start by making an unfamiliar term, familiar: “the archesoma”. “Soma” refers to any living creature with a sense of its condition and a sense of its environment. The term, archesoma, refers to the underpinnings of all living creatures’ sense of existence. It’s based on four universal functions:

We start with Memory, as I believe it to be the most accessible to you, friendly reader.

MEMORY

IMAGINATION

ATTENTION

INTENTION

The Gold Key Release
CLICK FOR INSTRUCTION

CONTACT:

copyright 2017 Lawrence Gold

Forty-two years ago, an educator by the name of Thomas Hanna embarked on a course of exploration that led to a major advance in the treatment of people with chronic, non-malignant pain from injuries and aging. This article will give you an inside look at one of the most potent developments in the last one hundred thirty years, or so, of research and development into the origins and elimination of pain in human beings. This development came from a tradition of movement education and sensory development that has come to be known as, “somatic education”.


The key distinction of this tradition is that its methods empower participants to take control of their own physiology, and in so doing, of their physical well-being as they age.


BACKGROUND
In the late 1960s, during the heyday of the human potential movement, Thomas Hanna held the position of chairman of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Florida at Gainesville.

In those days, the complexion of the humanities in academic life was different from what it is, today. Unlike today’s climate, which is bent upon the deconstruction of the primacy of any kind of knowledge, whatsoever, in those days, Dr. Hanna’s philosophical interest was about more than mental propositions and positions; he had an earnest desire to understand the human condition in such a way that it would lead to both human freedom and personal competence — not just freedom from all constraints, but improvement in capabilities, the awakening of practical human functions.


That desire drew him more than once into conflicts that embroiled students and the university administration during a time when young people were experimenting with both ancient and new methods of mind-expansion (remember, this was the 60s), and their professors were often caught in the middle. Dr. Hanna tended to advocate for the students.


Ultimately, his interests led him to California, where he served as the first director of the Saybrook Institute (now known as the Humanistic Psychology Institute — HPI). It was during that time that he heard of and became acquainted with a man whose own interests had led him to develop methods of improving human functioning and sensory awareness through movement education. His name was Moshe Feldenkrais, a Russian genius whose methods of education have since come to be known as Feldenkrais Somatic Integration.


Feldenkrais was a man of many abilities and interests — an electrical engineer, a research scientist in high-energy physics, and a black-belt judoka who had founded the first school of Judo in Europe (France). His methods of improving the functioning of the brain and muscular system had grown out of his studies of and training in the methods of F. Matthias Alexander (The Alexander Technique), the methods of Gerda Alexander (Eutony) and judo.


Hanna found Feldenkrais’ methods and views fascinating and, in addition to including a section on Feldenkrais in Hanna’s book, Explorers of Humankind (1979), he invited Feldenkrais to conduct a training in America, a training course that Hanna organized and directed and in which he participated as a student.


That training began Hanna’s sixteen-year odyssey of exploration as a practitioner of the methods of Functional Integration, as Feldenkrais’ method was then known. His experiences during those years of private practice and his ongoing, absorbing interest in developments in related fields (as founding editor of Somatics: the Magazine Journal of the Bodily Arts and Sciences), led to the advances in the field of somatic education that led to Hanna Somatic Education, a form of clinical somatic education used to end pain and improve mobility.


Hanna Somatic Education developed from the convergence of ideas and discoveries of many individuals. Its methods rest upon a simple principle brought forward by Feldenkrais, and before him, by F.M. Alexander: that improvements of human functioning rest ultimately upon human attention and intentional application of effective methods of change to oneself, i.e., upon education. Hanna Somatic Education freely applies the principles and methods brought forth by Hanna’s predecessors; however, to those methods, Hanna added something more, something that was his unique contribution to the field and that created a major improvement in the speed and degree of improvement possible with somatic education: a technique now called, “assisted pandiculation” — a strange term with a simple meaning.


THE PANDICULAR RESPONSE
The term, pandiculation, comes from the study of animal behavior — ethology. One paper in particular, on pandicular behavior of sheep fetuses in-utero, published by researcher A.F. Frazier, piqued Hanna’s interest and led to his developing a new clinical technique.


The term, pandiculation, refers to something that you have undoubtedly seen cats and dogs do upon arising from rest. It’s something you often do, yourself, before getting out of bed in the morning or upon standing up from a prolonged period of sitting. It’s also something referred to by an expectant mother as her baby “kicking” inside her womb. It’s a sensuous movement of refreshment and preparation for activity.

People commonly call it, “stretching” — but it isn’t stretching, and it especially isn’t stretching in the sense applied by physical therapists and athletic trainers. It’s a strong, pleasurable contraction of muscles in particular patterns, followed by a smooth (not sudden) release and then by movement into activity.


Animals and children pandiculate instinctually to refresh kinesthetic awareness and motor control. It’s what they spontanously feel like doing upon arising from rest. The action, which originates in the motor and motor-association areas of the brain, sends a strong cascade of sensory impulses to the sensory and sensory-association areas of the brain from the sense receptors of movement, a cascade of sensation sufficient to refresh the sensory-motor feedback loop by which we regulate muscular tension and movement. Motor control and sensory awareness improve in seconds of pandiculation.


The Pandicular Response, as a feature of neuroplasticity, depends upon an intact nervous system; lesions of the nervous system impair the application of the pandicular response to the affected region.


The presence of contractures that commonly form during injury and that persist long after healing of injuries as distortions of motor control is a sign that sensory-motor integrity has been blown out/interrupted. Voluntary control of movement has been distorted and diminished, and control has passed to the involuntary, subcortical brain level (e.g., cerebellum). Patterns of movement practiced repeatedly, as in athletics or as part of ones vocation, likewise pass to subcortical control, and are triggered by momentary intentions to move in familiar ways and are executed “on-automatic”, fine-tuned by in-the-moment intentions. Typographical errors are are an example of how automatic execution has overridden voluntary control, as most typographical errors involve the correct spelling of the incorrect word!

It turns out that pandiculation is sufficient not merely to refresh the sensory-motor feedback loop, but to reforge sensory-motor integrity when it has been interrupted/blown out by the pain of injury and reflexive movements have taken over. “Reforge” implies an enduring improvement.


Dr. Hanna devised a way to apply the pandicular response deliberately; more than that, he devised a way to magnify the effects of the pandicular response in a hands-on technique called, “assisted pandiculation”; and he devised protocols that apply assisted pandiculation in a systematic way to address three major reflexes of stress that commonly become habituated in human beings: Landau Reaction, Trauma Reflex, and Startle Reflex.

Habituated Landau reaction commonly appears as back trouble, so-called degenerative disc disease, insomnia and tension headaches.

Habituated Trauma reflex commonly shows up as lasting changes to movement and posture following injury or surgery, as TMJ dysfunction, and as the headaches that follow whiplash injuries.

Habituated Startle reflex commonly shows up as the chest-down, head forward posture and movement of the elderly and those who have been through emotionally traumatic times, and as breathing difficulties.

You can find more detailed discussion of these three reflexes of stress in Dr. Hanna’s book, Somatics: ReAwakening the Mind’s Control of Movement, Flexibility and Health, and in his definitive article, Clinical Somatic Education: A New Discipline in the Field of Health Care.

That “therapeutic/athletic” stretching is an inadequate approach to correcting alterations of muscular control and restrictions to movement can be seen in the long periods needed in therapy and athletic training needed to produce even modest improvements. Its error is in treating contractures as if they are bio-mechanical conditions, alone, that can be treated by biomechanical means, alone.

Assisted pandiculation, on the other hand, addresses such altered functional patterns in a way that is true to their nature as changes of muscle/movement memory (rather than as a bio-mechanical matter), and so it quickly produces the desired results and those results are durable and easily withstand both activities of daily living and vigorous activity.

Hanna Somatic Education fully acknowledges the bio-mechanical aspect of the human body and uses that view in applying its methods; however, it goes beyond the view of the body as a “marvelous machine”. It recognizes that the “memory” of “muscle memory” resides in the brain, not in the muscles; it recognizes neuroplasticity (memory formation and memory dissolution) as the underlying process of motor development and of the alterations of movement that follow injury; it recognizes that coordination trumps strength, that large muscular recruitment patterns trump the action of any single muscle, that inherent movement patterns trump arbitrary movement patterns; and that the feelings and action of the individual trump anything that can be done to him or her. Thus, Hanna Somatic Education integrates the understandings of kinesiology, neuroplasticity, and learning theory to get results faster, more easily, and more comfortably than by standard therapeutic or training methods, and it supports the processes of therapy and of athletic training.

Its effectiveness is so decisive that it usually brings lasting relief from excessive muscular tonus in any area of the body in less than two minutes. (The length of clinical somatic education sessions comes from the amount of territory that must be covered, when addressing altered patterns of control).