In our culture and in these times, practices for deep recovery are priceless. Cumulative stress may come from working too much, carrying an excessive emotional load, societal oppressions, financial insecurity, confusion about the future and intergenerational trauma. Some things we have control over and other things are not in our control. To keep staying the path, we need to find our resource wells. These are practices or places that provide a felt-sense of spaciousness, safety and support. Even if for a few minutes or half a day, experiences of “okay” and “enough” remind us of our inherent resilience. Head spirals is a somatic movement practice for deep recovery through spinal unwinding.

systems sensing

Unwinding is a felt-sense term that is more experiential than anything. There is also a growing body of research that reveals how self-guided unwinding effects our neurobiology by eliciting both changes in our tissues and autonomic nervous system. Unwinding practices feel like your inner body is releasing excess tension and strain and giving back a softer, easier feeling and thinking state. Somatic Groundwork unwinding uses several different techniques that each involve systems sensing. One of these systems is the fascial matrix. Another primary system in Somatic Groundwork is that of connecting to ground and gravity and space, our primary system of support.

sensing into fascia

Sensing into fascia is a primary way to create shift in our autonomic nervous system. Our autonomic nervous system has a global effect on our emotional and mental states as well as to the quality of our tissues, or fascial system. An effective way to alter the tone of our nervous system, specifically to calm arousal (heightened activation) and elicit the rest and digest processes of our parasympathetic nervous system, is through sensing fascia. One Somatic Groundwork technique for unwinding is called rock and roll. Rock and roll is part of a yielding process that involves rhythmic rocking and soft body rolling in organic phrases of movement and rest.

Enter head spiral for spinal unwinding. Try this 13 minute practice with me from a bed or on the floor.

https://youtu.be/GVBjgZHkYPs

rock & roll spinal unwinding

With a focus to unwind your spine, a whole body experience unfolds. Somatic Groundwork unwinding is like self-massage therapy with movement. Due to a high density of sensory receptors embedded within the tissues of our fascial system, somatic movement is one of the best pain relievers that is “administered” to our self, by our self. The fascial matrix is a sensory fabric with over 200 million interoceptors and proprioceptors. Interoceptors monitor our inner body processes and proprioceptors monitor the relationship of our body organization with our environment.

Rock and roll techniques bring mindful attention to sensations like weight releasing, rolling points of contact, inner shape changes and push forces. As we track these sensations in movement, we directly participate with both interoceptive and proprioceptive input and alter the quality of information integrating in higher brain centers. What we monitor, we modify. Somatic movement and inquiry teaches sensing skills to help us move and feel better from the inside out.

If you are a movement teacher or therapist and want to weave somatic movement into your craft (through both the art and the science) take a look at our somatic teacher training: Interdisciplinary Movement & Somatics.

 

The post Unwind your Spine with Somatic Movement appeared first on School for Somatic Groundwork.

The sensing-perceiving-acting cycle (SPA cycle) provides a map with which to understand the learning process.  As movement educators, we often teach others how to move in new and different ways.  We may focus on education for performance and recreation, guide techniques to develop expression and creativity or use movement as medicine for healing and repair.  Whatever intention movement serves, often times the first steps require disentangling holding patterns and changing habits before refining and adding new movement skills.

As movement teachers, we access the autonomic nervous system, fascial matrix and neuromuscular system to create change. These systems are targeted through specific movements and by paying attention to particular sensory channels. Importantly, the movement practice invites curiosity and inquiry about our landscapes of experience. In other words, somatic movement is our doorway to promoting meaningful and sustainable change. And the SPA cycle is a useful map in the process.

Somatic Movement

Somatic movement involves tuning into the experience of movement while moving. Somatic movement focuses our mind’s attention on our body’s voice. Our body’s voice is heard through the language of sensations and vibrations and forces and charges. The qualities we sense through our tissues become our feelings and thoughts and inform our movement choices. Movement is one primary way we commune with life. Through moving, sensations provide feedback to our brain and help organize our next movement action. The SPA cycle is an ongoing conversation of learning and adapting.

In somatic movement practice, instead of focusing on making the right shapes, or hitting the ideal rep range, or pushing for a goal, attention is on the moment unfolding. The somatic viewpoint is the first person perspective of our body; our lived experience; the personal consciousness of the body itself.  Somatic awareness turns up the volume on tracking sensation as a self-research tool.  Perception is the combined information from our internal senses + the environment + our unique associations to the sensations. Our action plan, our movement, is organized based on how we perceive the incoming information that our central nervous system receives.  Somatic movement is powerful way to access the sensing-perceiving-acting cycle to create change.

Movement Re-patterning

Chances are, if you are a movement teacher, you have instructed a student or client to fix or change something.  Perhaps you asked them to position their knees, or to shift their weight over their hips, or to breath in a certain tempo, or to activate a certain muscle group in an exercise. Whatever the cue, the person heard what you said and then attempted the correction, only to “lose form” or fall back into habit.  You try giving the cue a second time, and maybe a third, but the “fix” remains temporary. Movement re-patterning requires not only external feedback, in the form of coaching or instruction, but also internal feedback, based on our body’s experience of itself.

Even if the cue is clear, and your client understands what is instructed cognitively, that is not always enough to change the holding pattern. Learning is ingrained over time and movement is a perfect example.  Imagine if we had to think through the steps for bending over every time we needed to pick something up, or tie our shoes, or smell the flowers.  To promote survival, our neurobiology has become genius at organizing the symphony to play millions of sonatas without needing our conscious attention.  Brilliant! . . . until we need to replace the violin section or tune the trumpets. How to update the pattern?

Like a symphony of instruments and musicians and conductors and sheet music housed in a theatre to play for an audience . . . a holding pattern is complex. A holding pattern is a habitual movement behavior that limits someone’s ability to participate in life to their desired capacity. They can have any combination of emotional, psychological, social, ancestral and/ or structural influences. 

Sound impossible to work with using movement? Well, what I have found is that with the SPA cycle as map along with the principles of Somatic Groundwork, holding patterns can be identified and replaced through a process of discovery and application.

Sensing-perceiving-acting Cycle

The sensing-perceiving-acting cycle helps us understand, in a simple and basic way, how we learn.  At birth, we are gifted with a starter kit in the form of reflexes.  A reflex is a motor response, a movement, that automatically happens when a particular stimulus occurs (think sensation).  Stimuli come through many channels, including how we are touched and how we touch/ make contact with our environment, caregivers and our own bodies. All of this sets the tone for how we yield into the world. These early reflexes ensure that we survive by providing our neuromyofascial web a quick start guide on how to eat and how to get there.  Along the way, we receive a lot of new feedback as we move and sense new things by coming into relationships.  

The forces of our environment, experienced through our body’s architecture, are constantly at play and are at the core of our development. These forces are the signals of our earliest sensory experiences.  These patterns of vibration and mechanical stress determine our tissue shape and the composition of our fascial matrix which  gives rise to the organization of our structure as a whole (read more about fascia and tensegrity here).  Another view into the dance between form and function.  

The SPA cycle is a looping of sensations, perceptions, and actions that inform one another in constant and rapid succession.  These feedback loops are intrinsic to the continuous learning and adapting process. When we are tasked to climb the stairs, most of the time, unless we have pain or injury, we just do it without any thought at all, the task is reflexive. Under the hood, there is a relay of information processing happening between the inner and outer landscapes of our experience.  As we move, our fascia and nervous system is registering feedback from our environment through a variety of sensory channels.  

Slowing Down to Intercept the Ball

At the heart of somatic movement patterning is slowing down. We practice slowing down the movement to the speed at which the experience can be tracked. The first skills include the ability to tune into our soma and to settle our nervous system. We tune in to listen to our body in a fresh way. We listen to the language of sensation. Paying attention to our body in movement gives us cues about how our body organizes movement, about the nuts and bolts of our motor control.

When it comes to teaching movement, if our student or client has a holding pattern limiting progression, the external feedback in the form of our cue or verbal instruction may not be helpful.  Instead, guidance on how to “intercept the ball” in the SPA cycle may provide the most efficient learning pathway. For example, one of the primary sensory channels we track in Somatic Groundwork is force transfer through our fascial matrix. If I slow down in a floor bridge and pay attention to how the foot push travels through my lower body, I may notice that it gets stuck below my knees. In that moment, perhaps there is a belief that surfaces about my knees being weak. With this realization, a new inquiry arises: how can I move the force through my knees? And what happens when I do?

The process of monitoring with attention and modifying with intention is the basis for neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to adapt and repattern the neural circuitry through our daily routines and practices. Neurons have the ability to change their structure and function in response to experience which ultimately affect perception and behavior. Where does a present moment experience emerge from? Our felt-sense. The spaces between raw sensory data and perception.

Behavior change requires tuning in to our felt-sense before the action or reaction takes place.  Say I desire to improve my listening skills, for example, and change a habit of interrupting people in conversation. First I might begin some self-research by tracking the energy and charges and story happening within me when I am around others. Am I anxious?  Do I feel tense?  How is my breathing?  Who are my thoughts while a conversation is occurring?  Am I actually present to the moment in front of me or am I lost in myself while others are talking?  By focusing attention to my inner lived experience, I discover what underlies the interrupting habit.

Engaging in the SPA cycle begins with slowing down and paying attention inward to inspect the underpinnings of our sensory life. When we slow down sufficiently enough to check-in and research what is moving inside of us, we find the key to changing behavior.  External feedback from a trusted person is part of our journey toward change. Yet, the internal feedback we gather through somatic practice is like tending to the soil from which the plants grow.

Conclusion

As movement teachers, we thrive on educating our students and clients to discover new connections in their movement training and practices.  One common challenge we face are the inevitable roadblocks of holding patterns that cause limitations due to cumulative injury, pain and under-recovery. We are not keen as a culture to slow down and tune into the intimacy of our lived experience to nurture change. Quick fixes, doing rather than being and forcing outcomes are tendencies in western society. Somatic movement practice offers a different way to support change by moving from the inside out.

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Pain and Consciousness

Pain is not an object.  Chronic pain is a personal experience based on a web of interactive factors.  Pain is not located in any one place, there is not a primary “pain center” in the brain or body.  Instead, chronic pain emerges through the integration of a host of brain centers and is influenced by subconscious material. (See more here.)

Consciousness continues to be one of the great unknowns: how is it and where it is found? Perhaps we might look to our fascial matrix for some answers. A plain stated and basic definition of consciousness is the ability to be self-aware, to be conscious of self.  And then, there is the dark side of consciousness, that is our subconscious mind operating below the level of conscious awareness.  One common idea from neuroscience is that unconscious processes comprise 95% or more of human cognitive function.  Unconscious processes influence our behavior and include our beliefs, memories, values, attitudes and motivations.

Objective Fix and the 5%

So here’s a common scenario:  I have a pain problem so I decide to seek help from an expert so they can fix it and take the pain away.  Maybe I see a doctor, or a chiropractor, a manual therapist or a physical therapist.  Depending on the expert, a particular assessment or screening is performed.  Perhaps this is a health history intake, a blood pressure reading, a postural assessment or other movement assessment.  Then, based on the intake findings, I am given a prescription for a pain killer or an anti-depressant, an adjustment, or a few exercises and then I go home.  Good luck with your pain problem.

I might feel temporary relief for awhile.  And this depends on how often and regularly I take the pills, get adjustments or treatments, or do the exercises. Inevitably, I don’t feel better over time:  I don’t feel fixed.  When our responsive, adaptive, living bodies are treated as machines, instead of resonance fields, the treatments look like band-aids rather than relational processes.  There’s little chance for sustainable healing if only superficial information is gathered about my pain, the treatment doesn’t require my embodied participation and all of life’s stressors continue rolling in the same way. (Important clause: I know there are holistic practitioners out there and I thank you for who you are and what you offer.)

If we desire change, hanging out in the 5% will do little to disrupt the holding pattern that underlies the chronic pain. Imagine randomly opening a book of 100 pages and reading 5 pages total from somewhere in the middle of the story. You will probably get a gist of some part of the story- but of what?  And how many more questions is that 5 pages of reading going to leave you with? Then there’s the question of who you are reading the book with and how you are as you are reading.

There is another red flag in this scenario above, and that is wanting someone to fix me rather than to participate with me.  The western medical model has played into a spell that a symptom can be treated/ fixed as an isolated event.  If my car sputters and knocks, then I bring it to the mechanic to get the issue fixed.  Our body is not a machine. We are living. We are life.  We are nature’s design.

The Other 95 Pages

Two common factors contributing to pain include our perceptual artifacts in the pain pattern and life stressors. Pain science recognizes that chronic pain is not always associated with tissue damage. We also know that unresolved trauma is linked with certain health conditions, behavioral disorders and chronic pain. Unconscious processes are at play in our belief systems, coping strategies, defense responses and our sense of identity and worthiness in the world.  Buried in the other 95 pages of unconscious programming, we find autonomic functions, limbic-emotional functions, habitual functions and messaging functions below the neo-cortex.

In terms of life stressors, there is eustress and then there is distress.  We grow and thrive with eustress.  This occurs when there is appropriate time to recover after the stressor and if we have the resources to recover.  Distress is something that happens with a constant barrage of stressors that we just can’t quite get out from under.  Of course, there is our perception of the stress which may be the most detrimental- and this brings us back to unconscious processes.  Overall, what we know is the chronic stress response is extremely toxic and life diminishing.

Physiological Load

At the center of chronic pain is the subjective experience.  So although objective data has a place, without bringing in the human experience, without investigating behind the curtain, the pain management model will fall short on providing bodymind ease and quality of life improvements. Chronic pain, trauma and inflammation are products of central sensitization.  Central sensitization is a heightened sensitivity to pain due to the increased responsiveness of pain receptors in the central nervous system. Essentially the nervous system is in a consistent state of high reactivity.

Central sensitization is associated with poor coordination, poor short-term memory, increased levels of emotional distress and malaise.  The adverse stress of chronic pain increases the physiological load and may cause increases in global muscle tone, tissue dehydration, digestive distress, emotional instability and decreased immune function. These are largely processes of the autonomic nervous system and the sensorimotor integration driving central sensitization occurs below conscious perception. To effectively change the interacting neural inputs to reduce the physiological load, the subconscious material needs to be brought to awareness. Enter: somatic inquiry.

Somatic Inquiry

Practitioners managing chronic pain seem pretty comfortable with their various tools for the objective treatment of the body. The skill-set missing includes how to safely and effectively work with the lived experience of our body, or soma. Our soma is body from our body’s viewpoint.  Soma is the first person perspective of our living, breathing, sensing, feeling, moving body.

Somatics is the experiential study of personal consciousness, the experience of our body from the inside out. Somatics has a multitude of facets and applications. The somatic field has influenced many different disciplines such as movement education, psychology, social justice, body work, holistic health and therapeutic approaches. At the most basic level, the somatic viewpoint is the birthright of each one of us, as it is our body’s knowing.

There are many schools with highly developed somatic methods, insights and theories.  These specific somatic modalities have challenged traditional western assumptions that our body is something to be repaired in a 3-step protocol by an outside expert.  The field of somatics has proven itself as an effective way for weaving us back to connection.  Somatics is our contemporary solution for dissolving the spell of a mind-body split.   

A primary skill-set in guiding somatic inquiry is the ability to help someone tune into their experience of sensing and feeling.  The somatic guide offers maps for trail systems that reveal our living territory. One of these maps is the sensing-perceiving-acting cycle that help us identify limiting patterns so that we can choose new ones.  Importantly, somatic guides honor the personal sovereignty of each body while inspiring curiosity and possibility.  

Through somatic inquiry, a process of paying attention and then playing with the discoveries, new information is sent to the brain. We become active participants in building new neural networks.  Somatic inquiry has the potential to change the neuroendocrine responses leading to the central sensitivity.  One reason for this shift is due to eliciting the parasympathetic nervous system through our sensory practice.

Self-regulation

Self-regulation is the ability to manage one’s own behaviors, thoughts and emotions without discharging on others.  The state of our nervous system is the foundation for self-regulation. Somatic movement practice and inquiry provides easy access to our parasympathetic nervous system which feels like a calm, steady and spacious place in our body. 

In Somatic Groundwork, our primary practice for self-regulation is yielding. Yielding begins with active attention to the relationship with earth and space. Often practiced in constructive rest position or in other restorative postures, the fundamental action of yielding can be experienced in any moment and in any position. Yielding is a process of sensing into our tissue architecture and how we are in contact with the ground.  The practice of yielding supports intimacy in touch and contact and underlies our basic relationship with ourselves and the world we are embedded.  

While yielding, we notice our body breathing us. Breath is our first movement of life on land outside of the ocean-like womb.  Breath is the primal movement that initiates all other motion in our body. Offering entrance to the shape-shifting of our inner spaces, our breath is ever present and provides us with immediate feedback on the state of our bodymind.  With somatic awareness of our breath expanding and condensing, we influence autonomic functions like heart rate, vagal tone, blood pressure, hormone release and myofascial tone. 

Try yielding for yourself in the Somatic Groundwork class I taught on my birthday. 

Interdisciplinary Care

We need a new framework for managing health and wellness, including chronic pain.  The framework is built on polarity flow: objective and subjective, cognitive and intuitive, goal-oriented and process-oriented and evidence-based and discovery-based.  The framework is also client-centered and implements a whole-person approach. Finally, the framework is collaborative so that healthcare providers, wellness practitioners and movement professionals work together to serve our community at the highest level.

Client-centered honors the experience of the individual as paramount in the change process from how they are now to how they desire to be. In this framework of care, clients are treated with respect for their inner authority and with the potential to be creative, resourceful and whole through a process of learning and application.  

A whole person approach uses both outside-in and inside-out methods to attend to the client’s needs. Objective measures are in place to collect information, assess the baseline of the client’s bodymind (specific to each practitioner and scope of practice) and to provide techniques related to the practitioner’s expertise.  The integrated approach includes somatic inquiry to support self-regulation,  to bring unconscious processes to awareness and to promote client participation in their healing journey.

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Further reading:

This post was inspired by this article to bring somatic movement practice into the discussion.

The Ghost in the Machine- Is Musculoskeletal Medicine Lacking Soul?

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