April 3, 2010

Hello,

I am a big fan of somatic movement practices - movement where your awareness of what's happening in your body is the most important aspect of what you are doing. Too often in our culture, we are concerned only with how things look from the outside; somatic movement gets you into a deeper level of your body where changes can really start happening.

My introduction to these practices began in 1994, after I started doing contact improvisation dance. Over the years, I have taken classes and workshops in Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement®, Continuum, Hanna Somatic Education®, Body-Mind Centering®, and more.

Recently, I had the pleasure of meeting and taking a class from Certified Hanna Somatic Educator Ed Barrera. I asked Ed to write an article that introduces a core concept of Hanna Somatic Education - pandiculation. It gets a little technical in places, but if you want more information just follow the links to Ed's site and to the Hanna Somatic Education site.

Carol

Can You Pandiculate to Health?

All vertebrate animals that are healthy go through a series of movements known as pandiculations. A pandiculation is a stretch felt as a chain of actions throughout the entire body.

The result of a pandiculation is decreased stiffness and consequently satisfaction.

Every morning Fido will do it even before he gets to his email. Fido is sharp when it comes to self-care and prefers to use his own biofeedback self-correction act to begin his day.

You know when you see your cat or dog do it, they really aren't stretching. They consciously arouse their nervous system and they release themselves. A pandiculation is a reflex that involves an aware consciousness of voluntary control. If you watch closely, you'll notice how your pet is actually contracting, and then following through with a slow release.

Healthy animals have been engaging the process of pandiculation for as long as they have been alive. You yourself started practicing in your mother's womb. So this makes pandiculations the world's oldest and largest exercise program, if you think of it in these terms... and the one in which you began to program yourself how to move.

What is happening is that you are resetting the contraction levels of your muscles through a little known reset point called the alpha-gamma co-activation level, which is a feedback loop... and here you thought Fido was just being cute with his morning routine.

Your muscles change through sensitivity and a rate of contraction. The nervous system communicates to the muscles through a feedback loop that generally goes either from the spinal cord out to the muscles, such as when you flinch away from a hot stove.

When you walk, talk and chew gum, this is handled by your brain's cerebellum; you've learned it, so you now you just do it... and your muscles respond. The alpha-gamma loop helps coordinate the muscles so you don't have to remember how to take each step.

Engaging your motor cortex arouses the nervous system. The alpha-gamma feedback loop resets itself through the process of a pandiculation. Your muscles lengthen as a result of the process; now the previous level of contraction is reset to lower levels. The reset happens in an instant, since it is a brain event brought on by cortical inhibition.

When you use your awareness and voluntarily contract a set of muscles that otherwise would appear as a stretch... follow your action by being aware of the release.

When muscles shorten overnight, your dog pandiculates to regain length. Your pet will do a series of 7 to 11 patterns in the morning and then some periodically throughout the day. The satisfaction the dog feels is when her muscles are comfortable. This is what sets up her nimbleness, agility, and vitality as self-correction is sensed.

Hanna Somatic Education®, created by Thomas Hanna, systematized many pandiculations into Somatics Exercises. Unlike any other form of exercise, the pandicular response naturally creates results such as:

• decreased stiffness,
• freedom from pain,
• increased mobility,
• better balance, and
• the ability to recover from injury more quickly.

To increase your performance, like an animal, requires you to engage the very nature of the process by pandiculating to reset your nervous system.

As you learn the various patterns of Somatics Exercises you're led down the road of differentiation as a way to facilitate neural plasticity and apply neurogenesis. In other words, your brain can change and grow new brain cells through a learning process. This is what sets apart Somatics Exercises from traditional forms of exercise.

Pandiculations, in general, improve your health and well-being by changing the signals in your brain... and provide a satisfactory way to maintain it.

By differentiation of Somatics Exercises, your brain/body adapts itself to novel ways that set up movement in the first place... and the good news is... the exercises are easy and effortless to do.

Hanna Somatic Education® teaches you how to effectively transform the root cause of pain by re-education. In order to keep moving as easily, agilely, in balance, and with as much vitality as a cat, all you have to do is simply pandiculate and differentiate your way to health.

Nature has set it up for us to just keep re-engaging the process. So before you take that step to the computer in the morning, do what your cat has been doing all along... pandiculate your way to health and well-being; you just might catch the mouse with ease and email to your heart’s content.

About the Author

Eduardo Barrera, HSE®, is a Certified Hanna Somatic Educator and owner of www.GravityWerks.com.

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The information in this newsletter is for educational purposes only. Consult a professional healthcare practitioner as appropriate.

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