Traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies: the past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort. Their bodies are constantly bombarded by visceral warning signs, and, in an attempt to control these processes, they often become expert at ignoring their gut feelings and in numbing awareness of what is playing out inside. They learn to hide from themselves.

The more people try to push away and ignore internal warning signs, the more likely they are to take over and leave themselves bewildered, confused, and ashamed. People who cannot comfortably notice what is going on inside become vulnerable to respond to any sensory shift either by shutting down or by going into a panic––they develop a fear of fear itself. .Bessel A. van der Kolk, M.D. “The Body Keeps the Score”

Thoughts, Emotions, and Feelings

It took years to accept my thoughts, emotions, feelings, and lack of feelings, and feel more in control of my life. Years after a traumatic experience, it is reactivated and mobilized in the brain and body and floods us in massive amounts of stress hormones. The entire body responds for a lifetime to the original trauma. The imprint of trauma is experienced by the mind, brain, and body.

Many traumatized people just give up. Rather than risk experimenting with new options they stay stuck in the fear they know. And they are trapped alone. It is enormously difficult to organize one’s traumatic experience into a coherent account – a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. Often no words are there to share with a therapist. And the act of telling doesn’t necessarily change the automatic physical and hormonal responses of our hypervigilant bodies.

Trauma is preverbal, subcortical, impossible to articulate. And when words fail, haunting images capture the experience and return as nightmares and flashbacks. No matter how long ago the trauma, time is erased. I experience the horror of imageless nightmares with no conscious memory of screaming and waking my wife.

Brain scans show that during flashbacks the right brain lights up and the left brain is left in the dark. The left hemisphere handles words and logic and the right hemisphere stores memories of sound, touch, smell, and the emotions evoked. People with PTSD sometimes feel they are losing their mind. Actually, they are losing the logical, reasoning, sequencing left hemisphere of their brain.

Most people react to a threat with a temporary increase in their stress hormones. As soon as the threat is over, the hormones dissipate and the body returns to normal. The stress hormones of traumatized people spike quickly and disproportionately in response to mildly stressful stimuli and take a long time to return to normal. My instant response to an emotional storm was to lash out verbally and yet worse, physically. Sometimes this resulted in police at our door.

Agency

The first step of acceptance and control for me was aikido during my final seven years in Japan. Five years of daily practice earned both me and my wife shodan – first-degree blackbelt. That was the first time I felt truly proud of my life.

Agency starts with interoception, awareness of body-based feelings, the wordless physical sensations beneath emotions. We sat in the dojo with our eyes closed focused on our breathing. This puts you in touch with subtle, body-based feelings. And each time you are aware of thoughts and feelings, you return to your breathing. This is the practice of mindfulness. Mindfulness is necessary for self-control or agency.

In an 1894 article “What is an Emotion,” William James said that in terms of emotion, the body comes first. From the physical experience of the nervous system, we “discover” the emotion or how we are feeling. The sequence starts with the sympathetic or parasympathetic nervous system and morphs into feeling or emotional experience. James argued that emotional experience or feeling results from the experience of bodily changes. Everyone else argued that it is the other way around, that bodily changes result from the emotional experience.

James posited a now-famous thought experiment. You take a nice relaxing walk in the woods when suddenly you encounter a bear. The question is whether you run because you are afraid or are you afraid because of a bodily response that includes running away.

The common-sense answer is that you see the bear, are afraid, and run away. But James said what happens is you see the bear and your body reacts physically. A couple of seconds later as you are running away fear sets in. You don’t know you are afraid just by seeing the bear. Instead, you nonverbally tell yourself my heart is beating in my throat. Adrenaline is coursing through my blood. My breath has been taken away. I am running like hell. I am afraid of the bear.

Everyone thought James went off the deep end on this one. His theory was in contrast to the current thinking of his time that bodily changes follow from the perception of seeing the bear and a feeling of fear. You would see the bear; you would cringe with fear, your heart would pound, and adrenaline would flow.

Not so said, James. If you take away the heartbeat, the adrenaline coursing through your blood, the out-of-breathiness, if you take all this away, you would see the bear and you would not get scared. Psychologists could not believe this. William James had to be wrong.

If what William James was saying were true, then someone who is paralyzed from the neck down would not get scared if they came across a bear in the woods, because the message of what was occurring in the body would not be relayed up to the brain. That did not make sense. Or did it?

Antonio Damasio says this is exactly right. The message is not relayed up to the brain, so a paralyzed person from the neck down would not get as scared as able-bodied people. He said studies were done in this area by a paraplegic psychologist who thought that he felt less emotion than he did before he became paralyzed. He talked to other paralyzed victims and they reported the same. These studies report that people who had once been able-bodied and then became paralyzed were less happy and less sad than able-bodied people.

Leaving the body out of the equation is like severing the head from the body. Yet in all of my long dealings with therapists that is precisely what they do. And I have taken more than one hundred psychology credits and not one of these undergraduate or graduate classes spent significant time on the body in terms of therapy. I hope times have changed from then.

Stand up Straight

The simple act of adjusting your posture works as an instant shift of focus. You may not notice the difference in how you feel, but research indicates a shift in affect after adjusting posture. Initial studies were not how posture affects affect, but how the body reacts to emotional and feeling states.

Darwin studied the physical expression of affect, practically everything from screaming infants causing the contraction of muscles around the eyes, to the bodily expressions of grief, suffering, joy, love, meditation, determination, shyness, shame, and devotion. He covered just about every way the body displays feelings and emotions. Some of this was documented in his 1872 book, “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.” That publication began an era concerned with how affect affects the person.

Effect of Posture on Affect and Behavior

It took another hundred years before researchers turned this paradigm around and began studying the effect posture has on affect and behavior. In 1982, the first study on the effect of posture on motivation, emotion, and behavior appeared in the journal one and Emotion. The study (actually four studies) examined the effects of stooped relative to upright physical posture on depressed mood and helplessness. It asked the question, is a slumped-over relative to an upright physical posture a nonverbal depreciating of oneself?

They found no significant difference in self-reporting of self-confidence between the slumped and the upright posture groups. But that does not mean that posture does not affect affect. It means the subjects were unaware of the effect posture had on them.

When each subject was given a series of puzzles to solve, some of which were unsolvable, there was much lower persistence in working on the insolvable puzzles in the stooped-posture group. And after this puzzle-solving session, subjects who were in the slumped-posture group rated themselves as having significantly stronger feelings of helplessness and external control. This group also reported being more stressed. Posture had a definite effect on affect. Posture is more than a passive reflection of emotional states.

Drowned in Words

In all the psychotherapy I received over the years, the body was left out of the equation. I was never asked how I felt about my body and I never thought of bringing it up, even though body image was a huge issue from early on.

The body is the container of feelings and emotions, source of security and self-confidence, insecurity, and lack of self-confidence. Mind/body, somatic/psychic dimensions are inseparable. It is essential to come to terms with a somatic body and a body image, that can sometimes be unrecognizably apart.

The Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais Method, Rolfing, Somatics, and Orgone or Vegetotherapy are a few of the body therapies of the early to mid-1900s. Wilhelm Reich who developed the last two was considered  the father of body psychotherapy. Reich was an acquaintance of Freud and Freud referred patients to him. Reich went through psychoanalysis himself for fourteen years.

Initially, Reich was a Freudian psychotherapist. He sat behind his patient who lay on a couch. The patient free associated saying just about anything that came to mind. Dreams were analyzed fragment by fragment. But Freud shared little in his lectures or writing as to exactly how to do psychoanalysis. When Reich questioned associates, they all said just do it and you’ll understand.

The therapist looks for neurotic symptoms of repressed instinctual impulses. The “cure” was brought about by making the repressed drive conscious. So when Freud admitted later in his career that this did not necessarily lead to a cure, Reich gave up on psychoanalysis.

Reich developed what he called at times Orgone Therapy, Vegetotherapy, and Character Analysis. He came to believe that in many cases words obscure the expressive language of the biological core. He felt that psychoanalysis of years’ duration was a victim of a pathological kind of language. Rather than disclose vital questions of life, psychoanalysis drowned them in verbiage.

Reich said that people do not think rationalistically. They do not do things “in order to.” People function at the level of biological tensions and needs. You cannot understand a person’s consciousness from the world of language. We have traded the language of words for the understanding of “the basically different language of the living function.”

We cannot express our deep biological nature through language. What we hear when others speak is an impression, an interpretation in terms of what we can experience. But all living things have an identical “functional identity” enabling us to be “impressed” and understand even the functioning of a worm. We perceive the emotional expression of pain, for example, which is the same ours would be in the same painful situation. In this way, we comprehend the biological emotions of all other living organisms in terms of a universal living function.

I think Antonio Damasio, Professor of Neuroscience at the University of California was getting at the same crucial insight in his discussion on what may be going on in the brain in deep states of meditation. He talked about a screen and behind the screen is a deep state of primordial being that expresses the experience of the cells and tissues and systems that make up the body. He said that this is a place deep in the brain where there is a fusion of mind and body where extremely important realities reside that can enlighten and have therapeutic effects.

Character Analysis

Orgone Therapy or Character Analysis takes place outside the realm of word language. Instead of a focus on words, the focus is on the total expression of the person or the total impression the person makes. Rather than words, the therapist observes the emotional expression or the lack of or inhibited emotional expression. Inhibited emotional expression, Reich said, is exhibited by lack of facial expression, retracted pelvis, pulled back shoulders, shallow respiration.

Character Analysis attempts to break through muscular rigidity or armoring. The goal of therapy is to release the muscular and character armoring to allow the person to give up holding back and participate in any experience, be it work or pleasure. 

Hard to be loving suited up in knightly armor. Body armoring built up over the years blocks orgastic pleasure. Sexuality is pleasurable and healthy, and the blocking of sexuality causes anxiety, neurosis, and disease. By releasing the rigidity or body restrictions, emotional memories return and dissolve the corresponding pattern of psychological restraint.

Since muscular and character armor function to prevent the person from experiencing, during the course of therapy, muscular armor is taken down segment by segment, starting with the face and moving down to the pelvis. This is not done physically, but rather by working with expressive and nonverbal language and determining the difference between emotions expressed and those held back. The therapist must feel the expressive language, rather than try and understand it through words.

Oracular & Oral Armor

The top segment of this armor is ocular. This is expressed by contraction and immobilization of the eyeball muscles, the lids, the forehead, and tear glands, etc. It is not difficult for the trained therapist to observe the immobility of the forehead and eyelids, empty expression of eyes, and a general mask-like expression or immobility. All the organs and muscles of the ocular segment work together.

The next segment down called the oral armor has its own set of organs that work together, including the mouth, chin, and throat.

Orgiastic Impotence

Reich believed the overwhelming majority of people suffer from orgastic impotence. This damming-up of biological energy is the source of irrational thought and action. The cure is brought about by the reestablishment of the natural capacity to love. He attributed the psychic illness of a society that thrives on violence and war to this damming up of energy.

Reich linked mental illness with an authoritarian society that espouses a negative attitude toward life, sex, and pleasure. He said that when society represses life itself, people develop pleasure anxiety, which later becomes physiologically anchored in chronic muscular spasms. His book, “The Sexual Revolution,” published in 1945, was a major influence on the sexual revolution that was to come about some fifteen years later.

Part of the process of releasing body memories is through posture, movement, and breathing. Though Reichian body psychotherapists may occasionally use deep pressure to force the release of muscle tension and break up restrictions in connective tissues, I don’t recall anything about deep pressure or other physical therapy in any of Reich’s books.

He discusses physical muscular armoring paralleling character armor and resistance, but his Character Analysis or Orgone Therapy is a psychic approach as opposed to hands-on bodywork. Character resistance, he said, expresses itself in the manner of talking, gait, facial expression, etc. What is important is not so much what the patient says or does, but how he talks and acts. Reich’s psychotherapy is a whole-person approach that includes body symptoms, sensations, feelings, thoughts, and emotions. It uses all of these as clues to inaccessible, armored parts of the client.

Today psychiatrists routinely go through the basic checklist for depression as a part of a med check. Are you able to enjoy things? Are you still interested in the things that mean a lot to you? Are you able to sleep at night? But an absence of questions about body image: Do you dislike your body? How often do you compare your body with others? How often do you check any part of or your entire body in a mirror or reflection?

There is a functional unity between mind and body that needs to be addressed as part of any therapy. Much of this functional relationship must be observed and understood without words. Emotion plays a role as a bridge between soma and body.

You hear little of Reich today. He spent the last two years of his life in prison. He invented what he called the orgone energy accumulator. You enter what looks like a wooden outhouse he claimed generated orgone, a kind of universal life force energy. It supposedly offered improved ejaculations. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) obtained an injunction barring interstate distribution of all orgone-related materials. The FBI led by J Edgar Hoover built a case on Reich over the course of fourteen years that led to his arrest and imprisonment. Documents signed by J Edgar Hoover are a part of his case file. He happened to live in the wrong place and the wrong time.

Hakomi Therapy

Hakomi Therapy is a body-centered mindfulness therapy based on the idea that mindfulness is not about words. Founder Ron Kurtz, influenced by the work of Wilhelm Reich, admonished therapists to be present for the client and not focus on asking questions and gathering information. Instead of a focus on what the client is saying, the focus is on what the client is doing, what she/he is expressing nonverbally in the moment. Hakomi therapists say it is about what cannot be seen in an email message or text.

Kurtz was influenced by Wilhelm Reich in that Reich paid attention to the way a person walked, shook hands, facial expression, way of holding oneself, and to the person’s verbal productions rather than content. In this way, Reich was able to deal more effectively with the person’s defensive structure.

In Hakomi Therapy, the therapist guides the client to a state of mindfulness, watching for both habitual and moment to moment behaviors. Momentary behaviors give clues of present experience. Habitual behaviors offer clues to underlying memories, emotions, and implicit beliefs that organize what the client can and cannot experience. Behaviors can be virtually anything, for example, shrugging shoulders, breathing patterns, pace of speech, hand movements, eye contact, facial expressions, and posture.

During an initial “tracking” phase, the therapist looks for clues to the client’s unconscious core beliefs. These beliefs lie beneath the surface of the client’s words. Some of the more common beliefs include: “I’m not lovable.” “The world is not safe.” “I’m a bad person.” “My feelings are bad or dangerous.” The therapist watches behaviors and listens for keywords that stand out as clues to unconscious beliefs.

Kurtz says a person’s behaviors can tell a skilled and experienced practitioner what kind of world the person is imagining they are living in. The goal of Hakomi therapy is to enhance well being by reducing suffering that results from these over-generalized core beliefs. This is done by evoking the original experience and associated emotions and bringing the client’s core beliefs into consciousness.

Once the core beliefs along with uncomfortable memories surface, the therapist reacts in an unexpected way in order to break through the habitual way the client views the world. For example, if someone constantly shrugs their shoulders as if to say it’s not my fault, the therapist might say, “It wasn’t your fault.” Since they were expected to be blamed, this would run counter to what they are expecting and should evoke a reaction, sometimes a disbelief that the therapist means what they say. At this point, the therapist offers quiet support and even a comforting touch, perhaps a hand on the client’s shoulder.

Hakomi therapy begins by observing the way the patient walks into the office. Posture plays a huge role in understanding a person’s character. Kurtz says a person with a puffed-up chest is saying, “I have to be tough.” “I can’t let people in.” “I can’t be honest with people.”

Clinicians are trained in Buddhist practices of being present, loving, and compassionate. For example, when meeting and looking at someone, look for something to like. This will reflect back from the other person. And to be present in order to be constantly aware of the client’s present experience. Being in the present moment allows the therapist to learn about the client’s implicit beliefs, beliefs that are beneath the surface of the client’s conscious thinking. It enables the therapist to see beneath the surface and experience the client’s suffering.

The concepts in Hakomi are useful in dealing with others. When dealing with a difficult person and confronting them face to face, focus on something about them you like. Focusing on something about them that you like and staying in the present moment for them rather than an unpleasant past is a tool for connecting with others. You reflect subtle feelings that reflect back.

Hakomi Therapy involves self-awareness as well as an understanding of others. The training of a therapist involves developing an attitude of loving presence and a nonjudgemental, gentle acceptance. Hakomi therapy is practiced with mindfulness. It is a union between client and therapist, where the client, rather than therapist solves problems.

The therapy is not about memories or experiences, but about the structure of experiences in the present moment. The beliefs and experiences of the past are present in patterns of behavior, perception, and limitations experienced in the present moment. The client is helped to see how these limiting beliefs no longer apply in the present moment. Transformation happens naturally.

Ron Kurtz died in 2011. Hakomi Therapy is a work in progress.

Feldenkrais and Alexander Methods

F.M. Alexander was in his early twenties and performing in amateur theater when he developed hoarseness. It got worse and after performances, he could not speak. When he began gasping for air during performances, advice from his doctors led nowhere, so he began a process of self-examination.

Instead of trying to speak correctly, he found success inhibiting wrong movements. He broke everything down and eliminated any unnecessary movement. He learned not to focus on the end goal, but rather on the process. His respiratory problems completely disappeared and the foundation of the Alexander Method was established. The answer came from within, not from a therapist.

Feldenkrais was six years old and still living in Russia when F. Matthias Alexander first published “Man’s Supreme Inheritance.” In 1910, after World War II, Feldenkrais came to London and studied with F.M. Alexander’s assistant.

The Feldenkrais and Alexander methods are programs of slow, small movements to regain body awareness apart from the image we hold of our bodies. Both methods evolved from men motivated by a need to overcome or compensate for a physical impediment.

Israeli Moshe Pinchas Feldenkrais injured his knee and could barely get around. A judo expert, he studied and broke down movement, discovering that life and movement are practically one. He realized his inability to walk was not just due to structural damage, but that learned habits of movement contributed to the problem. He understood our movements flow from a self-image made up of sensation and feelings formed during the first fourteen years of our lives. The nervous system has no direct perception of the outside world.

Feldenkrais believed the best way of changing a person’s behavior is through the body, since it is easier to make a person aware of what is happening in the body. A body approach yields faster and more direct results for both mind and body. Feldenkrais approached unity of mind and body through retraining the muscular and skeletal system, thus affecting the body, feelings, and awareness of oneself and the environment.

A good presentation of the Feldenkrais Method comes from Ruthy Alon who studied with Feldenkrais in Israel from 1959 until 1967, during the time that Feldenkrais was well known in Israel as the personal tutor of Prime Minister Ben-Gurion. When Feldenkrais decided to come to America in 1972, he suggested Alon start teaching classes there and she did, at Esalen Institute in California where she gradually evolved her own way of presenting the Feldenkrais method.

Alon presents Feldenkrais awareness through movement in her book “Mindful Spontaneity: Lessons in the Feldenkrais Method.” Her movements flow seamlessly from one movement to the next. This is illustrated in her book in a series of small drawings that slowly change position across the page. Her videos on Youtube show the same movements and are beautiful and informative to watch. Here is the first of her series, “Movement Nature Meant.”

Somatics

Thomas Hanna became acquainted with Feldenkrais in 1973. In 1975, then director of the Humanistic Psychology Institute (now Saybrook University), Hanna arranged the first Feldenkrais training program in the United States. Continuing his studies with Feldenkrais, he and his wife Eleanor founded the Novato Institute for Somatic Research and Training where he worked with thousands of clients using the Feldenkrais Method. Whereas Feldenkrais went deeply into the philosophy behind his method, Hanna who coined the term Somatics, wrote in a straightforward, practical way in his 1988 book “Somatics: Reawakening the Mind’s Control of Movement, Flexibility, and Health.”

You will not come away with an ability to practice the Feldenkrais method after reading Feldenkrais’s own books, but Hanna’s “Somatics” offers detailed descriptions with images to put the method into practice. Both men’s books are well worth reading. I don’t think I would have looked into Somatics if I had not read at least one book by Feldenkrais and been smitten by his genius.

Hanna believed seventy-five percent of chronic pain suffered by American adults is caused by sensory-motor amnesia (SMA). Sensory nerves are on the dorsal root (branch), the back of the spinal cord. Motor nerves are on the ventral root (branch), the belly side of the spinal cord. Inside the brain, the two systems merge and branch.

Everything we sense travels up the sensory nerves on the dorsal-back root of the spinal cord, controlling our perception of the world and ourselves. All movement, everything we do, travels from the brain down the belly side or ventral root of the spinal cord. The nerves of both paths weave in and out of the spinal cord. Though the spinal cord ends at the base of the thoracic part of the spine, nerves of both pathways extend on downward.

These two nerve paths reach upward into the brain. The brain integrates incoming sensory information with outgoing commands to the motor system in a feedback loop of movement and perception, perception, and movement.

With sensory-motor amnesia (SMA), the cerebral cortex loses part of its ability to voluntarily control all or some of the muscles of the body. Instead of the frontal cortex of the brain voluntarily controlling muscles, control is taken over by the subcortical (beneath the cortex) subconscious areas. Reflexes took over by the subcortical brain cause muscles to automatically contract. We, or our cerebral cortex, have lost voluntary control.

Muscles held in chronic partial contraction become weak and painful and cause a constant energy drain. Structurally, the symptoms are evident in postural distortions and eventually what is mistaken for arthritis, bursitis, or other misdiagnoses. Doctors often have no idea of what to do other than to prescribe medications serving to mask the symptoms.

Involuntary contraction of the muscles in the body’s center of gravity affects the contraction of muscles in the periphery of the body. The contraction of these periphery muscles then causes a compensating contraction in muscles at the center of gravity. You experience these powerful muscles contracting at the center of gravity. That is why so many of us experience back pain.

Somatic Education

Somatic education involves integrated sensory-motor feedback. The problem is mainly functional; the brain has lost voluntary control of bodily functions. Problems of lost control due to memory loss are not an irreversible structural deterioration of body parts. Rather than treatment by a medical doctor, Somatics involves education.

We have lost the memory of what it feels like to move certain muscles and are in a state of constant contraction. We need to learn how to start moving the muscles voluntarily. Many so-called disorders of aging can be prevented and reversed through educating and retraining sensory awareness and movement. These are disorders that can be solved by us, not by a doctor.

Somatics is body psychotherapy; the cause of the body problem is the result of everything that has happened to us during our lives. Our brain reacts and adapts to all of the anxiety, fear, and despair, to the shocks to our system, to serious illnesses and accidents, to surgery. The brain compensates automatically and unconsciously in an attempt to rebalance the system. Education is needed to help the brain become aware of lost memories in order to change and adapt in a positive way of healing an inefficient body system that we easily mistake for “old age.”

To develop this awareness, Somatic exercises cause gentle contraction a bit more than the already involuntary contractions. Once you sense the muscles and have an awareness of what the contracted state feels like, you take back voluntary control and can relax the muscles. Somatics is about an awareness of muscles and their involuntary state of contraction in order to take back voluntary control and get a sense of well being.

Somatic therapists manipulate the body to help the client sense and have an awareness of contracted muscles. It is a short-term therapy. Hanna worked with most clients for only days and weeks. Once the client experiences awareness, they can practice the basic exercises on their own.

It makes life harder to manage when we are contracted in pain. We have forgotten how to take voluntary control after moments of stress and so the stress continues on, spreading to other body systems. By regaining voluntary control, instead of expending most of our energy fighting our stressed physical bodies, we more easily continue to move ahead throughout our lives.

In my early twenties, I worked in the post office and sprained my back one night loading heavy sacks of mail onto the boxcar of a train. X-rays showed a collapsed vertebrae in the lower lumbar of the spine. Other than surgery, not much can be done other than medication to relieve the pain. I sometimes barely could get up out of my futon during the night to go to the bathroom. I struggled to get the covers off my body, then inched my legs to the edge of the futon. Trying to stand, the shock of pain was so intense, sometimes I crawled to the bathroom. I now do a simple couple of exercise that takes only a few minutes and I get up out of bed with no pain. This sold me on Somatics.

Though X-rays show a picture that cannot easily be disputed, X-rays don’t necessarily show the complete cause of the problem and, of course, do not prescribe relief. X-rays too often are viewed in terms of a brainless mechanical structure demanding surgery or some other reengineering. But Somatics treats at least a part of the problem as hyper-tensed muscles caused by sensory-motor amnesia (SMA). Somatics is a set of eight exercises to relearn, sense, and control hyper-tense muscles. The exercises retrain the brain to regain voluntary control of movement and posture and relieve the brain of its habitual mode of automatic involuntary response.

Pandiculation Exercises

Somatic body movements involve pandiculation to reset control of the brain back to the voluntary cerebral cortex.

Hanna describes pandiculating as a strong voluntary muscular contraction that feeds back to an equally strong sensory stimulation of the brain, resetting the system from a subcortical involuntary pattern of response to a voluntary cortical one.

Pandiculation is the stretch a dog or cat does when they awaken; what an infant does in the womb. It is the basic resetting mechanism of vertebrates. When a cat or dog wakes up, it pandiculates by contracting the large extensor muscles of the back that are essential for running. Then it may pandiculate in reverse by contracting the anterior muscles into a flexed posture.

The pandicular response is a voluntary muscular contraction that “wakes up” the sensory-motor cortex of the brain. It awakens the feedback connection between the sensory and motor areas of the brain, improving voluntary muscular control. This ancient sensory-motor cortical arousal is linked with awakening in all vertebrates. Somatic exercises or movements are rooted in this concept of pandicular contraction.

Since the back is an issue for so many people, I’ll include the basic movement here. Lie on your back and pull your feet in towards your body, both feet flat on the floor so your knees are an inverted “V” pointing up at the ceiling.

Press your back gently down flat against the floor. Inhale as you press down on the base of your spine, on your tailbone, so that your back arches just a bit at the belt from the floor. Feel the contraction through your lower back.

Exhale as you ease your back down flat against the floor, flat and (not contracted) relaxed. Inhale as you press down on the tailbone and arch the beltline and contract. Exhale as you lower your back, flatten, and relax.

When you feel comfortable with this contract and relax movement, try pressing your tailbone down firmer to arch the back  just a bit higher. And when you bring your back down flat, push the opposite way, slightly lifting the tailbone. The concept is a wave-like contraction. Do this exercise slowly and gently. It may not feel like much is happening, but you will notice a difference in pain relief.

I do this before I go to bed and during the night four times each time I wake up. Hanna recommends doing this exercise for about 20 reps per session, but I get pretty much relief from back pain dividing it up through the night. I feel some immediate easing of pain in my lower back. But it moves this isolated point in my back into conscious control so that I know how to stand up straight and correct the pressure on this point. I knew I had to stand up straight – my wife kept telling me that – but I really did not know how.

Somatic exercises change your muscular system by changing your central nervous system. Unlike calisthenics, it is better to do slow, minimal movements giving your brain the chance to notice all that is happening in your body as you move. You don’t want to jump ahead to another movement until you internally experience the one you are working on. The exercises are progressive, so successful learning depends on learning the movements at the previous levels. The goal is to make this awareness a part of your regular pattern of movements.

We constantly seek out the latest innovations and in this incessant quest, the basics get buried. Few people today know of F.M.Alexander Feldenkrais and Hanna. Their work has managed to survive the years, perhaps because it is the basic foundation of many other systems.

Unconditional Body Self-Acceptance

If it is to be effective, unconditional self-acceptance had best be a basic part of any form of somatic therapy. As difficult as it may be to unconditionally accept yourself, any alternative to unconditional self-acceptance will likely lead to failure.

Stress builds when you reject and become detached from your body. You may find it hard to feel physical pleasure. You likely compare yourself with other people or to some ideal of what the body should be. It may make you unhappy to think of or feel your body. You may dislike being touched. All these are signs of Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD), and I’ve thoroughly experienced them  throughout my life.

So unless you find a way to accept and attune to your body, your body reacts to this disconnection with stress, pain, and disease. When you are attuned, your body has an amazing ability to correct discomfort and disease. This is an incentive to learn to accept and feel comfortable in your body. The process begins with awareness.

The more aware, the more sensitive you are to your body. But this is a sensitivity without the unresolvable ruminations. It is bodily awareness with minimal body image. It is the process of stepping back from the worry and rumination of perceived body image problems.

Ki Breathe into your body, breathing in awareness and acceptance throughout your entire body and into individual problematic parts. You are the decider. You choose to accept yourself or not. Choose to accept, not punish yourself with stress, pain, and disease. Decide to unconditionally accept yourself and it will make a noticeable change.

You can seldom shut out the bothersome thinking and the existential gnawing. But you can practice letting thoughts and feelings come and go with a detached third-person POV. You get better at this with practice. This took me years. But I did it completely on my own and started from ground zero. Most of the time was spent learning by reading the books of brilliant powerful minds; my saving surrogate therapists who brought me back from incessant suffering.

Self-help books that help:

Total Self-Renewal through Attention Therapies and Open Focus

The Open-Focus Brain: Harnessing the Power of Attention to Heal Mind and Body