Hanna Somatic Education®
Who Is Hanna Somatic Education® For?
- Anyone with chronic muscular tension
- People who have pain related to misalignment
- Those who experience stress, both physical and emotional
- Those who are over-trained such as athletes and dancers
- People who need to build body awareness and control
Hanna Somatic Education® (HSE) is safe and meets you where you are at. It is your journey.
About Hanna Somatic Education®
“The most important thing for you to remember is that Somatic Exercises change your muscular system by changing your central nervous system. If you do not remember this important fact, their effectiveness will be diminished for you."
- Thomas Hanna
Somatic movements are performed slowly, consciously, and with ease.
You learn how to turn down chronic tension and re-pattern dysfunctional habits freeing your movement potential and relieving the pain typical of stress and chronic tension.
HSE (Hanna Somatic Education) is an educational process. HSE does not require endless sessions with a practitioner. You will learn to maintain your own well-being often in just a few sessions. You will be empowered with the capability of self-care free from dependence on a practitioner for your comfort and wellbeing. HSE is entirely based on neurophysiology therefore the results are consistent and explainable. HSE is different than modalities where you are passively being worked on and your tissues manipulated by a practitioner. In HSE you are actively creating your own changes. This way you are gaining not just a momentary release of muscle tissue but establishing new healthy neuromuscular patterns and the tools necessary to turn down chronically held tensions.
Being stuck in the sympathetic system (flight/fight) has detrimental effects on the mind and body including the immune system. Slowing down and feeling good in the parasympathetic system (rest, digest, and heal) can have far-reaching positive benefits on all of your systems.
Somatic Motor Amnesia is a descriptive term referring to a habitual adapted response of the nervous system to stress or trauma. The state of SMA is characterized by misinformation about one's state of being traveling through the sensory-motor loop. This can show itself as too much or too little sensation and a loss of control of particular muscles or in a more full pattern involving many muscles. If you imagine being injured and the corresponding retraction of the surrounding muscularity that pulls you into a crooked stance. Over time this pattern then can become a habit. Soon crooked feels straight. The pattern is unconscious and difficult to get out of. Our sensors become accustomed to a particular ROM and may need reminding that there is more length available. Essentially our soma has “forgotten” what it feels like to hold ourselves and move as we did before the injury. Constant contraction brings fatigue and an inability to flush out the resulting lactic acid. Misalignment often causes compression of various joints, discs, or nerves, frequently leading to pain or numbness. The habituated pattern is not a conscious action. Some muscles are constantly being contracted, even during sleep, creating fatigue and functional weakness as they are not able to utilize their full potential. The opposing muscles are often difficult to activate or even sense, again resulting in a decrease in function.
If the pain is treated with drugs or the form of the patient is treated with surgery nothing has been done to change the root cause of the problem, the neuromuscular habit. Through the voluntary actions of HSE we re-pattern these habits returning the muscle/s to a more relaxed state. Effectively helping our Somas to “remember” how to move and rest more efficiently. Through body image retraining the student regains an accurate sense of alignment and access to full functionality. Strength, a Full Range of Motion, dynamic timing, and balance all depend on having access to the full capabilities of the musculature to shorten, lengthen and rest at varying rates of speed.
Over the course of a lifetime, we are exposed to many stresses and traumas. These stresses have both an emotional and inseparably a physical component. Often this leads us into habitual postural misalignments. A lifetime of repeating these patterns ingrains them into our unconscious movement habits eventually re-shaping our somas. Being stuck in these patterns a variety of issues usually start showing up in our mid-30s or 40s. Since it is muscular tension reshaping our positioning we can learn new habits and change our posture back into our optimal alignment through the reeducation of our sensory-motor system. Instead of adding tension to the opposing/antagonist musculature like a tensegrity system, HSE releases the chronic tension that is pulling the soma into distortion in the first place.
As we age we are commonly told that it is a natural part of aging to become distorted and restricted. This is due to tension not aging. We can relearn how to relax this hypertonicity and regain the comfort and freedom of movement we once enjoyed.
Many ailments commonly thought to be a result of aging can be attributed to these learned/ reactionary movement and postural tension habits. Utilizing the techniques of HSE we can learn new healthy patterns, recognize and unravel unhealthy contraction patterns and feel the discomfort of a lifetime of tension and distortions melting away.
"Knee bone’s connected to the thigh bone— a common adage, but do you know what that means for your body? Lori has taught me how to recognize and release dysfunctional patterns and how to establish new ones. Thank you, Lori!"
- Cary Orr-Kissner
The Benefits of Hanna Somatic Education®
Release and reverse neuromuscular pain (chronic and acute)
- Improve mobility, strength and coordination
- Improve posture and appearance
- Elimination of no longer needed habitual guarding of previously injured areas
- Create a new freedom of movement
- Ease breathing
- Improve athletic skills
- Long term pain relief from a host of common conditions
- Life long skills that teach you how to regain voluntary control of habitually tight muscles
- Greater physical independence and mastery of your movement
- Increased flexibility, coordination, stress relief, balance and proprioception
- A safe, easy and common sense alternative to drugs, and surgery
Hanna Somatic Education® is effective at relieving the chronic aches and disabilities associated with as:
- Headaches
- Painful joints and muscles
- Neck, shoulder and back pain
- Sciatica
- Hip, knee and foot pain
- Repetitive use injuries
- Poor posture
- Accident traumas and whiplash
- Breathing problems
- Frozen shoulder syndrome
"Lori Seymour introduced me to Hanna Somatic Education® in 2017. The Somatic treatment results on my posture and pain relief is, on a scale of 1 to 10, a 12. The effect of the Somatics, the ability of me to stand perfectly erect and painless, I would recommend the Somatic's to all clients."
- Robert Hales
(Due to popular demand, this service may have a waitlist. Please call for availability.)