M5 : Lesson 4: Somatic Movement Overview
Transcript
Cematics lesson 4. Somatic movement improves our health. Why is somatic movement is essential to our health? Cemetic movement is a key component of the regulate program and is important for improved brain, body connection, vascular pumping, lymph drainage and detoxification. Getting daily movement is essential no matter what level of illness you have.
When we have chronic illness, our brain and body communication is often impaired. In the regulate program, we’re using somatic movements to help the brain find and release tension and improper holding patterns in the body. Somatic movement can include yoga, tai chi, dance, exercise, and more. I will say this emphetically. Getting daily movement is essential no matter what level of illness you have.
You can move in your bed if you have to, but do make movement and somatic practices a part of your self care. Even if you’re listening and you’re relatively healthy, I recommend that you do these exercises because We often have a lifestyle of computers and phones and mental distraction, and we lose touch with our body and our wisdom. And for this reason, we have ongoing live and supported semantics classes for all levels in our community. So please participate in these classes when you can, or find a way to bring somatics into your life, whether it be through exercise, yoga, or some of the other things we mentioned earlier. Movement and exercise is one of the top predictors of longevity.
So please use your regulation tools to help you get movement back into your life even if you’ve been inactive for a long time. A lot of people ask me, well, what’s the difference between exercise and somatic movement? They look the same. Well, the answer is sometimes they do look the same, but somatic movement is all about mindful presence. Whereas exercise is often just about the movement or simply getting stronger and more endurance.
It’s not about your mind paying attention to every little thing your body is doing during the movement. So with somatics, by paying very close at tension while doing the movement. We can help our brain and our body sink up a little better, and we can also find hidden stress patterns that are lodged unconsciously in the body, holding energy and emotion and trauma. When we find that, it helps to release these trauma patterns from the body. There are a couple of key terms that I also wanna go over.
First is one called sensory motor amnesia. As coined by Thomas Hanna. This is where your brain and your somatic nervous system have communication that has become impaired where the brain loses awareness that the body is stuck in different tension patterns, and the body might not be in a proper posture alignment anymore, but the brain has lost touch with that. So the exercises we’re going to learn are gonna help you gain prefrontal conscious control of the body tension or trauma patterns that you might have stored unconsciously. If we have brain, body communication issues, this can also result in tension as we just said, but also body fluid pumping and regulation issues related to our blood flow and our lymphatic flow, and also something called loss of optimal pendulation.
What do I mean by pendulation? Well, this word was described by Peter Levine as our life force rhythm that is always expanding and contracting. If you think about it, our breath is always expanding and contracting. Our blood flow, our vasculature, our muscles, even our cellular respiration. Pindulation is the movement and slow of life in our body.
I wanna show you what pendulation looks like. Pindulation is think of it as expansion is always followed by contraction, whether it’s with our breath or the way that our blood is pumped through our veins and our arteries, all the way down to our cells. Our cells literally have respiration of expansion and contraction. And when we are in chronic stress that expansion and contraction that rhythm of life can sometimes get hardened and frozen and disrupted, and all sorts of things develop when that happens, especially our ability to detoxify We end up holding toxins in. We hold our emotions in.
We don’t digest well. So somatics helps us get our fluids, our rhythm back to life, back to movement, back to flow, back to release. One of the side effects that we can have with chronic illness is impaired fluid flow, as I just mentioned. This is most obvious when we have symptom of heart or a postural orchostatic tachycardia syndrome where we can’t regulate our blood pressure, which changes a position, But this also happens with poor lymphatic flow and sluggishness of fluids moving for our body in general or sluggishness even of our digestion. So getting our body moving and our tension patterns unlock through using somatic practices can result in amazing differences in our blood flow, our digestion, our lymphatic, We learned early on how dorsal vagal freeze or shutdown can impair our nervous system’s capacity to allow things to move through.
So think about what’s happening all the way down in your fluids, in your cells, in your muscles if you’ve been in a stress response. So we’ve got to get the body cells, the vasculature, the muscles pumping and moving as an important part of our recovery process. We’re also gonna go over some ancient yoga practices as the ancient yogis understood that health is dependent on how well our vascular systems moved fluids and exchanged nutrients and toxins throughout the body. Also, as we go through this, be careful of some side effects because we will start to release toxins, so approach somatics in a careful titrated way, especially in the beginning. In the next lesson, we’ll teach our body how to pendulate, improve our vascular pumping mechanisms through various somatic movements, And before we begin, I wanna remind you one more time about our live classes in Primal Trust.
We have all sorts of somatic classes and even some daily brain, body, neural reset classes to help you with these pumping mechanisms that I speak of. See you in lesson 5 where we go over somatic movement basics.