M5 : Lesson 5.1 Hanna Somatics Exercises – Red Light, Green Light, Dark Vice
Key Point: During these movements, your focus is to be on noticing what muscles are tightening vs which muscles are lengthening.
It’s not about just “doing the movement”, rather it’s about the BRAIN noticing the BODY/MUSCLES as the movements are happening.
This is a key mistake I see with people. They DO the movement and their mind is wandering. The somatic practice is about being mindful and noticing the subtle experience of the body.
You may also feel emotions surface or even shake as you move with mindful attention. This is all part of the processing and integration between mind/body.
Transcript
Less than 5.1. Panasymatics. Red light, green light, dark vise, and condiculation. The first movement we are gonna learn for our somatic exercise practices developed by Thomas Hanna is the green light reflex and the repatterning exercise that goes along with that. I’ll describe this and then I’ll give you a physical demonstration of what this looks like.
The green light reflex is a reflex involved in forward movement All of our large muscles of our back contract to move you forward with walking and running and standing, and the back muscles can sometimes learn to stay overly contracted, pulling the back into an exaggerated arch. If this reflexive response to stress becomes habituated, conditions such as herniated discs, neck pain, shoulder pain, and sciatica can develop. Again, I will be teaching you some exercises from Hannah Somatic’s which is where my postgraduate training was in the work of somatic repatterning. These exercises I’m gonna show you specifically for the red light green light and dark vise are very effective in helping the brain find the contraction in the body. So with green light, we just discussed that.
I’m gonna show you a demonstration in standing what a green light reflex looks like when it’s become habituated. So green light, when you are in the green light, your back is arched. You tend to be puffed up a little bit in the chest, and it’s like you’re on the go button. It’s the fighter flight sympathy setting, gotta go, gotta rush, going for thing to thing to thing, very type a. That is green light, and it develops into often pain through the back and sometimes through the neck.
So this is just when you’ve got adrenaline, you’re ready to take on the world and over time your body gets braced into this pattern. Next up, we’ll talk about the red light reflex I’ll show you what that looks like and then the dark vise. And after I describe all of these things, then I’ll show you the movement practices to go along with it. Movement number 2 that we’ll learn about the red light reflex. This is also commonly known as the startle response and involves the muscles in the front of the body, which tighten to pull you forward.
This is a slumping reflex that presents itself with rounded shoulders, depressed chest, and the head jutting forward. When we get stuck in the red light reflex, it can cause chronic neck pain, jaw pain, like with TMJ, a widow’s hump on the back of our neck and hip pain and mid back pain. It also results in breathing issues because we’re in a a posture and we end up depriving our brain with oxygen and our blood and muscles also get deprived from oxygen. This can result in fatigue, depression, anxiety, and sleep problems. Red light is the shutdown, the dorsal vagal response, and what it looks like is this.
So when I’m in red light, I am slumped. My back is rounded. My chin is jotted out. And often, if you can see this kind of looks like computer posture, doesn’t it over time? This is the dorsal vagal immobility shut down, not a lot of oxygen going through us, not a lot of blood flow.
This can happen especially when we’ve ended up in illness over time where we’re just kind of collapse. That’s the red light. Next up, we’ll talk about the dark vise. Movement number 3 that we’ll explore is the movement to address the dark vise and we’ll use a movement called pandiculation to do that. The dark vise is basically like a functional freeze where we are braced in between the sympathetic go of the green light and the collapse stop of the red light pattern.
We’re gonna use a movement called peniculation to address this, which is very similar to the act of yawning and stretching. Pendiculation is a natural response that helps us to come out of this bracing pattern we’re gonna be toggling between green light movements and red light movements. And the yoga cat cow stretch is a great example of pendiculation. Alright. So the dark vise, you’re just kind of locked.
You’re not really in go, and you’re not fully slumped. You’re just frozen. Often, you’re just, you know, getting through your day, tight chest, tight belly, not breathing, not moving. And over time, this is really hard on our system when we are just locked up and hardly able to move. And so we need to get our body to get some movement back, and this is kind of what the exercises look like.
We’re gonna go from green light to red light, and we’ll learn how to manipulate back and forth in a very slow, mindful way to teach the body how to get that traction, relaxation movement that we talked about earlier that is so important for unlocking our vital force. Up next, we will go over the somatic green light movement, red light movement, and peniculation to address the dark vise. This is the Hannah Somatic’s green light, red light, and dark vice movements. We’ll be going through all three of them in a row, and I’ll show you how we’ve all of these movements together into one practice. While you’re doing these, please be very mindful of what parts of you are contracting and what parts are relaxing.
As you do the practice. This is about mindfulness, not just about movement. Let’s begin with green light. We’re going to slowly extend and arch our back while our chin tucks. And then we’ll relax.
As we extend the back, we’ll do that on the inhale and extend tuck the chin. Exhale, flatten the back, bring your chin back up to neutral. Again, inhale in arch, tucking the chin, and exhale. Come back to neutral. Be very mindful as you repeat this process ten times.
Extend and tuck. Exhale and relax and flatten. Noticing your back is contracting on the inhale, Noticing it relaxing on the exhale. Noticing the front side of your neck contracting on the inhale. And relaxing on the exhale.
Noticing that your belly extends on the inhale. And comes back down on the exhale. Notice what tightens and what has to loosen to do this motion. Being very present in the body. And at the end, rest for about 30 seconds.
Up to a minute and notice the difference in your body. The rest is just as important as the motion. This is where your brain assimilates what just happened. This is where your brain and your body make deeper connections in the rest and in the integration process. And then after we rest, we’ll move on to red light, which is the opposite motion.
With red light, we’re going to be squeezing our stomach and almost lifting our glutes a little bit and extending our head and back down. So red light, it’s like we’re almost doing a sit up, but not quite. And our chin will extend while our stomach contracts. And this is done on the exhale, curling the stomach, lifting the chin, Inhale coming back to neutral. So it’s opposite of green light.
Exhale. Tighten your stomach. Extend your chin. Inhale. Come back to neutral.
Exhale and curl. Inhale and flatten. Exhale, curl, extend the chin, inhale, flatten. Again, doing this ten times. And just feeling the tightness of your stomach as you exhale and curl and then flatten.
And feeling the tightness in the back of your neck and then flatten. And again, this integration time of rest, so important, what do you notice in your body? Be very mindful of the feelings in your body as you complete each red light or green light movement. Next, we’ll be moving on to the dark vise, which is where we put together both the green and the red light as you see here. We move from green light to red light in one motion.
Green light, inhale, and extend. Exhale, curl. And tighten your belly. Inhale arch and extend. Exhale like a little sit up.
Notice the head motion. Inhale tuck the chin. Exhale. Lift the chin up. One motion of a full green light into a full red light pattern.
Back and forth ten times. This is also called pindiculation as coined by Thomas Hannah, where we are pindiculating in between green light and red light. You might shake like you see I’m doing here that’s normal. Sometimes our body can start to release stored up tension as we’re doing these peniculation practices. Just let your body do what it wants.
Let it go. Totally normally have an energy release and then just carry on back to green light, red light. Arching, and then tightening the stomach, and then back to neutral. There’s one more away. That you can also do the dark vice, peniculation exercise.
It looks like a cat cow from yoga. Well, your arch just like a green light, and then you’ll curl up like red light. And you’ll go back and forth arching and extending green light on the inhale, and sometimes even a deep stretch into the red light where your stomach is curling. And you can be variable with this. Like you see me doing, sometimes I’m sitting all the way back, sometimes I’m stretching one side of the body, So what does your body wanna do as you arch and curl?
And I just show you this to see to let your body lead as you move in and out of green light, red light type motions. At the end, I love doing a child’s pose and just resting. Allowing the integration to occur. Lastly, I wanna show you how you can do this in sitting after you maybe you’ve been sitting in a car or at the computer desk, how you can move between green light and red light. Green light, I will start with that first.
I’m arching, chin is tucking, exhale, Inhale arching the back chin is tucking green light. Exhale red light slumping chin is extending. Inhale arch and extend green light. Exhale, lift the chin and slump red light back and forth. Just moving between these pattern so your brain can find what is contracted, what is relaxed, and be able to find a neutral position.
Again, just noticing how you feel after you complete these practices.