Slow down! You’re not as young as you used to be!
This is some of the worst counsel we could follow. It is the path that leads to premature senility. If we follow this traditional advice we will forget the animation and vitality of our childhood and end up with a walker and a chair lift.
“Use it or lose it,” we say in the everyday vernacular.
Stolen by the Grind of Life
Staying active is good advice, and it would be wonderful if it were all we needed to function optimally all of our life. But there is a problem, one that few of us can easily escape. Throughout our lives, as we repeat certain postures and movements, our nervous system memorizes and automates these muscular patterns. Eventually, we don’t even have to think about these patterns. This is invaluable for playing ball, driving a car, or riding a bike. Unfortunately, though, our sensory-motor systems also respond to stress, trauma, bad habits, and inactivity. When this is the case, our automated reflexes eventually create muscular contractions that we can no longer voluntarily relax. These contractions eventually become so deep and unconscious that we can’t remember how to smoothly and efficiently coordinate our bodies so that we can move freely—and we become stiff, bound, and sore. This dilemma of habitual forgetfulness is what Dr. Thomas Hanna called sensory-motor amnesia.
How do we really know who we are and what we can do when we can no longer feel or control our muscles? And the worst part is that since this all happens in an automated system, we aren’t even aware of it—and we falsely assume that we are just getting old. All of this usually begins in our 30s and 40s—and accelerates from there.
“Any imbalance in the sensory-motor system creates imbalance throughout the entire body. When the muscles in one single limb become spastic or clumsy or two flaccid, this loss of control and efficient coordination within the musculoskeletal system causes an autonomic compensation within all the other interconnected bodily parts. The brain brings about these compensations automatically and unconsciously, in an attempt to rebalance the entire system.
“The basic problem is always the same: involuntary contraction of the muscles in the body’s center of gravity, affecting the periphery of the body; or involuntary contraction of the periphery of the body, causing a compensating contraction in the center of gravity. Powerful muscles connecting the spine and rib cage to the pelvis are the root of the specific problem of each person.”– Dr. Thomas Hanna
A Simple Sensory-Motor Solution
Sensory-motor amnesia is a functional problem, not a structural one. When we look at the problem from the outside in all we see are a plethora of baffling structural dysfunctions. Yet if we look at it from the inside out then can see the truth: we have a single somatic problem. The good news? Since this problem is a learned adaptive response it can be unlearned. Thus, much of our mysterious symptoms that are unresponsive to medical treatments—headaches, arthritis, bone spurs, carpal tunnel syndrome, disk dysfunction, inflamed joints, undiagnosable pain, and the like—can often be resolved by remembering what we have forgotten.
“Mind and body are the same thing if we look at ourselves from the inside.” – Dr. Thomas Hanna
We can reprogram our muscles and nerves using exercises that help us to look at ourselves from the inside out. These exercises use a groundbreaking technique of pandiculation to retrain muscle memory and relieve pain. By engaging our bodies through slow, focused movements we can revive the kid in us and learn again how to experience efficiency, optimal function, and relaxation.
Simple somatic exercises truly have the power to reprogram our muscle memory and optimize our posture, mobility, balance, body awareness, and muscular control. I encourage you to look further into Dr. Thomas Hanna’s somatic work or to enroll in an impressive online course like this one that uses his method to release chronic muscle tension, relieve chronic pain, and retrain muscle memory. Old age doesn’t have to mean frailty and debility. Give somatics a try! In just ten to twenty minutes a day, you can rewind your age and experience the youthful you once more.