Why does my body hurt?

Somatic education provides us with an answer to why we experience muscular pain and a solution to find a way out of this pain.

Through the course of life, our sensory-motor system learns to respond to daily stresses and traumas with specific muscular responses, creating habitual muscular contraction that we cannot voluntarily relax.

This habituated state of forgetfulness in which we lose the ability to fully feel and control our muscles is what Thomas Hanna termed sensory-motor amnesia. According to Hanna, sensory-motor amnesia occurs universally in the human species as a result of long-term stress conditions.

While sensory-motor amnesia often affects people as they age, it can happen at any stage in life.

Sensory-motor amnesia can develop for a number of reasons:

• Through stress, both physical and emotional

• Through trauma, including surgeries, injuries, falls and impacts

• Through repetitive actions, such as working at a computer, driving, or playing a musical instrument

• Through a lack of movement, resulting from a sedentary lifestyle.

The effects of sensory-motor amnesia are stiffness, pain, weakness, uncoordinated or restricted movement, low energy, and postural distortions.

As Thomas Hanna says in his book, The Body of Life:

We cannot ignore the pathetic fact that the “normal” life that most humans lead is a life of unconscious self-destruction.

Healthy habit

Understand your patterns

Take a few minutes to consider:

• Do you regularly experience stress, both physical and emotional?

• Have you had surgeries, injuries, falls and impacts? Have these affected how you move or hold yourself in space?

• What repetitive actions do you perform, and how do you position your body as you perform these activities? For example, do you regularly rotate your body (pelvis, rib cage, etc) as you drive or work at your computer?

• How sedentary are you? Has this changed as you have gotten older?

Noticing is your most powerful tool in this work. With reflection, we can better understand our patterns. This noticing is the key to making lasting change.