somatics
When you experience injury, emotional trauma or ongoing stress, the brain creates a learned response. This is not only psychological—it shows up physically as involuntary muscular contraction. With stress, muscles remain tight; with injury, the body creates protective guarding.
The brain is very good at learning, and turning what it learns into unconscious habit. Over time, this leads to sensory-motor amnesia: when the brain “forgets” how to relax certain muscles. Chronic contraction becomes automatic – resulting in pain, restricted movement, joint compression, and nerve irritation. These symptoms reflect your unique patterns of tension, movement, posture and past injury.
The good news is that because it’s learned, it can be gently unlearned. Because the problem originates in the brain (and not in the muscles themselves), lasting relief comes through neuromuscular re-education—restoring the brain’s ability to sense and release excess myofascial tension.
Clinical somatics works directly with these learned patterns, releasing involuntary tension and restoring voluntary control.
This is where pandiculation comes in.
You may have seen cats and dogs do it, and we do it to upon awakening—a contract and expand reflex often accompanied by a yawn that releases tension and stiffness and prepares for movement. Clinical Somatic movements are inspired by these. A voluntary muscle contraction is followed by a slow controlled mindful release to rest. This supports the myofascial system to let go of residual tension. It also invites the release of breath, which in turn down-regulates the nervous system, allowing for a state of rest and repair. This process is not something that can be achieved from the outside, it is only something that the brain can relearn: when given the right input.
I teach somatics to a wide variety of people, from those are those who are living with body tension, stress and stiffness to those experiencing complex persistent pain.
Somatic sessions involve guiding and teaching you these practices so that you are empowered with skills to navigate and overcome the experience of chronic tension and persistent pain. And even if you don’t consider yourself to be someone with chronic pain, if you are living with ongoing stiffness, tightness, body discomfort or restrictive postural habits that other approaches have not resolved, this modality holds so much possibility for meaningful change.
I love sharing this gentle yet powerful method with others, and integrating it with my other work of mindfulness, dance-movement and Pain Reprocessing. The approach reminds us that the body holds profound intelligence, and that healing begins not through striving and forcing, but through gentle awareness and movement.
If you have been living with pain and have tried many treatments without lasting relief, Clinical Somatics offers a different path—one that can truly change your experience of your body. It is for those ready to take an active role in their healing and to explore an approach beyond conventional methods.
