Hanna Somatic Education ®
DEFINITIVE PAIN RELIEF, A SAFEGUARD AGAINST INJURY, PERFORMANCE ENHANCEMENT

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Thomas Hanna's photo
Thomas Hanna, Ph.D.
developer, Hanna Somatic Education®

The more precise the remedy, the faster the improvement.
(
click for article).

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This website exists to introduce a new way to improve health for a lifetime. Accordingly, some background is in order.

A New Discipline in the Field of Health Care

New problems require new solutions. While the problems Hanna Somatic Education solves are long-standing, a new problem has emerged: Americans are finding the financial burden of health care to be heavy enough to warrant calling it a crisis. A significant portion of that burden has to do with chronic pain, musculo-skeletal disorders (such as back pain, pain from a neck injury, and TMJ Syndrome) and stress-related diseases (such as headaches, sexual dysfunction, breathing difficulties, and sleep disorders). Hanna Somatic Education can, by resolving such disorders quickly, economically, and definitively, substantially help to reduce the financial burden of health care. "Definitively" means "with finality, as intended."

Major advances in health care have always come from unexpected sources and led in unexpected directions -- germ theory (Pasteur), hygiene (Lister), and immunization (Salk) are a few examples. They're accepted now, but were unexpected and unaccepted when they first emerged. Clinical somatic education is such an advance.

While the most common approaches taken to treat chronic pain and stress-related disorders involve drugs, injections, strengthening, stretching, and manipulation, it is true that chronic pain and stress-related disorders are better understood as self-regulation problems of the nervous system. That may be a new idea to you, as it is to many.

The term, "somatic", refers to the body experienced and controlled "from within"; "education" means "awakening and gathering of ones faculties". So, there's a learning process involved -- actually a learn-by-doing process that takes you from the grip of stressful conditioning and pain to freedom as ordinary as walking or chewing food. It's a shift involving a previously unknown process that takes you in unexpected directions and leaves you feeling more natural, more like yourself. That's the nature of the beast, so to speak -- and it's a much easier way to go.

What do you think -- is it easier to get someone who has lost their way to change their course of action by giving them drugs, injections, strength training, by forcing them to stretch outside of their usual behavioral boundaries or by manipulating them? Does that really work? Does it even make sense? Or is it easier to teach them the way -- assuming they are willing? The nervous system is the same way; there's a harder way and an easier way.

The unexpected advance and easier way of clinical somatic education is that it frees the nervous system from the conditioning influences of injuries and stress by teaching (or re-teaching) the more natural, easier flow of self-control lost and forgotten due to injuries and stress. The results of Hanna Somatic Education can be had by almost anyone in a relatively short period of time.

A personal story:

I had hip surgery years ago and the docs said I would develop arthritis in my hip in "later" life...... well... later is now!! I used shark cartilage, gelatin, lots and lots of pain relievers but none of it helped very much.

I picked up the Hanna book on somatics... did the awareness of movement exercises and the hip stretching movement relieves the pain like magic. It stays gone for a long time -- I don't even take aspirin anymore. This somatics work is very powerful stuff!!!!

-- Patti M.: (PATTIMACK@aol.com)

As a matter of record, many people come to a Hanna Somatic Educator discouraged, skeptical, and in dispair, having exhausted their other therapeutic options. Some come hoping to avoid surgery. Most of the time, we are successful. However, it is wiser to come as soon as you hear the words, "We don't know what's wrong with you," "We can't find anything wrong with you," "It's all in your head," "You're just getting older," "You'll just have to live with it," or words to that effect. It's also wise to come if you're not progressing well in your physical therapy or you'd like to progress faster. Somatic education enhances all other clinical modalities.

Although somatic education has certain things in common with yoga, current somatic education techniques meet the clinical requirements for rapid and predictable improvements. The goal of Hanna Somatic Education practitioners is literally to lose clients by getting the job done directly:
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Applications of clinical somatic education include:

The processes of somatic education are comfortable and gentle. For that reason, the improvements commonly surprise clients, who often expect something like the sometimes grueling and lengthy course of treatment experienced in common clinical methods.

Somatic education accelerates the results of physical training and eliminates or reduces dependency on drugs or therapy for many types of physical problems. Surgery can sometimes be avoided and, in many cases, the results of an unsuccessful surgery can be improved, often substantially or even completely.

To see a partial list of conditions that can be corrected through somatic education, click "list".

To end chronic pain without surgery, pain meds, or muscle relaxants:

With decisive improvements after each session, the clinical methods of Hanna Somatic Education end chronic pain from injury, aging, and overuse. Hanna Somatic Education improves muscular control, freedom of movement, grace, strength, and overall health. It is common to regain much of the grace and flexibility typical of people ten to twenty years younger. How does it work?

This website provides explanations, abundant information, images, and access to resources and practitioners who practice this approach. Use the blue navigation bar at the top of the page to explore this website.

Improving Brain Functioning

To use the metaphor of computer hardware and software, the body is the hardware (or "wetware") and what the brain has learned is its software. (Reflexes and certain physiological functions are "hard wired" into the nervous system.) Somatic education upgrades brain and bodily functioning by upgrading the "software" (control faculties acquired by learning) with which your brain controls muscular control and coordination. You "install" such "software" in yourself by a learn-by-doing process (i.e., learning and practicing safe, self-controlled movement patterns). The sensations of the movement patterns enter your memory and serve as the approximate patterns by which you control your movements (adjusted to the needs of the moment). The improvements of body-awareness and control may seem somehow remarkable, and the relief of pain, miraculous, but are really the result of higher integration of your nervous and muscular systems. A series of sessions produces lasting and substantial improvements in physical comfort, flexibility, strength, and mobility.

The human brain is 90% dedicated to two classes of functioning: sensing and moving.

Of that 90%, it is said that people use only 5 - 10%. Somatic education substantially increases brain functioning by improving its degree of integration. These improvements affect multiple levels of the human being: attention and attention span, pattern recognition, exercise of intention, ability to convert ideas into tangible actualities, as well as the functioning of the physical body. These are side-effects of somatic education.

Permit me, as your host, to introduce myself. My name is Lawrence Gold.

I am one of the thirty-eight people Dr. Hanna trained in 1990 and among between one hundred and two hundred practitioners, worldwide, certified to practice Hanna Somatic Education.

Communicate with me: click here

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