We all use paradigms -- for example, about food: we all have ideas of what we like and don’t like, which foods are good for us and which are not, how to prepare them. For some people, calories are important, for others, nutritional balance, and for others, life-force. Those differences define different “food paradigms”.

        The healing professions are also built upon paradigms: germ theory, structural alignment, energy flow, etc.

        Now, a new healing paradigm is emerging: somatic education. The paradigm of somatic education involves improving control over our own life process -- the mind-body connection.

        The term, “somatic”, refers to the awareness of the body “from within”; “education” has to do with awakening capacities. The mind-body connection of somatic education is the same mind-body connection used in controlling our own movements, our own attention, our speech, and ultimately, our state of tension in life.

        Somatic education produces results particularly effectively with the residual effects of injuries (chronic pain and stiffness) and with stress-related disorders (such as headaches and back trouble).

PARADIGMS OF HEALTH CARE

        Health care has changed over the centuries, yet one aspect of healing has remained the same: the body heals itself, whatever other treatment may have been given.

        In other words, there are some things that no one can do for us; we must do them for ourselves.

        The shift from medicine-as-intervention to self-healing is a paradigm shift -- and with paradigm shifts come new ways of working.

        Two healing paradigms immediately preceded the emergence of the somatic paradigm: those of modern medicine (drugs and surgery, and only primitively, exercise and diet) and of bodywork (manipulation, exercise and diet, but not drugs and surgery!).

        Here, mind and the body are considered separately, as if they are two things that we experience at different times. Their relationship is considered somehow mysterious and arcane. But how could it be more obvious? Every voluntary movement we make is a bodily action governed by a mental intention, speech is a physical expression of a feeling mind, and emotional states correlate with muscular tension, movement and bodily chemistry (hormonal changes). Direct self-observation of body and mind reveals that to feel one is to feel the other. Both mind and body are sensations. Sophisticated practitioners of modern medicine recognize and work with that interrelation.

         In modern medicine, the individual's responsibility for healing may be summarized, “take your medicine, do what your therapist says to do, watch your diet, and exercise.”

        There is an ongoing problem for practitioners of modern medicine, however: patient “compliance”. People don’t necessarily do what their doctors tell them to do. This problem bids one become philosophical. Is it that people place too much responsonsibility upon their doctors and take too little upon themselves (the “fix me” mentality)? Or is it that the methods of modern medicine are so often unpleasant (drug side-effects, painful and invasive procedures, and austere dietary prescriptions) that nobody likes them? Or both? Might it be that people must deny or suppress their feelings to tolerate the methods of modern medicine, an unnatural act for any living creature?

        Still, for emergency situations (which often result from patients’ lifestyle choices), modern medicine is often the necessary first approach.

THE PARADIGM OF BODYWORK
“Body affects mind.”

        The operating viewpoint of various schools of bodywork, such as Rolfing^®, Cranio-sacral Therapy, The Trager Approach^®, and others, is that body and mind are, in reality, “body-mind”, a functional unity. Certain Asian health practices (including acupuncture) use the relation of mind and body as a diagnostic reference in determining treatment. Even so, where actual application of the method is concerned, it is essentially manipulative; the individual is, for the most part “on the receiving end” -- “done to”, manipulated by an outside agent -- though some approaches include pleasurable health practices as part of their recommended regimen.

        Still, even in these approaches, patient compliance is a problem -- possibly because people have been so indoctrinated by their previous medical experiences that they bring their indoctrination (the “fix me” mentality) to their bodywork practitioner. In fact, the notion of “compliance” is a problem; compliance implies obedience, rather than self-generated assumption of responsibility. Part of the task of practitioners of these methods is educating their clients as to their responsibility for their own success.

        This leads us to the emerging paradigm.

        The primary observation of somatic education is that how we respond and adapt to the insults and injuries of life largely determines how they affect us, both in the short term and in the long term. We have a major say in the course of our own healing. The rule governing this viewpoint is, “release reactions that are no longer necessary and instill abilities that serve us.” Create freedom from the past and apply that freedom into free and regenerative patterns of feeling and function.

        With somatic education, the individual learns to correct bodily malfunctions through an internalized learning process. This process is not so esoteric as it might seem. Major bodily systems affecting health and healing (breathing, digestion, circulation) are affected by a system over which we have virtually unlimited potential for voluntary control: our muscular system. Our emotional states are also tied in with that system.

        Somatic education involves a kind of awakening. What gets awakened is the capacity to feel what is going on with us and to bring it under our control. We make “it” (pain, tension, breathing, etc.) into “ourself”. Integration occurs. Then, when we stop doing “it”, “it” stops happening. We seem miraculously freed of the affliction.

        Participants in somatic education voluntarily place attention in the feelings of voluntary movement; they create changes actively, rather than receive them passively; at first guided by a teacher, they then proceed guided by their own awareness of themselves and the effects of their actions. The effects are indeed far-reaching.

        With certain conditions, such as chronic pain following injury, this approach is the only way that works in the long run. When a person has accumulated nervous tension from injuries, long-term stress, or the emotional and attitudinal conditioning that occurs over a lifetime, muscles can become so tight that they hurt. Spasms occur. Joints get compressed by those muscle pulls. Nerves get pinched. Breathing and physiological functions get impaired. Posture gets distorted. People suffer “body aches”. They “age”. However, there is nothing wrong with their muscles; they are working as they should. They are only obeying the nervous system. The problems that result can be reversed only by doing something different.

        Feldenkrais Awareness through Movement exercises, Rolfing^® Movement, biofeedback, Aston Patterning^® Neurokinetics, Continuum Movement^®, Hanna Somatic Education^®, and schools of yoga that go beyond stretching and relaxation, effectively awaken the self-determining, self-correcting link between self-awareness and self-control.

        Each healing paradigm has its area of superiority. The superiority of somatic education is its ability to alleviate conditions that arise from the individual’s adapted way of functioning -- often attributed to aging, mysterious causes, or even to genetics -- something that only the individual can correct. Somatic education operates from a new paradigm -- self-awareness and self-mastery -- that makes it possible to resolve conditions unresolvable by medical or manipulative means. You learn how to be more effective at being as you decide to be.