Somatics: The secret neuroscience of Yoga
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“It’s hard to be an expert in your body if you don’t spend any time there.”
- Ericka Thomas
Transcript
Ep 164 Somatics: the secret neuroscience of Yoga
Somatics IS the secret neuroscience of yoga and all exercise. As Fit pro’s, students and fitness enthusiasts we’re using some pieces of somatic therapy every time we move even if we don’t know it. Today on the Work IN we are going into the dark cave of the brain to shine a light on what makes certain kinds of movement somatic and how we can use that magic to build resilience, support mobility, strength and balance and improve mental health for ourselves and our clients.
Somatic movements are designed to strengthen the brain to muscle connection. Translation: Mind body formats are somatic.
What’s the difference between Somatosensory Yoga and JUST Yoga or any other exercise for that matter?
Yoga is already a somatic movement in its support of that mind body connection. Somatosensory yoga combines mindful movement & intentional sensory awareness and specific muscle activation of somatics to re-educate neuromuscular tension patterns, alleviating chronic pain, improving balance, proprioception and interoception to calm the nervous system.
The difference lies in the intention. In fact it’s intention that makes all the difference. I would argue that intention is the missing link when it comes to going beyond what the eyes can see in health and wellness. The Instructor’s awareness is of course key as well but we’ll get to that in a moment.
First let’s get a bit more understanding of what we mean when we say something is somatic.
Somatics is a term that was coined by Thomas Hanna in the early ‘70’s to describe using body movement as a way to improve mental health. It was picked up by others like Peter Levine (Somatic Experiencing), Ron Kurtz (Hakomi Method and Pat Ogden (Sensorimotor Therapy) The concept dates back to 19th century physical education movements that included things you might have heard of like yoga, pilates and even judo. You may have heard of Feldenkrais that’s another movement method that taps into somatics. And of course Trauma release exercise from David Berceli.
Thomas Hanna theorize that chronic pain is a result of “sensory motor amnesia” - in other words the neurons in the brain that control body movements have lost the connection to muscle tissue and that through mindful movement and specific muscle activation we can reinvigorate those connection pathways and relieve that chronic pain.
We see sensory motor amnesia a lot. It can happen with or without chronic pain but it tends to be associated with it because we override the body’s signals for a long time.
Body’s messages. Our body is talking to us all the time. 80% of the communication (the work the brain is doing) is translating the signals coming from the body. Only 20% of that communication goes from the brain to the body. That’s why bottom up therapies like somatics and yoga can have such a powerful benefit to the mind. This internal body communication is called interoception. Basically it’s how you know if everything’s ok or not inside your body. I’ll give you an example of interception at work.
Let’s say you get an email from your boss asking you to meet. As you read that email you feel something in your stomach, something like butterflies, you’re not sure what your boss could want, and so you interpret that physical sensation in your stomach as fear. As the meeting approaches your stomach gets worse, to the point of pain. The more you think and worry about this meeting the more your stomach hurts. It keeps you awake the night before.
That is interoception at work. Your body sends a signal via the butterflies sensation but it’s the brain that creates the meaning around it.
So we know this. We are not just a body and we aren't just a brain, they are connected. And now we know more about how they are connected.
We have a motor cortex that corresponds to moving but now scientists have discovered an area within the motor cortex that specifically moves hands, feet and face that are engaged when many body movements are performed together. They call it the somato-cognitive activation network SCAN and it’s responsible for integrated body movements when lots of things are going on and interestingly it’s connected to the higher level planning regions of the brain. This network seems to be the bridge from abstract plans, thoughts and motivations to real life action, movement and the physiologic changes that have to happen to make anything happen.
One of the researchers involved in this particular study, Nico Dosenbach from Washington University School of Medicine Said that this SCAN network provides an “explanation for why the body and the mind aren’t separate or separable.”
This SCAN network area of the brain isn’t present in newborns as it develops over time. And it’s that time, that experience, our history basically, that gives meaning or influences the meaning of the sensations that we feel coming up from the body. In fact our beliefs have a powerful influence on how our body physically responds.Even how we metabolize food. We’ve talked before on this podcast about the milkshake study By Ali Crum.
What does all this mean for us? For regular people just trying to improve our physical, emotional and mental health.
Because the mind and body are inseparable AND because the mind can influence the body as much as the body can influence the mind…
And because the mind is creating our patterns of thought, emotion and behavior based on the sensory inputs we are experiencing throughout our life in order to predict and make the world an easier place to navigate…
Then we have the ability through the practice of somatic movement to escape that predictive modeling and leverage awareness through intentionally new sensory experiences and improved interoception to trust the body and literally change how we see our world.
How do we do that in the context of fitness and movement classes? Big question because most of us aren’t psychologists or therapists or psychiatrists and we might be a yoga therapist but we certainly all want to stay within our scope of practice. The important thing in my mind for fit pros is to understand that you will never know what the people coming to your classes have been through. But you can be pretty sure that they’ve all been through something. You may not ever get to learn why they are coming to your class. But it probably has something to do with wanting to feel better in some way. With that knowledge we can apply 3 aspects of somatics to pretty much any format we teach to help our students and ourselves get a deeper level of results.
So let’s start easy.
The first piece to somatic anything is mindful movement.
Mindful movement is fit pro speak for “pay attention to what you’re doing.” which is sometimes easier said than done. Remember earlier when I mentioned sensory motor amnesia? This idea that we lose connection with certain areas of the body. Well if that is happening it will show up here in the mindful movement space.
For those of us who have spent a lifetime overriding our body or taking it for granted or never resting or who maybe have experienced some physical trauma or humiliation or have some body dysmorphia where you simply can’t see yourself as beautiful or who have been in chronic pain for a long time we may have simply cut parts of ourselves off. And at a muscular level there’s something that happens when a muscle lives in tension for so long the neurons simply stop firing.
How many times have you seen someone or maybe you yourself have done this, jumped on a treadmill or a bike at the gym, and turned on the TV. That television or the podcast or even the music takes your mind out of your body. I stopped running with headphones for that very reason. (also because they never stay in my ears) One of the things I miss most about running is being in my body with that rhythm . Noticing how my feet hit the ground, my arm swing my breath. But when we immediately try to escape our body because exercise is hard or the discomfort is too much we rob ourselves of the opportunity to build a stronger connection between the brain and the body through that SCAN. That improved connection can help build stronger cognition, decision making, emotional regulation and even memory.
On the fit pro side we can use our own body awareness to help direct awareness through the body for our students. This goes to cueing but also a level of acknowledging that sometimes things feel hard to do but the brain tells us to quit long before the body actually needs to. Sometimes the biggest challenge is to walk in the door so we want to encourage our students to notice where they are today so they can feel progress. We can explain the reasons behind why we are moving this way or choosing a particular interval pattern and give them options and variations along with permission to choose something different as the expert in their own body. It’s hard to be an expert in your body if you don’t spend any time there.
The second piece to integrating somatic formats is sensory awareness.
This is the active practice of interoception and exteroception. Noticing, feeling the sensations that are occurring within your body but and this is key without attaching any meaning or judgment to them. This will be challenging for many of us because our brain is so used to doing it without any thought from us. Exteroception is noticing external things coming into the body through the senses like sound, smell, sights, touch and taste. We take those things in and they affect us in some way. For example noticing how the foot feels on the mat when you drag it on the mat or rolling a spikey ball on the hands. Those things can help keep us present in the body. But it’s the interoception, building awareness of the physical sensations within the body that it is where we can really make a difference.
You can try this yourself anytime. Next time you feel a sensation somewhere in your body, notice the thought, feeling or emotion that’s attached to it. Are those thoughts positive or negative? Are they even true? Do they lead to other judgments about yourself? It happens quicker than a thought.
So if we want to break that predictive pattern we need to create a space for ourselves or our students where it is safe to NOT immediately jump to those meanings anytime we feel something in the body. And then the next step is to practice accepting the sensation as it is first. Sometimes my stiff hands are just stiff. They don’t mean I’m old or broken.
The benefit of this interoception practice is that it can help us learn to trust ourselves again. It reestablishes trust in the body, top down. And helps the body learn to trust us, bottom up. Which might not have happened in a while.
Third piece and the one most often missing I think is specific muscle activation.
All exercise requires muscle activation, duh. But for the somatic reeducation that we’re looking for we need to purposely cause predictive errors for the brain with our movement choices. Things like looking the opposite way from where you're reaching, turning the eyes away, crossing the body, moving slowly when you normally move fast, starting on the opposite side, creating opportunities for new experience in the body including visualization of the movement. Somatics can be sprinkled into any class, when I say any class I mean any format they don’t have to dominate the class.
I have long been a proponent of applying trauma informed principles across formats if for no other reason than to jumpstart recovery in some of the higher intensity ones. And that’s what somatics does by repatterning tension in the body and brain it can calm the autonomic nervous system. Literally shifting out of the sympathetic state that all exercise requires and into the parasympathetic for rest and repair.
In a traditional mind body formats like yoga, pilates or even martial arts once you know what somatosensory movement is all about it’s not difficult to layer in sensory challenges or sensory stacking.
In other formats like cardio kickboxing or HIIT one might wait till the end of class to do some slow crossbody twists or psoas release series or a simple body scan in the last 5 minutes. I use visualization in my indoor cycling classes and incorporate storytelling, people love it.
The opportunities are endless.
Think about how much of our life we spend on autopilot. Moving without thinking, driving without thinking, even thinking without thinking. 95% of the things we think about never actually happen. That tells us that most of what we do, think and feel (including our emotions by the way) is simply habit, made so by the predictive ability of our amazing meaning maker the brain for ease and metabolic efficiency. The brain eats up a lot of energy believe it or not.
So if we want to feel different, think differently we can start by moving differently. Forcing those predictive errors sets off a ripple effect through the nervous system that we need to sit up and pay attention. It can literally expand our capacity for resilience.
And no one needs to be a neuroscientist to be able to do it. All we need is to understand that the mind-body connection is a powerful lever. And that power lies in the subtle magic of making mistakes. It’s why we like to ride the edge of challenge and success in group classes.
Give it a try. And the next time a student says to you “I feel amazing, I’m not sure why, but I love this.” You can smile your Mona Lisa smile and receive it with gratitude and grace.
Thanks for listening! If you like what you heard and you want to know more about how you can integrate trauma informed instruction into your teaching or want to tap into some of these techniques for yourself through personalized coaching, head over to Savage Grace Coaching.com/theworkin where you’ll find links to book a call and of course all the show notes for this and other episodes. AND if you’re so inclined I would be so grateful if you would take a moment to subscribe and leave a 5 star review on Apple podcasts. It helps other people out there in the podcast universe find The Work IN.
Thanks everyone!
Hey there!
I’m your host Ericka Thomas. I'm a resilience coach and fit-preneur offering an authentic, actionable realistic approach to personal and professional balance for coaches in any format.
Savage Grace Coaching is all about bringing resilience and burnout recovery. Especially for overwhelmed entrepreneurs, creators and coaches in the fitness industry.
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