How does Hanna Somatic Education Work?

The following explanation makes sense of Hanna Somatic Education and gives people a way to talk about it that makes sense to their friends.

To begin with, it helps to understand why people get stuck in pain and discomfort. Then, you can understand what Hanna Somatic Education "handles" and how it handles it.

About 50% of chronic, severe pain can be traced to the effects of muscular contractions formed by physical injuries and high-stress emotional states. What follows, below, applies to that kind of pain -- and not the pain that results from organic diseases.

Here are the key terms:

• muscle-memory (muscle:movement memory)
• sensory-motor amnesia

Muscle memory is what you formed when you learned to walk, to ride a bicycle, to ski, to touch-type on a keyboard (as speed-typists do), or hunt-and-peck type (as in everyone who uses a smart phone or operating-system based device with a miniature alphanumeric keypad, does).

Sensory – motor amnesia is what happens when a  high-intensity memory forms, either from a high velocity experience or a prolonged one, a high-intensity memory that interferes with muscle movement memory of how we are, when we are free to move. Sensorimotor amnesia occurs, generally, in a state of activation triggered by something that's happening. When a triggered state of activation becomes a remembered state of activation, a remembered state of activation becomes a general state of activation.

"General state of activation"means an ongoing state of activation, a kind of readiness for experience based upon learning about experience.

Much of the pain that we endure in life has to do with generalized states of activation that have become submerged in the obliviousness of familiarity. In other words they are there, still activated, but, our awareness of them has become subdued. We may intuitively feel how that is so.

Because our awareness of them has become subdued, our control of them has diminished.

That's how a personality forms. It's how a tension set forms. It's how a chronic feeling state forms. It's how our condition forms. It's how our complaints form.

It's memories affecting how we move.

Movement involves the muscles -- and of course, other systems.

Let's talk about the muscles.

Any talk about action involves talk about muscle tension and relaxation of tension. Every state of readiness involves a heightened state of tension.

Memory shapes readiness.

Memory shapes muscular tension.

Injuries form intense memories.

Memories are states of readiness. Always.

Injuries form intense states of readiness, heightened tension, ongoingly. Heightened tension, after a short while, becomes painful -- not just psychologically, but also bodily.

The key to the pain are the memories.

Hanna somatic education cleans up muscle movement memory. By cleaning it up, we eliminate unnecessary states of readiness, unnecessary states of tension, unnecessary discomfort, unnecessary limitation of movement.

The pain people bring to a Hanna somatic educator is the pain of residual conditioning by experience in which they hold and stay tight, habitually, but without recognizing they are doing so: sensorimotor amnesia.

So, in a roundabout way, we've just covered "what"  Hanna somatic education handles.

Now we start on the "how".

Sensorimotor amnesia is another term for the muscle-movement memory of natural maturation "influenced" by the muscle movement memories of injury and prolonged stress. Hanna somatic education is a way of teaching people to take back influence over themselves, or to throw off the lingering influences of past experiences -- in this case, the lingering influences of past injuries and stress periods that lead to cumulative, muscular tightening up that "becomes who they are" (but are not).

What we need to do is to delete the automatic impulse to tighten up, to make "starting from rest" the default or customary disposition. The first way of doing that is to make them aware of the impulse to self-tighten. And then teach them to stop tightening themselves up -- not by effort to remember not to tighten up, but simply by not tightening up, in the first place, unless they mean to. They start at rest instead of from a an automatically-disturbed state of readiness. (Consider the mind of such a person.)

That's what the techniques of Hanna somatic education, and the intention behind their use, is. It's to teach people how to free themselves of conditioning influences, so they can feel more like themselves.

That, by the way, is the stated intention of many disciplines, but is most clearly stated as the intention of bodywork and somatic disciplines, in general. Some approaches are more effective than others.

When it comes to muscles, it means to awaken better control over our own tensing and relaxing of our muscles, of ourselves.

What Hanna somatic education does is clean up muscle movement memory so we can feel more like ourselves, when we are all right.

Hanna somatic education cleans up muscle movement memory and then improves it.

Result:

• movement, better
• pain, gone
• ability restored and enhanced

Hanna somatic education cleans up muscle movement memory.

Everything else that may be said would be the particulars of techniques and of somatic education exercise patterns – details that you might try to liken to therapies or exercises you already know. That might give you the wrong idea, if your ideas are based on approaches that work from the outside in, “on” you.

Hanna somatic education doesn't involve techniques that someone applies to you. It involves techniques of teaching you to get back influence over yourself. It's an outside-in AND inside–out job. That's why it works. We use an action or movement pattern "hard-wired" into us, programmed into everyone (and their dog), one related to yawning, called, "pandiculation". Yawning is pleasurable because it releases some of our tension. Hanna somatic education applies this "hard-wired", natural action pattern to clean up muscle-movement memory.

And by the way, because we're working with the programming side of things, meaning our memory conditioning, it works quickly and efficiently, in harmony with our influence over ourselves. Because it works in harmony, it works far faster than approaches that attempt to counter muscle-movement memory instead of dissolve its grip and then organize it. Being "worked with" works far faster and better than being "worked on".

Hanna somatic education works by cleaning up muscle movement memory that influences us in how we move and how we feel.

Muscle movement memory.

That's how Hanna somatic education works and what it does.

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Non-Attachment, by Itself, is a Heresy | The Middle Way Neither Includes nor Excludes Attachment; It Transcends It

The following is a very simplified and concise discussion of two items. One is the Buddhist doctrine of impermance or non-attachment, the perspective of the TetraSeed and its somatic manifestation. 

Because of the simplicity and conciseness of this discussion, you may feel like its zipping by without your comprehending it. If that's the case, you have two options I can think of. One is to re-listen, and the second is to take the state of bewilderment that you may be experiencing and subject it to The Gold Key release without further attempts to understand. Then, you may return to this discourse with a much easier comprehension.

Non-Attachment
The cultivation of non-attachment goes with the Buddhist doctrine of impermanence, which states that all experience is impermanent and that attachment is the primary cause of suffering, in life.

The expected reaction of someone exposed to this doctrine, who is serious about getting free of suffering, would be to seek non-attachment, to oppose attachment. This would be an error because it would involve suppressing attachment, would involve self-denial of desire, rather than releasing attachment. It then becomes attachment to non-attachment, or attachment to self-denial.

The significance of non-attachment, which more properly goes with the doctrine of impermanence than self-denial or opposition to attachment, is capacity for, and participation in, change. Change, not adherence to self-denial, is the opposite of attachment.

A way of better appreciating this difference, is to understand the four-part structure of individuated consciousness and of all experiencing:  the TetraSeed.

The TetraSeed
composed of

ATTENTION:LOCATION | INTENTION:EXISTENCE | MEMORY:PERSISTENCE | IMAGINATION:EMERGENCE

may be regarded in terms of MATRIX and VALVE
or BODY and MOUTH.


THE SUBJECTIVE ASPECTS OF THE TETRASEED

The MATRIX:BODY consists of

ATTENTION:LOCATION | INTENTION:EXISTENCE | MEMORY:PERSISTENCE.

The  MATRIX:BODY  is the "body of condensation" or "body of consolidation".


What's condensed or consolidated is whatever has come in through the opening, the valve, the mouth, of IMAGINATION:EMERGENCE.

THE SUBJECTIVE AND OBJECTIVE ASPECTS
of the TETRASEED, INTEGRATED


Like a MOUTH, IMAGINATION opens to ingest and closes to permit digestion into MEMORY. Short-term MEMORY takes what is in the MOUTH of IMAGINATION and "chews it over" (analyzing and distinguishing finer features: DISINTEGRATION); long-term MEMORY swallows and digests. (INTEGRATION)

IMAGINATION and MEMORY are counterbalancing opposites the way taking in food and swallowing are counterbalancing opposites: You can't do both at the same time; it's one or the other, though one feeds into the other.

Actually, we never experience memories as memories.  We always recall memories into existence by imagining them, just as we memorize something by repeatedly imagining it to ourselves. Memories, by themselves, are patterns that are unknown until we recall them by imagining them. (That's why memories are unreliable.)

ATTENTION and INTENTION are differently related than MEMORY and IMAGINATION. MEMORY and IMAGINATION trade off or alternate; ATTENTION and INTENTION synchronize and combine in the same moment.

Capturing, condensing and consolidating are INTEGRATION.

Something coming in through the opening of IMAGINATION:EMERGENCE always involves DISINTEGRATION. It always involves NEWNESS.  (If it's not NEWNESS, it's PERSISTENCE, and if it's PERSISTENCE, it's MEMORY, not IMAGINATION). Newness always involves DISINTEGRATION of the status of memories that have persisted to make way for new INTEGRATION, an altered viewpoint.

INTEGRATION:DISINTEGRATION:INTEGRATION

and DISINTEGRATION
and INTEGRATION
and so on.

IMAGINATION is the mouth of the TetraSeed.

MEMORY is the digestive tract of the TetraSeed.

ATTENTION and INTENTION are the senses and MOVEMENT SYSTEM (e.g., muscles and bones).

ATTENTION and INTENTION are yang/outgoing.
IMAGINATION and MEMORY are yin/incoming.

Beware of taking non-attachment to the extreme -- meaning, overlooking the counterbalancing function of memory, persistence, endurance -- attachment. Extreme non-attachment is "spiritual by-passing" -- the action of avoiding the work of personal transformation in an idealistic effort to experience what is Transcendent/formless. The formless intuition "surfaces" when the disturbances of personal immaturity and/or maladjustment resolve with the awakening and balancing-integration of the four facet/flexpoint pairs of the TetraSeed.

Life involves both persistence (apparent permanence) and change (or the movement of impermanence). Each needs the other for a balance between DISINTEGRATION and INTEGRATION. Each has its place.

a final word on the MATRIX (CONSOLIDATED MEMORY)
and INCOMING NEWNESS (IMAGINATION):

Every experience, even now, consists of two aspects:

1. CONSOLIDATED SUBSTANTIALITY
2. QUALITIES or BEHAVIORS

You look at or listen to something, you feel "something is there". That's consolidated substantiality.

Then, there are the qualities of what is there, including all of its relationships with everything else.

Every possible experience has the same sense of  "something" there-ness, or substantiality -- though the density of the substantiality varies.

Every possible experience has a different set of qualities, in the most ordinary sense.

The sense of something-there-ness is the sense of self-densification, the sense of attention to a memory or persistent "something" -- and the intention to have an experience of it, one way or the other -- all at once and in the same place. It's what is known as, "the self-contraction". It's a feeling. We experience everything by means of self-contraction. (It seems to me that that's what Adi Da meant, when he wrote, "The act of perception, itself, is the avoidance of relationship." ~~ The Knee of Listening by Franklin Jones/Adi Da Samraj)

That means that, with contemplation and practice to make one capable, every experience can be recognized as the feeling of consolidated ATTENTION, MEMORY, and INTENTION -- all in the same place as a single feeling, that singular "feel" of "consolidated something", which is self-contraction. (It seems to me that that's what Adi Da meant when he said that, at some point, one no longer needs to look into the garbage bag to see what one is throwing away; one just looks at the bag (the feeling of self-contraction) and recognizes, "Ah! Garbage!"  ~~ Garbage and the Goddess, by Bubba Free John).

Recognizing self-contraction, sufficiently, as ATTENTION:PERSISTENCE:INTENTION, self-contraction can be released entirely independently of the qualities of the thing being released. It's a shift of perspective from ingesting incoming experience (getting involved with it) to recognizing self-contraction in any form of experience as a "self-activity" -- a self-activity that can be desisted from (stopped or ceased) merely in the noticing of "something there" -- without need for analysis, figuring out, identifying what something is or means, reasoning about it, wonderings about "right" and "wrong" and what to do about it. It's the very soul of non-attachment through intelligence, not through an idealistic cutting off of self from experience.

This is a radical (at the root) approach to experience. Instead of "taking a position" relative to some experience, we dissolve it (or release it). That capacity for release is the meaning of non-attachment. It's the release that is our capacity to change, to participate in an even or fair way with the flow of impermanence that allows incoming imagination (creativity) to flourish. It's "emptiness" or "space" -- like the capacity of a vessel -- whether or not the vessel happens to contain anything, at the moment. It's not the "non-attachment" of refusal or self-denial, of "cutting off of all attachments" (which is a way of being idealistically full of itself, enforcing an erroneous understanding of emptiness or of non-attachment.) It's non-attachment as capacity to change.

It is acceptance -- not as fatalism about fate, but as the "open mood" of the space where something limited once resided, space that can now accommodate something new. It's receptivity, the space liberated by dissolution of "remembered point-of-view" space where unknown newness is allowed to develop and emerge as the new memory of this very moment, of ever-new self as the expression of that very space, rather than of biased and unreliable, self-held memories. It is spontaneous and also allows the free functioning of memory and so retains its intelligence.

This "acceptance" has a very interesting behavior: When all four aspects of the TetraSeed, (i.e., all four operations/drives/intelligences) sufficiently and consciously come "on-line" and are balanced and integrated with each other, in the context of, or in terms of, any kind of experience, that experience becomes as if "transparent"; it loses its feeling of density, while retaining its functionality, even at a superior level. It becomes "transparent" to the formless Ground of Being that is its source and very substance.

Search on YouTube for keywords, "Adi Da point of view".

The Gold Key Release
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copyright 2017 Lawrence Gold

Imagination and Memory, Together, Act Like Valve and Reservoir

I've kept coming back to the same thing in my experience, so I want to put it out there: It seems to me that in the TetraSeed, the aspect we call, "imagination", operates as a valve, opening and closing.

When imagination is closing, attention and intention are turning toward memory, closing in on memory.

When imagination is opening, attention and intention are turning toward imagining, opening to imagining.

Feel that?

Somas (living beings) open toward or close away from experience.

Attention and intention focus the power of attention on what is remembered in memory, or focus the power of attention on what is emerging in imagination.

I'll say that again.

Attention and intention focus the power of attention on a memory - or - attention and intention focus the power of attention on what is emerging in imagining. Attention and intention focus the power of attention on a memory -- or --  attention and intention focus the power of attention on what is emerging --  in the making -- in imagination.

In closed-minded individuals, memory dominates imagination by habituated intention. Memory "suffocates" imagination.

In open-minded individuals, imagination exceeds memory by free attention.

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Living Experience is a Four-Part Harmony

Every possible kind of experience can be understood in terms of a four-part harmony of four basic operations of mind. These operations of mind are familiar to everyone -- more or less.

The are:

INTENDING | IMAGINING | REMEMBERING | ATTENDING TO

not in any specific order, but all happening at once, together.

A basic understanding of each of these operations is a start in the direction of experiencing them, awake, in your own case. So, start there.

Take any subject, any subject, at all, and look at it through the slant of each of these four competencies.

Imagine intending something without remembering what you are paying attention to.
OR
Imagine remembering something without paying attention to it.
OR
Imagine attending to something without remembering to intend to imagine it.

These three slants on experience -- examples, and there are more -- are psycho-active mental exercises to give you a sense of the direction of experiencing these co-efficient competencies awake in your own case.

All movement and all cognition exist as these four aspects, these co-efficient competencies.

It is not a merely mental matter of understanding some concepts. That, as I said, is the start. The three slants rang your bell, a little bit. Some very interesting things happen, as you systematically use the four co-efficients of competence MATRIX as a way of coming up to speed in areas where one or more of them have been co-deficient.

Coming "on-line and up to speed" in an integrated way changes the underpinning of our behavior. Our expressions ride upon a MATRIX, a matrix is that is sensory:motor | subjective:objective:

the four co-efficients of competence.

The presentation will bring attention to the four co-efficients of competency, highlight each and connect the words and ideas to immediate experience, which will involve very simple exercisings of intelligence:

• intending intention
• imagining imagining
• remembering remembering
• attending to attending to

as examples. The idea is to get people's intelligent attention taking in something that's always been going on in them in all manner of ways, for some time, as the experience of being alive, active and sentient. We're turning the light on underpinnings.

In the workshop, we will do attentional:intentional exercises using the four co-efficients of competency in variously structured sequences and entertain conversation with the workshop attendees. The exercises will have effects, so it's likely someone will have something to say.

These exercises and the awakening that they enliven serve as a gateway, not merely for evaluating the world in a mental-analytical, conceptual way; but for coming up-to-speed and on-line in a well balanced, more-integrated way -- to change the underpinnings of the spontaneous impulses we call, behavior, seen as movement, felt as cognition.

The Gold Key Release applies this insight to handle Sensory-Motor Amnesia at the level of mind and consciousness (Attentional-Intentional Amnesia).

The Psycho-Active TetraSeed Transformations | Sharpening Intelligence

 

The Gold Key Release
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CONTACT:

copyright 2017 Lawrence Gold