Could Somatics Be the Future of Bodywork?

By Alissa Mayer, BSc(Equine), C-EHSE Owner/Director, Equine Hanna Somatics®
Education; Canine Hanna Somatics®
and Kevin Haussler, DVM, DC, PhD, DACVSMR

Although the term ‘somatic’ has become a popular buzzword in recent years, used to describe everything from fitness, yoga, and bodywork to psychotherapy, emotional processing, embodiment practices and more, the field of somatics has existed for over 50 years. Many are familiar with the work of Moshé Feldenkrais and other movement pioneers.

Because our interest here is animals, this article focuses on the neuroscience and physiology behind Clinical Somatics – the original method pioneered by Dr. Thomas Hanna in the 1970s for work with humans and further developed in the 1990s by Dr. Eleanor Criswell for work with horses and other animals.¹

We will discuss what makes Somatics and the use of Voluntary Pandiculation – Hanna’s innovative contribution – a profoundly effective intervention for helping animals overcome myofascial and associated postural disorders associated with involuntary, unconscious tension.

And we will note how this approach fits perfectly into the current paradigm shift towards a more holistic, ethical, and science-based practice within the equine industry.

Motor-sensory amnesia

Horses are prey animals, hard-wired for the startle response. When they startle, a brainstem-mediated polysynaptic reflex occurs, causing heightened mental awareness, epinephrine release, and increased myofascial tension charactered by the fight-or-flight response. With repetition, this increased myofascial tension, which can also be caused by trauma, injury or repetitive motion, becomes habituated and leads to characteristic postures, movement patterns, and behaviors. (Criswell)

This accumulation of learned muscle contractions results in persistently increased resting muscle tone that affects the body in a myriad of ways, the most obvious being altered skeletal alignment and restricted joint range of motion locally, regionally, and systemically. Over time, as the nervous system adapts to its new normal, the habitual contractions fade from the individual’s awareness and are maintained involuntarily by the brainstem and postural reflexes, producing a condition known as motor-sensory amnesia².

Motor-sensory amnesia typically presents in one of four characteristic postural patterns first identified and reported by Hanna in his 1988 book entitled Somatics – Reawakening the Mind’s Control of Movement, Flexibility and Health. These postural patterns are directly related to the body’s response to stress (startle, crossed-extensor, and withdrawal reflexes), pain or repetitive motion, and can be easily identified in horses as a posture dominated by either:

spinal extension (The Green Light Reflex or ‘action response’)
spinal flexion (The Red Light Reflex or ‘withdrawal response’)
lateral bending or axial rotation of the spine (The Trauma Reflex, an antalgic response)
extremely limited range-of-motion due to combined contractions of agonist/antagonist muscle groups (Co-contracted or Senile Posture)

A common misconception is that a hypertonic (i.e., persistently contracted) muscle is strong since it seems tense and contracted. However, hypertonic muscles often perform weakly or have altered timing where they do not produce enough force at precisely the right time, which can increase the risk of acute musculoskeletal and repetitive or overuse injuries.

In moments of excitement or fear, in response to spinal cord reflexes or via reciprocal inhibition, many habitual muscle contractions can be temporarily inhibited or compensated for with additional effort. But when the effort or excitement ceases, the habitual baseline muscle tone and length reasserts itself in response to the neuromuscular spindles and the myotatic reflexes, and the default level of muscle contraction and its associated postural pattern returns.

Once these patterns of muscle contractions are learned via repetition and then ‘forgotten’ via habituation, they cease to be under the horse’s voluntary control or awareness.

This kind of involuntary muscle activity does not respond readily to treatment with drugs, surgery, training, or externally applied treatments or therapies, because the muscle contractions are actively being maintained by the subcortical portions of the nervous system.

This unconscious self-organization of the body provides a reliable method of identifying which muscles are habitually (i.e., involuntarily) contracted, based on the pattern and direction of persistent postural deviation. These deviations can be observed in both static and dynamic postural assessments, and the increased resting muscle tone in many of the superficial muscles can be confirmed by palpation.

Voluntary Pandiculation

Once identified, areas of habitually increased resting muscle tone can be normalized by inviting the horse to use those muscles voluntarily via somatic exercises, which are based on the natural tendency of horses to pandiculate. “Pandiculation is a sensory-motor action pattern used by all vertebrates to arouse the voluntary cortex and muscles after repose, e.g., a dog, cat, or human ‘wake-up’ stretch.” (HSE training manual)

A.F. Fraser describes pandiculation as a polysynaptic reflex, “the symmetrical, coordinated stretching and stiffening actions of the body as one unit” – although he notes that pandiculation can involve only one or two limbs at a time, or just one limb and the spine, and it has been consistently observed across animal species. He adds that pandiculation serves to reduce stiffness, to restore the limb (or part of the body) and surrounding musculature to its original resting muscle tone and functionality (homeostatic state).

“Voluntary Pandiculation” (named by Criswell) is Hanna’s innovative interactive motor-sensory method for teaching humans to immediately and comfortably regain volitional control of habitually contracted muscles. The individual learns how to make specific, neurologically clear, voluntary shortening-contractions followed by very slow lengthening-contractions. The result of this process is to reset the resting level of the muscles, restore “motor-sensory-remembering”, and improve neuromuscular self-control.³

By inviting the horse to shorten and lengthen various muscle groups using this Voluntary Pandiculation technique, a Somatics practitioner can target the horse’s areas of muscle hypertonicity and cause an internally mediated normalization of resting muscle tone.

By engaging the horse in this slow, voluntary motor activity, the horse sends several volleys of neural impulses to the muscles involved. During the concentric phase of muscle contraction, the motor impulses are excitatory and produce a muscle contraction. During the slow eccentric phase of muscle contraction where the musculotendinous unit undergoes elongation, both the alpha and gamma motor impulses are inhibitory.

This helps to reset the resting length of the neuromuscular spindles (stretch-receptors made up of intrafusal muscle fibers) and of the force-generating extrafusal muscle fibers, simultaneously. If done correctly, these Somatic exercises give the horse’s nervous system the time and the specific sensorimotor input required to adjust the resting muscle tone back toward its original neutral levels during the movements, effectively reversing the learned motor-sensory amnesia.

Paradigm shift

Muscle activation involves both sensory (e.g., nociceptive, proprioceptive, mechanoreceptive) and motor (alpha, gamma) neural pathways. Most manual therapies focus on reducing pain to decrease muscle hypertonicity and improving proprioception to affect muscle timing. By applying these externally generated sensory inputs to the nervous system, manual therapists hope that the horse’s brain and nervous system will take that information and put it to good use by normalizing muscle function.

In contrast, the intent of Somatics is to invite self-generated motor output that then automatically creates immediate complimentary sensory inputs that complete the motor-sensory feedback loop in real-time. Guided motor activation by a trained Somatics practitioner helps to reset or normalize muscle activation patterns and provides the horse the exact sensory information he or she needs to assess and self-correct if the movement was not as intended.

How this unfolds

By engaging the horse in this intrinsic motor activity, several important things happen:

The full predictive and learning powers of the brain are activated before, during and after each voluntary movement for maximum self-organization, learning and retention. Because the entire motor-sensory system is actively engaged, rather than just receiving sensory input or producing feed-forward motor output, the learning and outcomes from the intervention are long-lasting enough to be described as semi-permanent (i.e., they do not ‘wear off’ or need to be supported with strength training to maintain) and in fact tend to be cumulative without any additional support, or in many cases even repeat sessions.
When moving slowly and deliberately as in a Voluntary Pandiculation, or when trying something brand new, motor output primarily comes directly from the voluntary motor cortex, rather than coming from or passing through other subcortical areas of the central nervous system that are responsible for involuntary motor activities.

The cerebellum does not initiate movement, but smooths ballistic, fast and previously learned movement patterns. The brainstem mediates primitive polysynaptic reflexes and maintains muscle tone. The spinal cord’s central pattern generators and interneurons are involved in involuntary reflex arcs.

This is important because it appears that the lengthening of the muscle spindles occurs during a slow and deliberate eccentric muscle contraction. Volleys of inhibitory alpha motor impulses allow the eccentrically contracted muscle to lengthen bit by bit, which helps to reset the muscle spindles and normalize resting muscle tone.

The slow, controlled movement gives the nervous system plenty of time to receive and then respond to various sensorimotor feedback loops by adjusting muscle tone and updating body awareness, as opposed to the faster feed-forward (i.e., planned in advance without sensory guidance) motor activation of programmed ballistic or continuous movement. (Brooks, pp. 7-11). Voluntary Pandiculation acts to normalize resting muscle tone and rapidly improve motor learning without the risk of removing any necessary adaptive compensations, because the degree of change is decided by the nervous system, not the practitioner.
Mechanoreceptors⁴ are designed to respond to a signal (e.g., pressure or movement) and then rapidly turn off, which is termed ‘adaptation’. Therefore, mechanoreceptor activation often creates a brief snapshot (lasting only a few seconds) of how the body feels, where it is in space, and what is happening in the immediate environment. These mechanoreceptive snapshots are not retained or recalled, even with repetitive movements, and immediately become outdated as the horse moves or the environmental factors (e.g., hard or uneven ground surface) change. Only about 2% of these sensory inputs (‘sense-memory’) are encoded into short-term memory. What does it require for sense-memory to become encoded into short-term memory? A motor response to the stimulus, e.g., a pandiculation. (McGreevy)

Anything not transferred into long-term memory via further repetition during this window will be lost… but with Somatics, we are not attempting to teach the horse something new, but only to facilitate the horse’s nervous system in remembering something it once knew: What its original, ideal resting length of muscles is for the body to be most comfortable and ready to move efficiently, and what it felt like before ‘life happened’ and the horse had to start compensating for an unbalanced rider, elevated stress levels, or to recover from an injury.

Once the horse has returned its muscles to their natural neutral resting length, no further repetition is required, as the horse has effectively changed the baseline level of motor output and has re-established a normal resting level of myofascial tone.

This is not something the horse has to re-learn or repeat to maintain, unless the horse is re-exposed to the repetitive stress or stimulus that caused the maladaptive compensation patterns in the first place (e.g., continues to live on a steep slope or in confinement, be ridden in an ill-fitting saddle or unnatural frame, engages in excessive repetitive exercises, frequent vehicular transport or other stressors).

The body is designed to remain upright against gravity mainly by passive resting muscle tone, with minimal CNS-mediated active contractions, automatically maintained as needed to balance load or movements, as part of homeostasis. (Masi et al.)

In closing…

Through this somatic lens, we can understand the functional and organizational impacts of the nervous system on posture, movement and well-being, and how various manual therapies and training modalities interact at different nervous system levels to achieve their results, and predict how long those results will last.

We can see how Somatics can be used to help our clients rapidly make changes to their own neuromuscular systems with this self-guided motor intervention, so they can enjoy the desired outcomes of manual therapy, pain management and postural training practices, without the risks of causing tissue damage or removing adaptive compensations on which the horse, human or other animal is relying.

The basis in shared physiology and basic neuroscience makes Somatics an equally valuable tool for practitioner self-care and functional self-preservation, which offsets the tendency for equine professionals to burn out, suffer career-ending injuries or develop chronic pain that leads to early retirement and interferes with our passionate equestrian pursuits.

For all these reasons and others, a strong case could be made for Somatics as the future of bodywork.