Somatics bodywork is one of the best ways I have found to treat neuro-muscular pain. The field of Somatics deals with the whole being: the mind, body, and spirit, through teaching the student how to gain awareness of those three aspects through slow precise movements. It is through the re-learning happening in the body, that the student learns where his/her muscular/emotional holding patterns are, and once bringing awareness to those points, can balance and reset their energies. This creates a much longer lasting effect then massage, for instance, because in Somatic bodywork the session gets programmed into the nervous system so to speak. The student is actively engaged within the session because he/she is consciously following the movements done to the body, because of this, the session as a whole, becomes more integrated into the consciousness of that individual, thus having a much longer lasting and deep effect then other traditional forms of therapy.
I have found that for me personally in my own experience, through witnessing clients of mine transform severe acute pain, or chronic pain in one single somatic bodywork session, I am made a believer of the power that lies behind this gentle art form. The first time I was introduced to Somatic Bodywork, I was doing a training through East West Somatics in St. George, Utah. After the 3rd day of having somatic bodywork done to me just for about an hour or so a day, I ended up purging all night long. I have had medicine journeys that reminded me of this particular purging experience, it was not pretty. The next morning I woke up still feeling off like I had caught a strange 24 hour bug, but more so it felt like a deep emotional clearing experience. Later that afternoon after class, I still felt off, and had to call my boyfriend basically to just cry for 2 minutes. Literally right after crying for less then 3 minutes, I felt a million times better and actually had the energy to attend the party being held that evening. IT was a crazy experience to feel shitty one minute, cry, then the next minute feel better. I would have shaken that experience off as perhaps being coincidental with the Somatic Bodywork I was doing, but I had a similar experience months later in Louisiana. There was about a group of 8 of us learning from our teacher together! We were moving through somatic processes on the movement floor, and on the table. After about 5 days of working together as a group, all of a sudden on the 5th night all of us felt ill. Some of us threw up that night, some of us threw up that morning, some (like myself) just felt weak and off. I would have written this experience off as being a weird bug that we all caught at the same time. The only thing preventing me from saying this out of my own experience, is because I felt in an altered state the whole day. It is a hard thing to describe, but basically it felt more to me like a shamanic journey experience instead of your usual common virus/sickness.
In my personal experience I see Somatic Bodywork as being a deep, profound cleansing/rewriting experience. I have seen a wide variety of reactions to this type of therapy. I have worked on a woman who slept for 24 hours straight after I worked on her. I have had people cry and have breakthroughs on the table. I have had a young woman come in with severe low back pain that had come on quick and hard, and within an hour she was totally pain free standing up off my table in complete shock. I have seen a man with chronic low back pain get off the table and remark that his back was better, after checking in on him later, his pain was still gone after weeks of that initial session. I have seen a wide variety of reactions to somatic bodywork. Most report significant pain decrease after the first session.
With ongoing treatment people have the opportunity to rewire their entire nervous system, thus creating a new multitude of possible outcomes for personal expression. If you are not held down in your mind and body by past traumas/poor posture/or stored emotional energies of any kind, imagine how free your mind and body would be to create the most epic version of you!!! You can literally use somatic bodywork as a tool to free yourself of musculo-skeletal/neuro-muscular/ trauma pain. Once freed of this burden, you're free to have a vessel to do the highest biding of your soul. The body becomes a much more clear channel for the soul, without the burden of pain weighing you down.
