Whatever we experience - be it physical or mental/emotional - has a physical effect on our bodies. We often learn to see the mental and emotional as separate from the body, but this is a false dichotomy, as anyone who has ever experienced butterflies in the stomach can tell you. Our bodies phyiscal response does not separate between the mental/emotional and the physical - but that isn’t how we have been taught to perceive and think about our bodies and beings. This seperation in how we think about and relate to our experiences leaves us disconnected from our bodies and short circuits our ability to fully process and experience all that living has to offer. These physical responses to what we live, feel and experience get stored over time in our bodies as unconscious patterns of tension and a disconnection - Thomas Hanna called them “sensory motor amnesia” - from our bodies themselves.

While each of us is unique in our experience of these stress-related patterns, we tend to respond to stress in one of three ways- we can take action, protect ourselves, or compensate. Each of these has a physical side, even when we think of our response as mental or emotional. Thomas Hanna called these respectively the green light, red light and trauma reflexes. These are full body patterns of response that are related to our individual experience of the events of our lives. When these patterns become habituated - become our unconscious and un remarked “normal” - then they can lead to pain and disconnection in our bodies.

Green LIght Reflex/Action reflex

When we respond to the events in our lives with action - moving forward, fleeing, getting angry, etc - we activate the muscles of the back body, even if we don’t actually move at all. Over time, especially if we live fast paced, driven lifestyles - for reasons we see as both positive and negative - we get accustomed to a chronic activation of these muscles and create an unconscious pattern of contraction in the back plane of the body. Over time we can see this pattern in things like a deeply arched back, a flattened neck, and shoulders that are pulled back and down. This unconscious constant contraction can lead to things like back pain, jaw, neck and shoulder issues, herniated disks and hip/knee pain among other complaints.

Red light Reflex/Protection Reflex

When we respond to the events of our lives with fear, worry and anxiety we are trying to protect ourselves. These protection responses activate the front of the body - as if we are trying to curl ourselves into a ball and hide. Again these physical activations of the muscles happen without actually curling into a ball - feeling anxious is enough to activate the muscles that would protect you from attack. Just as with the green light reflex, if we respond with fear/anxiety repeatedly we make a habit of this response and this contraction in the front body becomes constant. Habituation to the red light reflex can cause the chest to sink in and down, the head and chin to come forward, and the inner thighs and belly to chronically tighten. This can lead to hip/knee pain, shallow or limited breathing, digestive problems, and neck and shoulder pain among other issues.

Trauma Reflex/Compensation Reflex

When something happens to our physical bodies we compensate to allow the injured place time to heal. To avoid pain we keep that area still, and ask other parts of the body to do more. Imagine a knee or ankle injury - while the injury is healing we limp/use crutches etc to keep weight off of the injured area. Once the injury has healed though, we need to unlearn the limp. Unfortunately this compensation often has been learned so well that it becomes an unconscious habit that we carry with us long after the acute injury has healed. Even a surgery that saves your life can cause your body to compensate around the place of that physical trauma. This reflex usually creates one sided tension that makes the sides of the body asymmetrical - different from each other through these unconscious compensations that allowed us to heal. This can result in postural imbalances that can lead to things like shoulder and neck pain; knee, hip and foot issues; leg length differences and of course pain.

Any repeated action can become habit - how we look at our phones, the way we sit at our desks, the sports or activities we do regularly - all of these can become a part of how we hold tension, and thus how we “show up” in our physical bodies. A great what to see what we have stored is to look at your unconscious posture. How do you stand when you aren’t paying attention? Do your knees lock? Do you slouch? Is your chin forward, or your back deeply arched? Do you always stand with the weight more on one foot than the other? When you look in the mirror are your shoulders level? These are your patterns at work in the unique microcosm of your own body. While these three main patterns are universal, our individual experience is unique. These everyday responses to stressors manifest as muscle tension in our bodies and shape both our movements and our experience.

What we experience as pain, discomfort or disconnection is the boiling over of these patterns. Their impacts become conscious because they cause us pain or limit our movements, but the underlying patterns generally remain unseen and untreated because the current medical systems tend to treat the symptom - pain - rather than the cause - unconscious held tension in the body that can be changed through intentional, conscious connection and integration of the body. Hanna/Clinical Somatics uses a type of movement called pandiculation to help your mind, which is controlling muscle length, learn to reset and permanently change this set point of tension so that you can feel freer, more alive and reduce/eliminate the aches and pains that we currently describe as a part of aging. Defining these experiences