How to remember your muscles

We don't think of ourselves as having amnesia, unless we've obviously forgotten large chunks of our lives, but this type of amnesia is different and it happens to us frequently.

I'm talking about the term somatic motor amnesia, which is what Thomas Hanna used to describe the phenomenon whereby we forget how to rest and relax our muscles. This effectively leaves our muscles in a chronically contracted state, leading to physical dysfunction and pain. When your muscles are unable to return to their natural resting length

As a related example, this not being able to switch off, is akin to us coming home after a stressful day and not being able to switch our brain off. If you've every lain awake at night with thoughts buzzing about in your head, or noticed if you feel wired when you're trying to relax, this is a similar phenomenon. If not addressed, we will begin to adapt to this chronic state of tension and stress and eventually come to live this as our basic state of normal. This is the amnesia part, we forget what true relaxation feels like. We continue living our lives with the stress state as our normal baseline without even noticing that we are switched on and wonder why we can't sleep as well at night, feel irritable or just, in general, feel out-of-sorts.

You could also think of a distant siren going off, the hum of a fan or white noise. If it goes on for long enough your brain doesn't even register it any more, even though it's still there. You only notice it was on when eventually the noise stops and you realise – ah, that's what quiet sounds like.

When you hold an habitual level of tension in your muscles that is beyond the normal resting muscle tone, and don't notice, you have sensory motor amnesia. This is what somatic movement education aims to address. Through the process of mindful, slow contraction and release of muscles and muscle groups, you begin to re-awaken your motor-neuron pathways that have become forgotten.

In somatic movement education we take regular 'body-scans' to notice the before and after effects of releasing muscular tension so that the brain notices what resting and relaxing feels like. Once you consciously notice what relaxation feels like, you begin to notice when you are tense. You can't relax a muscle you don't notice is tense. Once you raise your body awareness to notice when you are tense, you can relax consciously throughout your day.

When your muscles are resting at their normal muscle tone, you begin to function and move with more ease. Pain that was caused by chronic muscular tension (which is the cause much of unexplained chronic pain) will ease.

Although sensory motor amnesia deals with physical tension in the muscles, all parts of our being are a related whole. When we move through somatic movements in a slow mindful manner, we are creating space for our whole being to relax. The physical body relaxes because our muscles have a chance to re-set to their optimal resting state but the mind also gets a chance to release its cacophony of swirling thoughts because we bring our conscious attention to a single focus, allowing our brain to take a break from thinking and be in a state of noticing and receiving. This is very much a moving meditation and we will gain the benefits of this as much as any form of meditation.