As open, adaptable human beings our bodies are always learning, and trying to find the quickest way to organize our systems to get the job done. Sometimes that involves shutting down certain areas that feel weakened, and overusing areas that feel more capable in order to keep going. Almost all of these changes happen automatically, but below our threshold of awareness.

After years of these choices that enable us to keep going, the areas that used to be strong start to give out, and numerous other areas have gone below the radar, including emotional, energetic, muscular, and mental aspects, which then manifest in more limited perceptions, more limited responses, and more limited movement. It’s also called ‘aging’.

Once adaptation patterns become wired in, they will continue to operate until you tell them otherwise. The ongoing imbalances will naturally create dysfunctions that eventually lead to more problems, so intervention is needed. For the corrections to be effective and healing, they must be wholistic.
Your body sees itself and learns as a whole, so focusing on fixing just a part ( even if the source seems emotional ) or an isolated symptom will fragment your system even more.

Psycho- motor programs that have become automatic, adaptive, and compensatory need a chance to be updated on the current situation.  They need to be informed that these protective mechanisms are no longer needed; that the originating circumstances have ended. For your body to believe it, you have to be convinced first.

Becoming aware precedes letting go. Then we can be guided to let go, re-sensitize, and reorganize into more open, more easeful, effortless ways of moving and using ourselves. Letting go and reawakening in the body, because they are interconnected, can also have a profound effect on the psyche, its energy, emotions, and personality.  Part of the healing process involves also becoming aware of the interconnectedness of the different levels of your being overlap and function in an integrated way.

There is a physiology to relearning and re-integrating., and it uses the proprioceptive system to provide feedback to the brain. This reeducation process resets the thermostat on muscles, bringing them back into a comfortable resting tone. The muscles have connections into the joints and nervous system that are in direct communication with the immune and limbic (emotional ) systems.

When the musculo-skeletal system is no longer wired into hyper-vigilance or guard/protect mode, it can directly signal the autonomic nervous system to turn off the stress response which supports healing.

The input via proprioception is so pertinent to the way the body communicates with itself naturally, the information is processed immediately, ready to feed forward new output in the direction of the change. When this input and output are guided to ensure learning occurs in the desired direction, we call this Somatics, or Somatic Education. NSI is directed towards the source of the matter, the heart of the matter, and when these central factors are discovered and learned, the rest takes care of itself.

Becoming Whole via the Parts

When it became obvious that trying to accomplish change through the mind alone  was very limited in actualizing change, I stopped using those methods. I realized that the mind, emotions, spirit, and energy of a person could be reached using various gates in the body, and that contacting all of a person brought forward the most potential for real progress.

I could see that Somatics, its concepts and methods were even more direct, more honest, more revealing, more simple, and much faster than strictly psychological approaches. This remained true even if the physical symptoms were based in psycho-emotional issues as the origin of emotions is also in the body.

The resolution of what appears to be a physical injury or chronic pain due to physical exertion or strain also moves faster when the tensions of associated thought, emotions, or images are open and flowing again. What binds soft tissue can have a variety of sources, and using an approach that is multi-faceted can yield better, farther reaching results.

NSI includes all of what we are. It touches the energetic , emotional, mental, chemical, electrical, and other cellular levels of communication that inform and form the musculo-skeletal system. However, it doesn’t resolve issues by diving into them and looking at them, it resolves them by opening into and out beyond them, wherever they reside in the tissue. 

Then when everything is open and moving again, resiliency and adaptability return; you’re no longer ‘one wrong move’ away from re-injuring yourself, learning and adapting to live in limitation. In the end, it is the awareness within the mind that will help to awaken and rebalance the body, although in the beginning, it appears that approaching the body surpasses approaching the mind.

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