Thomas Hanna

Let me ask you this.

So as you mentioned, Thomas Hanna studied under Feldenkrais.

So what did Hanna add to Feldenkrais? Great question.

It's a great question because I actually only learned that this year.

The stress reflexes being fight, flight, freeze, and fawn.

So when we have a lack of safety in our bodies, we are automatically tense.

Thomas Hanna said basically like, well, what if we could soften those reflexes? And he did it through a movement modality called pandiculation.

And a pandiculation is a contraction into a pattern, right? So a pattern can be anything, right? So if we think about freeze, for example, we're taught that's most likely impacting our deep front lines.

Like, I can't even remember which shoulder it was now, whether it was my right shoulder was a lot higher than my left, or it was even my left higher than my right.

But one shoulder was a lot higher than the other, which can be the sign that we've learned through our training and Thomas Hanna's work, that you've had a traumatic kind of experience or an impact within your life, and that's how it's showing up in the body, how trauma can show up in the body.

And yeah, I'd never noticed that before.

Just standing in the mirror and looking at myself.

So in somatic movement, we call all of this sensory motor amnesia.

This is a term coined by a somatic education pioneer, Thomas Hanna.

And he says sensory motor amnesia doesn't mean that your muscles are damaged.

It doesn't mean that you're irrevocably broken.