Feel Like Your Body Is Falling Apart? Here’s Why.

I was 18 when I threw my back out for the first time. I was working at a local coffee shop for the summer before heading off to Boston Conservatory to pursue a career in ballet. I mindlessly bent forward with my knees straight and picked up a crate of four gallons of milk, and felt an uncomfortable strain in my lower back muscles. I knew I had hurt myself, but at that moment I had no idea how bad it was. The next day, I couldn’t stand up straight and the pain was unbearable.

It took about four months for my back to completely heal, to the point where I could make it through a ballet class. All the while I kept wondering — why did I throw my back out, and is it going to happen again?

Over the next few years I learned some things about anatomy and became acutely aware of how my tight muscles were affecting my ballet technique. Despite stretching every day, my hips were very tight and I was forcing my turnout as a result. Since I couldn’t achieve proper, full turnout from my hips, I was tilting my pelvis forward and arching my lower back so that my legs could turn out farther.

Holding my back in this arched position while dancing had made my lower back muscles extremely tight over the years. This was why I had so easily thrown my back out when I picked up that crate of milk — my lower back was so tight already. It just took lifting one heavy thing to throw my muscles into spasm.

People who repeatedly throw their back out report it happening from reaching to pick up a coffee mug or bending over to brush their teeth. This happens because their muscles are already so tight, on the brink of going into spasm, that the slightest strain will cause the muscles to painfully seize up.

Unfortunately, I wouldn’t learn the science of why my muscles were chronically tight — and why I couldn’t release them with stretching — for another ten years. But I became obsessed with trying to retrain my muscles so that I could improve my turnout and be aligned properly. I’d get up at 5:30 every morning and lie on the floor in my dorm room, doing movements I’d made up to try to get my muscles to do certain things. On Sundays, my one day off, I’d go down to the dance studios and spend hours doing slow pliés, tendus, and other simple ballet exercises, attempting to retrain my muscular patterns and improve my technique.

I had the right idea; slow, conscious movement and repetition are key elements of retraining muscle memory. But I still hadn’t figured out how to reduce the tension in my muscles. I had a nightly stretching routine that I never skipped, but it only relaxed my muscles for a little while. By the next day, my muscles had always tightened right back up again.

Three years later, it happened again. I was in midair doing a grande jeté and I felt my lower back twist up into a knot. As I landed, I knew exactly what had happened. The next day I was in intense pain. The only way I could move was by shuffling around bent forward at 90°, like an elderly person walking with a cane.

By this time I was suffering from severe bunion pain as well — shooting pains going up through my feet and lower legs every time I went up on pointe. This was also the result of forcing my turnout and having improper alignment; rolling in on my feet was putting pressure on my big toe joints. I realized that my body wasn’t going to hold up if I kept dancing. Soon after my second back injury, I dropped out of school and quit dancing altogether.

Seven years later, while debating getting trained to do something in the health and wellness field, I happened upon the website for Somatic Systems Institute. It described a technique called Clinical Somatics, developed by a man named Thomas Hanna, that relieved pain and improved posture and movement. I’d never heard of it before and it intrigued me, so I immediately ordered Thomas Hanna’s book Somatics.

About five pages in, I looked up from the book and said out loud, “This is it.” I’ll always remember that moment. This was the movement technique I’d needed when I was dancing; this was what I’d been trying to do for myself when I laid on my dorm room floor every morning, trying to retrain my muscles.

Hanna described how we tend to develop habitual muscular contraction as we age. Our nervous system learns to keep our muscles tighter and tighter over the years as a result of stress, repetitive movements, and injuries. The muscular contraction becomes so deeply learned by our nervous system that we can’t voluntarily release it.

Chronically tight muscles cause a lot of problems. Tight muscles are sore and painful. They pull the skeleton out of alignment, leading to nerves being compressed and joint tissue being worn away. Tight waist and back muscles can hike one hip up higher than the other, creating functional leg length discrepancy. Tight muscles can pull the spine into a scoliotic, kyphotic, or lordotic curve. In short, chronically tight muscles are the underlying cause of virtually all the aches, pains, degeneration, and musculoskeletal conditions that we experience as we get older.

Hanna then described how his studies of neurophysiology had led him to the nervous system’s innate defense against chronic muscle tension: pandiculation. Pandiculation is our nervous system’s natural way of waking up our sensorimotor system and preparing us for movement. Humans, along with all vertebrate animals, tend to automatically pandiculate when we wake up or when we’ve been sedentary for a while. If you’ve ever seen a dog or cat arch their back when they get up from a nap, or watched a baby stretch their arms and legs as they wake up, you’ve witnessed the pandicular response.

Pandiculation sends biofeedback to our nervous system regarding the level of contraction in our muscles, thereby helping to prevent the buildup of chronic muscle tension. Pandiculation contracts and releases muscles in such a way that the gamma loop, a feedback loop in our nervous system that regulates the level of tension in our muscles, is naturally reset. This resetting reduces muscular tension and restores conscious, voluntary control over our muscles.

Hanna created hands-on movements and self-care exercises that made use of the pandicular response. His method of neuromuscular education, which he called Clinical Somatic Education, swiftly released muscle tension, relieved pain, and restored natural posture and movement patterns.

Enthralled, I enrolled in the professional training program at Somatic Systems Institute. As I practiced the exercises during my first week of training, I could immediately feel my muscles releasing and my posture shifting. When I stood up after doing some lower back exercises, it felt like my pelvis was literally dropping down behind me — having my lower back muscles finally release was such a strange, unfamiliar feeling!

Even after I quit dancing, I had continued to do my stretching routine every single night, and I was still doing it when I started the Somatics training program. But during our second training module, we learned about the stretch reflex (myotatic reflex). The stretch reflex is triggered automatically when we stretch our muscles farther than they want to go. It automatically contracts our muscles so that we don’t tear our muscles or connective tissues. This means that static stretching — in which we pull on passive muscles, expecting them to get longer — doesn’t actually lengthen our muscles.

I refused to believe it. I was so attached to my stretching routine, and I truly believed that it made my muscles longer. But I was in denial. After all, if stretching really worked, then why were my muscles still so tight after years of daily stretching?

I went home from that training module and decided that I’d give it a try: I’d stop stretching and only do Clinical Somatics exercises for one week, and see how I felt. The first night, I laid down on the floor and spent 45 minutes pandiculating all of the muscles that I normally stretched. When I stood up, my body felt like jelly. My muscles had never felt so relaxed, even after a massage!

The next day, I felt comfortable in my body for the first time in years. I was accustomed to feeling tight and uncomfortable all day, and now I felt simply relaxed and calm. It felt amazing. So that was it — I never did my stretching routine again.

I had another life-changing experience about six months into training: I began to have sensation in my psoas muscle. The psoas is a deep core muscle that attaches the lumbar vertebrae to the lesser trochanter, near the head of the femur bone. Because it’s located deep within the core of the body, the psoas is difficult to feel with your hands and to sense internally.

It took me a long time to gain sensation in my psoas because it was so tight and locked up. But as it gradually started to release, I could finally sense it, and it was like feeling an entirely new part of my body that I’d never felt before. Once I was able to consciously work with my psoas, I became aware that it was at the root of my lower back injuries.

Over the coming months and years I went through a process of gradually releasing my muscles and discovering patterns of tension that I held throughout my body. It was like peeling an onion. I’d become aware of an area or pattern of tension, figure out how to release it, and think “That was it!” Then I’d soon become aware of the next pattern of tension, and the next, and the next.

This process illustrated to me one of the fundamental principles of Somatics: No one else can fix you — you have to fix yourself. No physical therapist, chiropractor, massage therapist, acupuncturist, or doctor could have retrained my muscle memory and released my muscles for me. It simply isn’t possible for someone else to retrain our nervous system for us. It was a process that had to be done by me, from the inside, through conscious movement.

As time went on, I gained more and more confidence in how I used my body. I started running, and it felt amazing — I couldn’t get enough. Somatics gave me so much awareness and control over my body that I could sense when something was the slightest bit off, and I could correct how I was using my body in the moment. I knew I’d never have a recurring injury or be in chronic pain ever again.

Along with my newfound freedom was an intense feeling of frustration: Why didn’t everyone in the world know about this incredible technique?

I discovered that there were two main reasons why. First, Thomas Hanna had passed away in 1990, after having just taught his first professional training class. So at the time of his passing, there were 38 people in the world who had just learned how to teach Clinical Somatics, and it was up to them to continue teaching his method.

Second, we’re taught from a young age that we should go to a doctor or other healthcare professional when something goes wrong with our health. We aren’t taught how to heal ourselves or how to prevent health problems from happening in the first place. As a result, many people don’t want to put in the effort to take care of themselves or heal from a health issue — especially if they can go see a professional who can fix them.

But the reality is that most chronic conditions can’t be truly resolved by someone else; all that health professionals can do is give us a temporary fix. If we don’t deal with the underlying cause— whether it be muscle tension and body use, diet, stress, or lack of exercise — we’ll be back in the doctor’s office in no time.

I knew that I had found my passion. And the fact that virtually no one knew about this life-changing method of pain relief made me all the more motivated to shout it from the rooftops. I began seeing clients and teaching workshops at local yoga studios. I wrote a book about Clinical Somatics, which is on Amazon. After the birth of my daughter, I shifted my teaching online and launched courses that allow people to learn the exercises on their own at home.

I can’t imagine anything better than teaching people how to get themselves out of pain. Being empowered to take control over your own health and get yourself out of pain is so incredibly freeing. With such an effective method of pain relief and injury prevention available, no one should have to suffer in pain. I’ll keep teaching tirelessly until Clinical Somatics becomes a household name and everyone knows that they have the ability to retrain their nervous system and get themselves out of pain.