Fast relief for stiff and painful movement - easy safe gentle - somatic movement classes in Adelaide western suburbs

You do not have to suffer stiff and painful movement anymore. With this simple movement routine you can learn to keep yourself supple and moving. Sadly even medical professionals will dismiss you with "well what do you expect at your age" or other glib observations about your injuries. You will be sent to the physio and prescribed a few anti-inflammatory drugs. But who needs to spend life going to physio appointments, not to mention the money, and who wants to live on drugs forever.

But, I hear you say!

My doctor says I have arthritis, and its true, the scans show it

Yes, you have arthritis. So do many people who are practising this simple routine, and because they are doing it they are feeling less pain in their body. It doesn't cure the arthritis but it can go a long way to resolving your pain.

I have a herniated disc (prolapsed disc, bulging disc, slipped disc - it's all the same)

And so you might. and when it first happened there was tremendous pain. But further down the track it is probably not the disc that is causing most of your woes.

I have a Hip replacement (knee replacement, shoulder reconstruction etc)

Do you know what, I am not going to list all the various reasons people put their painful movement down to. The truth is that a lot of the time, despite the injuries, a lot of pain can be resolved with these simple movements.

How is that possible? No, it is fair enough to be sceptical, you've got some pathology in the body that even the medicos are saying is the cause of your woes, and here am I telling you it might not be so.

There is a solution to pain in the body, and it is easy, but you have to act

What the doctors aren't telling you (perhaps they don't know)

At a critical time you have an injury, or over time your joints degrade or whatever it is in your body, what it does is it makes you move in a strange way to protect yourself. Sadly that sets up a whole train of events in the muscular body that pulls it into distortion. Over time, if you keep on doing the same thing, these patterns get set, the muscles forget how they are meant to be and a terrible chain of rigidity and stiffness is established.

It happens even without injuries and disease and now we have chronic pain and stiffness

Are you sitting at a computer reading this? Pay attention for a moment to how you are sitting.

Or if you are reading this on a phone, what is your posture?

Perhaps you are standing and reading. Are you standing with all your weight on one side?

Are you sitting with your legs crossed?

Are you crouched over?

We all do it, but the long term consequences of these habits can be precisely the pain you are now finding chronic in your body.

Quasimodo needed to know this

As we go through life repeating such habits, whether just the habit of sitting cross legged while hunching our shoulder and craning the neck when working on the computer, or the habit of moving in a certain way because for awhile we had an acute injury phase and we never stopped protecting it, muscles forget what they are really supposed to do. More accurately the brain and the muscle get a bit out of touch and develop what we call Sensory Motor Amnesia. Fancy name, no need to remember it.

It is just that they get a bit fixed in their ways. Deeply held tension gets set up in the muscles and without some serious intervention they don't know how to let go. And that adds up to pain for you.

What we need to do is to re-educate them. Which is what this program is designed to do, through somatic movement repatterning.

Somatic movements

This is a generic name for a whole group of movement practices that work in similar ways to relieve the body aches and pains we are talking about. The term "somatic" was coined by Thomas Hanna to describe them. Soma is the Greek word for a living body, but we apply it in this movement discipline to mean the felt-sense of the body. That's important because it is by really noticing the feeling of what is going on that we get that brain/muscle connection happening again.

Gentle and easy

Somatic movements are so easy to do. You do as much as you can and that is perfect. To come to our classes though you will need to be able to get up and down off the floor. If you cannot do that yet, you had best start with a private clinical session, which is done on a table to make it easy for you.

So what do you have to lose?

• time spent going to medical and physio appointments
• stiff and painful movement
• being left out because you cannot dance, walk, hike, play with the kids

What might you gain?

• ease in the body
• move with freedom
• knowledge of a short and simple movement routine you can tailor to your own needs
• live life to the fullest

Two Pain-free Body/Mind classes per week

6pm Monday with Jo Bentley 60 minutes - Jo Bentley is practising Clinical Somatics and if you feel you need a private appointment, call her on 0400 225 210

6pm Thursday with Tina Shettigara 90 minutes - Tina's class includes an iRest® Yoga Nidra meditation.

Join these classes at Yoga Spirit Studios, 194 Henley Beach Road, Torrensville, SA 5031. Call us on 08 8352 7823, or email info@yogaspirit.com.au

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