Hi,
I'm Lisa.
I'm so happy you're here.
I'm thrilled that Insight Timer is a way that we can now share Hanasomatic yoga and Hanasomatic education with you.
If you've never heard of Hannah's somatic education,
It's a wonderful practice developed by Thomas Hannah and brought into the world by his wife,
Eleanor Criswell Hanna,
And part of the teaching team at Novato Institute.
It's a practice of doing movements.
Where you shift brain level.
You're doing movements with your motor cortex.
The part of your brain that does mindful movement in the present,
The part of your brain that can lower the level of contraction in your muscles,
As opposed to subcortical parts of your brain that do fast,
Learned,
Bombastic movements,
But you can only ever do those movements the way you have thought about them.
Learn to do them.
And subcortical parts of your brain cannot lower the level of contraction in the muscles.
So if it's new to you,
You may at first find that you have some aversion to moving as slowly as you're invited to move.
You may find that it's almost too subtle for you.
And what I would offer is,
Remember that this is work for your brain.
And if you can get yourself to slow down.
And tune into these very subtle movements.
You'll be able to do everything else you do in your life.
With greater ease and comfort and speed because your muscles will be able to coordinate and communicate and cooperate with one another at a higher level.
Hanisomatic education is often practiced from the floor.
The movements are done lifting out of gravity,
Which puts a load on the muscle.
And then the release is a lowering of the level of contraction in the muscles recruited to do the movement.
So the load or gravity is what is helping you to come out of the movement rather than engaging a new muscle.
And Hanasomatic yoga,
Which was developed by Eleanor Criswell,
Uses Hanasomatic exercises to prepare you to do your postures and is practiced all the limbs of yoga in a way that brings the same principles of how we practice hana somatic education.
So you're tuning in rather than watching,
You're listening,
Organizing the instructions within your soma and doing your version.
You're given time following yoga postures to invite your body to relax and to tune into the sensory information that has been generated from doing the posture.
And you're trying to do what you do with the greatest degree of ease.
That you can do it,
Which is a valuable learning because for various reasons,
A lot of us have habituated to doing movements that are hard and forceful and don't feel good.
I hope you'll come and visit me for some practices of hana somatic yoga and hana somatic education.
Namaste.
