SomaSpirals
TM
Somaspirals is a movement practice developed and created by Heather Parsons, designed to tap into your body's innate wisdom. By guiding and inviting your body to move in circular and spiral movements you’re exploring, in such a way that it teaches you something about your body and its movements.
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Unlike with typical workouts, you’re not trying to do as many exercises as possible. Instead, you’re fine tuning your sensory feedback so you are able to self guide to release tension, pain and muscular imbalance to create efficiency of movement with comfort, ease and pleasure. Pandiculating, the way animals do, is a natural way to release tension and reset homeostasis within.
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One of the gifts of Somaspirals is the felt-sense experience ' a remembering' of our primary relationship with the body of Earth.
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Getting more in touch with your body can also have the added benefit of increasing your emotional awareness. Many people who have trouble expressing emotions find it easier to convey them through movement.
Somaspirals was created by Heather Parsons and is inspired by the many forms of movement and body work from over 3 decades of her journey, teaching and learning.
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TM
What is Soma and why Spiral?
Soma is a word of ancient Greek origin and means “body” and where the field of somatic therapy has developed. Somatics emphasizes the individual’s internal experience of the body.
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Thomas Hanna, an educator in the field, coined the term Somatics in 1970 to describe a number of techniques, including pandiculation, that share one important similarity: They help people increase bodily awareness through a combination of movement and relaxation.
While somatic practices have become increasingly popular in the Western world over the last 50 years, many of them draw from ancient Eastern philosophy and healing practices origination.
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Historically, Soma means something in Buddhism, Pali, Hinduism, Sanskrit, Jainism, Prakrit, and is documented in the history of ancient Greece (Hellas).
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Soma is the elixir of the Gods and Soma is personified by the god of the same name and associated with the Moon.
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In Sanskrit: सोम, Soma literally means “to distill or extract”.
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Now, in the contemporary field of bodywork, somatics signifies a shift towards integrating body AND mind in the process of overcoming life’s obstacles.
It emphasizes the idea of learning from and through the body.
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Somatics on is about experiencing (systems sensing) how aspects of ourselves work together.
Sensing as a primary learning mode provides unique insights that top-down processes can't reveal.
Energy Moves in Spirals.
The spiral is the shape of a double helix in the DNA of each cell.
The spiral is the creating energy of flowers, trees, shells, fingerprints. The spider weaves its web in spirals and our earth, sun, galaxy, this whole universe is spiraling around and at the same time expanding forever.
The spiral is perceived to be the torque of the universe, a symbol of growth, evolution, and expansion.
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Spirals are most common in biological organisms as is the most effective way for something to grow in two directions under the force of gravity and its rebound. This interplay it gives us the connection earth-to-sky. It is the motion of rotation created by gravitational differences that creates the famous spiral shape.
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If we do not use the spiral motion at all, we get a straight line, and under the strain of gravity that is a very poor design.
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We can find the spiral pattern in our muscles, how they wrap bones around in a continuous network of spiraling movement. The heart spirals in and around itself, the blood enter and leaves the heart in a spiral, as the heart is nearer to a spiralizer (Gil Hedley) than a pump. Indeed, all the fluids of our body flow in spiral currents reflecting forms of nature’s rivers and waterfalls.
The common connection within all our internal space is the Fascia. If we removed every muscle, bone, artery, vein, nerve, organ from the body we would be left with fascia as a three dimensional ghost of the body, showing every organ muscle nerve etc in more detail than may be conceived at this moment in time. It is the fascia that forms us, in spirals.
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When we invite a pandiculating spiral motion in to our bodies we have a direct access of movement creativity and flow; We evoke a body-mind atonement, we foster sensations of ease, intimacy and pleasure, they help us to recover from chronic injury, as they naturally re align our body.
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