This book is about posture and movement. As such, it is an excellent sourcebook for somatic practitioners and movement teachers, particularly for teachers who integrate postural education into their classes, including dance, yoga, exercise, and massage training classes. But it was written first and foremost with the massage therapist and bodyworker in mind. Why?

Because this is my area of expertise. I have been a massage therapist and bodyworker for 23 years, specializing in a patterning-style bodywork where I combine posture and movement education with hands-on work to help clients change the patterns that cause their pain and dysfunction. In addition, I have been teaching movement classes to massage therapists and somatic educators in both private training programs and massage schools for 15 years. When I began teaching movement at massage schools, there were actually students who could not understand why it was important. Now, most massage therapists know how important it is for them to use good body mechanics while working to avoid pain and burnout. Massage magazines today are full of stories about how to recover from carpal tunnel syndrome and from shoulder, neck, and back pain, and how to avoid these problems in our work. This sourcebook offers the first comprehensive look at posture and movement for massage therapists, bodyworkers, movement educators, and somatic practitioners, as well as for their clients and students.

Most massage schools now offer some type of ergonomic training in Swedish classes, and may even have a separate class devoted specifically to this type of education. Most schools also have classes that address somatic, or bodymind, patterns, i.e., how emotional patterns and traumas show up in the body problems that many massage clients and practitioners deal with daily. This book was written to be a practitioner’s sourcebook as well as a text for both of these types of classes.

With books popping up left and right for massage therapists these days, you might be asking how this book is different and how it can help you. Somatic Patterning is unique in that it pulls together a broad body of information about body-mind patterns that until now you would have needed to study at least 40 books, many of them obscure, to understand.

Somatic Patterning is a practical and comprehensive sourcebook that can help you in three ways:

• It gives you concrete tools to improve your own posture and movement so that you can have a long and prosperous career without burnout.

To have a successful career in this field, a practitioner must use effective body mechanics, have a strong and healthy body, and practice attentive self-care. One of the primary sources of the repetitive-stress injuries that many of us experience may be ergonomics, but all ergonomic problems are rooted in poor posture and faulty body-use habits. This book goes far beyond the typical posture studies taught to massage therapists. It draws on a broad array of somatics and biomechanical approaches to provide theoretical information and simple exercises for you to improve your posture and movement not just on the job, but in all aspects of your life.

• It gives you simple, logical, and easy-to-teach exercises for your clients.

If you’re like most massage therapists, you probably teach your clients stretches and relaxation exercises to help them with the problems for which they come to you for relief. Most of the problems that clients need help with are rooted in poor posture and faulty movement habits, and this book is chock-full of exercises that you can share with your clients to help solve these problems. To make this text more user friendly, I encourage you to photocopy the exercises right out of the book and share them with your clients. (See the copyright page for photocopying parameters.)

• It gives you a template for understanding bodymind patterns in such a way that you can apply your new understanding directly to your table work with clients, which will boost your skill level and help you get better results.

Most massage practitioners learn a lot of hands-on techniques. But understanding which technique to use when on whom for the best results is another kind of knowledge altogether. I know from my own practice and my experience supervising massage therapists over the years that we all struggle with this issue. It is important because whenever we practice hands-on work, we are continuously stretching, moving, and repositioning the client’s body. Whatever the choices we make about these movements of our client’s body will help to shape a pattern in the muscles, joints, and nerves involved?a pattern that may stem from an ideal the practitioner holds, but is more often random.

Somatic Patterning addresses this issue by giving you a detailed template from which to understand the body-mind patterns that promote alignment, health, and well-being. With this information, you can make informed choices about how you touch your clients, and not only improve your skill level, but get better results. This text is the result of an intense study of the broad and diverse fields that work to change body-mind patterns. I coined the term “somatic patterning” as an umbrella for these approaches to wed two distinct approaches, the field of somatics with the generic process of patterning. Somatic approaches excel at working with the body-mind connection, particularly in cultivating body awareness. By making us aware of the continual flow of sensations through the body, particularly those sensations generated by movement, somatics teaches us to use awareness as a guide to improving mental, physical, and emotional health.

But a guide may be of little use without a map. Awareness through movement is a first step in changing body-mind patterns; patterning gives the somatic process direction. Patterning is a generic term to describe any method of intentionally changing body patterns to improve posture and movement. Some of the most widely recognized systems of patterning are muscle conditioning used in physical therapy for rehabilitation, ergonomic education for reducing repetitive stress injuries taught to office workers, and biofeedback for reducing the ill effects of stress. I believe that patterning systems such as these provide the direction and content needed for comprehensive somatic education, which Somatic Patterning was written to describe.

Whenever massage therapists integrate movement education into hands-on work, they are practicing somatic patterning. It is my hope that somatic patterning as a paradigm and a comprehensive body of work will become a standard study in massage schools. As a paradigm, somatic patterning can make massage more effective and refined, offering an array of practical approaches for working with rather than on the client’s body-mind patterns in a comprehensive and holistic manner.

Massage therapists and movement educators, it is my hope that this sourcebook will give you more tools to improve your own posture and movement so that you can have a long and productive career. Also, if you are the type of massage therapist who likes to teach your clients stretches and relaxation skills in order to give them the tools with which to help themselves, this sourcebook will provide you with many new tools in postural education. And lastly, it is my hope that you can more fully integrate somatic patterning skills into your massage or bodywork practice or classes to boost your skill level as well as the effectiveness of your work. In support of this, I welcome all questions and comments about this work that you may have. To contact me, please send me an e-mail at info@emspress.com.

Somatic patterning is so broad a field that its essence is often obscured by the diverse approaches it encompasses. Simply put, somatic refers to anything involving the “body-mind” relationship, and patterning refers to the process of intentionally changing body-mind patterns to improve posture and movement. Part 1 introduces the eclectic field of somatic patterning to the reader by presenting its theoretical underpinnings.

Chapter 1 begins with an introduction to the influences that shape bodymind patterns of posture and movement, with an emphasis on the sensorimotor learning processes of early motor development. This chapter explains that our patterns of posture and movement are not only molded and conditioned by early emotions and environmental conditions, but also remain an outward manifestation of our deepest thoughts and feelings throughout our lifetimes. This bodymind congruency is stressed throughout the text.

Many somatic patterning methods grew out of the need to address dysfunctional body-mind patterns that show up as general discomfort and ill-health, and can lead to pain and injury. Chapter 2 addresses this issue of dysfunctional patterns, discussing what occurs in the body that leads to patterns of pain and tension, and how to work with dysfunctional patterns.

Because there are so many different somatic schools and methods, knowing how to choose which technique to use when and to apply where can be confusing. To attempt to clear up this confusion, Chapter 3 presents the primary concepts and principles of somatic patterning that have been compiled from an extensive survey of the field. Chapter 4 categorizes the primary approaches and their application to specific types of body-mind issues.

This first part introduces simple patterning exercises for readers to build somatic awareness, learn relaxation techniques, deal with patterns of pain, work with breathing, and begin sensing the body both at rest and in movement. It concludes with a look at the steps of the patterning process in Chapter 5 to launch the reader into the many patterning exercises presented in Part 2.

As any reader who has explored any of the somatic patterning (SP) exercises presented so far knows, SP does not involve sweat. Yet while the SP exercises are easier than working out, they can be much more mentally challenging because the proprioceptive feedback a person gets from vigorous exercise is much stronger than the subtle sensations generated by patterning exercises. Unlike training for strength and endurance, SP trains for coordination, balance, and efficiency through the refinement of posture and movement. This refinement naturally enhances exercise and sports performance because it improves the economy of all body movements.

The refinement of movement patterns is made necessary by the immense functional changes that the human body has had to adapt to in recent history. Consider that in only the past hundred years, work-related demands on the human soma have evolved through three major transitions: from the physical labor of agriculture, to the mechanical exertions of industry, to the mental tasks of technology. Unless a person comes from a strong gene pool that breeds sturdy, resilient bodies, these changes have occurred much faster than the average body has been able to adapt to. Maladaptations are rampant as evidenced by the prevalence of structural and functional breakdowns in the body that the average person has to deal with, the most obvious being poor posture, which tends to accelerate the normal changes associated with aging.

Increasingly complex challenges call for comprehensive methods of postural education. The most popular method, ergonomics, is extremely helpful for the correct positioning of the body in relation to chairs and desks, yet it overlooks the intrinsic postural adaptations that people can carry with them into any activity. A comprehensive somatic patterning program can fill this gap because it is inclusive of mechanical, neuromuscular, and organic, biologically based approaches.

Although it will become obvious in Part 3 on the history of somatic patterning that a person can take numerous approaches to changing body-mind patterns, this section focuses primarily on patterning methods that involve actual body movement and muscular control. Because it would be impossible to source every single movement exercise, credits are given in this section only for exercises that are unique and have a clear source. However, whenever possible, the source of a specific theory or approach is provided.

Somatic therapies are being developed at a rapid pace. The proliferation of modalities and approaches in the general field of somatics can be confusing to the novice and practitioner alike. The chapters in Part 3 cover somatic principles underlying those modalities that work to change somatic patterns. These five chapters present an overview of diverse somatic approaches that work to change body-mind patterns of movement and psychophysiology. The overview is limited to what this author believes are the groundbreaking approaches in the respective areas. As a result, many useful and at times better-known second- and third-generation approaches that have grown out of these seminal works are not included here. Modalities and approaches are presented here in five categories, each a separate chapter of Part 3:

• Western movement therapies
• integrative manual therapies
• physiological patterning
• behavioral and cognitive patterning
• body-based psychotherapies

This history is not meant as a representation of how to practice any modality or system. Although such a history cannot help but reflect the views of the author, for the sake of accuracy, experts in each modality were given the opportunity to review the text on their respective system. Lastly, this history is presented as a background for the theory and practice found in Parts 1 and 2 of this book.