Ep124: A Somatic Approach to Bodywork, with Dr. Gabriel Posner

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What makes a massage truly somatic? It's not about deeper pressure or fancier techniques. It's about presence, awareness, and recognizing that the only person who can relax a muscle is the person who owns it. 

Aimee welcomes Dr. Gabriel Posner, a Hanna Somatic Educator, researcher, and author of Somatic Techniques for Massage Therapists, to explore how bodyworkers can shift from a biomedical "working on a body" approach to a somatic "engaging with a soma" approach.

Whether you give bodywork or receive it, this conversation will change how you think about touch.  

Dr. Gabriel takes us through:

• Why massage therapist don't necessarily relax someone else's muscles. 

• How bringing awareness to a tight spot can soften it without forceful pressure.

• Why most musculoskeletal pain comes from perfectly functioning physiology.

• The difference between the biomedical (third-person) and somatic (first-person) perspectives.

• Why practitioners must heal themselves to be effective guides for others.

And so much more!

Guest Bio:

Gabriel is the current president of the Association for Hanna Somatic Education’s board of directors and is funded by the Association to develop research on the field. In addition, Gabriel trains clinical practitioners and movement teachers with Martha Peterson and Essential Somatics. 

He also operates a private practice in Denver, Colorado, offering hands-on clinical somatic sessions, group classes, and trainings for both somatic practitioners and massage therapists. His first book, Somatic Techniques for Massage Therapists was released by Handspring Publishing earlier this year. Gabriel loves guiding people through somatic healing transformations and sharing this work with other wellness practitioners.

Connect with Gabriel:

Website: ⁠www.elevatedsomatics.com⁠

TikTok: Soma_to_soma 

Check out his weekly online class ⁠https://elevatedsomatics.as.me/schedule/0accd757/appointment/28992385/calendar/6330784⁠

and visit ⁠www.Essentialsomatics.com⁠ for info about training. 

His book’s discussion guide: Somatic techniques for massage therapists 

Connect with Aimee:

Instagram: @aimeetakaya 

Facebook: Aimee Takaya 

Learn more about Aimee Takaya, Hanna Somatic Education, and The Radiance Program at⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠www.freeyoursoma.com⁠⁠⁠.⁠⁠

LISTEN WHILE READING!

A: Hey there, listener. Aimee Takaya here of Free Your Summer Podcast. Have you ever had an incredible massage, a massage that makes you feel seen and felt and heard on a spiritual level? I know I have and I for one as a body worker know what it's like to really hold someone in that space. 

We're going to explore today the techniques, specific techniques for body workers as well as the experience that makes a massage or body work somatic versus some other way that it could be. 

I have Dr. Gabriel Posner on the podcast who has a new book, Somatic Techniques for Massage Therapists and we're going to discuss all of this and more as it pertains to body work, not only as someone who might receive it, but as someone who might give it. So stay tuned. 

A: Every day there is a forgetting and every moment there is the possibility of remembering. Remembering who you truly are, awakening to your body, to the inner world, to the experience of being alive. Here is where you find the beauty, the joy, and here is where you free your Soma. I'm your host, Aimee Takaya. I'm here to help you move from pain to power, from tension to expansion, and ultimately from fear to love. 

G: Yeah, it's great to see you. Thanks for having me. 

A: Gosh, it's been a while. You were on episode 50, right? And I mean, we're in the hundreds now, I'm not sure where, but it was season one or two of my podcast, I think. Yeah, the episode 50. And we had an episode all about science, somatics, and the future of mind body research, because you are like me are a fellow Hannah somatic educator, but you have also received a doctorate and you have published a study on Hannah somatic education. 

One of the few studies that is available. So can you tell us a little bit about, you know, kind of a brief summary of how you got into Hannah somatics, why you decided to go so deep with this and what, you know, what your mission is here? 

G: Yeah, great. Be happy to. So I got into Hannah somatics, like many people who get into Hannah somatics because I needed it. I was coming out of massage school and I was falling apart. I was completely literally falling apart. I remember, I remember wondering like how I was going to get through the next year of working, let alone like having this career that I just paid money to get certified in and to do for 10 or 20 years. 

And I was spending every dollar I made on treatments to keep myself functioning. So I was in a really rough spot when I found Hannah somatics and luckily I was working at a spa slash salon. And one of the estheticians there, her husband, was going through the Nevada Institute's training program and I was talking with her about what I was going through and she's like, you should check out this somatic work. 

I'm like, okay, sure. And so I don't know how many times she had to ask me to, if I checked out the book, but I finally checked out the book and I read it and it made a lot of sense. But a lot of things that you read make a lot of sense. So I'm like dubious. I'm kind of a dubious person by nature. 

But I, I don't know, I gave it a try. I laid down, I listened to the, or read the instructions in the back of the book, he has all these different lessons and I followed the lessons and I started to feel better. And I kept doing them and I started to feel even better. 

So that was completely life changing. It not just for my ability to continue doing massage, but it completely shifted the way that I organize myself, the way that I engaged with the world, the way, the possibilities that I had for my life and who I was to become. 

And now here I am 20 years later, I've been practicing for about 18, 19 years as a hand of somatic educator, I was practicing on massage therapists and a somatic educator for a long time until they kind of just like more and more started blend and become the one practice that I do. 

And so I went back to grad school, I got my doctorate in mind body medicine through Saber University, which coincidentally was originally the Humanistic Psychology Institute started by Eleanor Criswell, my mentor and our teacher at Novato Institute, probably both of our mentors, I would imagine. And, and so that was really cool to bring that full circle and get a doctorate from the school that she had founded. And she was on my dissertation committee. 

So a lot of great synchronicities there. And yeah, I'm practicing Denver, I teach with Martha Peterson and essential somatics by trained new practitioners in this. And I'm still working on getting more research done. In fact, one of my goals this year is to shift from doing primarily practice to research and decide to doing primary research and practicing on the side, because I'm just feeling really called to get get the data, get this information out there in a validated scientific way, a way that is recognized by a broader part of the population. 

A: Yeah, and it's it's very important because a lot of people really have no idea about this method, you know, especially people who are in positions where they could be, you know, referring difficult patients or clients who are not getting relief in any other way, who could be getting relief if they were working with their nervous systems in this way. 

And so having published studies and information made more available to, you know, people in that, you know, industry and world, you know, there's people out there that can get the help that they need. Because as you and I both know, this work can really apply across the board to all kinds of different challenges and be really quite miraculous in terms of the results that people get that they're not getting from anything else. 

You know, I mean, I've certainly got a few case studies in my time as a practitioner, and I'm sure you do too, where a person's body starts to shift into parasympathetic, they start to relax more deeply than they ever have before. And again, as we talk about in Hannah's Sematics, lower the resting level of the muscles significantly over and over until the whole person, their entire body, their entire being is just more open and relaxed. And what, you know, I often ask people, what in your life would change if you were more open and relaxed all the time? 

Right? But it's not even about just being open and relaxed, it's also being about like more responsive to life, right? And so in our conversation today, right, we're going to talk about this book that you wrote that I mean, it sounds like it's been a long time in the making, you've been practicing as a massage therapist, synthesizing both of these kind of modalities for a while, and then also teaching. 

And now, of course, there needs to be a book so that more and more people can have access to this information, right? You know, in my introduction, I was talking about this kind of incredible feeling that one can get when they are held in a certain way in a body work session. And in terms of when you say somatic techniques for massage therapists, what is the quality of a somatic practitioner and the way that they handle someone versus a different kind of massage therapy that's less somatic? What would you say would be the, how would you describe that contrast? 

G: Yeah, I mean, I think what's interesting about that is that massage is probably the most like innately somatic type of like wellness or integrative medicine, complementary medicine that we do. 

It can be an innately somatic thing. And so the book is all about just bringing people there. You know, most massage therapists are halfway or more already there and just bringing them like fully there. I taught at massage school for a long time for about six years in California at the National Holistic Institute. It's a great training program. 

They have campuses all over a little shout out to them. And I remember once I had this student and he'd been a professional boxer and very muscular guy still, a very big muscular guy, but he was so nervous when he came in and he was really struggling to just get through like our basic training and like Swedish massage. Like you could just see he was wound up and nervous. And when he was giving the massage, he was like unsure himself and kind of like clumsy for, and this is like a very athletic person. He was just very clumsy and nervous. 

And so if he wasn't going to get through his Swedish test, he couldn't continue in the course. And so I took him aside one day after class and we worked with another teacher. I had the other teacher lay down and be his recipient for it. And I had him just like try to do his massage and he started just very fast and rubbing and just doing the mechanics of a Swedish massage. And I was like, no, no, just just just rest your hands on your partner's body and just feel. 

Just just start there. Just feeling what you're doing. And he breathed and his shoulders relaxed. And he almost started crying as he started to just do the exact same thing. 

But just by asking him to stop and think about and reflect and feel what he was doing, he started to soften and move slowly and smoothly. And you could just sense the energy in the room. And I wasn't feeling his touch, but I could tell that his touch had like, like shifted. And now he was massaging somatically because now he wasn't just doing the mechanics of massage, but he was, he was in it. He was experiencing the work and he was engaging and experiencing the person he was working with. 

And so this is, you know, the essence of this book of how do you shift what you're doing and so much of it is just is a perspective shift. And is that like a little reflection on like, I am engaging with another soma right now. You know, I'm not, I'm not working on a body. I'm not trying to relax a muscle, pushing on skin. No, like, I am touching and engaging with a, another soma, another living, breathing, a live being. And that is this incredibly intimate, powerful thing that happens just by shifting the perspective to that. So that's sort of where the book starts. And then there's lots that I add into that. Yeah. 

A: Did you know that your muscles are holding on to thoughts, memories and feelings? If you have a tight neck or back, you're not just getting old. You're experiencing a buildup of tension from the life you've lived. Most people don't know this, but there is a part of your brain that can reverse and prevent chronic tension. When you relax your muscles, you not only move better and regulate your nervous system, but you also free yourself from the grip the past has over your body. So you can live with freedom, confidence and enjoy your life now. How does that sound? 

Join me, beautiful. I know what I also really love about the story you're sharing here is his nervous system and his body needed to relax in order to be able to be present. And when he was kind of lifted, you know, in his body, as you described, like tight and clenched and moving quickly and not breathing and all of that, it was much harder, maybe even impossible for him to really drop in to being present in the way that you invited him to be present. And so, I mean, I personally feel that as a body worker, we need to receive body work regularly to be in that position that we're inviting other people into that intimate sacred space where we are receiving that touch.

We are receiving that calming. We are co-regulating with another person, which is what you did with him in that moment, right? He got to feel into the calm and present quality of your nervous system. And it's amazing how quickly things can shift when we're able to co-regulate in that way. When our nervous system, nervous system, soma to soma experience can be shared that way. 

Again, miracles, things happen so quickly when we're able to drop in like that, right? So in this book, you're talking about like how to work with other people. Do you also describe some of these somatic exercises that have the practitioner also work with themselves? 

G: Absolutely. In fact, one of the chapters is about, I think about like the skills of becoming a soma-naut. So Gil Headley coined this term soma-naut, which I think is such an apt phrase for what we're doing. 

Whereas an astronaut is someone who explores outer space, a soma-naut is someone who is an explorer of the inner space, explorer of like the lived experience of being a human. And to be a good practitioner, you have to know what your client is going to be going through. 

You have to have an understanding of it. You have to have gone where they're going to go essentially, so that you can guide them there and to go with that analogy so that if like things go off course, you can calmly and quickly help to bring them back on course. And this is like such a necessary thing for healthcare that the practitioner heal yourself. Like you've got to take care of yourself before you can take care of somebody else. 

You have to be regulated yourself because there always is going to be counter-transferences, always going to be co-regulation. And that can go in a lot of different ways. And so many therapists, I know, like they'll finish their shift and they're going to feel more of a wreck than their clients that came in. In fact, I experienced a lot of that coming out of Massage Co. I was like taking on the stresses of my clients and feeling horrible afterwards. And so we can either be like bowled over by what we're working with, or we can help to influence people in that healing restorative direction. 

But if there's going to be any change, it's going to be a bi-directional change. And recognizing that, knowing that, and knowing therefore the responsibility that you have to be a calming force, to be a healing and restorative force to guide them there. So I have a whole chapter where I kind of break down what I think are like some of the essential components of being a good soma-naad, like what training would you have to go through? 

And then I do offer some somatic exercises that massage therapists can do in between sessions or right before, and then offer just a lot of other resources because other people have made books. You know, Thomas Hanna's book is still fantastic with the basic lessons of how do you control your extensor muscles, how do you control your flexors and rotations and things like that. So I tried to bring in some new movement patterns to explore that would be specific for hands-on practitioners. 

A: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I know that the difference between the way that I operate as a hanosomatic educator in terms of the output of my muscular energy versus somebody who's doing deep tissue massage, it's a lot more of a workout than a new deep tissue massage. And you know, the bonus of being a hanosomatic educator is that I've been practicing these releases that you're describing, right, that they're available in Thomas Hanna's book. And there's some in this book for practitioners that you don't have to hold all of that tension in your body as the practitioner. You can learn to be more soft and not work so hard, not drain your own energy so much because it's just a different way of orienting to the same objective, which is how do I help this person relax their body? 

You know, and again, it's not just their muscles, it's their whole being. Some people are going to need a lighter touch than others. Some people are going to need a stronger touch. And it's that intuitive awareness that we hope to cultivate in a somatic practice. And I think the first step is we're kind of describing here is working with your own body, working with yourself. And that changes from day to day, right? Some days I need more or less from my own body, you know, to drop in, right? 

Some days it's really easy to drop in. I'm in my emotions already, I'm feeling sensitive and soft. Other days it's like, I seem to be really far away for some reason, right? Whatever's been going on in my life. And it takes a lot to draw me back into my presence. 

Right? So in terms of like, people who are going to get this book, who are already interested in somatic techniques, what are some of the like outcomes that you hope for them as a practitioner or for their clients if they take this on? 

G: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, you mentioned deep tissue and that's, I'd love to talk about deep tissue because I think so much of the attitude that people have towards doing deep tissue or receiving deep tissue, we really need someone to like lean in and like, get in there. Yeah. 

And yeah, dig that elbow in. And so many of our clients are not ready to receive that. In fact, I was on a social media board and for a massage therapist and someone was asking like, what do I do? I've got like this 80 year old client coming in, her neck is killing her. She wants deep tissue. And I can't, I can never give her enough pressure and like, I'm worried I'm going to hurt her. 

A: Yeah, bruiser or something. 

G: And yeah, and you probably would. And the reality is that often when we get into situations like that is because the person has so much what we call sensory motor amnesia. And you can feel it massage therapists will feel this. We're very good at like palpating and sensing the tissue quality. And oftentimes, some will come in their whole back will be completely stiff as a rod, it'll feel like muscle will literally feel like bone. And sometimes the tissue will even start to calcify and that will be born like, but you're not going to be able to just dig your way in to a muscle like that without potentially saying or hurting yourself or just like creating way more effort than you want to do. 

A: And it really isn't all that effective a lot of times too, like the level of effectiveness of working with someone that stiff and tight and you push on them. Maybe you can get a little bit of bounce back into the muscle, but as you know, a somatic technique would work better because it's their nervous system making the change, right, rather than like an outside force trying to do something. It's like, how do we get that rock of the muscle to turn back into a bouncy fleshy muscle? 

G: Precisely. And here's the thing. I trained in massage therapy. I taught at massage schools for years. I don't think a massage therapist has ever relaxed somebody's muscle. 

A: No, they can't do that. The only person who can relax a muscle is the person who has the muscle. Right? 

G: Yeah. Your skeletal muscles are yours. Yes. And they're also called voluntary muscles. And somehow we learned this idea. We learned that skeletal muscles are voluntary muscles. And then when someone comes in with a shoulder up here, we say, well, I'm going to try to relax your muscle. And there's just there's a disconnect there. #

And the disconnect is that we forget that they're voluntary muscles. And so when you start from that premise, that is your muscle, you are in the best place to relax your muscle. Then my job as a massage therapist is to help you connect with that muscle and regain the ability to relax it. And so someone who's like coming in their back, and this is one of the techniques I describe is like, this the best thing you can do is just to like find the stiffest area of that muscle that they can't feel. 

Because often someone will come in their whole back will be stiff as a rock. And they'll say, I've got a little bit of tension right here and a little bit of tension right there. 

A: They're just feeling it at the apex, I like to say. It was like, they don't even know how much their whole body's contracted, but they feel it at these few major kind of apex points. That's right. 

G: And they're feeling and often those are the points where they're still movement. Yes. Right. Because we still have to move somewhat. And so the whole back will be rigid and braced, but they're still moving their lumbar spine a little bit. And they're still moving their cervical spine. And that's where they feel the pain. And they're not going to get relief there until they can sense the fact that the rest of their spine is stiff as a rod. And so even something simple is like applying cross fiber, like just horizontal or perpendicular motion, right into that tight muscle and just hanging out there. So you're bringing in sensory feedback into their nervous system. 

And you're just inviting them to connect with it. Just put your mind right where my fingers are. And tell me when you start to recognize what I'm doing. Tell me when you start to sense that my hand is on your back and then the sense that my hand is touching a tight muscle. And usually they'll start to feel first that there's tension there. 

And say, okay, we're going to hang out longer. And tell me when you can start to recognize that this muscle is incredibly sore. Because that muscle that's been locked up like that, very sore, exhausted, sore and achy, right? It's like been that muscle has been running its own marathon, keeping your back rigid. And so another day after a minute or two, so they, oh, oh, I can start to feel it. And as a massage, they'll start to not that basically the exact same moment that they start to feel that their muscle is sore and achy, this softens and you can sink in now. 

Now there's pliability to it, you're starting to restore proper tone. Because, and this is such an important point, awareness is a causative force, right? Awareness is not passive. When we bring awareness to something, we are creating an effect, right? And scientists have studied this in various ways, like the observer effect is a real phenomenon in science that when you, when the act of studying something changes it, well, the act of observing something in your own body facilitates a change. So as soon as you start to pick up on, oh, I can feel that muscle again, you're inhibiting it, you're inhibiting the team, starting to soften and let go. 

And then you can go ahead and do that, that deep tissue technique, which will feel really good. Because now they can actually allow you in, right? They're not resisting you. And now your job is easier. And your client is happier. 

And their back is going to release much more quickly. So you're working, the whole thing at the book is about working with your client at a level of helping them sense and change themselves, helping them self regulate and heal the inside out. Beautiful. 

A: Yes. And, you know, when people start to get a sense for, all right, I don't have to like push, right? I don't have to push this person. I don't have to push myself, right? That's a whole paradigm shift in an, on a whole nother level, right? For people in general, like living their lives, right? Where it's like, okay, what if I didn't have to push in all these other areas in my life in the same way? 

Right? What if there was an easier way to like exist as a person and be with other people where we're not constantly trying to overpower and overpower? It's, you know, I will have people come to me, I'm sure you do. And there's, you know, definitely people listening who have had clients who've tried all the things and they're not getting any relief. 

And they're, you know, really exhausted and frustrated and tired. And there comes a point where the step step one sometimes is just surrendering that sense of needing to control their body and needing to control what's happening. And that I also, as the practitioner, can like let go of that needing to make things different than they are. 

You know, so I love what you're describing in terms of just kind of gently working around, you know, the area that's like highlighted as the painful area. Like we don't have to just go straight for that point and like push as hard as possible, right? We can work our way around it. We can make these small changes that all add up to something larger in the long run. 

And I think this is just such a beautiful metaphor for like a different way to live life than just plowing through and pushing, you know, at every opportunity and and wondering why it's not working. Right? Yes. 

G: Yeah, I mean, if you if you consider that humans might be innately self healing, that we are designed to heal ourselves, we're designed to reorganize ourselves towards health, towards wellness, wellness, and towards achieving our goals, whatever they are. And so our job is not to like force that to happen, but just to like create the scenario where it will happen more quickly. And that scenario is so often the opposite of striving, the opposite of forcing, the opposite of digging and needing it to happen. 

But instead just connecting, connecting more than seagull. He wrote the mindful therapist and he developed this field of interpersonal neurobiology. And one of his core principles is that is that when a system becomes disintegrated, it falls into two types of dysfunction, chronic dysfunction or acute dysfunction. 

And he's focusing on mental health disorders, schizophrenia, chronic depression, stuff like that. But you can think of it the same way in terms of like physiological dysfunction, most of the skeletal pain that when we when we disconnect and are become and disintegrated, meaning that parts of us are doing things while other parts are doing other things. We're bracing around an old injury while we're still having to go to work and take our kids to school and all this stuff, right? 

We have to compartmentalize in that situation. So that leads to chronic tension or spasms. It leads to chronic back pain or injuries. Acute versus chronic. 

It's one or the other and often things will fluctuate back and forth. And so just by feeding more information into the system, helping people feel the connection between their limbs and their somatic center, between their left side and right side, et cetera, et cetera, that facilitates function, that facilitates integration. And the integration itself is what fuels and drives the change because we are organized towards growth, feeling and achieving our most amazing desires and goals. 

A: Beautifully said. Yeah, I think that there's more and more of a shift that I'm seeing at least in my personal world. And then being on this podcast, I guess I get a wonderful window into the innovative things that people are up to in the world, right? But there's more of a shift towards recognizing or remembering what you're describing about our self-organization and self-healing qualities. So I think that this is apt. 

I think that you're right on the cutting edge here and there's so many massage institutes or individual practitioners who are gonna benefit from what you have created. Can you tell us a little bit, because this came from a course, right? And there's a course that goes alongside this if people wanna travel out to Denver to practice with you. Can you tell us a little bit about the course itself and how it, I guess, is structured for people's learning? 

G: Yeah, and honestly, the development of this course is kind of like what you were just saying about, like you don't have to try so hard. We don't have to push so hard to make things happen. 

And certainly in many instances of my life, the times that my career has moved forward was when I just followed the opportunities that were being presented and didn't try to force them, but just was like kept on doing the work, kept on heading in this vague direction of getting this word out there more. And at one point, a colleague in Massage School got connected to a regional education person with Massage Envy in the Bay Area. 

And she's like, oh, this person's looking for different continued education course work for massage therapists. And I was like, oh, I've got an idea. And I just met with her and spouted off a few different ideas. And one of them was helping massage therapists learn how to incorporate somatic principles and techniques into their massage. 

She was like, that sounds great. So I did it for three different locations. Two days after my second child was born. Not quite how I planned it, but he came about six weeks early. So that's how it went and it went really well. 

And I did a few other times in the day. And then I kind of forgot about the course because we moved to Denver and I was in grad school. And then in 2021, I was invited by the Colorado chapter of the AMTA, they're like, we want a workshop on somatic work from a massage therapist. Do you know anybody who has a course like this? 

I'm like, what funny you should ask? I have a course like this. And so that sort of reinvigorated and kind of shook it off, dusted it off, brought it back out, revamped it. And now I've been offering it in Colorado, but I also I'm trying to get this out anywhere that people will have me. So anywhere we can get 10 to 15 people together, I'm happy to come out and do this. 

It's a, Oh, fantastic. An eight hour or 16 hour course depending on how much time people have. I think the 16 hours really necessary for people having the time to really explore and get that one-on-one feedback. So, and then maybe four days at some point, or maybe it'll be a whole month, maybe it'll be a whole curriculum and massage school at some point. 

I'm open to that too. But the course essentially is about like, how do we get out of a biomedical attitude, working on bodies, on tissue, trying to move blood flow, trying to soften fascia and reorganize fascia. All of these things are very much coming from this, like third person, biome perspective, which is the underlying perspective of Western medicine. And that people can be deconstructed down into their parts, into their basic components. And when we can like, we can fit the numbers not working. 

A: That they can become kind of an object for the practitioner to just be acting upon and changing and doing things too, versus something that is interactive, right? I will have this question often from my clients who they are asking, okay, like I'm seeing you, I'm really understanding the need for a more somatic approach, but I'm also gonna be seeing this physical therapist or this pelvic floor therapist. How do I know if this is like someone that's gonna benefit and not work against what I'm doing with you? And so I will often tell them, is the person checking in with you and responding to your feedback? 

And checking in doesn't have to be a direct question, right? It could even just be, if you're communicating something in your body language, do you feel like the person responds to that? Do they adjust their action to the feedback that you are supplying them? If they do that, that's a good sign. That's a sign that you have someone who's tuned in and actually paying attention to you, the person that they're working with, the person they're there to be of service to. 

If they're not checking in with you and they're just telling you a bunch of stuff about your body and they're telling you what they're doing and how it's so great. And I'm thinking of some very specific people I worked with in my twenties who did that. And I didn't know, I thought, I thought that they knew what they were doing and that it was great, but then it wasn't getting me the results. 

And what I realized now is because they weren't seeing me as a like interactive participant in the process. They were just going through their toolkit and they were doing all the things that they had been taught to do. And they were seeing some kind of result in me, but they weren't checking to see if I was experiencing what they thought they were doing. They weren't doing that interactive feedback. 

And I think that that does come more naturally to some people than others, but I absolutely believe that it can be learned if someone is interested in learning how to be more somatic in their approach, whether they're an massage therapist or a physical therapist or orthopedic doctor like anybody can learn this if they desire to be able to be present for that responsive interaction. 

G: Absolutely, no, I love that question. Are they being, are they engaging? Are they responding to what you need? Are they making modifications? Yes, they're seeing you as a human rather than a body. And so the biomedical perspective looks at bodies that addresses bodies and bodies are antithetical to the somatic perspective, but it's still useful information. And so one of the things I try to convey is that the biomedical perspective is one perspective. It is one view, it's one way of thinking of a human organism. 

It's not right or wrong, it is simply one piece of information. And it is objective, it is third person meaning, it's what can I see and touch and don't have to use my emotional brain to try to process, just like what is the, just the numbers, just the data. That is the essence of the biomedical perspective, which is very linked in with like Greco-Roman ideals and stuff. Well, the somatic perspective is first person. It's phenomenological. It's about what is the experience of being in the world as a physical being? 

And therefore it's first person. Thomas talks about going through the looking glass. You know, Alice going through the looking glass, coming the other side. So it is a second or additional perspective. 

And it is just as valid as the biomedical one. And then the question is what changes when you flip your perspective from working on a body to thinking about how your technique changes a person's experience inside that body? I use that word just because it's such a familiar word, but that's what we're doing. We're switching from thinking, what can I view from the outside to considering what would this person be feeling on the inside as I do this? And sometimes you don't know and you have to ask them. 

There's a lot of communication that goes on, but that's the shift. And if they can make that shift, and this is where I think this work is transferable to so many professions, so many professions that will benefit from shifting to the somatic perspective, because just that idea of recognizing that you're working with another human, another sent me changes everything. And without just like the therapist I was working with, without doing much else beyond that, you've already created a change in how you relate with them and how you apply the techniques that you're doing. Whether you're a PT, a SARS therapist, a doctor, osteopath, whatever, it fundamentally changes what you're doing. 

And then we can talk about ways of actually enhancing their experience with different techniques because then there's new techniques that flow out of that shift of perspective, where instead of like pulling somebody's limb out of their body, you're guiding them to sense and to relax and to give you their limb, for example. Because if they're not a body, then they don't wanna have their limb pulled out. Their limb is essential to them being a coherent organism. And there's so many feedback loops that are designed to keep that limb connected to the rest of them. So you just pulling on them just enhances those feedback loops, for example. 

A: It can, absolutely. I had someone recently was asking questions about, okay, I've been doing, they haven't done a lot of sessions of anesthmatics yet, but they ask me questions from time to time because they're curious and they're kind of almost ready to commit to the process with me. But they were to ask me questions about adhesions. And like, oh, I'm doing this adhesion therapy where they're breaking up all these adhesions. And they were like, why is it that I'm still in pain? 

Why is it? And I said, well, it may not be like what your body needs right now. It may be that your body needs something more soothing and more calming and breaking up adhesions. 

Just that term alone doesn't sound particularly soothing to me, right? And then I said, and furthermore, there may be a very good reason why your body has developed those adhesions. It's trying to support something. 

It's trying to protect something. And so breaking up those adhesions may not actually create the result you're looking for which is less pain and more mobility because there's a reason that your body stuck everything together in that one space because maybe there's something happening over here like we described before where you can't feel it. You know, that your body's, there's kind of like when people want to feel better and they're like, I just want to not feel these difficult emotions anymore. It's like, well, there's a very good reason why you're feeling how you're feeling. 

And if we look at that very good reason, we're gonna see that it makes sense for you to feel this way. And that kind of validation can actually be part of being able to work through whatever's there, you know, versus let's just break up these adhesions and try to, you know, again, kind of back to this idea of force it to change versus there's something here and there's some intelligence at play underneath all of this. 

And there's very good reasons why our body's positioned the way it's positioned or holding what it's holding. How can we start to communicate with that underlying intelligence to understand rather than just diagnose? 

G: Yeah, you know, 90% of like the musculoskeletal conditions that people suffer from have no known cause, right? There's nothing that someone can identify from the biomedical perspective that would help understand why that's happening. Less than 10% has something that they can see. And even then, even when there is something that can be identified on MRI or some kind of scan, still most of the pain people are experiencing is not because of that thing. Right. There's that plenty of people who have horrible looking X-rays and MRIs. 

A: And they're walking around feeling okay. 

G: And I've had plenty of people come in my office, they'll show me their scan, they'll talk about how they have scoliosis and their scoliosis is causing their pain and their slip disc is causing their pain, even though their pain is nowhere near their slipped disc and is in their muscles. And I'm saying like, I'm pressing here and you're feeling achiness here. This is not your disc. This is your muscle. This is your fascia. 

This is your skin, whatever. And so they can still get a ton of relief. So I say that to just point out that what that makes me think is that most of the pain people are experiencing, they're experiencing with a perfectly functioning physiology. 

Everything is working perfectly. But what their body, what their physiology is doing is uncomfortable. And so like you said, is uncomfortable because they don't wanna feel it. And so they're bracing and they're restricting and they're immobilizing themselves because they don't wanna feel that uncomfortable emotion or they fell and they got injured and now they don't like to move their leg as freely as they used to. 

So like the desire not to feel something often leads to other things down the road. And the other part of it is that they've become conditioned to use their body only in particular ways. When you get really good at only doing particular patterns of movement and behavior, you get really bad at doing other patterns of movement and behavior. And all of a sudden, if you are required to do something different, you're not ready for it. And you'll tear things, you'll pull things, you'll spasm in various ways because you can't adapt, you can't be as responsive to the immediate needs of that moment. 

And so if we're starting from the place that everything's working fine, yet you're incredibly uncomfortable, then we can work with the functionings of your nervous system and your myofascia and all of that to help you become more comfortable, to help you recognize that you don't need to brace, you don't need to hold yourself and you can let go and you can integrate and all of that and all of these things is kind of like they disappear. Yeah. 

A: Yeah, and a piece of this that you've touched on just now and what you said, but we kind of touched on it a little bit before, there are psycho-emotional kind of reasons why people are holding tightly, right? And I know that even just in a massage, people can have emotional releases, they can move through trauma and things that are held in their body. 

When we're talking about kind of somatics here, a lot of people are probably also attracted to a somatic approach because they're familiar with things like somatic experiencing and Peter Levine's work and is there an element of that in what you discuss in your book, not only for the giver, right, but also the receiver to kind of basically prepare them for, hey, as you become more intimate in this way, intimacy issues can get triggered, feeling overly responsible for your client's wellbeing and needing to process and let go of things yourself that are getting triggered in your experience as you're working with a person and they're going through something maybe you went through that you never fully processed, like the death of a loved one or things like this. Do you kind of dive into a little bit of that in the course materials? 

G: Yeah, so there's so many great things that you just said there, right? And there's so, and being a somatic practice, there's fundamentally an understanding that we are affecting all aspects of a person's experience at all times and simultaneously. I think a lot of people, a lot of people are more and more coming in saying, I had trauma and so therefore I need somatic work. And that's true, somatic work can be really helpful for people processing unresolved trauma, but it is not just trauma work, it is work for embodiment, it's work for awareness, it's work for awakening, connecting. 

It can be helpful for anybody no matter what they're processing. And as an individual practitioner, what you are speaking to, I think is this, I think it's the difference between like attention and perception is how I separate this in the book. Like one of the things that we need to develop is attentional abilities. 

How do we maintain our focus? Both receiving the work and also giving the work, so that we can stay present with the people that we're working with. If we can stay present, they're more responsive and we are engaging and we're recreating this therapeutic environment. This guy on Jack Blackburn that I've been talking to a lot recently, he's a Traeger practitioner and he has all these meditations on presence in touch. And when you connect in a somatic way, you are entering presence. 

And if you can maintain your attention, then you're maintaining that state of presence where, and that is a therapeutic container in mainly. But then the second part of that is like, is your ability to perceive the things that are happening at that point of contact, the things that are happening with your client and the things that are happening with yourself and be able to differentiate. 

So that you're not transferring your own issues onto your client, you're not bringing their stuff onto you, but you can say like, oh, okay, my client is having a really intense emotional experience right now, like, and I'm calm and centered. And I'm just helping them process that. Like they are having an experience, but that's not me having this experience. Or I just had a really stressful morning. 

I got my kids to school and that was not the easiest thing to do, it never is. And now I gotta come in and now I've gotta be centered and grounded in like the next five minutes for a client. How do we like pause, let go of what we just did and prepare ourselves for what we are now going to do so that our past doesn't need to come into the session, right? So that's an important aspect. There's so many important aspects to it. So I do touch on that quite a bit. 

A: Yeah, I love that. It reminds me of kind of what I, when I first started teaching yoga, my first career, we often talked about how your teaching is an extension of your practice. And so in this case, it's really true as well that as you give and hold space, it's an extension of your own personal journey. 

Although there's that differentiation, right? And as we just dove into it, you wanna create that discernment, but at the same time, the teacher is the student, the student is the teacher and you're both parallel to each other all the time. That's part of the mirroring process that creates that safe space, is that you're present and drawing the other person into their presence. 

G: Yeah, and learning from what you're seeing and you may teach the same class, but it's not the same class because people in there are different and the org users are different and your understanding of it is different, right? And that's where like this idea of like the practitioner as the technology, I think is like really important. A lot of other medicine is more and more relying on like computer technology together as a somatic practitioner. The only way to get better is to do the work ourselves. 

A: I love it. I love that. I haven't heard that before. I really dig it. The practitioner is the technology. It's true. It's so true and I, that's brilliant. So if people are intrigued, they're listening, they're like, okay, Gabriel, I gotta try this book out. 

I gotta try these things out. I massage and I wanna get this person and this person, as you're describing, I know that my clients need this. Where can they get your book and what do you have? Do you have any kind of special offer or special something for listeners today? 

G: Yeah, great question. The book, so I went through Handspring Publishing. They are a major publisher, a subdivision of Haschette. So anywhere you can get books, you can get this book. It's available on Barnes & Noble, Amazon, all the, I know there are other different vendors in Canada and the UK and other places. It's available through Singing Dragon, is the Handspring website. 

Handspring is more like Western complimentary medicine stuff and Singing Dragon's more like Eastern, Ayurveda and everything. So it sits on their website and you can buy it there. And I also selling physical copies through my website, with a secure checkout and all that. And I can sign and ship it to people. I've got a little discount on my website. I'm offering an additional 10% off to listeners of your podcast. 

So I check out if they put in free your Soma, all caps, no spaces, then they'll get an additional $5 off the book. And if they like it, let me know. And if they really like it, sign up for my newsletter and then I'll let them know when I'm coming around to do courses. I do plan to go up and down the East Coast at some point. 

A: Oh, let me know. I can probably arrange something for you here in Buffalo. That would be really awesome. I'm getting really connected to the body work community here. Awesome. 

G: Fantastic. Yeah, we should, we'll talk about that. But I just want to get this word out as broadly and as fast as I can. And I'm just loving the reception so far that I'm getting, where people that I've never met before are buying the book all over the country, getting messages from people in the UK and South Africa just telling me like how immediately applicable the work is for their practices. They're finding out they're able to just read the book and like immediately feel the effects on their practice. 

And that's exactly what I want. It's not super complicated. There are certainly techniques that I offer in there that take some time to learn, especially the clinical somatic techniques that you went through three-year training and are still developing, like we're still refining our technique. So it's not like you're gonna be a master of these things initially, but hopefully like even with the clinical somatic stuff, there's enough explanation and pictures that you can try it and you can start to, Oh, okay, I can do that. 

And then maybe you want to come do a training. So yeah, it's available in a lot of different ways, including on the Kindle if you want a digital format of it. 

A: Fantastic. Thank you so much for creating such an incredible resource. I mean, it's obviously you've been spending a lot of time for this book to come out the years that you spent teaching the course and working with massage therapists and in your own personal practice. I just really appreciate the dedication and devotion that I witness in you again and again. Thank you. Yeah. 

G: Yeah, absolutely. You know, I just throw this out there. I feel like there's so many, there's so many instances in research and other work where I feel like people are talking in the right direction and in my view, they're getting so close and then they just kind of veer off. And I think what they veer off is that we lose sight of the fact that we're conscious. 

And that being conscious means that we have control, we have volition, we have agency. And even like in the, I've been learning a lot about the fascia work and thinking about that, even with the fascia work, which I think is like really amazing. And the stuff people are discovering about fascia is so amazing. And still there's this like gap where they're talking right towards it and then they veer off. Where it's like, the fascia is releasing me. I'm like, really? You have the fascia end and you begin. I know. 

A: Very, very good question. 

G: So I'm hoping to just like, just bridge that last little step for so many people that are like almost there and just come on over all the way into this static perspective. 

A: Take some time. I mean, I think that's one of the reasons that the Hanismatic Educator Training was three years long is because it takes some time for the information to really sink in in your own experiential reality. 

So yeah, thank you for inviting people into this beginning or maybe clearing that last gate and stepping in all the way, wherever they are in their journey, wherever you are a listener, if you found this podcast to be engaging and interesting, if you have questions for Gabriel or myself, please reach out on social media. You'll find my Instagram in the show notes and as well as Gabriel's website. Check out his book, get a copy of it, maybe even a real hand signed copy. And we will look forward to another episode in our future, Gabriel. 

G: I look forward to it. Thank you, Aimee. Thank you. 

A: Hey there, friends. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. I would love to hear your thoughts. Follow me on Instagram @AimeeTakaya and send me a DM about this episode. I'd like to thank you for being part of this Sematic Revolution. And if you'd like to support the podcast and help more people learn about semantics, consider leaving a review or a rating. 

And finally, if you'd like to have the experience of relief in your tight hips or back and learn to understand what your body is really saying to you, visit youcanfreeyoursoma.com. I can't wait to share with you what is truly possible. Bye for now.