Yesterday I tweaked my back. It was not a full crash, but the pain was intense and my mid left back was giving me both pain and warning signals that told me I was in for a world of discomfort in the coming days. However, I have house guests, and Servaas Mes is a somatics expert.

What is somatics?

Somatics is studying the body from a first person perspective. Medicine is from the third person. It is about mobilizing awareness: both movement and emotions.

It is about moving from movement without awareness (somatic amnesia) to movement you are aware of. Somatic movements are based on innate movement patterns evolved when we were young.

Injuries, surgeries, stress, trauma, or habituated movements, are examples of things that create somatic amnesia in our bodies. So the process of mobilizing awareness is to recalibrate our authentic movement patterns. This is foundational for healthy aging.

But for me at this moment is was about injury recovery. Servaas put me through several gentle exercises to get me both moving fluidly and thinking about my movements as I did them. I’m used to deep muscle manipulation and focusing on individual muscles, but these movements were about using muscles in combination, and stopping myself from using my muscles in isolation.

I had a session yesterday and went from pain and limited mobility to discomfort and greater range. After a session today I was pain free. I won’t pretend I didn’t feel my back a few times during the day. I won’t tell you that I’m ‘fixed’, but I’m on a path to recovery that would usually take 1-2 weeks and it’s the day after I triggered my back crash.

Now it’s up to me to continue with the exercises. The hard part for me is twofold. First I need to connect physically, even emotionally, to the exercises, recognizing how my body wants to cheat and avoid full range of motion. I need to stay aware of how my body wants to move versus how it should move, and I tend to struggle with this kind of awareness.

Secondly I need to wrap my head around the gentleness of the movements. I feel like I’m not doing enough, or that these subtle movements aren’t worth doing because the effort is more intellectual than strenuous. Yet, I can distinctly see how one side of my body moves so much easier than the other during these stretches.

I am aware that I’m on a journey to move better; to improve not just my flexibility, but my ability to use my body more freely, more childlike, and less like an old man who can trigger a back spasm by taking a large breath. This is a somatic journey, and one I’ve only just started.