Ease into Winter with Somatics
with Samantha Holland
Saturday 12th November 10.00 – 4.30pm,
Sheffield Yoga School, South Road, S6 3TA
£50
Gentle Movement & Awareness to Release Stress & Tension, Combat Stiffness & Pain, and Promote Comfort & Relaxation in Your Body
In this one-day workshop, you’ll explore somatic awareness practices in combination with specific, gentle movements designed to reduce stiffness, discomfort and pain – and to create greater comfort, relaxation and ease in your whole body.
The focus will be on your felt sense as you move (rather than on how you look). You’ll be encouraged to notice how your internal sensations shift and change in response to different movement patterns, both large and small. The overall intention is to empower you to use simple movements and awareness to create change in yourself, from the inside.
The movements you do will be slow and gentle, with space for you to experiment with making the movements smaller or larger – whatever feels right to you at the time.
Who is this workshop for?
The workshop is suitable both for people with ongoing, ‘chronic’ pain (anything from back pain to fibromyalgia, from
RSI to tension headaches), and for people interested in exploring their capacity to move with greater efficiency, ease, and joy. It’s also suitable for anyone wishing to ease any stiffness or discomfort they might experience in meditation or yoga, as Somatics is often very helpful in supporting these practices.
Somatics approaches stiffness, discomfort and pain – wherever and however they show up for you – through noticing, and using movement to ease away from full-body patterns of tension created in response to the stresses, strains, and traumas of life. This eases pain and enables greater ease of movement because it’s so often these full-body patterns of tension that cause seemingly unrelated ‘problem areas’, and which take hold of us outside our conscious awareness. We will touch on how this works, on the day, but the focus will be on your experience, and on release and relaxation.
What is Somatics?
Somatics was established by Thomas Hanna in the 1980s. Hanna observed through practice that a very high proportion of human stiffness and pain (especially ‘unexplained’ and chronic pain) is rooted in automatic, neuromuscular responses to stress, and to other habits of movement that quite literally get stuck in the body.
Hanna’s Somatics teaches very focused strategies to get “un-stuck” from these painful patterns – enabling a shift from spending too much time in “fight/flight/freeze” states, to spend more time in nurturing and relaxing states associated with “rest and digest”. It thereby promotes overall well-being, comfort, and ease.
The Teacher : Samantha Holland
Samantha changed her life to train and qualify as a Clinical Somatic Educator after the practice resolved her increasing stiffness and chronic pain issues in a matter of months, despite her ‘symptoms’ having foxed numerous doctors and therapists for over a decade.
She’s a Certified Clinical Somatic Educator and Certified Essential Somatics® Movement Teacher, an ISMETA-registered RSME, and an active member of the AHSE.
Samantha worked as a lecturer, barrister, and then psychotherapy trainee before discovering Somatics: she’s Somatic Experiencing® Informed, and is currently taking the three-year Somatic Experiencing® professional training.
She sees students for 1-2-1 clinical sessions in person and online, as well as teaching group movement classes, running her online Somatics programmes, and presenting workshops for counsellors and other listening professionals interested in a Somatics-informed perspective on ‘the whole person’.
You can contact her on samantha@peelingtheonion.co.uk or see www.somaticsamantha.com for more information.
