Samantha Holland helps individuals release stuck stress and unresolved trauma that contribute to chronic pain, stiffness, and discomfort. Using movement and self-sensing techniques grounded in neuroscience, she guides clients to reconnect with their bodies, ease tension, and restore natural mobility. Whether struggling with unexplained symptoms or persistent stress, Samantha empowers individuals to create lasting change without relying on medications or continuous therapy. MysticMag offers you an exclusive interview.
Samantha, can you explain how neuromuscular communication plays a role in chronic stress, stiffness, discomfort, and pain, and how your approach addresses these issues?
Yes, and what a great question!
Neuromuscular communication essentially refers to the messages sent between your muscles and your brain. Without going into the neuroscience of it (which is fascinating, by the way!), in Clinical Somatics, we’re most interested in the brain–muscle messages about the resting muscle tension of each of your muscles.
Ideally, your resting muscle tension is as low as possible to do what needs to be done – and when you’re at rest (e.g. sitting down, lying in bed) it really needs to be doing as little work as possible. You want that muscle tension to increase only as and when it needs to – to get a specific action done, whether that be getting up, walking around, throwing a ball, digging a ditch, dancing the tango, or something truly stress-inducing, such as dealing with a potentially dangerous situation, which might include getting ready to run!
Ideally, your levels of muscle tension reliably and efficiently shift and change to suit exactly what you need for whatever activity you’re doing, or are preparing to do… But your brain controls your muscle tension, so when the messages between your muscles and your brain aren’t efficient and reliable? That is most often the cause of chronic stress, stiffness, discomfort and pain.
Why does this happen? Well, the root cause is almost always that your habitual responses to stress, and any uncomfortable and inefficient habits of posture and movement you’ve gotten into, get literally stuck in your neuromuscular system. This mean that your brain quite literally forgets to reduce your resting muscle tension when it’s not needed. The result is that confusing, inaccurate messages flow between your brain and your muscles – and they’re operating at an unconscious level, so you’re not even aware of the problem. You just experience the stress and tension that those ‘faulty’ messages create in your life…
Put simply: You quite literally forget to let go of unnecessary muscle tension, even when holding on is causing you stress and pain. It becomes an unconscious habit.
As a result, your muscles get stuck in over-contracted patterns that cause stiffness, soreness, pain and more – and you don’t even know why.
(Wondering where these unhelpful habits and responses come from? They’re usually learnt from your past experiences of responding to stress and trauma, or have become habits from something like protecting an old injury, or repetitive actions as seemingly insignificant as carrying a bag on the same shoulder for years. This is why Clinical Somatics can help with both neuromuscular and nervous system issues – and why its focus is on creating new modes of sensing and moving, so that old habits can be let go. This is also why Clinical Somatics can be so incredibly life-changing!)
My approach addresses all of this by using specific sensing, moving and learning techniques that enable you to sense and so release areas of muscle tension that need it, resulting in less stiffness and tension, and in less stuck stress. This in turn means not just less discomfort and pain, but far greater comfort in your body, and improved ease of movement.
Essentially, I address ongoing stress, discomfort, stiffness, and pain through neuromuscular and nervous system re-education – helping you to sense into the patterns that hold your body hostage, so that you can use movement to ease out of those patterns.
You mention that both stress and trauma can get “stuck” in the body. Can you describe the techniques you use to help clients release this stuck stress and trauma?
In the work I do as a Certified Clinical Somatic Educator, I use pretty specific techniques to release stuck stress and trauma – enabling and guiding clients in self-sensing, in self-moving (using specific patterns), and in self-learning.
The ultimate aim is to empower clients to move through life with the capacity to identify, access, and resolve their own full-body patterns of ‘stuckness’.
Drawing on notions of the felt sense, I guide clients to experience their internal sensations more fully, so they can explore and discover where they’re ‘holding on’ too tight (emotionally and physically), and where too-tight muscles are causing problems. I then guide them through movements to ease out of that tightness – to create more length in their muscles, and thus more capacity to move and breathe with comfort and ease.
The most important – and genuinely unique – technique I use is pandiculation. This is the most important, and most life-changing, technique that Thomas Hanna taught us! It’s a simple, specific three-part movement technique that releases stress and unnecessary tension from your neuromuscular and nervous systems, reducing resting muscle tension to avoid stiffness, discomfort and pain. (It’s based closely on what almost all non-human animals do naturally to release stress and tension – but which humans only really do ‘naturally’ when we yawn.)
Importantly, pandiculation avoids the pitfalls of stretching (which just aggravates a troubled, over-contracted neuromuscular and nervous system), and empowers the individual to create change in their own soma – from the inside out.
I teach these techniques in different ways for different somas. Some people benefit from hands-on help to sense into stuck areas and movements (these are often called assisted pandiculations); others do better from learning movements they can do for themselves from the start, while still others benefit from Focusing and SE-Informed work around self-sensing.
There are several ways ‘into’ this work, then – all of which enable more efficient neuromuscular communication, and the literal release of stress and tension from muscles and the nervous system.
This freedom from stress and tension isn’t felt ‘just’ at the muscular level: it promotes far greater personal freedom and fluidity – creating what I like to call a supple centre, from which far greater physical and emotional freedom of movement can flow.
Your work emphasizes the importance of self-sensing and movement for healing. How do these practices differ from traditional therapeutic approaches to pain and stress management?
There are quite a few ways in which they differ from practices that ‘sound’ quite similar.
Perhaps one of the key differences is that the sensing and movement I teach is always in the context of understanding the person not as a ‘body’ plus a ‘mind’ but as a soma – that is, as an embodied, living process.
This fundamental understanding of the ‘self’ is really important to my approach – and is why real, lasting change is possible not because of anything a Clinical Somatic Educator like me does ‘to’ someone, but only through changes the client makes in their own living process.
The movement work is also super specific. First, pandiculation is a genuinely unique way of working and creating change in the neuromuscular and also nervous systems. Further, all self-sensings and movements are understood as always involving the whole soma, and as always related to specific, full-body patterns of responses to stress and trauma.
The predictable nature of these full-body patterns is really useful in helping clients access and resolve their more nuanced, individual patterns over time – as there are clear patterns to work with from the start, which underlie all the movements we teach.
All this means that Clinical Somatics really is about the client creating their own change – and never about a someone like me doing something ‘to’ them. This is why we use the term ‘Educator’ in Clinical Somatics: I am educating and guiding clients how to access and activate change from within, never changing them ‘from the outside’.
What are some common signs that someone might be experiencing neuromuscular pain or stress, and how can they begin to address it through your methods?
Another great question! It’s so important that people are empowered to identify where their stress and pain might be coming from, and so to know what might actually help them! (This was huge for me, in my own journey, and I see it ignite hope in clients when they first come to this type of work. Often the people who benefit most from Somatics are those who really want to understand the whys of what has happened to them to create such stress and pain.)
There are a whole bunch of signs that discomfort, stress and pain (emotional and/or physical) are neuromuscular in origin. I have a free resource that sets out 12 of those signs, but here I’ll just outline a few.
A big indicator that your symptoms are neuromuscular is if they’ve been described as ‘medically unexplained’, or you’ve been advised that something like CBT or talk therapy might help.
Another is if you did in fact suffer a physical injury, but even after apparently healing from it fully you’re still experiencing discomfort or pain, whatever you do to try to resolve it. (The problem here is that your brain put your muscles in patterns to help support the injured part of you – and then forgot to let go or change those patterns once that part had healed.)
Other signs include that your pain shows up in different parts of your body at different times, and is affected by stressful situations. (This definitely doesn’t mean ‘it’s all in your head’, by the way – although you might feel like it is, or you might have that suggested to you. Neuromuscular pain is most assuredly in your soma, literally stuck in your neuromuscular and nervous systems.)
Also, if you’ve experienced relief from things like physical therapies, stretching, or strengthening work, but the relief is always (and frustratingly) only temporary, this is often a sign that the underlying issue is neuromuscular. This is especially the case if you start to wonder, over time, if the things you’re doing to help might actually be making things worse. This can be really scary – which, in turn, also makes things worse, by increasing your levels of stress and tension… Clinical Somatics helps break those nasty vicious cycles.
You offer a variety of resources, including free courses and one-on-one sessions. For someone new to somatic practices, what would you recommend as the first step to start their journey toward releasing chronic stress and pain?
I’d say that looking at my free resources (and those of other Certified Clinical Somatic Educators/Hanna Somatic Educators) is the best place to start for most people. With the resources I offer, for instance, you can get a sense of whether the ‘symptoms’, or experiences, you’re dealing with seem like they’d respond well to Somatics – and, also, if the approach resonates with you.
Ideally, I’d try to then book an in-person 1:1 session with a Certified Clinical Somatic Educator, to get some clear guidance and an embodied, in-person understanding of pandiculation and what your individual soma might need the most.
If there isn’t a CCSE near you, you could have a 1:1 session online, or find a Somatic Movement Teacher (e.g. via the Essential Somatics practitioner listings) who’s adept at hands-on movement work.
At this point or later in your journey, I’d encourage you to look for someone who really speaks to your symptoms and experience. (For example, I tend to work with individuals in chronic pain rooted in trauma, and also with psychotherapists and SEPs who want to better serve clients dealing with chronic pain or repetitive patterns they can’t seem to break. I have colleagues who specialize in areas such as scoliosis, back pain, or pregnancy health – and some who work mostly with professional footballers or bodybuilders: Clinical Somatics really can help a wide range of people!)
After exploring free resources and maybe a 1:1 session, I’d encourage people to do what works best for them. Some people take my 28-Day online course to learn more for themselves. After that, they might come to me for further sessions, or take movement classes with me or another teacher. The ultimate aim of Hanna’s Clinical Somatic Education, after all, is to find the best, most effective ways to ultimately take care of your own soma – and that can be quite different for different people, depending on their circumstances, and also on whether their underlying issues are stuck more in neuromuscular or nervous system dysregulation.
So my answer, really, if you’re new to Somatics, is to encourage you to take advantage of free resources like mine, and then have a 1:1 session or attend classes to start figuring out the best possible pathway for you to release stuck stress and tension and so move through life with more embodied freedom and ease.
If you would like to find out more about Samantha Holland, please visit https://somaticsamantha.com/
