Somatic Yoga: What Does It Have to Do with Vision? with Lulu Elmes

Lulu Elmes returns to Healing Our Sight to clarify the differences between Somatics, Somatic Yoga, and traditional yoga.

Lulu explains how Hanna Somatics influenced the development of Somatic Yoga, why the practice emphasizes slow, conscious movement rather than stretching, and how awareness, breathing, and rest help the brain and body integrate change.

We also bring the conversation back to vision, exploring how releasing tension and improving coordination through the neck, shoulders, and torso may influence the way we use our eyes.

This follow-up conversation offers a deeper understanding of the principles behind the Somatic Yoga practice and why slowing down and sensing what is happening in the body can be such an important part of the process.

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If you'd like to learn more about Lulu's work or connect with her directly:

📞 Phone/Text: 808-276-7005

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Transcript

Denise: This is the Healing Our Sight podcast where we discuss vision issues and healing strategies from the patient perspective. The goal of this podcast is to create an awareness of the diverse types of vision issues people experience, to highlight the types of help available, and to open a dialogue between patients to show we're not alone in our vision struggles. As a patient who gained 3D vision at age 54 through vision therapy combined with strabismus surgery, I feel uniquely qualified to offer a hopeful, balanced perspective on the possibilities. Please use the link in the show notes to send me a message and thanks for joining me today.
Welcome to the Healing Our Sight podcast. Today I have Lulu Elmes returning to do a little episode where we talk about the difference between Somatics, Somatic yoga and yoga itself, separate from those two pieces to see if we can give some clarity.
Lulu: That's a great idea.
Denise: It seemed like we weren't clear enough when we did our episode, so we decided that this would be a great addition. So, thanks for returning.
Lulu: Oh, you're welcome. And thank you for the opportunity because I think I did mention Eleanor Criswell at the time because really, somatic yoga is sort of her child, so to speak. But that's born of an in-depth knowledge of the full subject of yoga. Yes, as well as deep and full knowledge off somatics and particularly Hanna Somatics as probably any living human had. Because when not only was she partnering with Thomas Hanna who coined the term somatics, he had written something that she read. She was the founder of humanistic psychology and running her part of a department of a university. And the head of the university said if you could teach anything in the world that you want, what would it be? And she said yoga because already here's this pioneer already in the field of human health and human happiness. And when she wrote this book, book that you now have that called How Yoga Works, it came out in 81, but it was 16 years in the making, and the bibliography is pretty impressive at the back. It's quite awe inspiring. So both somatics and yoga are terms that describe huge fields. Yes, especially yoga. Yeah. And so, yoga has many aspects, but there are most schools of yoga of Indian heritage and base, clarify seven of them, which I won't name them all, but they include meditation, for example, they include pranayama, which are the breathing practices. They include yamas and niyamas, which I think Eleanor does have a piece about that in her book. And they are basically vices and virtues. So you can begin to see how yoga goes into how to live. Well, yes. With ourselves and with God and with each other. And the word yoga means union. Union with God.
Denise: Yeah.
Lulu: Also, little known. And I love that. I know. It took me a while to know that, too. So somatics is. And so somatic yoga specifically affects the physical section, which is hatha yoga. And that's the part of yoga that is so widely taught.
Denise: Right.
Lulu: And sometimes there's lots and lots of emphasis on the physical yoga without even in some cases, knowledge of the other aspects of yoga. Many people think that is yoga. Right.
Denise: I was going to ask you about that because I think for me, before I started doing somatic Yoga, I just thought it was positions. You know, you go to the gym, and you take a yoga class, and you're just moving through all these positions, and people think it's hard because then maybe they don't think they're flexible enough to. To get into those poses, so they maybe don't try it even.
Lulu: Well. And the truth is they're probably not flexible enough to get into those. Exactly why somatics became very, very helpful. And not only helpful, it made yoga safer. The USA began to have this huge amount of yoga injury. I mean, I never heard of yoga injury. It might be not such a big thing in England, because England, we have a vast Indian population. Since the days of the colonies, we've had it. I mean, I think, I don't know a town in England that doesn't have an Indian restaurant. And most have many. So, there are major, major, major populations. So, we've had that cultural knowledge. The first people I knew who went to yoga went to the home of an Indian elder. They had Indian people teaching them yoga. So, we had a big advantage in that way in England. And so Eleanor, knowing what she knew and then finding Thomas, she read something he wrote, and she went and tracked him down. She told me this as all she said. I went and found him and told him he needs to write more. She didn't tell me exactly which piece that was. If she was here now, I'd have all these questions for her. But so, the piece of. So, he coined the term somatics. Thomas Hannah coined the term somatics. He's the founder of the field of somatics, and that's very clear. But he coined the term to describe the study and the science of what he called the bodily arts and sciences. And when they got together, they founded the journal the Somatics magazine, which is known as the Journal of the Bodily Arts and Sciences, Okay. She didn't take a look at yoga and thought, oh, we need to make this better. No, not at all. There's no need to modernize it. But there is some new information that can be helpful in a culture that botches it up quite a bit and hurts themselves. If you're born of a yogic body and a yogic mom and a yoga came from a yogic womb, probably a yogic birth, it's a whole different picture. You go to the gym and get told, put your leg here. Here's what the pose looks like. And you go to mimic that pose. It's a little bit crazy to some. So, what it does is it puts our muscles into what is known as the stretch reflex. And it's a reflex. Most reflexes, many reflexes. We have a lot of infantile reflexes, and most of them sort of fade away as we become adults. There are two that don't in the abdominal muscles, which are these great big, long central muscles in our front, and the long erector spine muscles. Long muscles up the back also, which I forgot that I might mention, have these reflexive characteristics that aren't taught in PE but are, in his view, quite responsible for why we end up getting shorter and stiff and stooped when we're old. Because all of our muscles know how to do one thing. They know how to get short. A muscle moves the bone by contracting very often because of the way we live in. And he didn't differentiate between east and West. I love that he differentiated between us all. But he specified, it's mostly in industrialized society that these problems are pervasive. Farmers don't have these problems. Fishermen don't have the. What do they do? They're clambering around all the time. Hunters, gatherers used their back muscles and their front muscles. They didn't have a life full of stress and full of needing to get going. Because when you contract the abdominal muscles, the reflexive response that makes them contract, they contract in a reflexive response to stress or specifically fear or apprehension.
Denise: Right.
Lulu: And the. And he called that the red-light response, which results in. After lots of it, in the red-light posture, everything frontal gets a little bit shorter. And what he called the green light is that the erector spine muscles respond to stress as well, but it responds to the call to action. So, when the phone rings, neurons are firing involuntarily to these voluntary muscles because we got to get up and go. And I see also that when we're tired and we have to kind of employ a little bit of drive to keep going and finish what we're doing, then that's happening there too. But in many lives, a lot more of one happens than the other. And in as many lives, a lot of both happen, and neither of them are happening in a way that help the other one to lengthen. And what he. Besides naming this vast field of movement and these sciences, that movement is so important and the study of it is so important, he created a very specific modality known as Hanna Somatics. And that's what Eleanor brought in. Some of that. Pieces of that are what Eleanor has brought into hatha yoga.
Denise: Okay. And so, the point of the practice is to lengthen the.
Lulu: Yeah, the big. The. If you had to pick one giant single thing that somatics brings. The purpose of somatic yoga is to avoid stretching. And ironically, if he had lived, I think he would have perhaps renamed this sequence of lessons that amount to the Myth of Aging. It's a beautiful sequence of profound lessons. They begin with lengthening the muscles of the center at the front, the back, then the sides, and then move on from there. It's called the Myth of Aging. But from that is distilled a daily practice routine. And they're not exactly exercises, for one thing. You just repeat and repeat and repeat. And they're not aerobic as such, but they could be called exercises. They're definitely movements, and they definitely help you with breathing and relaxing and lengthening and all of that. But it's known as the cat stretch, which is kind of crazy because in a training as a practitioner in Hanna somatics, stretch is a bad word. Red flags everywhere. Because the whole essence of this work is to that he brought to light how muscles work. And Eleanor implemented in the training the requirement of writing a paper on neurophysiology. So that we had to show that we understand that, not that the work doesn't. It's very effective without it. But if you do have that, you're much better at watching that somebody doesn't go into these things and exploring what else you could do to move something else in the soma. Essentially, if somebody goes to a somatic yoga session, what will be different from a traditional yoga session? Hatha yoga? It will mostly be that, first of all, especially per Eleanor, she had everybody check in a little bit because building community is a part of yoga. So, everybody just says hello to everyone and how is your soma today? And he used the word soma instead of body because it's what the Greeks use for our body. Their word body is what they would use, the equivalent of ours. Like if we translated our word body, they would use it for the body of an engine or a body of soldiers, or a body of something that's not a living organism.
Denise: Right.
Lulu: And he redefined this as the living organism seen from the inside. So, it's very friendly to yoga because a central pillar of yoga, the foundation of yoga, is self-awareness. Through all the different branches of yoga, it's about self-awareness. However, because they didn't know then, and they didn't maybe need to know because they were all flexible anyway, which we in a city going to a gym usually aren't. And we look at a picture of a posture that might have taken them some time to develop. I'll bet you five-year-olds don't necessarily do it right away. Or teenagers, though maybe five-year-olds did it since they were babies can still put their toes in their face, I don't know. But the big piece is not to stretch, because in the muscle and in every tendon are little mechanisms that detect length and tension. And what they do is they cause the muscle to recontract, to protect from overlengthening or tearing or separation or any of those things. So, when we go into stretch routinely, as with a fairly rigorous yoga practice in the west, we end up quite stiff. So, we think we need to do more yoga. Right. In somatic yoga, per Eleanor, she has us do the first four movements from the whole myth of aging, because they involve, as with the original early elementary yoga movement, the cat movement, where you're on all fours and you arch and then you arch up and then you kind of arch down and I don't know what you call each of them, because that in somatics is called arching and flattening, because we're lying on our back so there's no gravity at play. So, we're not pulling ourselves and holding on all fours with other muscles. We're very specifically arching the backup, which is brought to us by the back muscles, relaxing them, and then pressing the belt line down, which brings in the abdominal muscles, and then we're releasing those very gently. So instead of putting our limbs in a position to achieve what a posture is meant to look like, and then go into what it's meant to be doing internally, which yoga very much is supposed to be doing, we use our muscles, contracting them gently to bring ourselves into that posture. We're aware and sensing what muscles we're using, and then we gently reduce the same contraction of the same muscles. To release out of the posture.
Denise: Right.
Lulu: So, when a weightlifter bends their arm, the biceps, to lift a weight, that they tend to just sort of release it. So, the intelligence of the bicep is it just got told to shorten and nothing told it to actually lengthen again. Whereas when you have an eccentric contraction and release it under your own control, a few things happen and it results in a re lengthening of that muscle. I met a 25-year-old who's begun to develop that thing that happens to a lot of weightlifters where they actually can't straighten their arms anymore.
Denise: Yeah, I've seen that.
Lulu: And he was only 25, you know, and they were all bulked up and they thought it looked cool, and they were good enough looking anyway, by my book. But I said, well, can you straighten your arm? And he said, “it is straightened.” I said, well, look in the mirror to the side. And he said, why can't I straighten it? He was panicked. So, I saw him a couple of months later. He said, I've been doing that thing. He said, I go to the gym and I lift the weights, but afterwards I take my little water bottle, and I do that thing where I lower it very consciously. And he does an eccentric contraction, and his arm has begun to be able to straighten again.
Denise: That's awesome.
Lulu: When we can do that with the tummy and the whole torso and every other muscle. So that's the biggest difference in how we go into the postures and how we come out of the postures. Because when we are consciously controlling our muscles, operation that has calls on the cortex, our movement is done by the cerebellum. It makes our movement easy. Once we know what we're doing, it does it for us. It keeps it smooth, and it doesn't rewrite the programming that builds up and ends up with short people later that wonder why they feel stiff.
Denise: Yeah.
Lulu: The only place that that programming can be rewritten is the cortex. So, if we go into a posture and we start to tremble, or we're coming out of a posture, or we lift our bicep, and then to control the release, it trembles, which is very common. That's sometimes Elena said, it's okay, that's pay dirt. That's the cortex saying, I'm not used to controlling this. But it tells us we've succeeded in getting the cortex to be in control. And when it is in control, the whole avoidance of this shortening and tightening is what she's brought into this.
Denise: Okay. I think that that is a lot of explanation. That should help people understand to some degree what we're talking about. How somatics and somatic yoga is different from regular yoga. What I experience when I do it is just the fact that I have to really consciously make myself slow way down. And it's not my natural rhythm or energy to be that slow and deliberate in the movement, but I'm getting better at it. And so as I keep doing it, I'm more conscious of the fact that I can go slower and the results are better when I do.
Lulu: And it ends up translating and spreading into other things that we do. Many, many things in our daily lives begin to just be a little softer and a little smoother. And we're just as efficient with them. They don't take us any longer to achieve. Yeah, but there's a slightly different way of doing them. And that self-awareness which is a big part of yoga is equally a big part of somatics. So, in a full session to make this work, because the motor cortex partners with the sensory cortex. So that's how if we need to put something or retrieve something from right near a hot plate. Right. It's a classic example of when both are at work together. And there's a bit of a cortical play there because if you just randomly went and put your hand there, that's when you burn yourself or when you tripped over because you weren't treading very, very carefully. There's a bit of cortical action in those things. So, the sensory cortex receives when the heat gets too much and tells the motor cortex what to do. They work together very, very well. So, what she does is she has implemented first, there's a golden rule that this is what the posture looks like. That's sort of. It's the direction of the destiny. It doesn't have to be today's destiny or a goal. So, goal-oriented movement is more often harmful than helpful. That's not part of it. So first of all, it's working within comfort somatics, whether it's in a treatment session, in a practitioner session, or just with gentle practice or somatic yoga is all about working where it's comfortable. If it's easier to turn your face one side than the other, we do the easy side first.
Denise: Right.
Lulu: And one reason, because it's good to work in comfort body and the whole person likes it better. But it's also because if it's easy to turn that way, the chances are those muscles on that side are already a little bit contracted. So, we'll work with that Side first, and that will begin to equalize things. But also, the brain. Whatever side you start with, the brain gets it. And it's much easier on the other side. That's happening as well.
Denise: Right.
Lulu: But in between postures, when we, after doing the first warmups, if the front and the back, and then there's a diagonal back release, after which it's always good to follow it with the frontal back release, which is we call Cat 4, where you have the knee going diagonally across you towards the other elbow. But it's not about how close to my elbow can I bring my knee, as Hanna said, it's about how well can I round my back into my mat. And we'll notice that that's what brings the knee and the elbow effortlessly together. We're guiding the direction. And then as we very slowly uncurl from that, we're uncurling from that diagonal thing and what are we doing? The back one is the back part of a walking pace, and the front one is the front part of walking, because we walk with this diagonal twistedness is how we stay on two feet, as he used to say, without having these crazy movements of our head. Like chickens and ostriches, we have these ar swinging, but they swing in differentiation. They swing in opposition to the leg. When the right leg is going forward, the right arm is coming behind us, et cetera.
Denise: Right.
Lulu: It's very graceful as we get better at it once we do yoga asanas, which is what she continues with from there, in between, almost every posture, every asana, is a full minute of lying flat on our backs, assuming that we're comfortable on our backs, of deep breathing and self-sensing. And it's not just a good idea. It's that it is in that minute of self-sensing that the sensory cortex can really gather the information that it wants. So that whole cortical function is established, it's settled. And any change that happens, like a re lengthening or want something that feels longer and looser is a lasting change. Whereas when we've gone into the stretch mechanism, it feels great Right. Afterwards, but then we have to keep doing it. The change sticks.
Denise: Yeah. So that moment of pause allows everything to integrate in the body.
Lulu: Yes. And in the brain and.
Denise: Yeah, exactly.
Lulu: Yes. So, it's cleaning up the. The neural pathways. It's. We're really cleaning the. The communication between our brain and our muscles.
Denise: Well, and just the fact that you're stopping and breathing, I think, is a huge thing too, because, you know, the breath can be part of it, but just that Relaxation and breath, I think, is a big deal.
Lulu: And it's amazing what we might notice. We might notice that something hurt that we didn't know that hurt, or that something that used to hurt isn't hurting anymore. There are all sorts of information that comes to enable that to work, requires that time of listening and allowing the sensory cortex. And the other piece, of course, as you know, is motor planning. First, where we're visualizing in somatic yoga. So, we're visualizing the movement before we do the movement.
Denise: Right.
Lulu: And then we're doing it by pulling ourselves gently into a contraction with certain muscles and then releasing slowly the same contraction of the same muscles, and then we're lying down and sensing what's been generated by that movement between every posture.
Denise: Yeah. So, I, I and I think that probably my listeners are saying, that's all good and fine, but how is this going to help my vision?
Lulu: Oh, because. Well, in Thomas's words, a lot of people used to come from him when he did. I think it's in lessons, lesson six, where we come vertical. But it doesn't have to be only that. It can be any. There are lots of ways of working with the neck muscles and the upper back muscles. Of course, once you've read up the center, what he called the somatic center, is anywhere sort of between above the pelvis and below the ribs.
Denise: Right.
Lulu: It's not just the solar plexus; it's not just the waist. It's that whole center of us.
Denise: Yes.
Lulu: And when the long muscles involving that and the side muscles get a little bit longer, then so the shoulder muscles and the hip muscles and the leg muscles and then the neck muscles can also become. They regain their suppleness and their length. So, what he said when he does the actual this, the things that are literally aiming at the work of the freeing up the shoulder and the neck muscles. And then he comes to the point of working, differentiating the movement of the head. The head may be turning one way at the same time as the torso is turning the other way and then gently releasing that and turning back and forth. So, the head is going to your left while the body turns to your right and the torso turns back to the right while the head is in there. It can be really like patting your head and rubbing your tummy kind of thing at first, but when it comes, it's delicious.
Denise: Yes.
Lulu: And sometimes it's very challenging for people because they have quite a lot of stuff to work out, and that's the set of movements that really change his vision. He used to say, people have come to. You've cured my eyesight. And he said, I haven't done anything with your eyesight. I've just helped you release the muscles, so the eyes are freed from the tyranny of the neck muscles. Yeah, that was how he put it.
Denise: There was a point in the last session, or it might have been the one. The one. The last one that you did, where I was so confused. We were doing the opposite direction, and. And I. I couldn't even do it. And I thought, okay, well, clearly this is the spot where I really need to do the work.
Lulu: Yes. And it's also interesting that you say that. I'm very heartened to hear it, because 40 years ago, that lesson was taught. The whole lesson on one side, and then a different day, the whole lesson on the other side. And working with people in their late 70s, I've divided that lesson into three parts. So that one where you felt confused was the last third of the one lesson.
Denise: Right.
Lulu: But imagine what it could be like. And the reason for that is partly because we're different now.
Denise: Yeah.
Lulu: There's a lot more tension in society. There's a lot. There's just so much going on at the moment that people are not the same as they were 40 years ago.
Denise: Yeah, that's for sure.
Lulu: And Elisa, who put that together, is an eye doctor. And I said to her, if you want me to teach lesson six, here's what's going on with me in lesson six and these ladies I'm working with. And she. He said, oh, it's just too much. I'm so glad. So, we divided it into three sections.
Denise: Yes. Yes. It was amazing. So did you want to talk at all about the breath work or the meditation piece of.
Lulu: That's the other difference, of course, between somatic yoga and somatics, which is what you first asked me. So somatics is very much about the movement, and the breath is part of it. And lying still and being at rest and just breathing and sensing is a big part of it. But in a somatic yoga session, very yogic, once we've done the initial warmup movements that are very much anisomatic movements because they help us lengthen and bring suppleness to our very center muscles, which just keeps having an accumulative effect over time. We just keep. I got an inch and a half taller when I did the mythophagy, and it was pretty amazing. And so, it also gets our mind and brain ready to apply that method with going into the asanas and releasing out of the asanas, and we set that in by resting and then after doing a series of asanas which may be all different from one session to the next, or there may be some of them that are always the same and then some variations on it. Then there is a section of a somatic yoga session like all. To me, any real yoga session would have, which involves a whole phase of pranayama or the breathing practices and another phase of meditation and then close with a lovely chanting of Om.
Denise: Right.
Lulu: It can be. I mean, I think my first yoga lesson was an hour and a half in this gentleman's house. He'd been in India for four years. And we did a third of that time with hatha yoga and a third of that time was breathing, half an hour breathing, and a third of that time was meditation.
Denise: And when you say you're going into asanas, can you define the word for people who are just not in the yoga world at all?
Lulu: Yes, they're the postures that we see. If you see a yoga book, usually somebody's in a posture or they may be standing on one foot with their arms to the sky and one foot up on one leg and they may be in that cat position or there are many, many positions and they're often named after animals.
Denise: Right.
Lulu: And they are designed, so to speak, to stimulate and ease therapeutically certain organs or parts of our brain and our body. They're very specific. It's a very health-oriented practice. And that's the part of the whole body of yoga that of course addresses our physical form, which fortifies us and prepares us to do these other spiritual practices at whatever length we choose to. So that's what asana is the word, the Indian word for posture or pose.
Denise: Okay. Just wanted to make sure that was clear as we're explaining all of the aspects of, you know, differences between everything. So have we hit on all of the things that you wanted to clarify?
Lulu: I suppose the most important part could have taken two minutes. Just saying, look, we use our muscles to go in and we release ourselves out. We don't put ourselves in the posture because that's what it's meant to look like and then get the stretch. So that was really a piece that sort of almost woke me up. And I think that honoring both the lineages and understanding also that somatic yoga isn't just yoga, that's sort of got some adjustment from this vast field of somatics, it is Hanna somatics and this knowledge of how using our muscles in a certain way and allowing them to re lengthen is how we not only avoid yoga injuries, but we give ourselves much more benefit from this gift from India. It is a gift from India. It's a huge gift.
Denise: Yes. And it's been really helpful for me. I appreciate that you're able to explain it all in such detail and hopefully those who are interested at this level will feel like it's a lot more clear than it was before.
Lulu: Well, I hope so too.
Denise: Yeah. So, thank you for that.
Lulu: It's a big subject and it's a signific ant thing to understand.
Denise: Yeah. Well, I appreciate that. Thank you very much.
Lulu: Thank you very, very much. And I thank you to Eleanor and to Thomas for their work that has saved our lives. So I love the work, as you can tell. 
Denise: Yeah, I can tell. Thanks for listening to the Healing Our Sight podcast today. I'd love to connect with you. You can leave a comment by clicking the link in the show notes. I love receiving your messages. You're also invited to join the Healing Our Sight Facebook group. Let me know what resonated with you and how I can better serve you.