If you're looking for results that last and are ready to be actively involved in your health, clinical somatic education is the best that I have to offer and Elevated Somatics is one of the few places in Colorado providing this service.  I would recommend Somatic Education for anyone suffering from chronic or subacute musculo-skeletal pain, physical trauma, poor posture, lingering injuries, and optimal performance goals.

One-on-one sessions at my Highlands office are a way to get personalized attention for what ails you.  Sessions are about an hour in length and generally consist of three parts; assessment, hands-on clinical techniques, and instruction for at-home movements.

What’s worse than being physically injured? For many people it’s dealing with the lingering aftermath and domino effects of that injury years later. A car crash when you were a teenager, a skiing accident in your twenties, falling out of a tree when you were a young kid. All these things take their toll and can continue to take their toll long after the bones have mended and tendons, ligaments, and muscles have healed. Elevated Somatics can help.

EXAMPLE

When you are physically injured, there are multiple processes that occur in the continuum from damage to healing.  At the moment of impact, when pain, we protectively cringe, contracting around the injured area, immobilizing that part of us and reducing bleeding.  This is an important life-preserving function and is reflexive in nature, meaning we do this automatically without thinking. We all experience this regularly with smaller injuries.  Remember the last time were walking barefoot and stepped on a pointy stone or touched a pan on the stove that was hotter than you expected.  You likely cringed, immediately retracting that limb up from the rock or back from the stove.

But what preserves life immediately after an injury can become a problem itself if it perpetuates.  When they pain is strong and/or lingers, the cringing pattern can persist and become a chronic holding pattern of muscle tension.  Meaning you know longer trust puting your injured foot fully on the ground, straightening your arm out or exposing one side of your torso.  Inevitably, you rebalancing your weight and muscle tone in an effort to compensate. This can lead to gait issues and wear and tear on joints from a redistribution of weight and load during movements.  Additionally, while decreasing blood flow is important when there is an open wound, chronically decreased blood flow can lead to further cell death (hypoxia) and a decrease flow of oxygen and nutrients to the tight areas.  So while, on x-rays and MRIs, everything appears to be back to normal, there are now a number of issues that may have popped up.

Symptoms of this “trauma pattern” tend to be one sided, because life usually doesn’t hit us head on.  

Some common issues that may have resulted from an old injury are: 

+ restrictions in breathing

+ frozen shoulder

+ an achy knee or hip (often on only one side)

+ sciatica

+ scoliosis

+ functional leg length differences

While the techniques employed at Elevated Somatics will not magically make your bone heal faster or repair a severed tendon, they can help with this secondary issue of injury and assist in helping you to fully and completely recover balance and free, painless movement again. We will do this together by helping you to learn to let go on the holding pattern that is no longer necessary.  Through slow, gentle movements, you will lean

Somatics can help by reconnecting you to the muscles that are locked up in this chronic pattern of holding.  As you reconnect, you will learn to relax parts of you that might still be protecting you from a long ago healed injury. Through slow, gentle movement, you will experience safety once again moving an area that has been fearful of pain.  This is a process is reintegrating parts of you that have essentially been lost and in this process of integration you become more whole and more free.