Do you pandiculate?

Pandiculate? what is that?

Here are some examples:

  

I first learnt the word when I trained as a Hanna Somatic Movement Coach with Martha Peterson. 

At first sight you might think that you are looking at stretching in the photos above, However Stretching would be lengthening the muscles, and there is actually a lot of muscle contraction happening in what you see, and a contracting muscle is shortening, not lengthening. Pandiculation is to the body yawning.  It is resetting the muscle length and the brain. 

As I write I am also watching my cat sleeping. Every few minutes he contracts his toes and then lets them go, or rolls and brings his spine into extension and then relaxes into it. Animals pandiculate a lot and so should we.

Somatics uses pandiculation to retrain the body's held tensions to bring us into balance and alignment. Somatics is movement with awareness from the inside out. I think that is also what yoga is and have always enjoyed a somatic approach to yoga. When we release held tensions in the body, we are also releasing them in the mind, because our minds and bodies are not separate. So somatics and somatic yoga will bring body, mind and spirit into alignment and let joy bubble up from its natural state within us. 


Somatics is also amazing for relieving a lot of physical pain that we walk around with that is only there because of those held and habitual tensions in the body.


So enjoy pandicualting, its good for you.