Enhancement Techniques for Hanna Somatics Protocols
to Improve Whole Pattern Self-Awareness
Bogusia Badon & Andrew Schaefer 4-27-2019
In this session we will introduce exciting somatic maneuvers, therapeutic exercises, and hands-on techniques to complement and enhance your work with clients—especially those with special challenges. This interactive lecture/demonstration will present invaluable practices to increase your knowledge base and skill in working with clients with impairments in alignment, movement patterns, and musculoskeletal dysfunction.
We have all encountered clients who are unable to tolerate certain HSE lessons because of their particular pain and bracing patterns. In our physical therapy rehabilitation clinic we also frequently encounter patients such as athletes and laborers, who are strong but don’t pay attention to the subtle sensory feedback required for somatic change. Post-surgery trauma-induced SMA can likewise be disruptive to teaching self-care somatic movements. Our work with these types of clients aims to improve their self-awareness and reinforce the fundamental teaching that the benefits of HSE are dependent on the client’s own somatic education, rather than the practitioner’s interventions.
Join us and we will compare and contrast principles of Hanna Somatics with other common modalities used by physical therapists, exercise professionals and chiropractors. We will also share somatic maneuvers to help your clients improve control and sensory awareness of whole body movements. Examples include side-lying total body extension, supine trunk rotation, shoulder clock with scapular isolation, and more.
Bogusia Badon, RPT, CHSE is a physical therapist and owner of Farmington Valley Physical Therapy and has been in practice over 30 years. She is originally from Poland and trained in rehabilitation both in Europe and in the U.S. In addition to being a licensed physical therapist, she became a certified Hanna Somatic Educator in 2007,
and also has had training in Pilates and Yoga. She incorporates aspects of Hanna Somatic Movement and Pilates while treating patients and clients with sports injuries, during post-surgical recovery, and with chronic pain. In addition to her clinical practice, she teaches Hanna Somatic movement, private sessions and group classes. She enjoys skiing, swimming, gardening, biking, and tea appreciation in her free time and has two grown children.
Andrew Schaefer, PhD, PTA, CSE obtained a PhD in Neurosciences from Case Western Reserve University in OH and worked as a Research Scientist at the Departments of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology and of Mechanical Engineering at Yale University. He spent 25 years conducting original research on cellular mechanics underlying motility and nerve regeneration - publishing numerous peer-reviewed articles. Throughout those years, he enjoyed training and collaborating with distinguished medical clinicians, neurosurgeons, biologists, physicists, and engineers. Together they applied innovative technologies to visualize the inner life of cells. In 2011, he personally experienced the healing power of Hanna Somatic Education and realized he wanted to integrate his third-person scientific understanding of life with his embodied first-person experience as a living Soma. He is now an Allied Somatics Practitioner (2013), trained at the Somatic Systems Institute in MA. He currently integrates Clinical Somatic Education into a physical therapy practice at Farmington Valley Physical Therapy & Sport Medicine, and Soma Movement Studio in CT. He enjoys synthesizing knowledge of neurophysiology and biophysics and sharing it to empower people to live more fully.