Written by Martha Peterson
Aging Doesn’t Have to Hurt: Let’s Rethink What We Think We Know
Somewhere along the way, we absorbed a story about aging – that after a certain point, pain is normal. The creaking, the aching, the gradual narrowing of what you can do without wincing, these are just the price of getting older. We hear it so often that most of us stop questioning it.
I’ve spent over 20 years teaching people to question it and what I’ve found is that the story isn’t true.
The pain and restriction that so many people associate with aging are not, in most cases, caused by age itself. They are caused by the accumulated weight of injuries, surgeries, stress, grief, and the postural habits quietly adopted over decades to cope with all of it. Our nervous system is extraordinarily adaptive. When life demands that we brace or compensate, it obliges. The problem is that it keeps obliging long after the original need has passed, locking us into patterns of chronic tension we can no longer consciously feel or release.
Thomas Hanna, the philosopher and movement educator whose work forms the foundation of Clinical Somatic Education, gave this phenomenon a name: Sensory Motor Amnesia. The brain, through years of responding to stress and injury, gradually loses its ability to sense and release the muscles. We feel tight, stiff, and in pain, and we assume that’s just what our body is now – aging.
But, you and I both know that this isn’t age, it’s a learned pattern. Learned patterns can be unlearned.
This is what makes Clinical Somatic Education so different from most approaches to pain and movement. Rather than treating the body as something broken that needs to be fixed from the outside, through manipulation, medication, or forceful intervention, it works from the inside out, engaging the brain’s own capacity to reset and restore. The gentle, precise movements at the heart of this practice are not exercises in the conventional sense. They are lessons in awareness: invitations for the nervous system to remember what free, easy movement feels like.
People come to this work often as a last resort, after years of trying everything else. They find themselves moving with a lightness and ease they thought they’d lost for good, and understanding, perhaps for the first time, that this ease was always available to them.
This August, I’ll be bringing this work to Hollyhock on Cortes Island for a five-day immersion, Essential Somatics: Free Your Movement!
(August 26–31, 2026). We’ll explore the root causes of chronic tension and pain, practice Somatic Movements that retrain the nervous system, and discover what becomes possible when you stop believing that pain is inevitable. If you’ve tried everything and are still hurting, I’d love for you to join me. Register Now!
