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Our culture teaches that there is a "voluntary" nervous system - i.e. that the muscles of the body all work according to your will, and only according to your will - and if they work on their own this is a problem. The situation is in reality not so clear-cut.
On reflection, most movemets we make during the day are not "mindful" and so are semi-involuntary. We have decided to make them in a generic sense but are not really in control of any of the details, or "we just react". In other words the (truly) voluntary motor nervous system is hardly ever wholly (or even partly) under genuine cortical [1] control.
In effect the body is a horse and the Cortex / cognitive mind is the rider of the horse. From this point of view it is possible to vary the degree of tightness and control with which the reins are held.
Most people most of the time hold the reins moderately loosely, and the horse places its feet wherever it wants to - a sensible arrangement because after all, the horse is a better arbiter of how to move its body than is the rider.
If we are training the body, we hold the reins more tightly to induce a somatic memory of a certain quality of movement. All forms of this kind of training use many repetitions, and most of them also slow the movements so that there is full cognitive control [2]. This slowing down also ties the mind into the muscle so that there is an enhanced feedback loop between awareness and response-reaction.
It is also possible to let go of the reins. We do this anyway (see list above), but do not usually expect the body to move itself without a wil-ful decision to move. When entering the slightly altered states that come with deep somatic awareness, it also sometimes happens that the body begins to move itself without the need of your will. If you notice what is happening, a clear decision can be made at this point whether or not to allow this movement (or even help and encourage it), or to contain movements - to rein them back into the realm of cognitive control.
These spontaneous movements always express a biological-level attempt to improve your survival-status, are for the most-part self-healing (as they always one way or another reflect and directly express the desire of the organic body to be optimal in its energy usage, to be healthy, to be safe from danger), and to be as adaptive and responsive to the world as possible. They tend to [3] cease to be self-healing when they are fast or extreme. Because most people are used to being in control (or at least feeling in control), for some there is a tendency to make up movements or over-anticipate the movements, so they are not longer spontaneous.
After years of training is is possible to make extremely fast spontaneous movemenmts that truly are spontaneous (rather than being cognitively induced "as if" they are spontaneous). So for most intents and purposes in this context it's more useful to keep the movements slow. At a very slow pace the experience is that the body is moving itself and the motion may have a recognisable viscous treacly or honey-like fluid quality. The movements can become quite strong - strong in that once they start they may insist on a particular specific trajectory. But at the same time, there is a clear feeling that you could make a simple decision to disengage, step outside the state - and the movement would stop.
I have never seen these self-movements cause damage or strong pain despite them sometimes going into extremes that would have appeared impossible. If you have any tendency towards psychosis or schizophrenia (or similarly severe mental disturbances), it would be better not to deliberately encourage self-motion (for some individuals in this case self-motion can be helpful, and for others it can just open up yet more unhelpful loss of cognitive control). This is an issue for everyone, but not a dangerous issue for everyone. Most people have some level of denial and self-deception in place as a form of identity-survival, and at whatever point that self-preservation gestalt kicks in, self-movements will be expressing a reactive defence-survival loop rather than expressing a self-healing process. There is no clear way to discriminate except that really profound healing self-movements may have vast perceptible effects in a relatively short space of time. In contrast, defensive self-movements tend to be cyclic, repetitive and reach no specific conclusion, but are still useful in that they may identify non-conscioius reactive patterns.
Spontaneous movements may tie into primal somatic memories of evolutionary states, sometimes from many hundreds of millions of years ago, and into layers of profound intelligence arising from inside the soma / body tissue. Spontaneous self-movements are a common phenomenon in Craniosacral Therapy, and I find that about half the people I see in my clinical practice easily express spontaneous self-movements during treatments (the vast majority of these movements being very small and contained). And (of course) about half do not - but actually they probably do, because self-motion may easily express and micromovemmnts - so small as to be almost inperceptible.
Self-movememnts come from so deep inside that they demand respect and a degree of awe. [4] They are what they are, they are always one way or another expresisons of health, and what they are always reflects your body's immediate priority - not the priority of your mind.
My personal view from all his experience is that the most important thing is to learn to trust your body (including learning to trust your body when it is telling you that there are things happening around you that are not trustworthy). Indeed, wholehearted yet discriminatory trust is something that underpins everything of value. Learning to trust your body's wisdom and then learning how to allow it to express that and convery it through movement, sensations (and how to listen to these and constructively discriminate) is a self-reflective activity, and a valuable skill that can be cultivated. I believe that this kind of self-movement is a "natural" way our bodies evolved as a way to interface and optimise between somatic and cognitive levels of intelligence.
References & Notes
