Awaken whole body aliveness. Inspire health and resilience.
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Somatic Sessions:
Bodywork, Movement Education, Embodied Therapy
Our bodies are our first homes, from which we move, act, feel and engage with the world around us. Our connection to ourselves as Body is impacted by our life experiences and directly influences our ability to have healthy relationships, homes, communities and cultures. By cultivating more awareness of the current, often unnoticed, patterns that shape our ways of being, we can begin to see and feel ourselves more clearly. In choosing practices that orient to and from our embodied experience, we begin to notice the patterns of stress and trauma in our lives and start to process them in different ways.
How do we Understand Somatics?
"Somatics is a path, a methodology, and a change theory, by which we can embody transformation, individually and collectively.
Embodied transformation is foundational change that shows in our actions, ways of being, relating, and perceiving. It is transformation that sustains over time. Somatics pragmatically supports us to align our values and actions. It helps us to develop depth and the capacity to feel ourselves, each other, and life around us. Somatics builds in us the ability to act from strategy and empathy, and teaches us to be able to assess conditions and “what is” clearly. Somatics is a practice-able theory of change that can move us toward individual, community, and collective liberation. Somatics works through the body, engaging us in our thinking, emotions, commitments, vision and action"
-from "What is Politicized Somatics" by generative somatics
"Somatics is a path, a methodology, and a change theory, by which we can embody transformation, individually and collectively.
Embodied transformation is foundational change that shows in our actions, ways of being, relating, and perceiving. It is transformation that sustains over time. Somatics pragmatically supports us to align our values and actions. It helps us to develop depth and the capacity to feel ourselves, each other, and life around us. Somatics builds in us the ability to act from strategy and empathy, and teaches us to be able to assess conditions and “what is” clearly. Somatics is a practice-able theory of change that can move us toward individual, community, and collective liberation. Somatics works through the body, engaging us in our thinking, emotions, commitments, vision and action"
-from "What is Politicized Somatics" by generative somatics
What is a Somatic Session?
A Somatic Session uses somatic education, manual therapy, somatic therapy and embodiment coaching practices and techniques to support clients in addressing their challenges/intentions/desires. We aim to support clients through generative, client-centered care within safe relational containers, offering multilayered support, nervous system re-patterning, whole body awareness, re-connection to embodied wisdom, movement re-patterning, more body ease, new options for pain management, and hope.
Somatic Education: Nervous System Education and Experiential Anatomy
In working with and through the body, having a shared understanding of how a body works can offer the conceptual frameworks to explore ones lived/somatic experience and we can begin to ask "how does your body work"? Knowing how our nervous systems are patterned and responding to the world around us is foundational to change work, and can offer great insight to our experiences, grow compassion and give clues in our change journey. Somatic Education weaves together anatomy, science, and the lived/felt experience.
Somatic Therapy: Unpacking Experience/s through Body & Mind Connection
Trauma and our experiences are held in the body. Movement and sensation are inseparably the language of the body. Somatic Therapy focuses on learning and listening to the language of the body while unpacking current and old stories and experiences, great shifts and insights can take place to transform how that experience is held in the body, and how it continues to shape us. Through presence, communication, and guided body-mind connection, we can integrate old stories, cultivate new patterns in our nervous system, and feel more wholeness.
Embodiment Coaching: Movement, Patterning and Practice Development
Guided by goal development and skill building, we work to shift patterns through verbal cues, imagery, anatomical education, developmental movement patterns, and guided awareness practices. This body re-education could be as clear as learning to move from the floor to standing with less pain, to re-patterning nervous system responses through releasing holding patterns, all rooted in practicable skills. Through consistent and iterative practices to bring new awareness, practiced outside each session and adapted through each session, new patterns are grown.
Manual Therapy: Therapeutic Touch-Based Somatic Bodywork
Consent-based fully-clothed hands on techniques to bring awareness to places of holding, as well as places of resilient intelligence, and to restore balance, ease, and integrity to the system. Rooted in BodyMind Centering, we work with the body as interconnected, inter-relational, open systems. Through touch, we communicate, listen to and offer new pathways to all systems, including fascia, cranio-sacral system, organs, the enteric nervous system, the lymphatic system, the musculoskeletal system, the endocrine system, the proprioceptive system, and all systems a part of vestibular and movement coordination.
Each session is unique and dependent on the goals and intentions of the client.
Some sessions/clients want to focus completely on manual therapy, while others may want to integrate aspects of each component to address their concerns.
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As Registered Professional Members of the International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association, we meet the high Standards of Practice and uphold the Code of Ethics. For more information visit www.ISMETA.org
You're invited to read more about the scope of practice of somatic movement education, as defined by ISMETA.
What makes our practice trauma informed?
We know that our bodies hold and move our stories.
We center relationship and "move at the speed of trust", as voiced by adrienne maree brown.
We aim for collaboration and empowerment through bringing education and active consent into our sessions.
We are in active practice of interrogating our positionality and learning/unlearning the ways that white body supremacy shows up.
We aim to be culturally humble, accountable and responsive as we work across difference.
We stay current to the field of trauma education and collective liberation.
We invite and offer, instead of "tell what to do". We give options.
We make space for all the feelings. We care.
Book a Somatic Session with Amanda:
*Interested in a deep dive somatic transformation journey?
Check out our Re-Embodiment Training Course, a 10 week personalized somatic training and coaching program.
*Need a more accessible option?
Check out our monthly Somatics for the People PWYC Clinic.
Check out our Re-Embodiment Training Course, a 10 week personalized somatic training and coaching program.
*Need a more accessible option?
Check out our monthly Somatics for the People PWYC Clinic.
Praise for the work:
"Amanda is gifted in her ability to convey healing and understanding through touch, word, and movement. She offered me solace and support through a difficult time and instilled more capacity in me to listen to and care for myself." -C.G., Collab Facilitation Co-founder
"I had the great pleasure of working privately with Abbi. As someone who loves dancing but is not comfortable with a lot of contact, i needed to approach the practice of contact improvisation and touch gently. I could not have asked for a more skillful, compassionate and attuned guide. She led me through experiences that opened doors, possibilities, and deepened my connection to myself, to gravity and to other. I walked out of the beautiful Everything Space feeling greater ease, peace and openness." ~Fearn Lickfield, Green Mountain Druid School
"I had the great pleasure of working privately with Abbi. As someone who loves dancing but is not comfortable with a lot of contact, i needed to approach the practice of contact improvisation and touch gently. I could not have asked for a more skillful, compassionate and attuned guide. She led me through experiences that opened doors, possibilities, and deepened my connection to myself, to gravity and to other. I walked out of the beautiful Everything Space feeling greater ease, peace and openness." ~Fearn Lickfield, Green Mountain Druid School
