Your body and nervous system can easily become dysregulated and out of balance when chronic stress is part of your life — as it is for so many of us right now.
Whether it’s anxiety, depression, sleep difficulties, or physical aches and pains, stress can show up in many areas of life.
But you have more power than you might realize — because, right now as you read this, you possess the ability to regulate your own nervous system.
To fully embrace this innate power, you’ll first need to know how your unique nervous system works, take the time to feel it — and become clear on how it impacts your everyday behavior.
A powerful way to deeply understand and regulate your nervous system is through Dr. Martha Eddy’s Dynamic Embodiment Somatic Movement Therapy (DE-SMT).
As you practice DE-SMT, you’ll integrate technical skill-building exercises with meditation, relaxation, healing postures, and new movements. Learn rituals as well as improvisation — staying present in each moment to help your body respond to its surroundings.
Join us for an empowering 7-module online course with Martha — and somatic movement therapist — as you learn to pay close attention to the soma (the living body) and discover your own inner truths about what creates stress for you, when you feel safe to be fully vulnerable, and how you can best connect with others, even during times of stress and conflict.
During your seven modules with Martha, you’ll calm and restore your nervous system, establishing a baseline that you can reactivate when needed — until it’s fully rested, alive, and receptive — unlocking feelings of happiness, balance, health, and wellbeing.
Each module, you’ll practice guided, tailored movements, embodied visualizations, meditations, healing postures, and play to enhance your bodily awareness, balance your nervous system, shift your physiological status quo, and develop peaceful, self-regulated responses to conflict and/or stress.
With a doctorate in Movement Sciences and Education from Columbia University, Martha is a Registered Somatic Movement Therapist (RSMT) trained in Massage Therapy and known for her Dynamic Embodiment somatic-movement contributions in the fields of dance, dance science, conflict resolution, child development, and vision enhancement.
You won’t need any somatic-movement experience or a performance background to fully embrace Martha’s unique modalities.
She’ll equip you with new tools to navigate stressful times, provide you with rituals you’ll want to return to, and guide you to build a comforting sense of structure into your life — for a happier, healthier you.
In this 7-part transformational intensive, Martha will guide you through Dynamic Embodiment movement techniques to alleviate stress, amplify inner peace, and reclaim your optimal health.
This course will feature step-by-step teachings and experiential practices with Martha. Each session will build harmoniously upon the previous ones, so you’ll develop a holistic understanding of the practices, tools, and principles of Dynamic Embodiment Somatic Movement Therapy to regulate your nervous system with nourishing, easygoing ways to work through conflict, stress and trauma.
A calm nervous system provides a baseline for healthy reactivation of an alive and receptive nervous system — and a happier you.
Did you know your nervous system can become dysregulated even if you feel like you’re in a passive state of mind?
To calm or balance your nervous system, you first must know how it works — taking time to feel it so you can discern how it impacts your everyday behavior.
Sensitizing movements enhance your bodily awareness as your body senses a change in the status quo. When you speak, walk, draw, or dance — then learn to pay attention to the new sensations — you’ll gain empowering new information about yourself.
This consciousness-shifting process, moving the body to increase self-awareness and act with greater clarity and conviction, is known as DE somatic movement.
By paying attention to the soma (the living body), you’re listening to your body, which is capable of both survival and expression.
This somatic listening supports self-regulation, self-care, and greater health. It can be a tool for guidance and attunement with your outward direction and your inner truths.
In this opening module, you’ll come to understand the key components of the nervous system — the involuntary (autonomic) functions and the voluntary functions.
Martha will share how you can awaken connection to the autonomic nervous system, the vagus nerve, and the skeletal-muscular system — through awareness of glands, organs, fluids, and the nerves that activate them.
You’ll discover the power of choice as you work with, through, and hopefully against different types of stress. Each stressor is experienced through your body — and slowing down to feel and move your body is a huge part of the solution.
In this session, you’ll discover:
Why is early motor experience important?
How you move today is based on your early childhood experiences.
As you’ll discover in this module, by learning and even practicing the basic coordination of baby movements, you’ll gain insight into your adult self.
Connections to old, stuck places often emerge. Because some infant movements are hard to perform as an adult, Martha will share the adaptations she’s created for going through developmental movements of creeping, crawling, toddling, and walking that are easier on the body — with options to sit, stand, and lie down.
This Relax to FocusSM movement series can be done seated in a chair, on the floor, or standing — as your body sinks, rises, encloses, spreads, advances, and retreats.
Martha will guide you to experience how you first behaved as a baby — with movement responses, including vocalizations.
When moving, even from one seated posture to another, you’ll also explore different moods and states of mind. You’ll learn “movement scales,” rituals or sequences for aligning with your attention, finding different emotional responses.
You’ll also become alert to the nonverbal communication habits that are connected to your posture, your movement, and the pitch of your voice.
In this module, you’ll explore:
Conflict resolution is an important skill in life. Bringing your body wisdom into handling conflict can expedite staying present.
In this module, you’ll explore embodying peace at home, in work, and at play.
Martha’s EmbodyPeace approach includes numerous models of resolving conflict — developed over 40 years while working with people of all ages in schools, universities, nonprofits, and for-profit organizations.
Martha will explain traditional systems of negotiation and mediation. You’ll explore how embodiment, including inner and outer awareness (interoception and exteroception), establishes the ground and insight for peaceable responses to conflict.
Interoception is awareness within the body — and sadly, it’s rarely taught. New vocabulary will help unpack how you have access to your inner wisdom and bodily knowing.
Using the flow of movement that emerges unconsciously through hand gestures or postural shifts, you’ll learn how Martha’s Active Witnessing Process can help you find words for feelings, and movement for action. You’ll feel more embodied.
Exteroception refers to your senses that pay attention to the environment outside of your body. Martha will guide you to explore this space of inner and outer flow, the betweenness.
As you balance your nervous system, you’ll ask yourself:
How do I see, feel, then react to disagreements, conflicts, abusive situations, and harm? How do I come into feeling safe? When do I feel safe enough to stand up for a systemic change?
In this session, you’ll discover:
As you apply what you’ve learned in the last three modules, you’ll begin to notice your personal stressors — plus the larger pressures on our culture and world.
In this module, you’ll explore what Martha calls the Stress-to-Trauma Continuum, which asks the questions:
How do stress and trauma differ? How are they the same? When does internal conflict or conflict with others play a part in what’s happening? How do our bodies and awareness of the vagal nerve responses, body tone, and movement help us recognize what state we’re in?
Martha will guide you to ask personal questions, understanding that you and your classmates will have very different answers. Questions will include:
What can you control? What do you need to let go of? What is the role of intuition? How can you be more observant of the present moment? What helps you look into the future without fear? When is it helpful to recognize these issues — and when do you need to set boundaries?
You’ll ground and center, then imagine a slightly stressful situation and explore how it can be of service to you. You’ll learn the bodily skills that can balance the nervous system enough for safety and help you find physiological calm.
In this session, you’ll discover:
Everyone has unique bodies and pasts. Your genetics and life lessons — nature and nurture — influence who you are today.
In this module, you’ll review which function each type of movement serves — for instance, relaxation, activation, interaction, and play.
You’ll reflect on which activities are best for you and develop a map for handling your emotions and body sensations in different situations.
You’ll use journal writing, visualization, movement, and vibration as ways to perceive what is, support what feels challenging, and move into new bodymind states.
You’ll explore Dynamic Embodiment’s O.S.O. model — Observe, Support, and Optimize.
You’ll work with the mystery and anatomy of breathing. Martha will walk you through three-dimensional breathing using your thoracic diaphragm to breathe in all dimensions.
As you breathe, you’ll reinforce different postures that hold stories and impact your neuroendocrine system, hormones, and chakras. Martha’s guided practice will help you experience how surges of hormones can be released through breath and movement.
You’ll track which activities you’re most likely to stick with. As Martha will share, we only benefit from what we actually do, or at least imagine. You’ll find the pathways in your nervous systems to be who you fully are, as a unique individual.
From there, you’ll commit to a practice — your personal journey.
In this session, you’ll discover:
In this module, Martha will help you see the ways you glean support and create separation from the people around you.
You’ll also explore ways to work with conflict, stress, and trauma — and learn to notice which systems set up chronic tensions like humiliation, abuse, or feelings of neglect and unworthiness.
Understanding the social systems you’re operating within helps you connect more deeply with others — and connection is your key to healing.
You’ll explore how bonding with and defending are responses to other people. How do they show up in movement? When do you attach, and what does your body do? When do you separate, become more numb, or even disappear a bit? What’s useful and what’s harmful about each of your responses?
In this session, you’ll discover:
In this closing module, Martha will guide you to review all the concepts you’ve explored during the course.
At this point on your journey, you’ll be able to feel when it’s safe to share your true self.
You’ll review times when you may have wanted to remain hidden, as well as your freest moments when your authenticity comes through. Martha will help you recognize the related feelings and sensations.
You’ll role-play (in the privacy of your own Zoom space) with concrete situations, allowing your vulnerability to come forward.
You’ll discern when it’s possible to be vulnerable with family, friends, or colleagues. You’ll solidify the resources you brought with you into this journey, those you’ve learned along the way — and get clear on the ones you’ll want to keep practicing.
And you’ll visualize barriers and stumbling blocks, moving with them to melt them away..
In this session, you’ll:
We feel honored that Dr. Martha Eddy has chosen to partner with The Shift Network to offer this exclusive online training. This is a unique opportunity to learn from a leading expert on embodiment and somatic movement whose powerful insights and pioneering work are helping us heal and transform ourselves and our world.
If you’re serious about exploring Dynamic Embodiment movement to regulate your nervous system and work through conflict, stress, and trauma, then you owe it to yourself, your loved ones, and our world to take this one-of-a-kind training.
If you’re ready to take the next step in evolving yourself, click the register to reserve your space now.
Dr. Martha Eddy is a Registered Somatic Movement Therapist (RMST), dance educator, and applied physiologist. Her decade as faculty at the School for Body-Mind Centering® and in Laban Movement Studies influenced her to develop the first Somatic Movement Therapy Training, now rebranded as Dynamic Embodiment SMTT, affiliated with Moving On Center in the Bay Area (co-founded with Carol Swann) and several universities. As a professor at Marymount Manhattan College, she was awarded the title of Geraldine Ferraro Fellow of Social Justice. In 1999, she developed Moving For Life, a holistic exercise program for cancer patients that is offered free throughout NYC and around the world.
Martha remains active as a performer and teacher of BodyMind Dancing (with online classes available), and has served on numerous boards, including The Yard, National Dance Education Organization (recipient of outstanding leadership in dance award), the International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association (ISMETA-past president), and the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies (LIMS-past president). Martha was cited in The New York Times three times since 2019 for her work.
Martha also maintains a small private practice specializing with children and adults, and provides educational consulting and evaluation in public schools and dance programs worldwide. As director of the Center for Kinesthetic Education, she has implemented Peaceful Play Program for recess enhancement in New York City, and implements activities from her co-produced DVD, Eye Openers Are Mind Openers. She has been an advisor to BalletMet on developmental research implemented with Head Start, and helps develop curricula and guidelines for the NYC Department of Education.
Her articles and chapters have been published in research, arts, and educational literature. Martha is the author of Mindful Movement: The Evolution of the Somatic Arts and Conscious Action. The book she co-authored with Shakti Andrea Smith, A Dynamic Embodiment Approach to the Sun Salutation, guides readers in how to balance their hormonal system.
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