Join Martha in a highly experiential and profoundly healing 7-week journey to discover how to sense where you have tension in your body, identify its root cause…
… and free yourself from the traumas of a lifetime through powerful yet gentle somatic movement techniques that are designed to maintain the health and functional integrity of your myofascial system — to relax your muscles and release the chronic discomfort that may be holding you back from living your most self-actualized life.
Martha will show you how to transform your body’s default response of fight/flight/freeze to one of joy, freedom, bliss, and heightened potential. She’ll show you how you can easily release yourself from even very old traumas.
At the heart of her work is the powerful somatic movement technique of pandiculation (what Martha calls “nature’s reset reflex” because it’s used so much in the animal kingdom) — an easy-to-learn set of practices that enables you to improve your brain’s ability to sense and move your muscles with ease as it calms your nervous system and allows deep relaxation.
Pandiculation is a complex sounding word but it involves a series of simple, yet highly effective ways to stretch the soft tissues involuntarily — which is thought to be more effective and natural than stretching — as a way to release muscle tension, reduce pain, improve posture, and increase mobility.
As the seven weeks of this course progress, Martha will take you through a perfectly designed, systematic process of relearning how to move, much like babies discover themselves and progressively develop the capacity to control their muscles.
She’ll lead you in somatic practices to restore freedom from head to toe — so you canregain balance, improve breathing, have better posture, and enjoy comfort in everything you do.
Martha’s positive energy is contagious and her background in dance and massage therapy provides her with a unique skillset to mentor you in this work…
… as she reveals how pain and restriction of movement are functional, rather than structural disorders of the nervous system.
Through the work of Thomas Hanna — a professor, philosopher, pioneer in the field of somatics, and founder of Hanna Somatic Education — Martha learned the skill of self-sensing as the key to regaining freedom of movement and achieving long-term pain relief.
Hanna taught that when our bodies become habitually contracted due to emotional stress and physical injury, muscles lose their ability to fully relax… and we develop a condition known as Sensory Motor Amnesia (SMA) — which results in ongoing tightness, stiff joints, and persistent pain.
Yet, we have the choice to respond to stressors in healthier ways.
Because you created these habitual responses in your body, you do have the power to reverse them — allowing your skeleton to return to a healthier state by teaching your muscles how to release.
In every session, Martha will guide you in somatic movement techniques and offer specific skills for each area of your body, to unlearn those stress response reflex patterns and restore fluid, effortless, joyful movement — with practices you can easily do on your own.
Even if you feel you’ve tried everything to relieve your chronic pain, these practices offer you the ability to finally experience long-term relief.
And, as you learn more about SMA and the impact it has on your body, you’ll be better equipped to prevent injuries and other medical issues, as well as diminish depression and anxiety.
By the end of the program, you’ll have a full toolbox of practical, easy-to-use techniques that will transform how you feel in your body and your life — to go from pain to possibility. You’ll walk away with your own daily movement practice to remain pain-free, with full mobility and presence…
… and the capacity to continually grow and thrive in a self-actualized, deeply fulfilling life.
In this 7-week transformational intensive, Martha will guide you through the fundamental skills and somatic movement practices you’ll need to address the root cause of pain in your body — rather than just the symptoms — and reset your whole body to function more optimally.
Life is a complex combination of stresses — “good” stresses, like running, moving, or creating, and “bad” stresses, like grief, loss, worry, or failure.
Martha says that it’s not the number of years we’ve lived that determines how we can move and feel as we age, but how we’ve habituated to these stresses.
When we feel out of balance, stuck, or defeated by life’s challenges — both physical and emotional — we tend to react in predictable, reflexive ways.
You’ll experience what these reflexes are and how to begin to release them so you can take back voluntary control of your unconscious, involuntary reactions and habits — improving the quality of your brain, nervous system, and life.
In this session, you’ll:
With all the computer work we do and technology we use these days, who doesn’t have tight shoulders? Tight shoulders are actually a result of a ribcage that can’t expand and contract.
Martha will show you how to release tension in your ribcage, release stress in the muscles that move your shoulders, and restore improved range of motion to your shoulders.
You’ll be able to breathe more deeply and fully.
In this session, you’ll:
Emotional stress and fear — a daily experience for many people — can evoke a deeply primal reflex that causes us to withdraw physically, mentally, and emotionally.
This reflex is known as the Startle Response (or “red light reflex” in clinical somatics) and creates tension in the muscles of the eyes, jaw, tongue, neck, and shoulders.
When we contract inward to protect ourselves from a real or perceived threat — or we slump over our computers and phones — our chest collapses inward, our shoulders hunch, our head goes forward, and we tighten our abdominals.
This tightness in our centers creates anxiety in our bodies and shows up as tension in our eyes and jaw.
Martha will guide you to use gentle, basic movements and differentiation of the eyes, jaw, tongue, and shoulders to create a deep sense of calm in your nervous system.
In this session, you’ll:
The psoas is a deep stabilizer of the lower body. When it’s habitually contracted, it restricts freedom of movement — not just in your lower body, but also in the shoulders, neck, legs, and feet.
By releasing muscle tension in your front, back, and sides, you’ll be able to connect your shoulders and pelvis for improved walking. You’ll learn to move your pelvis in a new way to create more freedom in your entire body. You may even be on your way to dancing again!
As you gain freedom, you may experience unexpected emotions, like fear, which may force you to challenge the way you’ve been living your life — because as you change your movements, you change yourself as a human soma.
You’ll explore how releasing fear of moving, other people’s opinions about you, and your mental expectations can impact your long-term success in moving forward in life.
In this session, you’ll:
Everything you’ve learned in the course so far has been leading to the restoration of the most important movement in our human vocabulary — sensing the ground and walking forward toward life.
Now that you know how to release the red light, green light, and trauma reflex muscles (back, front, and sides of your body), you’re ready to connect your feet to your legs, and your legs to the center of your body for easier walking and more stability.
You’ll also play with rolling over onto your front and back and getting up off the floor with ease.
In this session, you’ll:
At this point in the program, you’re likely to feel safer and more grounded in your movement. It’s time to take a step further and explore what it’s like to twist and rotate from your center.
Our spine is meant to gently rotate as we walk. After all, movement nourishes our spine and keeps us standing tall and feeling strong.
You’ll learn the “Propeller” — a more complex movement that connects the head, shoulders, hips, pelvis, legs, and feet for a luscious experience of spinal rotation.
In this session, you’ll:
Anxiety and stress can lead to a fear of movement. It’s important to remember what it was like to be playful and “dance as if nobody was watching.”
You’ll explore seated, standing, and balancing movements you can do every day to feel confident in your movement and body…
… and learn how invoking curiosity, patience, persistence, and the willingness to be kind to yourself is vital to your daily practice.
Martha will also illuminate how creating a daily somatic movement practice is the best and most time-tested way to create long-lasting improvement and comfort in your relationship with yourself, your body, your movement, and your life.
As you strengthen your capacity to sense, you’ll become more self-monitoring. And as you enhance your ability to self-monitor, you’ll become more self-correcting, self-regulating, and, ultimately, self-actualizing.
In this session, you’ll:
We feel honored that Martha Peterson has chosen to partner with The Shift Network to offer this exclusive LIVE online training. This is a unique opportunity to interact directly with the founder of Essential Somatics and author of Move Without Pain whose powerful insights and pioneering work are helping us heal and awaken ourselves and our world.
If you’re serious about moving without pain and joyful freedom, so you can lead a fully self-actualized life, 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 your own evolution, click the register button to reserve your space now.
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