Wisdoms of Embodied LeadershipSharing a perspective of serving on the ISMETA Board for 9 yearsBy Maria Luisa Diaz de Leon Zuloaga In preparation for our September virtual Board retreat, we were invited to spend time outdoors, in nature, and reflect on what is one quality that you want to bring to this meeting and to the coming year of your Board service? It’s been a year since my husband, cat, and I moved to the Wabanaki Nation’s land of coastal Maine. Summer has been an opportunity to explore and hike on the small mountains around here. The hike up is always a bit intimidating, and I usually ..read more

By Wendell Hanna Ph.D., ASMP, CHSE (Certified Hanna Somatic Educator) I am proud to share that I am the first Associate Somatic Movement Professional (ASMP) to be welcomed into ISMETA membership and wanted to introduce myself. As a music education professor (San Francisco State University), I have worked alongside dance academics and practitioners for many years and we have always understood and respected each other through the commonality of sound and music. Somatic bodywork can often feel empty to me without the beauty and aesthetics of sound. That is why I have been exploring the combinatio ..read more

A review by Florian Filtzinger, RSME, ISMETA Board of Directors, Berlin, Germany   This November, the courageous and visionary team of four curators around Kai Ehrhardt – Founder of the Somatic Academy, Berlin and the BodyIQ Festival series – brought a pandemic-conquering and deep-tissue-touching festival to the field of Somatics. In six rooms, spread over four different venues, the curators invited more than 100 presenters to share their approach to Somatics, Activism and the Arts with an audience of peers and researchers b ..read more

Maria Luisa, ISMETA Board President We did it! We ALL did it! Our ISMETA Conference brought together more than 825 somatic movement practitioners, students, and established professionals over the course of five days at the beginning of March. The conference opened up a new chapter in the life of our organization; a chapter where each one of us are invited to contribute to continue to develop, research, experience and enjoy the somatic movement profession in all of its philosophies, schools, and applications. Thank you for joining us, for re-membering this larger body that we all are. The Live ..read more

Why not Martial Arts ! Hoffman Soto, RSME Back in the mid to late 80s in the San Francisco Bay Area, there were meetings with many movement teachers, body workers and others looking to create a somatic organization. I am not sure if these are the roots of ISMETA or if it evolved out of another effort to centralize and organize Somatics into an association. In any event I went to a number of these early meetings and was always taken aback, because the participants only wanted to define “Somatics” as Western-based practices. I remember introducing the idea that non-Western practices like Tai Chi ..read more

Linda Hartley – RSMT, Director of the Institute for Integrative Bodywork and Movement Therapy, an ISMETA Approved training program We were three weeks into the lockdown here in the UK and perhaps like many I was beginning to settle in, after the initial shake-up and all the online messaging that we had collectively reached for in order to stay in touch. A book called to be read, written by my dear friend Liz McCormick and her colleague Nigel Wellings, both experienced transpersonal psychotherapists, teachers and authors. The title Nothing to Lose (Wellings and McCormick 2010) seemed a goo ..read more

Mark C. Taylor, RSME, RSMT Notes from the first Encuentro Somático en México “Celebrando al cuerpo vivo” The first Encuentro Somático in Mexico, Celebrating Embodiment, took place from March 29 to 31, 2019, at the Centro Cultural Pedregal, in the south of Mexico City. More than 140 participants gathered from five countries (Argentina, Colombia, Spain, the U.S., and many regions of Mexico) with 34 teachers and performers representing many different somatic movement traditions, including the Alexander Technique, Authentic Movement, Body-Mind Centering, BodyMindMovement, Contact Improvisation, Eu ..read more

Dynamic Embodiment of the Sun Salutation: Pathways to Balancing the Chakras and the Neuroendocrine System guides you to do the Sun Salutation with more ease by integrating awareness of glandular and chakral embodiment cues and neuro-developmental movement. Everything in this book can be applied to your personal practice and overall health, or to teaching others. It offers a soft, organic yet powerful approach to being in the poses and transitioning between them. What you will learn is effective and surprising. There is tangible mystery in accessing this ability, which we all have, t ..read more

Ukrainian NGO Development Foundation, in collaboration with Wesleyan University Professor Katja Kolcio Ph.D./RSME, received a grant from the United Nations Recovery and Peacebuilding Programme and Government of the Netherlands, to introduce somatic methods in psycho-social care and evaluate their impact on the wellbeing of people affected by the armed conflict in Donbas, Ukraine. Vitality Project Donbas is based on five years of research and development working directly with relief workers, veterans/soldiers across Ukraine to develop a program specific to the Ukrainian context.  ..read more

ISMETA’s Executive Director, Elisa Cotroneo, RSME/T, was honored with an invitation to participate in, and provide comments at, The National Institute of Health Stakeholder Meeting for Research on Whole Person Health, October 17 and 18, 2022. The goal for this meeting, sponsored by the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH), was to discuss the gaps and opportunities in research on whole person health and what is needed to implement whole person health in the real world from a variety of perspectives. One exciting outcome of the meeting is the plans for the d ..read more