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Essential Somatics

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Manitou Springs, CO
Essential Somatics

Essential Somatics is a revolutionary approach to eliminating muscle pain. It's safe, easy, and common sense. Learn to move without pain!

It goes to the root of most chronic muscular pain: the brain and its control of muscles and movement. Since 2010, Essential Somatics® has grown from a small solo practice to a team of highly skilled and devoted Clinical Somatic Educators who teach multi-day introductory courses, clinical certification trainings, and embodied movement for corporate leadership. The trainings we provide are offered in the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Europe. The teachings of Somatic Education have helped thousands of people worldwide to return to a more vibrant life of movement, self-agency, and awareness.

04/15/2026

Our upcoming PRTM Workshops

We’re running Pain Relief Through Movement workshops over the coming months. If you’ve been curious about Clinical Somatic Education but haven’t experienced it yet, these are for you.

PRTM workshops are two-day in-person events where you’ll learn foundational somatic movements designed to release chronic muscular tension. We work through common pain patterns and teach you the movements that address them at the source.

You’ll get hands-on guidance, personalized feedback, and the tools to maintain your practice at home. Small group sizes mean individual attention as you learn.

Upcoming dates:

➡️Zagreb, Croatia – 2-3 May 2026 Led by Martha Peterson Early bird €300 until 1 April
➡️Colorado, USA – Fall 2026 Led by Martha Peterson Early bird $345 until 1 July
➡️York, UK – Fall 2026 Led by Karen Statner Early bird £260 until 1 July

If chronic pain has been part of your life for longer than you care to remember, and you’re tired of managing it without resolving it, come and see what somatic movement can do.
Interested in coming along? Comment MOVE below and we’ll send the booking link👇

04/13/2026

You’re tired of treatments that don’t last.

The pattern is familiar by now. You find something that helps. It works wonderfully for a while. Then, slowly or suddenly, you’re back where you started.

Same pain. Same restrictions. Same frustration.

You start to wonder if lasting relief is even possible, or if this is just how it’s going to be. Temporary fixes on repeat for the rest of your life.

Here’s what’s actually happening. Your body is brilliant at adaptation. It learns patterns to protect you, to get you through injury, to compensate for stress or overuse.

The problem is, it doesn’t always unlearn them when the threat is gone.

So you’re left carrying protective tension that’s no longer protecting you from anything. It’s just there, running in the background, creating pain.

Most treatments work around this. They release the tension manually, or strengthen the muscles nearby, or block the pain signals.

All useful. All temporary.

Because none of them are teaching your nervous system to let go of the tension it’s holding.

Clinical Somatic Education does just that.

It works at the level where these tension patterns live: your brain and your nervous system. When you retrain your brain to retrain your body to release what it’s been gripping onto the results last because you’re not just managing it. You’re actually changing it.

04/11/2026

What if you had an entire retreat center to yourselves?

Just you, your body, and the space to finally address the pain you’ve been carrying for years.

This is what we’re offering. A private retreat experience where Clinical Somatic Education becomes the focus of your days, not something you fit in around everything else.

Most people experience somatic education in hour-long sessions once a week, fitting it around work and life and all the other demands on their time.

It works, but it’s slow. Our retreat format changes that. Multiple sessions across several days, with time between to rest, process, and let your body integrate what it’s learning.

You wake up and move. You rest. You eat well. You sleep properly. And somewhere in those few days, something shifts that might have taken months to shift in weekly appointments.

If you’ve been putting off addressing your pain because weekly sessions feel too slow, or because you can’t imagine fitting it into your schedule, a retreat might be exactly what you need.

04/09/2026

Three sessions in, you’re not seeing the dramatic changes you hoped for. The pain is still there. Maybe it’s slightly better, but not enough to convince you this is working. So you stop.

This is where most people give up on Clinical Somatic Education. Right before it starts to work.

Here’s what’s actually happening in those first few sessions.

Your nervous system is beginning to recognize patterns of tension it’s been running on autopilot for years, maybe decades.

You’re learning to sense tension you’ve stopped noticing.

You’re starting to release muscular contractions that have become so familiar they feel normal.

That process takes time. Your body didn’t learn these patterns overnight, and it won’t unlearn them overnight either.

The people who get real results from somatic education are the ones who stick with it past the point where it feels like nothing is happening. They’re the ones who show up for session six, session ten, session fifteen, even when the progress feels slow.

Then somewhere around that mark, something shifts. The pain that’s been constant for years starts to ease. Movement that felt restricted opens up. The tension you thought was permanent begins to release.

Most people quit right before they would have felt the difference.

If you’ve tried somatic work before and stopped because it wasn’t working fast enough, you’re not alone. But you might have been closer to a breakthrough than you realized.

04/05/2026

Imagine walking into your doctor’s office with chronic back pain you’ve carried for years. Instead of just prescribing medication or referring you for surgery, your GP writes you a prescription for Clinical Somatic Education sessions.

Six weeks later, the pain that defined your daily life has reduced significantly. You’ve learned how to release the muscular patterns your body built up over decades. You’re moving differently. Sleeping better. The tension you thought was just part of getting older turns out to have been something you could address all along.

This isn’t a far-fetched idea. In countries where somatic education is integrated into healthcare systems, people are finding relief from chronic pain, reducing their reliance on medication, and regaining movement they thought they’d lost permanently.

Clinical Somatic Education works with your nervous system to release chronic muscular tension at its source. It’s not a quick fix. It’s a process of retraining your body to let go of patterns it’s been holding onto, sometimes for years.

The question isn’t whether it works. Research is increasingly showing that it does. The question is when healthcare systems will start recognising it as a legitimate treatment option rather than something people have to seek out and pay for privately.

What could change if somatic education was as accessible as physiotherapy?

For thousands of people living with chronic pain, that shift could mean the difference between managing symptoms and actually resolving them.

04/01/2026

Some thoughts from Martha on the parallels between small island life and somatic movement💭

03/30/2026

You can’t think because your brain is foggy with pain

Simple tasks feel overwhelming. You read the same paragraph three times and still don’t know what it said. You walk into a room and forget why you went there. Someone asks you a question and your mind just blanks.

You think you’re losing it. You’re not.

When chronic pain takes over, it doesn’t just affect your body. It hijacks your entire nervous system. Your brain becomes so consumed with processing pain signals that there’s barely anything left for focus, memory, or clear thinking.

This isn’t weakness. This isn’t “all in your head.” This is your nervous system in a constant state of alarm, unable to return to baseline. And when your brain is stuck in that alarm state, cognitive function suffers. Of course it does. Your brain is using all its resources just to manage the pain.

The fog isn’t separate from the pain. It’s part of the same pattern.

Here’s what most people don’t realize: when you address chronic tension at the nervous system level, when you teach your brain to actually release the patterns it’s been holding, mental clarity often returns alongside physical relief.

Not because the pain was “in your head.” But because your nervous system finally has the resources to do something other than constantly process discomfort.

Your brain has an incredible capacity to rewire itself. When you give it the conditions to release chronic holding patterns through Clinical Somatic Education, you’re not just addressing the tight muscles. You’re giving your entire nervous system permission to settle.

And when it settles, the fog lifts.

You don’t have to live like this. There’s a way back to feeling like yourself again.

03/28/2026

We get asked the same questions quite regularly, so we thought what better thing to round them all up!

And if we’ve missed anything you’d love to know, put it in the comments👇

03/24/2026

We just finished Module 1 of this year’s ESMTT training, and these are some behind-the-scenes moments from the program.

It’s nine months. That sounds like a long time, but there’s no way to compress this and have people actually understand what they’re doing.

A lot of the year is spent on the floor. The students are experiencing the movements in their own bodies first, because you can’t teach this if you haven’t felt it yourself. You can’t guide someone through releasing a pattern you’ve never released in your own nervous system.

They’re learning the theory too - the neurophysiology, the reflex patterns, how chronic tension develops. But the real learning happens when you can feel the difference between contracting and slowly releasing, when you start to recognize the patterns in yourself and then see them in other people.

Those who graduate from the ESMTT understand Clinical Somatic Education and Somatic Movement in a way that truly allows them to help people. Not because they memorized the sequences, but because they’ve done the work themselves and understand that this is the start point for every good Somatic Movement teacher.

That’s what makes the difference.

Address

Manitou Springs, CO
80829

Opening Hours

Monday	9am - 5pm
Tuesday	9am - 5pm
Wednesday	9am - 5pm
Thursday	9am - 5pm
Friday	9am - 5pm

Website

http://essentialsomatics.com/, https://www.unionsquareandco.com/9781454953173/the-mindful-motion-deck-by-martha-peterson

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Our Story

Essential Somatics is grounded in the revolutionary approaches of Hanna Somatics, Moshe Feldenkrais and other modern day somatic pioneers. We teach people to eliminate their own muscle pain and create more freedom and ease in their bodies and their lives. Essential Somatics gets to the root of most physical discomfort and restriction: the brain and the way it communicates with the muscles through movement. Come learn safely and gently to move through life with mastery and joy.