Welcome…
Gena is an educator, dancer, yogini and creative explorer, working as a Clinical Somatic Practitioner with a private practice in Maplewood, NJ and New York City. She trained in the tradition and lineage of Thomas Hanna with Martha Peterson of Essential Somatics, where she is currently part of the training/teaching team. Gena leads training, workshops, retreats, and private Clinical Somatic Education sessions online and in person.
What is Somatic Movement?
Hear Gena talk about her approach to somatic movement, which is, at its core, about finding and reconnecting to joy and who we are.
Certifications
Advanced Certification, Thai Yoga Bodywork
My approach
Together, I teach you to work with your nervous system to sense protective habits that no longer serve you so you can make new choices toward freedom and ease in all aspects of who you are.
My approach is to help you realize your infinite capacity to make lasting changes. When you understand what it means to be fully integrated within your system, body, mind, and spirit as one.
While your nervous system is brilliantly designed to protect you when you experience pain or lose connection to what you feel, this protection can manifest as compensation for pain, or result in a tightening response to a traumatic experience, or numbing. These are normal stress responses, but sometimes we get stuck, and held in a state of high alert, with our sympathetic nervous system at work!
You can educate your nervous system, reminding yourself what the state of rest and digest feels like. Spending more time in this healing state, the parasympathetic nervous system will benefit all aspects of who you are and how you are in the world.
Build your practice
In our work together, you’ll learn to feel the tension that your body holds unconsciously. This takes practice and thoughtful guidance in a safe space.
Once you begin to sense and feel your body from a new perspective, one of full awareness and consciousness, you’re on the way to teaching your brain a new pattern of movement. This is how you learn to release your unique, specific habitual patterns and pain, all at the level of your brain.
Somatic movement education helps bring our unconscious patterns of tightness and holding into our conscious awareness, so we then can make changes that last.
Online Learning
In-Person Learning
Work With Me 1:1
The art, science, and philosophy of movement
Somatic movement explorations invite inquiry into challenging our outdated ideas and beliefs that may no longer serve us, or in fact, work against us. Our awareness is infinite, it’s our mind that confines us to preconceived notions and expectations about who we are in the world.
I work with you to bring a new perspective and powerful method for improving your function and eliminating chronic pain. My classes and work are for anyone interested in learning the basics or those with an interest in reviewing.
When we work one-on-one together, we’re able to go beyond the most common issues I see: from general stiffness, mobility, chronic back, shoulder, or neck pain to the unique patterns that arise in your body in response to the world around you.
Contact Gena
To get in touch with Gena, email her at gena@emergesomatics.com or call (646) 734-9708.
To join her newsletter and get regular updates on somatic movement opportunities, click here.
More about Gena…
I have spent much of my life in motion; dancing, yoga and various somatic explorations throughout my education and dance career. After earning an MFA in dance from NYU TISCH school of the Arts, I performed and taught internationally as a member of the Trisha Brown Company. I moved from the product oriented world of graduate school to working with Trisha. It was while working with Trisha that I had a true experience, my first real experience of what it meant to work and be in “process”… ALWAYS, refining, growing, changing and adapting. Trisha's approach to dance making was scientific, exploratory and playful. She surrounded herself with movement investigators, her dancers all with a thirst for their own moving explorations. Many of us on different somatic paths to embody our dancing, share with Trisha, one another, the audience and our students.
My path to yoga came as I transitioned from performing to teaching and becoming a mother. It began purely as a desire to stay in my body, as I had in my dancing life. A different process began to unfold. A gift of deeper awareness, a new perspective and more learning. My 18 year yoga journey started at Integral Yoga, followed by practicing Ashtanga and studying with Raji Thron in NJ. Raji's depth, vast knowledge, generosity and excellent teacher training were a great foundation. My desire for more learning led me to a variety of teachers; Viniyoga with Gary Krafstow, Doug Keller and Jonas Westring.
I went on to study Thai Yoga Bodywork with Jonas Westring. This work and Jonas' teaching helped to illuminate the subtle energy body of my yoga practice. I have advanced certification in Thai Yoga Bodywork, assisted Jonas in his foundation courses over the last 10 years. I spent 3 weeks in Thailand completing 2 modules of yoga study with Jonas in 2011.
In May 2017, I completed my 3 year Clinical Training with Martha Peterson of Essential Somatics. The evolution and change has been more than I could have imagined during this time. From opening The Somatic Loft with Martha Peterson and Carrie Day in 2014, to taking over Martha's Maplewood NJ practice, assisting in Essential Somatic trainings and working as the only Clinical Somatic Educator in the greater NY/NJ area.
The shape of my work and practice continues to evolve and grow in fascinating ways. Lori Dalvi, Shamanic Practitioner and energy healer, joined me in the summer of 2016. We have since shared our office and work with each other and clients to further awaken the body and spirit. We are working on collaborations and workshops such as Somatic Illuminations, which brings both of our work into one shared experience.