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ARTEMA SOMATICS
  • Welcome
  • Services
    • Somatic Bodywork
    • Acupuncture & Energy Medicine
    • Supplements
    • Events & Resources
    • CCS Program
  • About Mellie
Online Scheduling

Approach to Care


This work brings unique restorative practices together to support personal empowerment, honoring intuition, conscious embodiment, and whole-person presence. This gentle approach tends to resonate with those who have sensitive nervous systems, those who identify as neurodivergent, introverted, highly sensitive, or empathic, and those who have experienced trauma or other difficult circumstances. Sessions are part intelligence-based and part intuition-based to offer you the benefits of my experience plus the holding of space for other forms of wisdom to emerge. 
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This process-focused bodywork can be helpful during times of stress or transition, when you want support accessing your own inner wisdom, before and after surgery, when doing personal healing work after physical or emotional trauma, when processing difficult circumstances, and whenever you want a sense of being supported and witnessed.     

Heart-Centered Care & Co-Regulation
  • Building physical, emotional, and energetic understanding & resilience 
  • ​Supporting those who are highly sensitive or empathic
  • Accessing your sense of inner knowing 
  • Supporting post-trauma growth
  • Enriching your sense of vitality and purpose 
  • Deep restoration and stress reduction
  • Support with life transitions including end-of-life
  • Contemplative care in support of alleviating suffering​ ​

If you desire holistic support in your process of personal growth, transformation, creating a sense of deep inner connection, and increasing self-awareness, I look forward to collaborating with you.

Elements of this work

This approach embraces the concepts of slow medicine, relaxation, receptivity, and the gentler, "yin" aspects of healing work. In a society that pushes a go-go-go  mentality which can lead to over-stimulation, overwhelm, and stifling of our inner wisdom, I encourage you to soften, become quiet, slow down, and access the inner knowing that you already hold within you. I collaborate with you as the expert of your own life and honor your lived experience. We work together to bring a sense of safety, support, and peace to areas in the body that are holding sensations such as tension, bracing, armoring, fatigue, collapse, and overwhelm while also exploring areas that hold messages related to comfort, joy, creativity, ease, and trust. We listen for the subtle messages from the body and integrate them into consciousness awareness. 

I offer the holding of time and space for you to practice presence in order to access your own inner knowing. I offer witnessing and undivided attention. My practice is intentionally process-focused and non-clinical. That means I don't chase symptoms or seek to fix anything. What I do is remind you that you hold great wisdom within you and support you in finding your own way. Together, through this process, we work to inspire a sense of wholeness, ease, connection, integration, and transformation through bodywork, movement, attention, and intention.  ​

I have a special interest in integrating somatic practices (body-focused therapies) with biofield therapies (energy medicine)
. Somatics has been beautifully described as the study of the self from the perspective of one's lived experience, encompassing the dimensions of body, psyche, and spirit. Through practices focused on interoception, proprioception, and sensation-based awareness, somatics-based modalities help bring unknown parts of yourself and your experiences into the known realm. It is a process of tapping into a fuller range of human experience. Somatics embraces inner sensation, curiosity, pleasure, inner beauty, wholeness, and wonder.  It is the art of inner listening to our wise selves with curious awareness.

I support those who have a desire to learn, explore, and lean further into the human experience. My approach honors your beliefs, practices, traditions, preferences, and experiences. I offer support and witnessing as your path unfolds. The work I do is eclectic and integrative. If this slow, quiet, sensitive style of practice resonates with you, I would be happy to support you on your personal journey. 

Somatics studies the body-mind-soul interface, the relationship between our physical matter and our energy, the interaction of our body structures with our thoughts and actions, and conscious embodiment of mind and spirit. 

Techniques from CranioSacral Therapy, NeuroAffective Touch
®,
and advanced energy medicine practices are highly emphasized in this work due to their abilities to deeply support the body and nervous system.​

What is somatic relational bodywork?

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Sessions use a gentle touch to focus on listening to the unspoken language of the body through its tissue responses, rhythms, micro-movements, pulsations, and patterns of ease and resistance. This work uses collaborative processes that include working together to explore patterns of tension, bracing, fatigue, comfort, and other felt sensations in the body through guided somatic awareness, bodywork, quiet listening, and conversation. Through this gentle, hands-on work, the practitioner "listens" for and responds to the messages from your body that come through the acupuncture meridians, cerebrospinal fluid, pulses, connective tissue, bones, organs, nervous system, biofield, and other elements, working to support a deeper sense of being at home in your own body.

​During sessions, we communicate about what areas of your system are in need of support and attention as we work together to follow the messages from the body itself. Techniques from modalities such as Somatic Biofield Therapy™, CranioSacral Therapy, Somatic Experiencing®, NeuroAffective Touch®, Pranic Healing®, reflexology, and other holistic practices are part of this process as we attend to the body itself, the emotions, and the energy field. While this style of bodywork addresses the physical patterns in the body, it also works with the body's energy system. Energy medicine helps to support flow where things are stuck, encourage ease where things are difficult, and encourage stability and organization where things feel collapsed or chaotic. These methods are informed through an interdisciplinary approach that includes concepts from East Asian Medicine and acupuncture theory, anatomy & physiology, neuroscience, interpersonal neurobiology, polyvagal theory, eclectic energy medicine traditions, somatic psychology, and transpersonal psychology. 

Relational bodywork is about building and strengthening your relationship within your own body-mind-soul system and giving you access to the free flow of your own life force energy. It offers support for moving stuck energy and for nervous system regulation through relational connection and co-regulation with the practitioner. Communication between practitioner and client reinforces a sense of safety in the nervous system and offers guidance towards your own sense of inner knowing. It honors the body itself as a wise aspect of your complete wholeness with its own way of knowing as it communicates about shifts in the biofield in real-time. We practice hearing the somatic language of the body through sensation awareness, imagery, and dialogue as we explore the energetic and imaginal realms.

Techniques are designed to bring a sense of support, compassion, and curiosity to the experiences of the body-mind-soul so that we may fully listen and lean into the ways your system may be asking for care and support. This work is energetic in nature while also directly attending to responses of tissues, structures, and systems of the physical body that may be reflecting our energetic and emotional imprints, holding tension, fear, shame, anger, and other blockages or patterns of disorganization that keep us from fully accessing our life force energy.  

We give space to notice, honor, and integrate your experiences. This slow-paced style of bodywork is a holistic, collaborative partnership that helps us deepen into who we are at our core while giving awareness to somatic and transcendent experiences. ​It is an opportunity to have a trusted companion on your path with you as you explore how experiences show up in your energy field and in your body as we experience personal growth, healing work, hope, love, forgiveness, compassion, grief, pain, deep questions, fears, and all the things that life's journey asks us to hold. 
​
These gentle techniques work with the natural pacing of the nervous system and can be greatly supportive for working with:
  • Personal development and self-inquiry explorations
  • Post-trauma growth
  • ​Support for relational wounding and developmental trauma
  • Healing from accidents, injuries, falls, concussions, and physical traumas
  • Sensory processing challenges and the neurodivergent experience
  • Chronic musculoskeletal tension, pain syndromes, and physical injuries
  • Support for burnout and emotional stress
  • Tension, fears, feelings of hypervigilance
  • Lack of motivation or sense of stuck-ness


What is a session like?

Sessions are always gentle, integrative, and collaborative. They allow you to rest, unwind tension holding patterns, gain personal insights, and encourage your own intuition and self-healing capacity to emerge. Sessions generally consist of a combination of bodywork, guided somatic (body awareness) practices, dialogue about your present moment experiences, and quiet integration time.

Note: the somatic practices I offer work in present moment timing. Conversations are focused on sensations, experiences, and what is arising in real time versus talking about old patterns, past experiences, etc. It is important that you make time and space to process after each session to get the most benefit from this work. Some ways of processing may include journaling, creating art, working with a good spiritual mentor or therapist, or any other way you feel tapped into inner wisdom.    

During bodywork, you will be relaxing, fully-clothed, on a soft, heated table. As we work, I listen to your both your words and to the messages from your body as we collaborate, intuit, and weave in supportive modalities that will bring you one-of-a-kind, highly personalized care. It is important to wear stretchy, comfortable, non-restrictive clothing that allows you to breathe and move freely, similar to what you might wear for yoga. It is important to avoid thick seams (such as those in jeans), belts, and restrictive clothing. We always tailor each session to what is showing up for you on the day of your appointment.


​I bring decades of experience with multiple modalities to your session.  Biofield therapy is an umbrella term for modalities that focus on working with the body's energy system. Somatic therapies help us integrate and bring forth the subtle changes in the energy system, the nervous system, and the body into awareness and fuller conscious embodiment. I integrate working with the entire body-mind-soul being. This work is intentionally slow and gentle, in order to allow for unwinding holding patterns, supporting the nervous system, and integrating the shifts experienced with the work. 

When our systems have experienced chronic stress, dysregulation, and long-term sympathetic activation, it can take time to help the body remember how to orient towards safety and increase capacity for processing life's experiences, including learning how to hold a sense of joy and aliveness. Because this is process-focused work, there is no set amount of sessions that are recommended. That is up to you to decide as you do your own processing and navigate your own sense of capacity, personal growth, integration, and healing.  
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How does a session feel? Everybody will have a different experience and every session is different, but here are some common experiences. 
  • Deep relaxation or light sleep
  • Noticing thoughts or sensations such as warmth, heaviness, or lightness in the body
  • Gentle twitching in the body as the nervous system releases tension
  • Unwinding sensations where parts of the body may want to move such as in the neck, shoulders, or hips
  • Memories or dream-like visualizations and images
  • Discharge of unprocessed emotions such as crying, laughter, or feelings of anger  
  • Feeling both calm and energized after a session
  • Feeling more comfortable in and aware of your body
  • Reduction in pain and feelings of stress
  • A concurrent sense of expansiveness, centeredness, and feeling well grounded

The intention of this work is to create an experience of support through touch and deep listening. While things such as relaxation, pain reduction, etc are often experienced, it is not the intention of this work. Through cultivating a sense of safety and co-regulation, this kind of process-focused work is meant to support body-mind connection and connecting to messages from the unexpressed inner self. 

I most frequently work with:
  • Supporting personal transformation and growth-work
  • Supporting awareness of nervous system states
  • Body-mind-emotion connection
  • Supporting post-trauma growth
  • Stress and tension reduction
  • Concerns related to neurodiversity or sensory processing​​
  • Supporting those who experience fibromyalgia and chronic pain conditions​​
  • Conscious dying support and end of life care​​

Through our work together, we seek to:
  • Explore patterns of  ease, tension, comfort, stress, and other sensations
  • Notice and support areas of the body that hold a sense of fatigue, stuck-ness, or exhaustion
  • Become aware of the power within the subtle and imaginal realms
  • Enhance proprioceptive and interoceptive awareness
  • Bring unconscious holding patterns into conscious awareness
  • Nourish the body-mind-spirit system as a whole
  • Support healthy responsiveness in the nervous system
  • Trust the self-healing wisdom of the body  ​ 

ArtemaSomatics@gmail.com
Artema Somatics LLC​
800 Wilson Avenue, Suite 51
​Menomonie, WI 54751

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  • Welcome
  • Services
    • Somatic Bodywork
    • Acupuncture & Energy Medicine
    • Supplements
    • Events & Resources
    • CCS Program
  • About Mellie