Martha Eddy
Explore Dynamic EmbodimentSM Somatic Movement Therapy to regulate your nervous system and move through conflict, stress, and trauma — using body awareness and strategies like Dr. Martha Eddy’s Active Witnessing ProcessSM.
Your body and nervous system can easily become dysregulated and out of balance when chronic stress is part of your life — as it is for so many of us right now.
Whether it’s anxiety, depression, sleep difficulties, or physical aches and pains, stress can show up in many areas of life.
But you have more power than you might realize — because, right now as you read this, you possess the ability to regulate your own nervous system.
To fully embrace this innate power, you’ll first need to know how your unique nervous system works, take the time to feel it — and become clear on how it impacts your everyday behavior.
A powerful way to deeply understand and regulate your nervous system is through Dr. Martha Eddy’s Dynamic Embodiment Somatic Movement Therapy (DE-SMT).
As you practice DE-SMT, you’ll integrate technical skill-building exercises with meditation, relaxation, healing postures, and new movements. Learn rituals as well as improvisation — staying present in each moment to help your body respond to its surroundings.
Embark on an empowering 7-module online course from Martha as you learn to pay close attention to the soma (the living body) and discover your own inner truths about what creates stress for you, when you feel safe to be fully vulnerable, and how you can best connect with others, even during times of stress and conflict.
During these seven modules, you’ll calm and restore your nervous system, establishing a baseline that you can reactivate when needed — until it’s fully rested, alive, and receptive — unlocking feelings of happiness, balance, health, and wellbeing.
Each module, you’ll practice guided, tailored movements, embodied visualizations, meditations, healing postures, and play to enhance your bodily awareness, balance your nervous system, shift your physiological status quo, and develop peaceful, self-regulated responses to conflict and/or stress.
With a doctorate in Movement Sciences and Education from Columbia University, Martha is a Registered Somatic Movement Therapist (RSMT) trained in Massage Therapy and known for her Dynamic Embodiment somatic-movement contributions in the fields of dance, dance science, conflict resolution, child development, and vision enhancement.
You won’t need any somatic-movement experience or a performance background to fully embrace Martha’s unique modalities.
She’ll equip you with new tools to navigate stressful times, provide you with rituals you’ll want to return to, and guide you to build a comforting sense of structure into your life — for a happier, healthier you.
During this experiential course, you’ll:
- Deeply understand the inner workings of your nervous system — including how to calm or energize it with the right movements
- Move through embodiment practices to develop peaceful responses to everyday conflicts
- Shift your consciousness with Dynamic Embodiment Somatic Movement, to better know your often unconscious responses and new coordination
- Develop greater body awareness and vagal-nerve responses determine where you are on Martha’s Stress-to-Trauma Continuum
- Read your own body language as it communicates whether you’re safe or in danger
- Apply your newfound knowledge of your nervous system to successfully navigate stress and conflict — in your daily life and the larger world
- Explore the ways you’re unintentionally “othering” people, causing you to miss out on essential connections with others — a true key to healing
- Discover the power of choice as you work with and through different types of stress using intentional movements
- Learn and practice infant-like movements to gain insight into your adult self
- Map out the personal movement practices you most need for stress management and deep healing
- Connect with others to regulate and heal your nervous system
- Discern who in your life it’s safe to be your true self with
- Explore powerful, personalized practices to regulate your nervous system whenever you need to
- And much more...
What You’ll Discover in These 7 Modules
In this 7-part transformational intensive, Martha guides you through Dynamic Embodiment movement techniques to alleviate stress, amplify inner peace, and reclaim your optimal health.
The Beauty of On-Demand
This course features step-by-step teachings and experiential practices from Martha. Each session builds harmoniously upon the previous ones, so you’ll develop a holistic understanding of the practices, tools, and principles of Dynamic Embodiment Somatic Movement Therapy to regulate your nervous system with nourishing, easygoing ways to work through conflict, stress and trauma. Your purchase includes 24/7 ongoing access to your course content, allowing you time to review the materials at your own pace and integration.
Module 1 Cultivating & Accessing Neurocellular Awareness Through Movement
A calm nervous system provides a baseline for healthy reactivation of an alive and receptive nervous system — and a happier you.
Did you know your nervous system can become dysregulated even if you feel like you’re in a passive state of mind?
To calm or balance your nervous system, you must first know how it works — taking time to feel it so you can discern how it impacts your everyday behavior.
Strategic movements enhance your bodily awareness as your body senses a change in the status quo. When you speak, walk, draw, or dance — then learn to pay attention to the new sensations — you’ll gain empowering new information about yourself.
This consciousness-shifting process, moving the body to increase self-awareness, is known as somatic movement.
By paying attention to the soma (the living body), you’re listening to your body, which is capable of both survival and expression.
This somatic listening supports self-regulation, self-care, and greater health. It can be a tool for guidance and attunement with your outward direction and your inner truths.
In this opening module, you’ll come to understand the key components of the nervous system — the involuntary (autonomic) functions and the voluntary functions.
Martha will share how you can awaken connection to the autonomic nervous system, the vagus nerve, and the skeletal-muscular system — through awareness of glands, organs, fluids, and the nerves that activate them.
You’ll discover the power of choice as you work with, through, and hopefully against different types of stress. Each stressor is experienced through your body — and slowing down to feel and move your body is a huge part of the solution.
In this session, you’ll discover:
- How your body and consciousness are related
- Neurocellular awareness and how to access it
- An embodied map of the nervous system and its key functions
- The causes of dysregulation — from stress to conflict to trauma
- What to do to calm your body
- Guided movement practices for balancing your nervous system, including embodied visualizations and meditations, relaxing movements, and play — all within a caring and socially aware setting
Module 2 Remembering Your Early Childhood Movement Patterns to Gain Insight Into Your Adult Self
Why is early motor experience important?
How you move today is based on your early childhood experiences.
As you’ll discover in this module, by learning and even practicing baby movements, you’ll gain insight into your adult self.
Connections to old, stuck places often emerge. Because some infant movements are hard to perform as an adult, Dr. Eddy will share the adaptations she’s created for going through developmental movements of creeping, crawling, toddling, and walking that are easier on the body.
Her Relax to FocusSM movement series can be done seated in a chair, on the floor, or standing — as your body sinks, rises, encloses, spreads, advances, and retreats.
Dr. Eddy will guide you to experience how you first learned to behave as a baby — with movement responses, including vocalizations.
When moving, even from one seated posture to another, you’ll explore different moods and states of mind. You’ll learn “scales” for finding different emotional responses.
You’ll also become alert to the nonverbal communication habits that are connected to your posture, your movement, and the pitch of your voice.
In this module, you’ll explore:
- A neurodevelopmental approach to your habitual movements — or baby movements, as Dr. Eddy calls them
- Your relationship with your caregivers and its impact on your personality and behavior
- Brain-mood-body movement connections — and why movement is behavior
- How you breathe and move when you’re calm or stressed — and ways to coordinate breath and movement
- Four easygoing guided movement practices to support effective approaching and withdrawing, bonding and defending, and reaching and pushing — to locate what’s inside, outside, and between different parts of yourself as you calm your nervous system
Module 3 Developing Peaceful Responses to Conflict in Everyday Life Through Embodiment Practices
Conflict resolution is an important skill in life. Bringing your body wisdom into handling conflict can expedite staying present.
In this module, you’ll explore embodying peace at home, in work, and at play.
Dr. Eddy’s EmbodyPeace approach includes numerous models of resolving conflict — developed over 40 years while working with people of all ages in schools, universities, nonprofits, and for-profit organizations.
Dr. Eddy will explain traditional systems of negotiation and mediation. You’ll explore how embodiment, including inner and outer awareness (interoception and exteroception), establishes the ground and insight for peaceable responses to conflict.
Interoception is awareness within the body — and sadly, it’s rarely taught. New vocabulary will help unpack how you have access to your inner wisdom and bodily knowing.
Using the flow of movement that emerges unconsciously through hand gestures or postural shifts, you’ll learn how Dr. Eddy’s Active Witnessing Process can help you find words for feelings, and movement for action.
Exteroception refers to your senses that pay attention to the environment outside of your body. Dr. Eddy will guide you to explore this space of inner and outer flow — the betweenness.
As you balance your nervous system, you’ll ask yourself:
How do I see, feel, then react to disagreements, conflicts, abusive situations, and harm? How do I come into feeling safe? When do I feel safe enough to stand up for a systemic change?
In this session, you’ll discover:
- How movement of the eyes and heart are both key for deepening attunement with emotion
- The delightful surprise of finding words for feelings, and movements that support statements and actions
- The C.A.P.S. system of conflict resolution — Cool Down, Agree, Points of View, Solving Problems
- Interoception of rising emotions — clarifying proprioception, kinesthesia, nociception, neuroception, and visceroception
- Using “the balance of inner and outer focus” as Ariadne’s string to find the way back to a self-regulated state
- How to use Dr. Eddy’s Active Witnessing Process
- A somatic social-justice perspective, anchoring your body as you picture transformative and restorative justice — and experience “body alerts” to your own bias and prejudice
Module 4 Recognizing Where You Are on the Stress-to-Trauma Continuum Through Body Awareness & Vagal Nerve Responses
As you apply what you’ve learned in the last three modules, you’ll begin to notice your personal stressors — plus the larger pressures on our culture and world.
In this module, you’ll explore what Dr. Eddy calls the Stress-to-Trauma Continuum, which asks the questions:
How do stress and trauma differ? How are they the same? When does internal conflict or conflict with others play a part in what’s happening? How do our bodies and awareness of the vagal nerve responses, body tone, and movement help us recognize what state we’re in?
Dr. Eddy will guide you to ask personal questions, understanding that you and your classmates will have very different answers. Questions will include:
What can you control? What do you need to let go of? What is the role of intuition? How can you be more observant of the present moment? What helps you look into the future without fear? When is it helpful to recognize these issues — and when do you need to set boundaries?
You’ll ground and center, then imagine a slightly stressful situation and explore how it can be of service to you. You’ll learn the bodily skills that can balance the nervous system enough for safety and help you find physiological calm.
In this session, you’ll discover:
- The similarities and differences between stress and trauma
- The vagus nerve’s role in determining our psychological and emotional states — and how a myriad of common psychological and physical symptoms, from anxiety and depression to migraines and back pain, link back to an issue with the vagus nerve
- Differences between homeostasis (maintaining body systems such as blood pH or body temperature) and allostasis (maintaining stability through altering physiologic parameters to counteract challenges)
- Movement’s role in stress and stress management, including the positive use of reflexive responses
- A 5- to 10-minute movement practice, Calming the Nervous System & Engaging the Parasympathetic Nervous System
- How to dissipate stressors with return to the breath and imagery strategies
- A guided movement practice where you’ll embody boundaries with your lymph, muscles, and gaze, strengthening your ability to act for change
Module 5 Mapping Your Personal Movement & Dynamic Embodiment Practices
Everyone has unique bodies and pasts. Your genetics and life lessons — nature and nurture — influence who you are today.
In this module, you’ll review which function each type of movement serves — for instance, relaxation, activation, interaction, and play.
You’ll reflect on which activities are best for you and develop a map for handling your emotions and body sensations in different situations.
You’ll use journal writing, visualization, movement, and vibration as ways to perceive what is, support what feels challenging, and move into new bodymind states.
You’ll explore Dynamic Embodiment’s O.S.O. model — Observe, Support, and Optimize.
You’ll work with the mystery and anatomy of breathing. Dr. Eddy will walk you through three-dimensional breathing using your thoracic diaphragm to breathe in all dimensions.
As you breathe, you’ll reinforce different postures that hold stories and impact your neuroendocrine system, hormones, and chakras. Dr. Eddy’s guided practice will help you experience how surges of hormones can be released through breath and movement.
You’ll track which activities you’re most likely to stick with. As Dr. Eddy will share, we only benefit from what we actually do, or at least imagine. You’ll find the pathways in your nervous systems to be who you fully are, as a unique individual.
From there, you’ll commit to a practice — your personal journey.
In this session, you’ll discover:
- How to use journal writing to help uncover when you’re stressed, irritated, and more
- How belly breathing also moves your pelvic floor, vocal cords, and some of the fascia around your brain — and how each can serve as a support
- Which habits get in your way right when you’re hoping to regulate your system
- Your profound resiliency skills
Module 6 Regulating Your Nervous System & Healing Through Connection With Others
In this module, Dr. Eddy will help you see the ways you glean support and create separation from the people around you.
You’ll also explore ways to work with conflict, stress, and trauma — and learn to notice which systems set up chronic tensions like humiliation, abuse, or feelings of neglect and unworthiness.
Understanding the social systems you’re operating within helps you connect more deeply with others — and connection is your key to healing.
You’ll explore how bonding with and defending are responses to other people. How do they show up in movement? When do you attach, and what does your body do? When do you separate, become more numb, or even disappear a bit? What’s useful and what’s harmful about each of your responses?
In this session, you’ll discover:
- How to notice the ways you “other” people or groups — in this process, Dr. Eddy will help you learn more about your own systems of dysregulation
- How your eyes and vision help with orienting you
- Techniques for regulating your gaze during a “group sway” practice
- What happens when you or someone you know is blocked by shame, humiliation, or destructive forces — and how to dialogue in a way that supports compassion and healthy desire
- Guided movement practices —including the body language for saying yes and no, gazing with compassion, rocking to co-regulate, and techniques to calm your nervous system
Module 7 Safely Sharing Your True Self With Others
In this closing module, Dr. Eddy will guide you to review all the concepts you’ve explored during the course.
At this point on your journey, you’ll be able to feel when it’s safe to share your true self.
You’ll review times when you may have wanted to remain hidden, as well as your freest moments when your authenticity comes through. Dr. Eddy will help you recognize the related feelings and sensations.
You’ll role-play (in the privacy of your own Zoom space) with concrete situations, allowing your vulnerability to come forward.
You’ll discern when it’s possible to be vulnerable with family, friends, or colleagues. You’ll solidify the resources you brought with you into this journey, those you’ve learned along the way — and get clear on the ones you’ll want to keep practicing.
And you’ll visualize barriers and stumbling blocks, moving with them to melt them away..
In this session, you’ll:
- Show Dr. Eddy what you’ve learned (if you’re feeling called)
- Check in with how resourced you are — what bodily and cognitive information you have available
- Review how differences of opinion or beliefs, as well as surprises, can be reframed within life as part of an improvisational model
- Use your awareness of prejudice and bias to cultivate compassion for yourself and others
- Move through a practice personalized by you, for you — and try to explain it to your classmates, if you’re feeling called
SPECIAL BONUS OFFER
In addition to Martha’s transformative 7-module course, you’ll receive this special bonus offering to complement the course and take your understanding and practice to an even deeper level.
Relax to Focus Theory & Practice: Calming the Nervous System
Video Teaching From Martha Eddy
Play with gentle, restive movements to balance your craniosacral rhythm and regulate your nervous system. Whether you long to relax from stress, you seek healing from anxiety, fear, or loss, or you just want to chill, these gentle movements will resonate with your soul and your body. You’ll experience the movements for your own benefit, and also learn how to describe them in order to teach them to others if you’d like.
The Interface of Psychology, Lifestyle Management, and Movement & Mindfulness
Video Dialogue With Dr. Martha Eddy and Dr. Annie Rosen
Learn how to feel better about the present and future with Dr. Allison Rosen, (psychologist and fertility preservation expert) and Dr. Martha Eddy. They illuminate the disciplines of somatic movement therapy, psychology, psychotherapy, and how they all work. The two share their recommendations for getting into your body, reducing anxiety, and much more.
The Nervous System, Glands & Neuroendocrine System
PDF of Chapter From Martha Eddy’s Book Dynamic Embodiment of the Sun Salutation
Your endocrine glands secrete hormones, and hormones spur your body into different states of action and into various moods. In this excerpt from Martha’s book on the dynamic embodiment of a classic yoga asana, you’ll learn strategies for sleep, for expression and energy, for calming your autonomic nervous system and balancing the branches of your vagus nerve, and for warding off toxins.
Movement Maverick
Audio Dialogue With Martha Eddy and Erin Carlisle Norton
Go on a listening journey to hear how Martha came to become a Movement Maverick, highlighting her expansive career in movement awareness. Produced by The Moving Architects, this dialogue begins with Martha’s early roots growing up in Spanish Harlem and how she came to dancing early in life, yet has always been a scientist. You’ll discover more about how she builds connections between movement and communication, dance, science, peace activism, and her own Social Somatics.
01MEddy01_21 FA Bonus
Selected Sessions From the 2021 Summit
Discover even more lifelong practices for fluidity, vitality, and healing. These five video sessions were some of the most popular from our recent Somatic Movement Summit event. The diverse array of topics share embodied practices for wellbeing, resilience, and optimal aging.
You’ll receive:
- Calming the Nervous System: Small Steps to Release Stress & Help in Trauma Recovery with Martha Eddy
- Precision Moving Forward on Solid Ground with Mia Segal
- Inviting Pleasure and Power Through Movement with Lavinia Plonka
- Applications of the Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais Method to Self-Image & Somatic Project Changes in the Last 50 Years with David Hall
- Rolling Reaching & Moving with Ciara Ni Dhiomasaigh
What People Are Saying About Martha Eddy…
MA, AThR, art psychotherapist. TraumaSensitive HeartMath Certified Practitioner
Here’s What You’ll Receive
Seven Pre-Recorded 90-Minute Sessions
Experience a unique opportunity to learn from the founder of Dynamic Embodiment Somatic Movement Therapy Training from the comfort of your own home. Each session includes a streaming video and guides you to discover specific skills and abilities to regulate your nervous system and work through conflict, stress, and trauma — using Martha’s Active Witnessing Process to recognize and manage your deepest triggers.
Seven Transcripts of Class Sessions
In addition to the high-quality videos and MP3 audios, you’ll also receive session transcriptions. You can then review, print, and highlight the most important insights and practices you were given.
Exercises and Questions for Each Lesson
Between sessions, you’ll have the option of completing related exercises, practicing new tools, and answering questions to accelerate your learning and integrate each lesson.
An Unprecedented Opportunity to Join the Online Course, Reset Your Nervous System & Regulate Your Own Wellbeing With Dynamic Embodiment℠ Movement
Your Satisfaction Is 100% Guaranteed!
If you don’t absolutely LOVE Reset Your Nervous System & Regulate Your Own Wellbeing With Dynamic Embodiment℠ Movement — or don’t feel that it meets your needs — please submit your refund request form 14 days from your date of purchase and we’ll happily issue qualifying customers a refund.
More Praise for Martha Eddy
psychologist
fellow, Center for Applied Psychology, Rutgers University
About Dr. Martha Eddy, RSMT
Dr. Martha Eddy, RSMT, an esteemed international speaker and somatic movement therapy expert, holds a Doctorate in Movement Science/Biobehavioral Studies from Columbia University, where she is an honorary professor. She is a Registered Master Somatic Movement Therapist and Educator (MSMT/E) and Registered Somatic Dance Educator (RSDE).
Recognized for her dedication to social justice, Martha is the Geraldine Ferraro Fellow of Social Justice and Movement at Marymount Manhattan College. With a decade on the faculty at the School for Body-Mind Centering® and collaborations with pioneers like Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen and Irmgard Bartenieff, she founded The Somatic Movement Therapy Training, later rebranded as Dynamic Embodiment® SMTT.
Her impactful literary contributions on eco-somatics, movement, the brain, and healthy living include the books Mindful Movement and A Dynamic Embodiment® Approach to the Sun Salutation, which she co-authored with Shakti Andrea Smith.
Over three decades, she's passionately bridged somatics with social change, training Certified Teachers of BodyMind Dancing and Moving For Life Certified Instructors globally. She co-founded Moving On Center and Moving For Life DanceExercise for Health®, serving older adults and those affected by cancer or chronic illnesses.
Martha's media presence — she's been featured in The New York Times, and on National Public Radio and television networks — underscores her commitment to somatic healing. Her dance programs and free Moving For Life wellness initiatives have earned acclaim for transforming pain, tension, grief, and stress into joy, relief, ease, creativity, and beauty.
Beyond her prolific career, Martha has served on numerous boards, including The Yard Choreographic Residency, the National Dance Education Organization, the Congress on Research in Dance, and the International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association. She held leadership roles as the president of the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies and has been voted a top speaker at numerous online forums.
Martha's enduring legacy in somatic movement, social justice, and holistic wellbeing extends globally to hospitals, community centers, libraries, arts organizations, corporations, and universities.