Meaningful Body

15/12/2025

With our move to the Azores, many clients have asked me how I envision my work evolving. One of the directions I feel deeply called to pursue is a shift from single, stand-alone sessions toward a longer program. Let me explain what I mean.

This program grew out of my own development as a therapist working with the restoration of bodily function through brain retraining. People usually come to me because something in their life no longer flows. Often this is the result of serious injuries or illnesses, including autoimmune conditions, and it commonly shows up as chronic pain and functional limitations, accompanied by low energy, emotional instability, and difficulties with memory and concentration. As a rule, these issues have not been resolved through conventional medical approaches.

When I begin working with someone, I often sense what feels like an invisible suit of armor embedded in the body. This is the body’s protective response to injury—both physical and emotional (they are always intertwined). Most people are not aware of this armor; they adapt to it as if it were a second skin. But when I touch the body, I feel it as tension that holds a charge.

This “charge” is a complex phenomenon that exists on multiple levels: physical (tension or numbness), emotional (anxiety, reactivity, or emotional shutdown), cognitive (problems with memory and attention), and mental (deep-seated beliefs about the world). The charge disrupts the natural flow of energy in the body, creating blocks that interfere with healing.

This is where my work as a researcher truly begins: what is the nature of this charge? What keeps it stored in the body, and why doesn’t it release on its own?

Over fifteen years of practice, I have become convinced that working on only one aspect of these blocks is ineffective.

It is nearly impossible to resolve physical pain when emotional wounds are still holding the charge. I have spent many years finding ways to communicate to people who come with physical symptoms that the roots of these issues usually lie not in “faulty bodies,” but in disruptions—often unconscious—in how they relate to the world. More precisely, it is the way we learn to live with these disruptions that blocks our vital energy, eventually expressing itself in the body as pain or dysfunction.

Drawing on elements of both Eastern and Western traditions—including Chinese meridian therapy, Tibetan TsaLung yoga, emotional anatomy, Jungian psychology, Reichian body therapy, Lowen’s bioenergetics, and Gendlin’s focusing—I learned to “read” the language of the body and translate its messages into something we can consciously understand.

I came to realize that there is no universal method of healing. However, healing is impossible without making sense of our lived experience and restoring connection with ourselves and with others. Our greatest ally in this process is the body itself. The body responds honestly to every experience and every thought, and it holds the entire story of our lives—from birth to the present moment. When we learn to read the body, we can bring this experience into awareness and live it differently. Awareness softens emotional wounds, transforming them into material for growth. The body naturally follows this shift, and one day you may notice that pain no longer dominates your life and that anxiety becomes something you can actually work with. And then, energy becomes available—to create what you are truly here to create.

To see these connections clearly, it helps to step out of everyday life for a while. To give the soul an elixir of beauty and joy, allowing it to emerge from its familiar protective layers. Equally important is genuine human connection—open, trusting communication in which we can see ourselves without filters.

This is why I offer the program in the following format: you stay on one of the most beautiful islands of the Azores—São Miguel, where mountains meet the ocean and the roads wind like strands of Chinese noodles. Here, we engage in deep personal work, balanced with walks through stunning landscapes—to the ocean, to waterfalls, to breathtaking viewpoints where your body naturally responds, “Yes, I feel this too.” The length of the program depends on your possibilities, though I generally recommend staying on the island for at least one week.

The work can be entirely individual or take place within a small group, where each participant receives daily one-on-one body therapy. The advantage of the group format is that shared sessions and discussions often make it easier to recognize yourself through others. In every case, the program is tailored to the specific needs and capacities of each participant, clarified during preliminary consultations.

Accommodation, meals, and transportation are arranged individually, based on your preferences, physical condition, and financial considerations. The most important requirement is your willingness to look honestly at your life.

If you would like to explore whether this program might be right for you, please contact me and we can arrange a time to talk.

22/02/2023

My friends asked me if I can come to Amherst, NS, to do a clinic, offering individual sessions of somatic therapy on weekend of March 4-5, 2023. If you live with chronic pain or other functional limitations resistant to conventional therapies, this may be a good opportunity for you. Please contact me directly if you are interested.

10/02/2023

01/01/2023

Overcoming Chronic Pain and Other Functional Limitations Resistant to Conventional Therapies

An Experiential Healing Program in the Azores with Tatiana Reymarova (May 4-13, 2023)

As a somatic therapist, I seek to help people appreciate their body as their one true home. Being at home in our body allows us to savour the fullness of life, remaining present through both joy and sorrow. This is what healing looks like.

I have long been dreaming of a place where one feels enveloped by the majestic scenery evoking wonder, curiosity, and reverence for life that are so necessary for fostering our self-healing capacity.

São Miguel, the Emerald Island of Portugal’s Azores Archipelago, flaunting its one-of-a-kind tapestry woven by breathtaking natural forces and a rich cultural heritage in the middle of the Atlantic, strikes me as being just such a place.

Our program will be a small, intimate gathering — just four people (including myself) exploring healing intensively.

We will be staying together (for nine days and nine nights) in a spacious villa overlooking the ocean, with a private bedroom and a private bathroom for each of us. And a magical garden for all to enjoy!

The program will include daily one-to-one sessions of somatic therapy with me. There will be also group sessions in the evening, dedicated to experimenting with various self-regulation tools. And every morning I will be offering Tibetan self-healing yoga practices.

In addition, we will make time for some of São Miguel’s gems: hot springs, beaches, trails, miradouros, to name just a few.

* * *

A few words about the nature of my work:

Somatic therapy starts with learning to listen to the inner voices of our body. These voices are our trusty guides! They tell us how we engage in all aspects of our lives.

Through gentle, supportive touch and dialogic inquiry I assist people in establishing a deep, meaningful connection with their body, which enables them to realize how the signals of pain, tension, fatigue, or imbalance their body sends reflect their habitual thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

Awakening to the wisdom of our body inspires us to explore it further, just the way true friendship grows — and our body is our closest friend!

As we come more in touch with our sensations, we discover our individual possibilities of freeing ourselves from old habits that constrict us.

* * *

I have been working as an independent practitioner of natural healing since 2011. Typically people who seek my services experience a wide spectrum of functional limitations for which the conventional system of health care could offer no effective treatment, and often did not even have a diagnostic label… other than MUS (medically unexplained symptom).

Among the MUSes I commonly encounter are pain in the muscles and joints, low muscle tone, numbness, backache, headaches, dizziness, fatigue, and concentration difficulties. I have found that these medically futile conditions can often be successfully addressed if we shift our focus away from “chasing symptoms” to the living body in its wholeness (which is what the ancient Greek word “soma” stands for). Soma is not a thing; it is a process that encompasses all facets of our experience — physical, mental, emotional, social, and spiritual.

I am registered as a Somatic Movement Therapist with the International Somatic Movement and Therapy Association (ISMETA).

* * *

If you are interested in participating, please contact me for further information via email (meaningfulbody@gmail.com).

12/11/2022

29/04/2022

Healing power of our hands - pure magic!

Shared from Sacred Dreams 💛

“Grandma, how do you cope with pain?”

“With your hands, honey. If you do it with your mind instead of relieving the pain, it toughens even harder.”

“With your hands grandma?”

“Yes, our hands are the antennae of our soul. If you move them; knitting, cooking, painting, playing or sinking them into the ground, you send care signs to the deepest part of you and your soul lights up because you’re paying attention to it. Then signs of pain will no longer be necessary.”

“Hands are really that important?”

“Yes my daughter. Think of babies: they start to know the world through the touch of their hands. If you look at the hands of old people, they tell you more about their life then any body part. Everything that is done by hand is said to be done with the heart. Because it’s really like this: hands and heart are connected. Masseurs know well: when they touch someone with their hands, they create a deep connection. It is precisely from this connection that healing comes. Think of lovers: when they touch their hands, they make love in a more sublime way.”

“My hands grandma.... how long I haven’t used them like this!”

“Move them, my love. Begin to create with them and everything within you will begin to move. The pain will not pass away. And instead what you do with them will become the most beautiful masterpiece and it won’t hurt anymore. Because you have been able to transform its essence.”

~Elena Bernabe
Shared and translated by Takiruna

29/04/2022

WHY CONVENTIONAL THERAPIES ARE LARGELY INEFFECTIVE FOR CHRONIC PAIN

The impact of chronic pain is immense, practically every aspect of your life is affected. You may know how the pain has started, or it may have appeared out of the blue. You may know your medical diagnosis, or you may not. You have already tried to “fix what is wrong” with various therapies and remedies. But the pain keeps coming back. Anxious to find a cure, you may even consider more radical medical options, such as a surgery.

What may have never crossed your mind is that your pain could be a “side effect” of the strategy your organism has developed in order to keep functioning despite the various “blocks” in your body.

What are these “blocks”? They arise from your body’s instinctual defensive responses to perceived physical or psychological threats. When such experiences are not resolved, they are held in chronically tense muscles and tissue.

Body blocks have remained largely “below the radar” of modern Western medicine – they don’t show on X-ray, MRI or CT scans. Nonetheless, they are real. In functional terms, they are the parts of your body that do not participate effectively in performing its various “jobs.” Worse yet, these blocks disrupt communication between different body parts that normally constitute a unified ensemble. To continue functioning, the organism has to find a way to work around those blocks.

Practically all body blocks have one common feature: you don’t know that you have them! They feel so habitual and “normal” that you take them for “the way things are supposed to be”! For most people it comes as a complete surprise when they discover that they have no sensation or control of certain parts of their body – for example, the major muscles in their trunk. It is only when you regain awareness of those parts that you may realize how different it feels to have them “unblocked.” Another common feature is that you can’t use the blocked parts of your body to perform voluntary movements – or certainly not in a functional, organic way. From a neurological perspective, this indicates a disrupted communication between your brain and the blocked parts of your body. As a consequence, these parts cannot function in concert with the rest of the body.

Your brain is then forced to find a different way to organize your movement by creating alternative neuromotor patterns. For example, instead of the blocked muscles, which were designed to meet a specific functional demand, it will engage other muscles that are still available, even though their biomechanical properties are tailored to a different performance requirement. This commonly causes overcontraction of the “newly appointed” muscles, which may further lead to their damage and pain. Aside from pain in these muscles themselves, there also often develops other associated pain (such as headaches brought on by muscle tension in the nearby areas of the shoulders and neck).

It seems perfectly logical that we should be able to eliminate pain in overworked muscles by relaxing them. This is what conventional treatments (such as massage, physiotherapy, stretching, or manual adjusting) are aimed at. Most often, however, this approach yields only temporary results because it addresses symptoms rather than the cause.

A major reason why conventional therapies are largely ineffective for chronic pain is that they view muscle tightness as a “fault,” whereas it actually represents the organism’s solution for the task of maintaining functioning with fewer means (each body block reduces its repertoire of resources for organizing action). Muscle tension is set by the brain according to life’s demands, and no matter whether it hurts or not, the appointed muscles have to work this way to accomplish a particular function, if other options are not available. This may sound strange, but remember that your brain is built for survival. In other words, its main job is to ensure the continuation of your functioning, which will therefore always have priority over comfort! Indeed, any attempts to relax the tight muscles forcefully entail fighting against the patterns of neuromotor activity that manifest the organism’s survival strategy. While such attempts may ease muscle tension temporarily, they cannot be expected to yield enduring improvements, since the brain will keep restoring the “necessary” tension.

But there is another option. We can refrain from battling against the body. Instead, we can identify its parts that are blocked and free them. Those blocked parts of the body are not lifeless; they can be reawakened and reintroduced to the brain, where they will be happily reconnected with the overall neural network and once again become instrumental in coordinated functioning of the body.

Once these blocked parts are reengaged to perform the functions they were designed for, the other parts of the body stop being overworked and pain goes away naturally, without any additional treatments. It can happen so fast that it feels almost unreal.

As a somatic therapist, I use gentle touch to detect patterns of tension in a person’s body and explore how they affect its entire organization. Further, I help my clients to become aware of the blocks held in their bodies and to release and reintegrate these blocks.

My clients typically start feeling more ease and freedom in their bodies from the first appointment. With every following session they become more aware of their habitual pain-perpetuating actions, and learn new ways of functioning that are not causing them pain and discomfort. The enhancement of physical and mental self-awareness eventually enables them to part ways with chronic pain – for good!

Learn more about my approach at https://www.meaningfulbody.com/post/a-somatic-therapist-s-view-on-healing

18/05/2021

Your tongue acts as a rudder and support system through a fascial line that runs right down to your toes!

In nearly all my patients, I see poor tongue posture, and the links to bad spinal posture, breathing, and other issues are felt right throughout the body.

The simplest way we can see how the tongue is so influential is how it supports proper head posture. When the tongue is down and forward, forward head posture and mouthbreathing occurs.

Over time this associates with a narrow jaw, crooked teeth, and sleep disorders.

But… you guessed it, as always the mouth is a gateway for so many other systems in the body.

The tongue is an extremely complex muscular and fascial rudder system.

It guides all the structures of the myofascial continuity that runs from the inner arch of the foot all the way up through the middle of the body to the tongue and jaw muscles.

Isn’t that amazing?

Actually the tongue is potentially more important for core stability than turning on your actual core.

Our core begins deep under the arch with the insertions of the tendons from the lower leg, especially tibialis posterior.

To find its insertion, feel just under the inside arch of the foot, just underneath and forward of protrusion of the navicular bone you can feel a bit over an inch in front of your tibial malleolus on the inside of your ankle.

This point will respond to a soft-but-energy-rich touch that is held, and also to a more firm and direct fascial release. Pressing here can make a flow of feeling run up the fascial line.

So for better core support, spinal, hip and leg strength, you need to work on your tongue posture.

During exercise practice sealing the tongue to the roof of the mouth, this turns on the fascial rudder to the toes. It takes time and you need to work on making the BACK of the tongue connect to the soft palate. More on this to come.

10/07/2019

Meaningful Body is the first practice in Atlantic Canada that offers somatic movement therapy for rehabilitation after motor vehicle accidents, including consequences of mild to severe head injuries and traumas to other parts of the body. Recognizing that pain and functional limitations that persist or even progress over a long period of time after a car accident are largely due to neurological disturbances (such as disrupted communication between the brain and muscles or between different brain areas), we engage our clients in a process of neuromuscular reeducation that helps them “re-inhabit” their body by enhancing their self-awareness and facilitating new learning through a “dialogue” with their brain. This dialogue is conducted in the language of mindful movement explorations that generate new sensations fostering the creation of new neural connections, and ultimately the growth of competencies in various domains of one’s life — physical, cognitive, and emotional.