Kelly Lazzara

Professional Experience

Owner and Teacher at Somatic School

• Somatic Coach and Teacher working with clients and students in chronic pain, limiting perspectives of self, anxiety, grief, injury recovery, and athletic skill development.

• Designing and leading workshops, multi-month programs, corporate wellness sessions, and custom individual and group programs for hundreds of students and clients.

Personal Trainer / Group Fitness Instructor

• Trained hundreds of fitness clients with an emphasis on coordination, skill development, and cardiovascular training.

• Developed training programs for clients to accelerate rehabilitation from injuries.

Other Teaching / Coaching Experience

• Coached youth soccer

• Taught quantitative business modeling to undergraduate students.

• Taught software development to high school students.

My prior career was in technology and fashion. I have worked as a business founder, operations executive, data scientist, marketer, web developer, sales consultant, and teacher to undergraduate and high school students. I have a BA from the University of San Francisco in International Business with a minor in Chinese Studies.

In his transition from USL and NCAA D1 soccer to a competitive amateur athlete with a desk job in technology, something drastic shifted. Injuries would come up and they wouldn't heal the same way. This new work environment and healthcare did have the same air of optimism, concern, and serious levity for getting back to really using the human body for athletic expression.

So the hypothesis for Kelly became, "if the people trying to help me heal are not succeeding - no MDs, no PTs, no acupuncturists, no massage therapists, no shamans, etc. - then there must be something in the way I move that is causing my recurring injuries and also preventing me from healing."

Naturally the next question is, how do I learn to

Why I Do This Work

Because

I found Somatic Movement through my experiences with chronic pain and repeat injuries.

Chronic pain is complex. It’s much more than excruciatingly unpleasant sensations. It’s about urgency, uncertainty, confusion, grief, fear, beliefs, perceptions, emotions, knowledge, ignorance, ideas, trust, care, resilience, and so much more. What stands out for me was not seeing a way out, feeling like no one else really cared, and that any one who kind of cared, didn’t have a solution.

Somatic Movement continues to be the foundation to my own healing and development process and

I felt guilty that I couldn’t be present with people. I felt guilty that my life experiences, from the outside, probably looked awesome, cus they were! I felt guilty that I couldn’t just be chill and enjoy everything. I felt an incessant fear of future plans. Worrying about too much sitting, too much standing, or too much walking. I felt a nostalgic stickiness to a time where movement and play came carefree. I felt cheated that my only solace and my trusty panacea for the most challenging moments in life– soccer, the gym, and dance– had become loaded with fear. I could not accept the reality that the things that made me happy, made me healthy, and connected me with other people had become things that made me scared, hurt my body, and would keep me more and more isolated. It didn’t make sense.

My left hip and hamstring hurt all the time. Other parts of my body weren’t much better. I generally felt tight all over but the hip and hamstring stood out. My left calf and foot felt weak. My lower back hurt, it was tight. I didn’t feel capable or confident.

Injuries and pain weren’t new to me. I’ve played soccer and skied my entire life. My childhood had countless hours of skating, biking, and falling. Some highlights include two inguinal hernia operations, a broken wrist, a broken collar bone, a fractured tailbone, a fractured foot, debilitating IT band pain, separated cartilage from a rib, sprained MCLs, LCLs, and an ACL, torn menisci, several sprained ankles, and wrists, bruised toenails falling off, and a torn quad. That’s what you did, you trained hard, you did cool stuff, you got hurt, you recovered, and you came back and got back on track.

Nothing that worked before was working this time. I had a bunch of ideas about what my diagnoses were. I would “study” muscular anatomy. More like, I would Google “quadratus lumborum pain” then read a post written by someone on some site with the word “syndrome.” I’d take what I’d learned and bring it to professionals who I desperately hoped could help, shelling out thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours towards physical therapy, acupuncture, massage, specialized personal training, sound healing, psychedelics, MRIs, X-rays, and consultations with orthopedic surgeons. No one had an answer for me.

I wasn’t getting better so I’d force myself to do the things I enjoyed. I’d resentfully go out dancing. I’d anxiously and sadly go hiking. I’d play soccer occasionally, but only after unenthusiastically downing 800mg of ibuprofen, copiously applying KT tape, and panicking the entire drive to my game. At least when I was playing, I felt somewhat normal, but my play was timid and the pain afterward was just shit. I wouldn’t be able to sit or stand at my office. I’d do my work lying down on a bench.

I hated and I blamed my bed, my desk, my office, I hated capitalism because I saw myself in a system that values money and material over the quality of the subjective experience of myself in my body. The more I tried different approaches and the more I thought about it, the more apathetic and less trusting I became.

All of the approaches that I tried were delivered to me with care and trust. They just weren’t what I needed. I needed something very specific. I needed to listen to, explore, and support what my body was communicating to me. I needed to attend to myself with care and trust. This was, and still is, the unlock. This is Somatics.

For the first time in years, through somatic practice, I experienced my own body with curiosity and newness. For the first time in years, I wasn’t aware of my pain. I wasn’t even sensing it or thinking about it. I was fascinated with the subtle sensations coming from my body, listening to them as if they were the most fascinating and intelligent information right here right now.

So this was obviously great. Non-drug induced reprieve from years of incessant anguish was infinitely inspiring. I’d counted once; 40 seconds of every minute was spent focusing on pain. During my first somatic practice and the hours after, my body felt different. It felt like it was reorganizing into a new way of moving. I could sense this happening while I was practicing. I felt active in my healing. There were no words or concepts in this learning: just sensing and moving. Was this sustainable or could I only achieve this state in the midst of practicing?

The pain came back, and although it still sucked hard, it didn’t come with this psychoemotional pit of infinite despair. Yes, it was just as painful but I knew there was a way out. I’d gotten what I needed. I needed to step outside of the sensory-emotional-thought loop of pain-fear-tension-desperation that had consumed my experience and image of myself for well over 1,000 mornings, afternoons, and nights.

Years later, I decided to study somatic methods and the human body so that I could heal more. The approach was radically different and it resonated with me. Somatics values all the established theories of anatomy, kinesiology, and evolution and it emphasizes the subjective experience of the human. I mean, like, duh. The human is the source of all these categories of theories anyway. And everything is changing all the time so the most accurate information about any person is right here right now.

Through somatics you can regain stewardship of yourself. You can understand how it all works enough so that your body becomes your collaborative companion. This is what I want to share with you.

Schedule a 1:1 Coaching with Kelly Lazzara