Kelly Lazzara

Certified Somatic Trainer – Akademie für Physio-Mentale Entwicklung

Anatomical Embodiment, Somatic Coaching, Somatic Touch and Healing Dance, Advanced Training – 400 hours

Associate Somatic Member – United States Association for Body Psychotherapy (USABP)

Associate Somatic Movement Professional – International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association (ISMETA)

Corrective Exercise Specialist – The BioMechanics Method

Personal Trainer and Group Fitness Instructor – American Council on Exercise

Sound Healing – The Globe Institute

BA International Business and Minor in Chinese Studies – University of San Francisco

Feldenkrais Method® Student – Various Teachers

The Feldenkrais Method® with, Tara Eden MSME/MSMT, Julianna Bulgarelli CFATMT, Donna Wood, and ATM lessons from David-Zemach-Bersin, Elizabeth Beringer, and Alan Questel – 60 hours

Education and Registrations

My role is to support your discovery of more easeful and inspiring patterns of posture, movement, and self-perception. I coach you to notice your own subtle sensations and motor expressions within open and explorative qualities so that your body can use this information to enter into its natural state of self-healing and self-development. My aim is that you experience the immediate effects of an open and compassionate dialogue with your body and establish this quality of dialogue as an automatic, habitual way of being so that self-healing and self-development become integrated into who you are.

I am trained to create a safe and trusting environment that facilitates exploration, attentiveness, and learning. The client-centered method I apply radically accepts whatever you express so that you have the opportunity to explore whatever your body and mind present in the present moment. This method establishes listening to the and trusting the innate wisdom of your inner fountain of information. Because the inner landscape of sensations, thoughts, and emotions can be entangled and intense, I am trained to help you navigate towards, and stay connected with, helpful resources of self-sensing and movement exploration that establish safety and even curiosity. What I’m describing is practicing studying yourself (your body and mind) from the first-person perspective.

Somatic Coaching

Human Body Education

Establishing an open somatic dialogue and ability to self-heal and self-develop through movement is the main aim of my work. To support this aim, I also educate you on the marvelous human body. The overall purpose of this education is to offer perspectives that reveal your body to be more interesting, familiar, and worth attending to.

Sensations, thoughts, and emotions all have a physiological explanation. They can all be mapped to physical processes happening within the body. They can also each be mapped to a time in history where an ancestral species developed the ability to sense, feel, and think. Understanding these features of being human through theoretical models as well as embodied experiences just offers more options of self-perception. You can choose what’s interesting and helpful for you.

I teach physiology, anatomy, evolutionary biology, and Buddhist psychology through embodied and collaborative education.

Verbal Reflection

I believe in verbal reflection during somatic education for three reasons. One, to establish safety and calibrate based on what’s shared. Two, to benefit from mammalian coregulation. Three, so that the executive control system in the brain understands. Read more about this here.

I am trained to listen attentively to this feedback, but luckily for me, I naturally find this to be within the realm of most interesting information I can hear. I enjoy listening to your reflections of your somatic explorations and while you’re learning about the human body and mind. I feel like I am part of something authentic and novel. These ideas that spring from within the deep exploration of sensing yourself are the main fuel and inspiration for my work.

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 over 120 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 injury rehabilitation.

Other Teaching / Coaching Experience

• Coached youth soccer.

• Taught quantitative business modeling to undergraduate students.

• Taught Android development to high school students.

My prior career was in business entrepreneurship and technology. I have worked as a business founder, operations executive, data scientist, marketer, web developer, and sales consultant.

Why I Do This Work

I found Somatic Education through my experiences with chronic pain, and I choose to focus my professional practice on coaching and educating other people who are currently experiencing chronic pain.

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.

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.