Aerial Somatic Therapy is a precision method of bodywork that uses the Somatic Swing to deliver traction, compression, and rotation through the body’s fascial lines while the nervous system feels completely held. Gravity becomes a therapeutic tool. The swing creates what no surface-based modality can: 360 degree contact, the body met and supported from every direction at once. Tissue releases at depths that are otherwise unreachable. What becomes possible in that state is profound.
AST is made up of two practices: a self-bodywork practice and a practitioner-client session, each rooted in the same three principles.
Three Principles, One Practice
Three principles run through every aspect of Aerial Somatic Therapy. They live in the self-bodywork practice and in the practitioner-client session. They are orientations, ways of listening, attuning, and moving that make transformation not just possible but inevitable. They are present in the first moment of stillness inside the swing and in what continues to unfold long after.
Attunement
Attunement is the heart of this work. It begins with presence, the capacity to slow down, listen with the whole body, and meet what is actually here. In the practitioner-client session, attunement means tracking the client’s nervous system in real time, moving with them rather than on them, and holding their system with enough steadiness that the body begins to trust and let go. In the self-bodywork practice, attunement turns inward, learning to listen to your own body with that same quality of presence and care. Both expressions are cultivated in AST. Both lead to the same place: the felt sense of being truly held.
Alignment
Alignment in AST begins with the body’s relationship to gravity. Not as a force to resist but as a guide. When the body is suspended and fully supported in the Somatic Swing, it stops bracing and begins to reorganize toward its own optimal blueprint. Joints decompress. Fascia hydrates and reorganizes. The body remembers a more natural, easeful way of being. This is regenerative alignment, and it is one of the most immediate and lasting effects of the work.
“Regenerative Alignment: the state where being supported creates the capacity to support others.”
Embodiment
Embodiment is not something you do. It is something that arises when the body finally feels safe enough to be itself. In AST, that safety is created by three layers of holding: the swing supporting the body completely, gravity working with it rather than against it, and the practitioner’s attuned presence holding the relational field. In that held, weightless state, something the body has been waiting for becomes possible. Tissue releases. The nervous system stops defending. Breath finds its depth again. The practices and tools of AST give embodiment a place to live beyond the session. Something shifts in the body’s relationship to itself. And once that shift happens, the body knows how to find its way back.
What Makes AST Different
AST was built around a specific set of conditions, for the body, the nervous system, and the practitioner, that are unlike anything else in the field.
“Maura’s Thai-inspired work couples sure hands with a supple movement vocabulary to produce just the right stretch challenge that leads to relaxation and somatic clarity.”
Tom Myers Author of Anatomy Trains
“Integrating a combination of breath, movement, massage and sound she brought my body into alignment, and my mind into a state of radiant clarity. She is a true body-mind-spirit master.”
Mark Divine Founder, SEALFIT. NYT bestselling author, Unbeatable Mind
“I have spent my life becoming an artist of the body-mind. Most of it has been a remembering.”
Maura Rassman · Founder, embodiment educator, and professional bodyworker of more than 20 years.
The Sixth Cohort opens November 5, 2026.
November 5 to 8, 2026 · The Aum Dome · Encinitas, California
Limited to 8 students for direct, personal attention across all four days.
