About Aerial Somatic Therapy
Aerial Somatic Therapy is a precision modality built around conditions that are rare in bodywork: a nervous system that feels completely held, fascia accessed at depths that suspension alone makes possible, and a practitioner whose own body is resourced by the very act of giving the work. It is both a somatic method and a personal practice, and it was designed to serve the person receiving it and the person offering it in equal measure.
For Clients
Whether you are navigating chronic pain, held tension, unprocessed stress, or trauma held in the body, sessions at the Aum Dome are shaped by what your body is ready for and held by over two decades of practiced attunement.
For Practitioners
AST was designed with the practitioner in mind as much as the client. The self-bodywork practice component of the modality gives you a set of practices to tend to your own body, build embodied sensitivity, and sustain yourself across years of hands-on work. Practitioners from bodywork, psychotherapy, somatic facilitation, and psychedelic integration have folded AST into their existing work and found it deepens everything they already do.
Maura Rassman
I have spent my life becoming an artist of the body-mind. Most of it has been a remembering.
What began as a childhood immersed in movement became a lifelong inquiry that has never stopped deepening. The body as sacred form, its geometry a language I have spent decades learning to speak. The cellular and the structural. The thousands of bodies I have held and what they have taught me: how to reorganize and recondition fascia, how to meet unmetabolized emotion and trauma with steadiness, how to create the conditions for a body to soften and let go.
My influences span structural integration, craniosacral therapy, acro yoga therapeutics, Thai and Osteo Thai bodywork under master teachers, and decades of yoga study. All of it in service of one thing: understanding the human body in its fullest expression.
In this work, body and mind are not separate. They are one intelligent system. The body holds what the conscious mind can’t access, and AST works precisely there.
As an embodiment educator and the founder of AST, I have spent over 20 years as a professional bodyworker developing a modality that is both precise in its methodology and deeply felt in its transmission. My studies in biology and education gave me a scientific and pedagogical foundation that lives underneath everything I teach.
My work creates the conditions for the nervous system to feel completely safe, for the body to be fully held, and for people to come home to the wisdom living inside them.
Eighteen years ago I built the Aum Dome in Encinitas, California, a geodesic sanctuary whose structure embodies the same principles I work with in the body: tensegrity, sacred geometry, and the intelligence of force moving through the whole rather than being held in any single point.
I am still amazed by what becomes possible in there.