Aerial Somatic Therapy Practitioner Training · Level 1
The Aum Dome · Encinitas, California
What if the modality you’ve been looking for works as much on you as it does on your clients?
Aerial Somatic Therapy emerged from more than 20 years immersed in the body and in bodywork traditions from around the world, converging into a single original modality that works at the level of fascia, nervous system, and the whole person simultaneously. Over the past three years, AST has trained five cohorts of practitioners from diverse healing and movement disciplines. This sixth cohort continues that lineage inside the Aum Dome.
What Aerial Somatic Therapy Actually Does
Gravity becomes a therapeutic tool. Joints decompress and tissue releases at depths that are otherwise unreachable. AST uses the Somatic Swing as a precision instrument to deliver traction, compression, and rotation through the body’s fascial lines while the nervous system feels fully held. Suspended in the fabric, a client’s weight is taken up entirely, by the swing and by an attuned practitioner moving with them, so the body’s habitual holding has nowhere left to live. That double holding, structural and relational, is what creates the conditions for deep release.
AST works at the level of the body-mind, where the subconscious lives, reaching patterns that conscious thought alone cannot touch.
AST stands on its own as a modality, or it weaves into the work you already do. Practitioners have folded it into everything from clinical bodywork to ceremonial spaces to talk therapy, becoming part of the larger fabric of their life’s work.
Who This Training Is For
- Bodyworkers who are exceptional at caring for others and ready to learn a method that also cares for them physically, season after season, client after client.
- Psychedelic and transformational facilitators who know that integration lives in the body, and want a somatic modality that can meet people at that depth.
- Psychotherapists who want to bring an embodied, body-based modality into talk-based work, without abandoning the rigor of their clinical training.
- Wellness practitioners of any kind who are drawn to work that creates real, lasting transformation, the kind that reshapes how a client feels in their body long after the session ends.
If you’re ready for the next evolution of your work, this training is built to meet you there.
What You’ll Walk Away With
Four days inside the Aum Dome. You’ll leave with the ability to offer full AST sessions to clients, with skill and with confidence, from day one.
- A working understanding of fascial anatomy and how suspension reaches tissue in a way few other methods can
- The ability to read and support a client’s nervous system in real time, inside a session
- Full session architecture, including AST’s proprietary 5-phase sequence, from intake through integration
- The AST self-bodywork curriculum, so this becomes a practice that sustains your body, not just your clients’
- A felt, personal relationship with the work, the foundation that lets you offer it to others with real integrity
Your Faculty
Maura Rassman-Gwiazda
Founder, Lead InstructorI 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, and AST works with all of it. 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.
Michelle Nayeli Bouvier, B.S., E-RYT, C-IAYT
Guest TeacherInterdisciplinary embodiment educator and founder of the Kutilaa School of Embodied Resilience. 25+ years at the intersection of living yoga, fascia research, and the body’s fluid intelligence. Certified yoga therapist and GYROTONIC trainer, AST trained, longtime personal somatic swing practice.
Amy Toosley
Returning Assistant, Fifth CohortSomatic Experiencing practitioner, IFS practitioner, Psychedelic Facilitator and integration coach who knows this work from the inside.
Limited to 8 students for direct, personal attention across all four days.
What’s Included
- Four days of immersive, hands-on instruction with Maura, Michelle, and Amy
- A 40-page full-color AST manual
- The AST self-bodywork curriculum
- Access to the AST practitioners’ WhatsApp community
- A 60-minute group integration call, 4 to 6 weeks after training
- A certificate of completion for 30 hours of training
The Sixth Cohort (November 5 to 8, 2026) is full. Join the waitlist for the 2027 trainings and you’ll be first to hear when new dates open.
Payment plans available.
A limited number of scholarship spots are held for practitioners for whom tuition is a genuine barrier. If that’s you, reach out.
Join the 2027 Waitlist
This cohort fills by talking it through. If something in this work speaks to you, reach out to Maura directly.