What Is Aerial Somatic Therapy
The Practice
Aerial Somatic Therapy is hands-on bodywork using a suspended fabric that envelops the body like a second skin. Gravity becomes a therapeutic tool. The whole body can be reached at once through the practitioner working from multiple planes of access (below, lateral, above).
It is a modality where complete nervous system support creates the conditions for genuine transformation. A precision method grounded in over two decades of exploration. Accessible to the body in ways ground-based work cannot reach. Designed to serve both the person receiving it and the person offering it.
AST is made up of two practices: a self-bodywork practice and a practitioner-client session, each rooted in the same three principles. Attunement, Alignment, and Embodiment.
What Makes AST Different
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.
Aerial Somatic Therapy is spatial medicine in motion. Tom Myers, whose pioneering work on the Anatomy Trains myofascial meridians has reshaped how we understand the body’s continuous fascial network, describes spatial medicine as: “Spatial medicine concerns itself with how we unfold in space – how we develop into the world from our mother’s lap, how we dance with the world, how we shape and are shaped by circumstance and inner conviction.”
AST is spatial medicine in practice through three intelligences working as one. The fabric and its ability to contain. The practitioner’s attuned presence. Gravity’s anchoring force. When these converge, the nervous system finds safety woven through a global conversation with the fascial network—a three-dimensional access that the architecture of this work uniquely enables.
Through over two decades of personal practice with the swing, client explorations, and deep study of acro yoga therapeutics (as both base and flyer), craniosacral therapy, Thai massage, osteo-thai, and structural integration, Aerial Somatic Therapy emerged and took form. It is a unique offering where both client and practitioner receive the transformation.
A precision method of bodywork.
A healing modality for the practitioner.
The capacity to hold physically, structurally, emotionally, and spiritually.
360 Degree Contact
Three intelligences converge to create conditions for complete holding. The fabric wraps and conforms to the body like a second skin, providing constant sensory feedback of containment. Gravity anchors and suspends, opening access. The practitioner moves around the suspended body from below, laterally, and above, reaching the entirety of the being.
As the swing moves dynamically through space, the interplay of tensional force from the fabric, gravitational force, and the practitioner’s attuned touch creates variable pressure along the body’s spiral fascial lines. The body moves into developmental shapes—fetal-like positions within the womb-like fabric. The body rotates and coils through space, spiraling like the helical patterns that organize all living systems. The fabric holds all of the body’s weight, and the spatial dynamics of the swing make this movement possible.
Every surface of the body becomes available to be met. When the practitioner works at the feet, the receiver feels the connection all the way through to the head. The nervous system receives coherent sensory feedback across the entire fascial matrix. Beneath the protective patterns the nervous system learned, continuity emerges. The entire being remembers it is one whole.
This multi-directional support imprints safety directly into the nervous system, much like a baby held and shaped in the womb.
In that state, the body stops protecting and starts trusting.
Gravity as a Therapeutic Tool
Ida Rolf, the founder of Structural Integration, said it simply:
“Gravity is the therapist.”
Ida Rolf Founder of Structural Integration
AST applies that principle as a core therapeutic tool. When the body is suspended in the swing, whether fully or partially, the relationship with gravity fundamentally shifts. Joints decompress. The body begins to reorganize and remember a more spacious, easeful relationship with gravity’s pull. The body’s response is simple: when gravity becomes an ally rather than a force to resist, ease follows naturally.
The Triple Holding
In an AST session, three kinds of holding converge: the fabric’s physical embrace, gravity’s anchoring force, and the practitioner’s attuned touch, moving with the body inside that holding. This triple quality, structural, gravitational, and relational at once, creates a depth of safety that allows the nervous system to access genuine rest. In that state, patterns held in the body begin to surface. The body’s wisdom finds room to speak.
Two Expressions, One Modality
AST is built around two practices: a self-bodywork practice and a practitioner-client session. Through the self-bodywork practice, the practitioner’s body is resourced and restored. The work sustains both the giver and the receiver.
A Modality That Cares for the Practitioner
Bodywork is physically demanding. Most practitioners know what years of hands-on work accumulates in their own body. AST addresses this directly. The self-bodywork curriculum gives practitioners a dedicated practice for their own fascial and nervous system health. The techniques of the practitioner-client session are taught with regenerative alignment in mind, the practitioner’s body moving in ways that replenish rather than strain. The practitioner’s wellbeing is as central to this modality as the client’s.
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 with curiosity rather than agenda. Attunement is the container itself: the felt sense of safety that allows nervous systems to relax and reorganize.
In the practitioner-client session, attunement means tracking the client’s nervous system in real time, moving with them rather than on them. The practitioner’s own inner attunement directly shapes what is possible for the client. Through mutual resonance, co-regulation happens. The practitioner’s steadiness allows the client’s body to begin to trust and let go, while the client’s opening deepens the practitioner’s capacity to listen and respond.
In the self-bodywork practice, attunement turns inward, learning to listen to your own body with that same quality of presence and care. How you attune to yourself directly shapes how you can attune to others. When you approach your body with curiosity rather than trying to fix or control, everything shifts. Both expressions are cultivated in AST. Both teach you to listen to the body’s own wisdom, to follow what wants to emerge rather than impose what you think should happen.
Both create the conditions for genuine presence and the capacity to respond authentically from your own ground.
Alignment
Alignment is learning to organize your body in relationship to gravity and the Earth, and in relationship to your own center. Gravity becomes not a force to resist but a gift to be the receiver of. The body is sacred geometry made flesh, organized by the same mathematical principles that move through the cosmos.
When you distribute the force of gravity throughout your structure as one integrated whole, the body stops bracing and reorganizes toward its own optimal blueprint. In this alignment, you resource yourself through the earth’s support. Ease becomes possible.
Your body becomes a compass, awakening your proprioception and interoception, connecting you to your own wisdom and intelligence. I call this regenerative alignment: the state where being supported creates the capacity to support others.
“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.
In that supported state, the body accesses what it already knows how to do: reorganize and release. Through sensation and felt sense, the body’s own intelligence begins to work. Tissue releases. The nervous system stops defending. Breath deepens. Patterns held for years begin to move.
This happens in the practitioner-client session, where the client’s body awakens through gradual, gentle awareness and complete support. It also happens in the self-bodywork practice, where the practitioner cultivates direct sensation of their own body, learning to listen and respond to what the body is telling them.
The practices and tools of AST give embodiment a place to live beyond the session. The body reorganizes its relationship to gravity, to itself, to the world. Once that happens, the body remembers how to find its way home.
For practitioners ready to train: