WELCOME

situating myself + my approach

My name is Mary-Dora (MD) and I am a queer, non-binary, politicized somatics worker, therapist, mental health educator, careworker, doula, artist, a Zia, and lover of water, fluidity and all things liminal. I wear many hats and I am also many other things. I am second generation Italian, and third generation Danish, born in 'so called Canada, Ontario', based in Tkaronto (Dish with One Spoon Territory).

I've always been deeply curious about ways of expression that move beyond words — about the layers of meaning that can emerge through the body, sensation, and movement. My journey into this work has been shaped by a lifelong interest in human stories, especially the ones we carry in our soma. I come from a lineage of artists and healers, and grew up surrounded by creative expression as a way of understanding and connecting.

My path began as dancer and visual artist since I was very young, where storytelling through art and the body became a way to make sense of my inner world. For me, physical and artistic expression through art was an integral part of my life. Later on in my career as a dance artist, I discovered somatic movement and fell in-love with it. I fostered and followed this curiosity for many years, through movement, dance and later as a way to process trauma. Over time, this evolved into a deeper somatic practice rooted in Body-Mind Centering, the work of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen. I would spend summers in Montreal studying BMC with Mariko Tanabe. Around this time, I also had the privilege to work with a therapist who had a strong orientation to including the body in sessions. Coming to somatics as a dance artist gave me a new relationship with my body — one that felt more attuned, caring, and intentional. I learned to listen differently, with compassion, and to trust the body’s cues as meaningful.

The desire to become a somatic therapist emerged from a long-standing curiosity about people and their stories — including my own. Through my own healing, I realized that therapy — especially somatic therapy — offered a dynamic and non-linear way of working with trauma. It welcomed creativity, aliveness, and the body’s intelligence into the process of healing.

Most somatic modalities as we known them in the west were started by cis-gender white people (like Peter Levine, Bonnie Bainbridge, Pat Ogden, and many others) and have taken from other Indigenous, Eastern and African healing practices. Our own ancestries also hold their own form of healing practices that have existed long before our modernized and westernize understandings. Somatics has been around for as long as humans have. Many of these white somatic 'pioneers' who brought somatics to the western world failed to included intergenerational trauma and contextual social/political//economic trauma in their approaches. As a politicized somatics worker, I continually include these contextual factors into my practice to hold myself and others within these larger histories and communities.

I approach therapy much like I approach art-making: a co-creative, emergent process. People arrive as they are, and the work unfolds from there—sometimes consciously, sometimes beneath the surface. There’s no need to make sense of everything right away. Instead, we listen together for what’s ready to emerge, allowing meaning to form in ways that are often more aligned with one’s deeper desires.

I am dedicated to supporting others in finding a way back to their mind-body. I will meet every being where they're at by taking a collaborative and holistic approach that fosters curiosity, self-discovery, resiliency, understanding and new meaning. I take an integrative approach drawing from my formal training and informal lived experience with disability, madness, neurodiversity, queerness and ancestry.

I am a Registered Social Worker (MSW, RSW) in good standing with the Ontario College of Social Workers and Social Service Workers (OCSWSSW). I hold this designation with critical awareness. I recognize the history—and ongoing reality—of harm that the social work profession has enacted, particularly toward Black, Indigenous, and other marginalized communities. My membership with the College is complex and often conflicted. My abolitionist stance includes a commitment to imagining and working toward forms of care and accountability beyond the structures of social work as it is currently practiced.

I am committed to creating a culturally sensitive and attuned space that honors and welcomes individuals of all identities, cultural backgrounds, faith traditions, neurotypes, and gender expressions. I strive to cultivate an environment that is gender-affirming, neurodiversity-affirming, and grounded in respect for each person’s unique lived experience. I hold a sex positive space for those exploring poly/consensual non-monogamy or other non-heteronormative relationship dynamics, and those who engage in sex work. I strive to hold a brave space and I stay open to feedback around the best way to support the needs and dignity of each person I engage with. In my practice, I will not tolerate transphobia, homophobia, Islamophobia, Anti-semitism, fat phobia, racism, sexism, classism, ableism, or any other "-isms", discrimination or stigmatization.

Thank you for being here human. I am deeply grateful for your curiosity and presence.

- Acknowledgment -

lineage, land, un-learning, re-learning, re-membering

A part of this learning means acknowledge the lineage of where my practices come from, who my teachers are and what their influences were. Acknowledgment of lineage is an on-going process of uncovering the layers of history that has shaped the practices I am in relationship with, as a means towards reciprocity and repair. Without this acknowledgment, western somatic healing modalities, yoga and birthwork paradigms will remain embedded within the values of white supremacy. A fellow practitioner recently drew my attention this article by Susan Raffo which has been a helpful tool for me in addressing appropriation in somatics and related fields.

The first step towards lineage acknowledgment is naming my practices, from who these practices emerged from. I don't adhere to any one discipline or modality. I practice in an interdisciplinary way that includes my training in euro-western modalities. As a student of yoga asana and meditation, I have studied in the foundational practice of ashtanga vinyasa of K. Pattabhi Jois, shared with me through a western lens as a student of Downward Dog Yoga Centre, where I completed by YTT in 2013 with Ron Reid and many other teachers within the school and beyond as I continued my yoga education over the years. My primary somatic movement education and somatic psychotherapy training comes from Body-Mind Centering (Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen and Mariko Tanabe) and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (Pat Ogden), respectively. Generative Somatics also deeply informs my own practice and the way I show up as a careworker/therapist. All of these modalities have taken from Indigenous healing and contemplative practices originating in Eastern and African cultures.

As a co-conspirator, I have learned from and been shaped by the grassroots and artistic work of angel Kyodo williams, Che Che Luna, Jacks McNamara, Kai Cheng Thom, Lara Sheehi, Layla Saad, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Lindsay Elin, Marika Heinrichs, Raina El Mugammar, Ravyn Wngz, Renee Linklater, Resmaa Menakem, Rodney Diverlus, Sage Hayes, and Syrus Marcus Ware, just to name a few. I am grateful to these teachers, mentors, community members and to the many movement teachers I have had over the last 20+ years who have shared their wisdom and teachings with me.

Birthworker Acknowledgment

It is important to acknowledge the history of the granny midwives of the American South who very much paved the way for midwives and doulas today. Black granny midwives offered person-centered care and holistic support for their clients and we owe an acknowledgment to the important work they did. It is important to understand how the legacy of white supremacy has failed to acknowledge this history, as well as the mothers of gynecology (Anarcha, Lucy and Betsey) who gave up their bodies for the Western medical practices that are still used today.

Yoga & Somatics Acknowledgment

Many of the practices and techniques I draw upon include elements of yoga and somatic practices that originate from Eastern and African mind-body lineages. Many of these practices in the west blur the origins and traditions of these mindful practices. By acknowledging their origins I strive to honour these practices with care and reverence. I continually work to question and leave room for the ways I can better show up in these practices as guest, to honour them and their teachers. I am forever humbled and grateful as student to these practices.

Land Acknowledgement

I am a second generation Italian-Danish settler living on the stolen and unceded territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the Anishnaabek Peoples, the Wendat and the Chippewa First Nations. Tkaronto is governed by many treaties including The Two Row Wampum, The Williams Treaty, The Toronto Purchase Treaty/Treaty 13, and The Dish With One Spoon. Tkaronto is home to many different First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples. I acknowledge the ongoing violence and cultural genocide the First Nations peoples experience under the colonial project known as "Canada". I pay my respects to their elders, past, present and emerging, and stand behind them in their fight for justice and self-determination, we cannot be free until everyone is free. I acknowledge how the struggles and resistance of colonial violence of the Native population here on Turtle Island is connected to the same struggles and resistance of Indigenous peoples around the world who are currently experiencing on-going ethnic cleansing and genocide at the hands of settler colonial violence.

I continue to explore the ways in which my work can support movements for decolonization and liberation on this land. I am learning what it means to honour these ancestries, and my own ancestry in right way. With this acknowledgment comes a responsibility to educate ourselves to our real history. To critically challenge the conditions and attitudes that we have been mis-educated and socialized to accept as givens and to stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity with Indigenous people in their just demands for Land Back in order to pursue and win climate justice and our collective liberation through a just transition.

Photo by @Abandonedaffair

somatic practice

movement & touch is our bodies first language

movement & touch is our bodies first language

"When we explore the interior of the body, we discover a landscape as rich as that of the earth. A whole universe exists within the boundaries of our skin that mirrors in all its extraordinary microcosmic details the workings of the greater universe of which we are each a part.”

- Offerings -

Somatic Therapy + Embodiment

Birthwork, Perinatal Counselling, Childbirth Ed.

Birthwork, Perinatal Counselling, Childbirth Ed.

Birthwork, Perinatal Counselling, Childbirth Ed.

Birthwork, Perinatal Counselling, Childbirth Ed.

Birthwork, Perinatal Counselling, Childbirth Ed.

Selected Creative Works

Birthwork, Perinatal Counselling, Childbirth Ed.

Selected Creative Works

APPROACH + VALUES

situating myself + my approach

- Acknowledgment -

lineage, land, un-learning, re-learning, re-membering

“When we think we are getting it right, we realize we’re only getting it better…Becoming anti-oppressive is not a comfortable place to be. It means constantly reflecting on how one is being constructed and how one is constructing one’s world.”

movement & touch is our bodies first language

movement & touch is our bodies first language

"When we explore the interior of the body, we discover a landscape as rich as that of the earth. A whole universe exists within the boundaries of our skin that mirrors in all its extraordinary microcosmic details the workings of the greater universe of which we are each a part.”

- Offerings -

Somatic Therapy + Embodiment

Birthwork, Perinatal Counselling, Childbirth Ed.

Birthwork, Perinatal Counselling, Childbirth Ed.

Birthwork, Perinatal Counselling, Childbirth Ed.

Birthwork, Perinatal Counselling, Childbirth Ed.

Birthwork, Perinatal Counselling, Childbirth Ed.

Selected Creative Works

Birthwork, Perinatal Counselling, Childbirth Ed.

Selected Creative Works

APPROACH + VALUES

situating myself + my approach

- Acknowledgment -

lineage, land, un-learning, re-learning, re-membering

“When we think we are getting it right, we realize we’re only getting it better…Becoming anti-oppressive is not a comfortable place to be. It means constantly reflecting on how one is being constructed and how one is constructing one’s world.”

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