I bring everything I am to this work — so that you can bring everything you are.

What follows includes references to childhood sexual abuse.
Please tend to yourself as you read.

Sweet body. Holding on until I was ready.

Marta Burton, smiling, outdoors in Colombia

By the time I was seven years old, my body had become a place that held things I had no words for — fears I could not escape, memories I could not name, sensations that had no explanation.

By the time I was nine, I knew something was terribly wrong with me.

The body holds what the mind cannot yet bear.

What was the prickly heat spreading across my thighs that left me weak, burning and finally crawling — alone — into a dark place where I could collapse into a sweet, death-like sleep?

Without conscious awareness, I adopted the unspoken rules of survival.

Don’t talk. Don’t trust. Don’t feel.

I adapted: freeze, numb, collapse, play dead — so that I could go on and act like the happy little girl I should have been.

I abandoned myself to save myself.

I had no understanding of what my body was holding — confusion, isolation, shame — the burning shame of those who betrayed me was injected like dark poison into my body. It silently consumed me from the inside, and grew over years of abuse. And beneath the shame was despair, and grief so tender I could not touch it.

For decades I went on. Performing, pleasing, achieving, proving. I was a good girl, a good student, a good wife, a good mother. I danced. I sang. I wrote. I read. I prayed. I married. I mothered. I changed careers. I learned. I sought. I tried. I messed up. Again and again.

And through it all, my sweet body held on tight... until it couldn’t anymore.

The performance was over. I had no choice but to fully engage in my apprenticeship with grief.

It was as if I had fallen to the bottom of a dry well — landing hard and heavy — breaking into pieces. I collapsed there, frozen, terrified, exhausted. I was lost in the darkness. I was afraid. And I didn’t know if I was going to make it out alive.

It took many years to return to life. Years of searching. Yoga. Sacred plant medicines, psychedelics. Parts work. Meditation. Deep rest. Slowly, I found peace inside my own skin. Trust in my body. Trust in life.

I know what it means to be dismembered — to have left parts of yourself behind in rooms you swore you’d never re-enter.

Grief asks us to retrieve — one by one — the banished and blamed parts of ourselves, to gather them to our hearts, to witness them, to hold them, and to bring them home.

Today I walk with others through the dark. I am familiar with the territory.

Somatic Intelligence and Integration

This is the work I have been moving toward my whole life — accompanying others as they awaken the intelligence that lives within the body, the intelligence that integrates all that we experience and transforms what we have survived into what we are becoming.

The certifications below are the formal record of a lifelong pursuit — to understand what it is to be human, in a body, on this planet — and to learn how to fully experience and express all that we are.

I am still studying. Still unfolding. This is the path of emergence.

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