ABOUT ME
Companion with Spirit.
Somatic explorer.
Movement and embodiment devotee.
My Journey
Hello, I’m Megan Brians
My healing journey has come from a joy of moving and a desire to feel good in my body, mind and spirit. Early on while I was pursuing a professional dance career, I discovered how profoundly numb I was to my own body. Fortunately, I was introduced to the gentle movement and awareness practice of Continuum Movement. This initiated a softening and shedding of accumulated years of physical guarding and parasympathetic freeze. I began to feel and comprehend myself more.
As I learned to trust my own sensations, I increasingly experienced and related to my physical and emotional self and my environment through a felt experience rather than solely through my intellect. Somatic,* perceptual and intuition classes helped me deepen my relational skills, my understanding of emotion and affect, and increased my trust in my own sensibility.
Self Discovery & Healing
By my early 30’s I had come a long way from being the physically and emotionally numbed person I once was. But then I was hit by a massive disruption that sent me into deeper layers of self-discovery and healing. One day after dance class my legs cramped up so severely that I could barely stand or walk. While the pain eventually went away, I remained extremely weak throughout my body. Just a few weeks prior I had been dancing four times a week. Now I barely had the energy to get from work to home. Within that same year I was attacked by several teenagers and had to move out of my home due to a terrible bed bug infestation. While I retained some sense of humor as I doggedly went through my days, I was most often in a deep pit of depression.
Over the course of six years, with the help of many healing friends and allies, I regained my health—emerging not only stronger in body, but stronger in spirit.
The Fundamentals of my Practice
From this healing journey I learned four important principles that are fundamental to my healing practice:
Nourishment for the Body, Mind and Soul
I learned that I needed nourishment for all aspects of my life, not just dietary (one of the reasons my body had crashed was due to an eating disorder). To nourish my body, psyche and spirit daily is an absolute necessity and I fiercely advocate nourishment for everyone I know.
The Healing Power of Imagination
I freed my imagination from the fetters of strict rational thinking, re-discovering an imagination that once thrived when I was a child. I imagined characters, settings and scenarios that bolstered and nourished me, thereby creating a vital pathway for my healing. Providing guided imagery to my clients is essential to my work: it is by thinking about, feeling into and embodying these images that clients receive medicine for their well being.
Whole Awareness Listening
Foundational to all my sessions with clients and my own healing journey is attentive and holistic listening: what needs attention and what kind of care does it need? It is in this act of listening where healing begins.
Communion with Spirit and Nature
As I opened myself to my imagination, I felt the support of Spirit surrounding me. Spirit, of course, is very much alive in all of nature. Communion with nature provides me great nourishment and many lessons about life and living. It is Nature and Spirit that support and work with me in all of my sessions.
My Experience
Studies & Practices
Somatics
Currently enrolled as a student of somatic sex education with the Institute for the Study of Somatic Sex Education; Organic Intelligence® Certified Coaching with Steve Hoskinson; Organic Intelligence® End of Trauma Course; Continuum Movement and embodiment practices with Mary Abrams, Susan Harper (“Heart of Belonging,” “Perceptual Body “and “Body of Relating”) and Emilie Conrad;= Embodied Enquiry and Transformative Dance with Zuza Engler; Somatic Intuition with Ron D’Angelo at the Soma-Psyche Institute.
Bodywork
Myofascial Release Therapy with Michael McMahon at Moving Mountain Institute; Chi Nei Tsang (Energy Organ Massage) for the Abdomen and Pelvis with Saumya Comer; Entering the Temple: Bodywork for the Female Pelvic Floor with Leslie Stager; Arvigo® Advanced Pregnancy with Amy Colo; Holistic Treatment of the Pregnant Body with Lynn Schulte, PT; The Belly and Female Pelvis with Leslie Stager; The Arvigo Techniques of Mayan Abdominal Therapy® with Hilary Lewin; Ortho-Bionomy with Rosa Rodriguez and Gary Lee Williams; Ortho-Bionomy Scar Tissue and Surgical Trauma with Morel Stackhouse; Polarity Therapy with Ellen Krueger at the Soma-Psyche Institute; Massage Therapy at the Fingerlakes School of Massage.
Shamanic, Spiritual Healing
Awakening the Illuminated Heart with Viola Rose, Shamanic Journeying for Guidance and Healing with Sandra Ingerman (online course); Soul Somatics with Rebecca Green; Cherokee Bodywork with Lewis Mehl-Madrona.
Mind-Body Movement
Conscious dance classes in Soul Motion, 5 Rhythms, Ecstatic Dance and Movement Medicine; Alexander Technique with June Ekman and Judith Gradowitz; Gyrotonic Expansion System® with Maria Holm and Young-Ah Kim; Pilates at the Kelly Kane Core Integration School; T’ai Chi with Maggie Newman; Modern Dance with various NYC teachers; Ballet with Christine Wright and Zvi Gotheiner; Yoga at Now:Yoga; Anatomy with Irene Dowd.
Licenses & Certifications
Organic Intelligence™ Certified Coach, 2022
Integrative Pelvic Bodywork, 2020
Vaginal Steam Facilitator, 2019
Arvigo® Advanced Pregnancy Practitioner, 2019
Oregon Licensed Massage Therapist #24955, 2019
Arvigo® Abdominal Therapy Practitioner, 2018
New York Licensed Massage Therapist, 2015
Associate Polarity Therapy Practitioner, 2006
Pilates Instructor, 2001