Whole Person
Learning Through
Movement and Awareness
explore somatics and restorative movement with curiosity and creativity
Welcome to the School for Somatic Groundwork!
Whether you are looking to move and feel better, improve somatic awareness, expand your movement literacy or learn somatic pedagogy, you have come to the right place! Our offerings provide high-quality online somatic movement education for beginners and teaching professionals alike.
Since 2018, our school has consistently offered online somatic movement education with the intention of making somatic practice more widely available, inclusive and resonate with the times. Somatic movement reveals a basic way of learning that applies relaxation and attention to the moving experience. Learning through our body terrain is the foundation for our early childhood development. The process is fostered by sensing and moving and using the real-time data to understand our relationship within and between ourselves and our environment. With restorative movements done on the floor, seated, kneeling and standing, Somatic Groundwork partners with your body’s inherent learning system, revealing a bedrock for healing, recovery, and creative expression.
Start With Direct Experience
Study the Art & Science of Teaching Somatics
Are you a practitioner who wants a comprehensive somatic movement education to develop and evolve your craft? Learn more about Interdisciplinary Movement & Somatics and join an ISMETA Approved Training Program. 2026 Fall Enrollment opens August 29th!
The Somatic Groundwork Way
Listen & Notice
Slow Down and Notice, Listen with Awareness
Relax Here
Bring Attention Here and Relate with Environmental Support
Practice Your Body
Stay Curious, Follow Movement Impulse and Respect the Edges
Explore Novelty
Identify Opportunity, Experiment with Options and Track the Effects
Somatic Relating
Learn Through Your Whole Person by Sensing, Feeling, Thinking & Moving
contemporary somatics
Somatics was coined in 1976 by Thomas Hanna. Over the past 50 years the field has been an umbrella for variety of physical practices, manual therapies, embodied inquiries and healing methods that collectively realize the bodymind as a cohesive learning system. Somatics is a field of research that explores the phenomenological body or lived body. ’Soma’ describes body as a conscious, relational entity. ‘Body’ in this way refers to our own bodily structure and consciousness as well as the structure/consciousness of any bodily ecosystem (cell, blood, kidney – mother, family, tribe – seed, earth, sun). Somatic movement education is one branch of the larger somatics field.
Somatic Groundwork, developed by Kaila June Keliikuli, is aligned with a contemporary somatic view. The movement system applies three interrelated lenses: neurofascial, developmental and decolonial. With therapeutic, creative and functional benefits the ‘inside out-ground up’ approach helps improve regulation, feeling states and mood, coordination, mobility and stability. Yielding Practices, Unwinding Methods and Patterns of Connectivity are partnered with basic movements and somatic patterning methods. Somatic Groundwork blends mindful attention, intentional effort and novel choice while relating with sensing, moving and thinking. Somatic activities are experiential and inquiry-based.
VISION | to participate in healing and repair processes with ourselves, others and our planet so that we may cultivate good relating on all size scales
MISSION | to guide somatic movement activities in participatory and inclusive spaces for therapeutic, functional and creative outcomes
CORE VALUES | emergent learning + liberatory action + practice as play
how people are moved by Somatic Groundwork
“Learning with Kaila has provided confirmation that being in and living from an embodied sense of self is an act of love. That to be at home in the body and to invite students and clients to be at home in their bodies is how we affect the change we want to see in the world.”
Antonia Small
Integrative Movement Educator
“I highly recommend Somatic Groundwork to anyone with an appetite for exploring and developing a deeper sense of themselves. This is a profound journey and I continue to evolve.”
Janet Steeves
Yoga Teacher
“I taught hatha yoga for several years and found I was unable to teach or delve deeper than offering a physical movement practice. Somatic Groundwork has helped me to find what was missing – the bridge from movement into the nature of ourselves and all that is…life, connection, relationship.”
Vanessa Brumby
Somatic Movement Teacher