You do not learn this work from the outside.
The training asks you to study the work and to enter it. Theory matters. So do sensation, relationship, expression, risk, repetition, and what happens when something you thought you understood becomes real in the body.
Interpretive Somatics is learned through participation — by noticing what happens in you, between you and others, and in the choices you make from there.
The arc of the training
The first three years form a developmental arc, with each year building on the capacities of the one before it. Throughout the training, students work through the body, relationship, group process, creativity, and sexuality as different ways of encountering themselves and one another.
Year One — Foundations
The first year builds the ground: sensing the body, recognizing defensive patterns, and developing a language for what is happening internally and in relationship.
The group is part of the work from the beginning. Students learn through their own process and through witnessing, contact, difference, resonance, and being seen.
Year Two — Deepening
The second year brings greater depth and complexity. Students become more able to stay with what is happening in the body, in relationship, and in the group.
There is more room for contradiction, vulnerability, experimentation, and creativity — not simply as expression, but as a way of discovering what the work becomes when it moves through a particular person.
Year Three —
Leadership
& Contribution
By the third year, the work begins to turn outward. Students encounter more directly how they relate to visibility, power, and responsibility.
The emphasis moves toward leadership, contribution, and community — bringing what has been developed in the training into the places, relationships, and systems students are already part of.
The rhythm matters.
The training moves between immersion and integration.
Three times each academic year, students and faculty gather for five days in person at Menla Retreat Center in the Catskills. The extended time together allows the work to unfold through teaching and practice, but also through meals, rest, conversation, movement, nature, and the life of the group itself.
Between retreats, two live online modules bring the cohort back together with an emphasis on integration: what has stayed with you, what has changed, and how the work is meeting the life you actually live.
The time between modules is part of the training — where the work is carried into daily life and encountered again in relationship.
The work is
held by what
surrounds it.
Students are expected to remain in active relationship with the work throughout the academic year, including individual practitioner sessions and, as the training progresses, mentorship and supervision.
Years One–Three
During Years One through Three, students continuing toward practitioner training must complete 12 individual practitioner sessions each academic year. Students completing the three-year training must complete 8 sessions each year.
Year Three
In addition to individual practitioner sessions, students in Year Three must also complete four individual mentorship sessions in support of their leadership and community project.
Year Four
In Year Four, students must complete 12 individual practitioner sessions and 12 supervision sessions, alongside live supervision as part of the practitioner training.
Year Four — Practice becomes responsibility.
Year Four brings greater rigor to the practice students have already been developing. The emphasis shifts toward therapeutic skill, judgment, supervision, and the responsibility of making choices in service of another person's process.
Students deepen their capacity to track process, work with the body and relationship, make and evaluate interventions, and recognize how their own responses shape the work. Supervision asks them to examine not only what happened, but why.
The aim is to develop the grounding, discernment, and self-awareness to work responsively rather than from a fixed method. The work becomes less about knowing the right thing to do and more about developing the capacity to meet what is actually happening.
What you do with the
work is part of the work.
Whether the training changes how you create, lead, relate, practice, or contribute, the invitation is the same: enter it fully and see where it asks you to go.