Aspen Marino

Aspen Marino is a somatic coach who calls herself the Embodied Freedom Coach. She works with growth-oriented people who have already done inner work through therapy, meditation or other practices, understand their patterns, and still find themselves caught in the same loops. Her aim is not only to help people feel better but to have more choice, capacity, aliveness and freedom in their bodies.

Her path to this work began with a lifelong pull toward the body, through dance, movement, acting and yoga. What woke her full commitment, she writes, was pain. In her late 20s, feelings surfaced that her old coping skills couldn't manage. During yoga teacher training she found that the calm, relax-and-release approach common in many meditative and yoga worlds was not what her body needed. She started trauma talk therapy, then looked back and saw how much the body needed to be part of that process, with resourcing and capacity-building first.

She went on to study widely, with workshops, retreats, embodiment classes, somatic experiencing and emotional intelligence trainings. She also began mentorships with teachers whose work she wanted to carry into the world. Body-based practices, and letting her body feel big energies instead of calming them down, are what brought her back to herself. She describes herself as still dedicated to growing her wisdom and capacity.

Today she offers private somatic coaching, hands-on or over Zoom, along with bodywork, courses, workshops and retreats, in person and online. On Insight Timer she shares embodied meditations and movement practices, and describes herself as a bodyworker and soul liberator who helps people get unstuck and free who they are.

Her wider belief is simple: the more people learn to be a body, meeting the emotion, the struggle or the situation that is here, the more natural compassion and connection to the world arises. She calls this a radical choice rather than a self-help hack.