hello pretty human!
I’m Olga.
Nearly 20 years of living this work in my own body. Seven years of walking alongside others. And an approach that has evolved from yoga into integrative somatic coaching.
I’m a trauma-trained somatic coach, therapeutic yoga facilitator, and embodiment practitioner. For the past seven years, I’ve worked primarily with women and femmes, both individually and in groups, supporting them as they reconnect with themselves, their bodies, their needs, and their aliveness.
My own journey began nearly two decades ago, and my work has evolved alongside it. What began through yoga and embodied movement has grown into an integrative somatic approach rooted in nervous system education, relational attunement, body-led exploration, and the deep knowing of the soma.
My work supports people who are tired of surviving, shape-shifting, over-functioning, and abandoning themselves in order to feel safe, loved, worthy, or in control.
Together, we reconnect with the body, understand protective patterns, and create space for something beyond survival: more agency, self-trust, desire, choice, and aliveness.
My approach is trauma-informed, relational, body-first, and integrative by nature. I don’t work from rigid protocols or one-size-fits-all formulas.
We follow the SOMA, the living bodymind, and work with what is actually present in real time.
I believe healing and embodied transformation happen through relationship:
relationship with the body,
with the nervous system,
with emotions,
with unmet needs,
with protective patterns,
with other humans,
with truth,
with choice,
with agency,
with pleasure,
with nature,
and with your aliveness.
Because the goal isn’t simply to become better at surviving.
It’s to become more fully available for the life you actually want to live.
training, certifications, & professional education
My work is grounded in integrative somatic education, trauma-informed practice, nervous system science, embodied movement, contemplative traditions, and lived experience.
Alongside my personal healing journey, I’ve completed numerous professional trainings and continue to educate myself and practice this work:
Trauma Center Trauma Sensitive Yoga
Center for Trauma and Embodiment
300-hours
MindBody (somatic ) Coaching Certification
The Embody Lab
120 hours
Training with Dr. Scott Lyons, Kai Cheng Thom, Manuela Mischke-Reeds, Staci Haines, Dr. Rae Johnson, Dr. Arielle Schwartz, Licia Sky, Richard Strozzi-Heckler
Integrative Somatic Trauma Therapy
The Embody Lab
60 hours
Training with Dr. Scott Lyons, Nkem Ndefo, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, Pat Ogden, Peter Levine, Stephen Porges, Deb Dana, Kai Cheng Thom, Dr. Arielle Schwartz, Manuela Mischke-Reeds, Staci Haines, Gabor Maté
Somatic Stress Release Practitioner Training
The Embody Lab
100 hours
Training with Dr. Scott Lyons
Somatic Attachment Therapy
The Embody Lab
60hours
training with Dr. Scott Lyons, Diane Pool Heller, Manuela Miscke Reeds, Kai Cheng Tom, Gabor Mate, Peter Levine, Dr. Daniel Siegel, Karine Bell, Dr. Ruella Frank, Dr. Fanny Brewster, Dr. Anne Wieser Cornelle, Nkem Ndefo, Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen
Somatic Parts Work Level 1 (IFS-Informed)
The Embody Lab
Training with Fran D. Booth
Healing Trauma & Addiction: A Holistic Approach to Recovery
The Embody Lab
Training with Gabor Maté
Healing Trauma with Dr. Peter Levine
The Embody Lab
8 hour masterclass
Mindful Trauma-Informed Yoga
Yoga Medicine
20 hours
300RYT Yoga Teacher Training
Samadhi Yoga
Registered Yoga Teacher
Embodied Activism
The Embody Lab
25 hours
Training with Nkem Ndefo, Farzana Khan, Dr. Rae Johnson
Ashtanga Yoga Teacher Training
Uk,40 hours
Training with David Swansen
my story is my purpose
I’ve struggled with my mental and physical health for most of my life, carrying a persistent feeling that something was deeply wrong with me.
I was a highly sensitive child growing up in communist Poland with very young parents who carried their own unresolved trauma from post-war poverty and instability. Much of that pain was never named, yet it lived in our bodies and relationships.
Trauma, I’ve learned, isn’t only a single catastrophic event. It can be chronic, relational, systemic, intergenerational. It can look like emotional neglect, not being seen or heard, oppression, migration, and living without safety or voice.
As a result, my nervous system adapted early. I learned to be “good,” to hold everything in, to override my needs, to translate vulnerability into anger or compliance in order to belong.
These adaptations were intelligent. They helped me survive.And over time, they also became the template for disconnection, addiction, self-harm, and harmful relationships.
After immigrating to New York at age five, frequent school changes, bullying, and cultural displacement deepened that sense of not belonging. Emotions weren’t spoken about in my home, so my body carried what had nowhere else to go.
By my teens and early twenties, I was living in survival mode without knowing it. My life became a cycle of intensity, numbness, chaos, longing, and escape. At 23, I hit rock bottom and became homeless.
What followed was not a straight line, but a spiral of healing.
I spent years in addiction recovery treatment, talk therapy, and personal development spaces, doing profound cognitive and emotional work. It helped me understand myself, but it didn’t yet help my body feel safe. I was extremely anxious and repeating the same toxic relational patterns – which just kept me stuck in cycels of shame.
When I relapsed years later, it was my body that ultimately led me home.
Yoga, breath, movement, and somatic awareness slowly reintroduced me to sensation, presence, and choice.
For the first time, I began to feel present, grounded, and alive.
Then I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer.
That diagnosis cracked something open.
It forced me to slow down, listen more deeply, and tend to my body with care rather than force. I realized I had been treating my body like a machine, and by all means trying to control and fix myself.
I began meditating, changed my relationship to food and rest, set boundaries, became less rigid and anxious, tried new things, had more fun, ended toxic relationships, and recommitted to sobriety.
When my body started to feel more support, space, permission, I started to experience a profound sense of connection, self-compassion, and belonging to this life, this planet, this universe.
When I was declared in remission, I knew my life’s work would live at the intersection of healing, embodiment, spirituality, and nervous system wisdom.
I completed my first yoga teacher training in 2018. For a time, I practiced and taught Ashtanga, until I recognized that I was repeating the same patterns I’d learned in trauma: force, self-punishment, perfectionism, and treating my body like a machine to optimize. ( there were also very disturbing accusations of SA that came out in this time about the creator of Ashatnga Pattabhi Jois, and I felt it in my gut that this was NOT aligned.)
During the pandemic, I started on a journey of deep shadow work and self discovery through different online certifications about where trauma and these protective patterns actually live, in the body ( the subconcious, subcortical brain , and the autonomic nervous system).
I learned that many of the parts of me I had judged or tried to eliminate were actually protective patterns shaped by survival and conditioning.
This was when I truly understood that I was never broken, but that my body was protecting me.
Healing and embodied transforamtion, I discovered, is not linear. It moves in spirals, layers, and seasons.
Everything started to click.
Trauma was not a flaw. It was a wound with adaptation. Protection. Intelligence.
I left environments that reinforced harm and began cultivating a gentler, more compassionate, body-led approach.
In 2023, I finished a Trauma Sensitive Yoga training at the Center for Trauma & Embodiment started by Bessel van der Kolk and later continued to educate myself at The Embody Lab and certified in mindbody coaching, integrative somatic trauma and attachment therapy, somatic parts work, and as a somatic stress release practitioner.
Today, my work is devoted to creating body-led, resilience-based, and relational spaces — particularly for women and femme-bodied people — to reconnect with their bodies, reclaim agency, and remember their intrinsic wisdom.
I know from lived experience, and from the nervous systems I have been honoured to guide, that no matter how stuck, disconnected, or overwhelmed we feel, transformation and healing are possible.
At our own pace.
And I’ve also learned that this work isn’t only about healing what happened.
It is about creating the capacity to experience more of what is possible.
More choice.
More connection.
More expression.
More pleasure.
More agency.
More life.
Outside of my professional work, embodiment continues to be my practice.
Pole dancing has been a powerful part of shedding internalized misogyny and toxic shame, and reclaiming my birthright of body trust, sensuality, and aliveness in the present moment.
I am deeply nourished by nature, creative expression, embodied movement, conciseness exploration, travel, and community care. I am an artist, a forest walker, a beach lover, and a long-time volunteer with animal shelters.
This work is not something I do.
It is something I live.
all of
you is welcome here
how I work
My approach is integrative by nature.
I do not work from a single fixed method, because the nervous system does not live in silos.
Instead, my work is informed by multiple somatic, psychological, relational, therapeutic and contemplative fields of understanding.
These are not techniques I apply mechanically. They are languages of perception that shape how I listen, track, and respond in real time.
Depending on what is present, this work may draw from:
• Somatic Parts Work (IFS-informed) & shadow work
• Polyvagal Theory & nervous system science
• Somatic Experiencing, Hakomi, Inner Relationship Focusing, and Sensorimotor-informed approaches
• Trauma-sensitive yoga and attachment-informed approaches
• Body-Mind Centering & somatic stress release
• Authentic movement and somatic dance
• Mindbody coaching
• Expression through voice, writing, imagery, and embodied movement
• Contemporary neurobiology of stress and trauma research and somatic psychology
You do not need to know or understand any of these modalities.
They simply inform how I perceive, attune, pace, and support your system in the moment.
This is not a protocol-based approach.
It is an attunement-led, body-first practice that follows the intelligence of the Soma as it unfolds.
teachers, mentors, and lineages
My work has been shaped by many streams of learning across somatics, trauma healing, nervous system science, embodiment, contemplative practice, movement, and depth psychology.
Some of the teachers, researchers, and practitioners who have deeply influenced my understanding include :
Peter Levine, Stephen Porges, Deb Dana, Pat Ogden, Bessel van der Kolk, Gabor Maté, Dick Schwartz, Carl Jung, Eugene Gendlin, Staci Haines, Nkem Ndefo, Kai Cheng Thom, Scott Lyons, Manuela Mischke-Reeds, Rae Johnson, Arielle Schwartz, Ram Dass, Jack Kornfield, Alan Watts, Gabrielle Roth, and Wilhelm Reich.
Alongside professional education, lived experience, ongoing practice, creativity, spirituality, movement, and relationship continue to shape how I listen, learn, and work.
if you were my bestie you'd know...
Outside of my professional work, embodiment continues to be my practice, not just my profession.
I’m an artist, a forest walker, a beach lover, a deep feeler, a long-time animal shelter volunteer, and someone who still believes movement, creativity, ritual, laughter, music, nature, and community are medicine.
Pole dancing became part of my own journey of reclaiming sensuality, body trust, pleasure, and self-expression after years of shame and disconnection.
I love yoga, authentic movement, dancing, creating art, singing in the car, writing, weird humor, dogs, pizza, kombucha, and spending long stretches of time alone in contemplation, nature, and imagination.
I’m Polish-American and often think in two languages at once.
And yes, all of you is welcome here.
my somatic manifesto
I don’t believe you are broken.
I believe your body is intelligent, adaptive, and has inherent capacity to reorganise, grow, transform, and heal.
I believe many of us are living in conditions our bodies were never designed for. Fast, overstimulating, productivity-driven environments that reward disconnection and call it success. A culture that teaches us to override, optimize, regulate, biohack, and push through instead of listen. The trance of capitalism, internalized patriarchy, colonialism, and other power-over systems and institutions that shape us on a mind, body, heart, nervous system, and spiritual level.
What we often pathologize as anxiety, burnout, numbness, overreactivity, or “too much” is very often a nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do: adapt and survive.
Stress is meant to move through the body. Activation is meant to rise and then resolve. We are built to flow between activation and restoration. But in modern life, activation often stays on. The cycle does not complete. And over time, unfinished stress can become the baseline.
Many therapeutic, healing, and coaching models focus on symptom reduction or performance enhancement. Fewer ask whether your reactions actually make sense in the context you are living in or what your body has lived through.
I am interested in something beyond symptom reduction.
What becomes possible when the body has more capacity?
More capacity to feel.
More capacity to rest.
More capacity to express.
More capacity to stay connected.
More capacity to experience pleasure and desire.
More capacity to respond rather than react.
More capacity to move toward what we actually want.
Somatic work begins from a different premise:
your sensations, symptoms, and subconscious patterns are not the enemy.
They are communication.
The body speaks through sensation, tension, impulse, emotion, breath, movement, rhythm.
This is our first language.
You cannot think your way out of patterns that live in the nervous system alone. Insight matters, but transformation happens through lived embodied experience.
This work is not about being calm all the time.
It is about capacity.
The capacity to feel without collapsing.
To mobilize without burning out.
To rest without guilt.
To stay connected to yourself in moments of intensity.
To have more choice.
Capacity is not just the ability to survive more. It is the ability to experience more of life.
I also believe that safety and belonging are not distributed equally. Oppression, discrimination, trauma, and lack of access to resources create ongoing nervous system stress for many people and communities. Naming that matters.
At the same time, I believe embodied healing should not be gatekept. We all have bodies. We all carry innate wisdom, adaptation, and the possibility of reconnection.
Before modern therapy and optimization culture, humans gathered. We moved together. We breathed together. We used rhythm, sound, movement, ritual, touch, storytelling, and community to regulate and reconnect.
This work is not new.
It is remembering.
Healing is not about becoming a better machine.
It is about becoming more fully human in a world that often asks us to abandon ourselves.
And becoming more fully alive is part of that work.
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