Michele Torino Hower, MFA, RYT, ST-3

From Yoga, to Dance, to Somatic Practices, to Somatic Therapy, the body has been my reliable guide along my own psycho-spiritual-physical path towards wholeness. I look forward to accompanying you on your path of illumination, integration and well-being.

Somatic practices believe the body posesses its own intelligence.  Learning that mind resides over matter, most of us are not connected to the information our body is always giving us.  Somatics listen to and work with the body’s information to affect growth and change.

I encountered Somatics with my first Yoga teacher, a dancer and yogini, in 1999, in Boston, MA. I had just graduated from college with a BA in Theater and a minor in Psychology and this new work in Somatics emboldened me to study Dance at the Graduate level. I knew my body had a lot to say, to do, to show me, to make and unfold.  

As I earned my MFA in Dance in Albuquerque, NM, I simultaneously taught Hatha Yoga and earned a 500-hour Yoga Teaching Certification in the Iyengar Yoga lineage.  Connecting with internal quiet knowing and with the subtle energies of the body supported my practice of being a human as well as making dances.  

Then, living in NYC I taught dance to kids in under-resourced Brooklyn communities, helping kids develop joyful and creative relationships with their expressive bodies.  I also taught Yoga to adults and began my study of Klein technique, a somatic practice that opens, aligns and strengthens deep body connections.  I also made a lot of dance and performed with a variety artists.  

After starting my family, my nervous system needed nature.  I moved with my husband, young son and baby-in-utero to Asheville in 2015. Here, I continued to teach Somatics and Dance in elementary schools and at UNCA.  Getting older, however,  I felt a call for more stillness and quiet and turned my attention to the emotionally therapeutic nature of somatics.  I took up study with The Somatic Therapy Center, based in Philadelphia, and am now a Level 3 Certified Somatic Therapist in Transformative Touch Somatic Therapy.  I have been practicing this form since 2020.  

Somatic Therapy offers a full-bodied, lived experience of making connections and gaining insight.  

The body is the ground that we return to again and again as we explore sensations, emotions, beliefs and our relationships with all of it.