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Welcome back to Fascia and Bones: Unpacking the Mystery.  Some things I love—fascia and bones with a detective mystery. I am a practicing manual osteopath and structural integrator and love working with the connective tissue of the body and the holistic systems of the body. I am also a long-time educator in the field of bodywork and movement. My hope is to share some insights into the fields I practice.

In Season 2, Episode 9, I am sharing some thoughts around “turning up the volume”, Zohran Mamdani, changing paradigm of trauma theory, feminism, patriarchy, colonization, non-binary and queer politics. I have been reflecting as women how we hold each other up, support each other, and continue to melt the patriarchal messages, including within us, to help offer healing and change in the systems we live in.
 
 I thought I would share an excerpt from my book I am writing and the chapter is entitled “How trauma shows up in the body or does it?”

 “In resonance, all fluid systems are united. I say that no matter where in the galaxy they may be, all fluid systems function as basically one body or organ of intelligence.” — Emilie Conrad

Go to Substack for full post.

Meanwhile, thank you for listening to Fascia and Bones: Unpacking the Mystery and please review the podcast on the platform you listen to.

Somatic Touch © 2023 by Kirstie Segarra is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

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In Season 2, Episode 8, I am interviewing Dr. Helen Frances Paris, an extraordinary performance artist, writer, and professor who brings a deep experience with the body, feminism, as well as queer politics. She began her performance artist career in the 90’s in London. Dr. Helen and I speak about how she incorporates the body in her performance art and her writing. We speak about the hyoid bone as a way of reclaiming authenticity, how women are often not heard/listen too. Dr. Helen supports her students to rediscover, claim, and explore the next chapter in our lives within creativity and much, much, more. She is leading a women’s retreat for in creative writing in April of 2026 in the south of France. Which I plan to attend. You can learn more about it at https://www.creativebody.org/nextchapter. Her website is curiousperformance.com and on Instagram at Helen Frances Paris.

Another wonderful podcast with Dr. Helen at https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/best-book-forward/id1709327980?i=1000740333751.

   Now for the interview with Dr. Helen.

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Welcome back to Fascia and Bones…

I have become her, or becoming her, that late 50’s invisible woman standing amongst the sagebrush of Taos, New Mexico, in the dark with a strand of solar Christmas lights, untangling the knots of the string as I drop the strands over the sagebrush in honor of the winter solstice nights. It is a period of time with longer nights, as we approach the time at that very moment on the winter solstice where the moments of darkness begin to be filled with new light.

This is the time of the ancient goddess, the Caillach Bheur of the Highlands, who shaped the mountains, protected wells and springs, and was a guardian of the deer. She is the daughter of the Winter Sun during these short days. So much lore surrounds her, and it seems she isn’t just from ancient Scotland and Ireland, but also possibly among the ancient Britons before the Celts over 4,000 years ago. The Caillach is woven in the invisible landscape of winter. If you have not been taught her mythology then you might not notice her influence and wrath as she throws rocks at you to wake you up.

I first heard the term “invisible woman” in reading my friend’s novel, The Invisible Women’s Club, by Dr. Helen Paris. I am not a big reader of fiction anymore, and somehow Dr. Helen’s book pulled me in with her sense of the body, humor, and character development. One of the lead characters had a way of knowing plants, their Latin terms, medicinal properties, and a heartfelt vigilante nature to help save the community garden, finding friendship and, dare I say, love. I am looking forward to interviewing Helen next week for the podcast.

My academic semester of teaching craniosacral therapy has just finished, and I will be taking the spring term off from teaching to continue working on my book entitled Somatic Touch:

An Integrative Approach to Healing from Physical and Psychosomatic Trauma. This book is a culmination of my teaching an osteopathic approach to the cranial field and sharing what I practice. I cover concepts from my second doctorate thesis in the art of listening, embodiment as an indigenous way of knowing, as well as specific craniosacral and visceral techniques, as well as osteopathic manual therapies of treatment. More importantly, I am offering a reframe of trauma theory and questioning some of the profound assumptions that are brought forth in narratives in our culture. Suffice it to say, it is a work in progress and I hope to have it completed by the end of 2026 for the publisher.

Another big change on the horizon is that I am in the process of reclaiming my mother’s maiden name as my own. The surname I carry now is shared with my daughter from my previous marriage and one that doesn’t belong to me. I would love to have a surname that is the first in my matriarchal line. With all the ancestry deep dives I have done, the names always belong to the husband. I filed the legal paperwork to change my surnames to MacDonald Scott today! This is a beautiful way to enter the new year and next chapter of my life.

I am wishing you and yours a beautiful Winter Solstice and see you soon on Fascia and Bones: Unpacking the Mystery. If you have been listening and would like to leave a review, that would be most appreciated.

Dr. Kirstie

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In Episode 6 of Season 2, I am interviewing a friend and colleague, Kieran Schumaker (they/them), Board Certified Structural Integrator and instructor of Neurovascular Release work they developed. Kier started practicing in massage therapy in 1998 and trained with Anatomy Trains in 2005. Before transitioning to bodywork, she trained in environmental science at The Evergreen State College. They are skilled in a gentle approach to supporting the body via the nerves as well as osteopathic methods of treatment. Kier is an experienced instructor of structural integration and has a wonderful way of sharing with metaphor and clear descriptions of the anatomy involved with the techniques they are teaching. One of the things I love about Kier is their choices of words. They are careful and articulate in how they describe and share their thoughts.

In this podcast, we discuss several topics in our fields around integrating nerves in our work, how we learned to explore and be curious as we learn and creative as children, neurodivergence, and our love of our field.

Kier’s website is via AgileBody Integrative Learning at https://learn.neurovascular-release.online/ and now for the conversation with Kier. They will be teaching here in Taos, New Mexico in September 18-20 and November 13-16 of 2026.

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Welcome back to Fascia and Bones: Unpacking the Mystery.  Some things I love—fascia and bones with a detective mystery. I am a practicing manual osteopath and structural integrator and love working with the connective tissue of the body and the holistic systems of the body. I am also a long-time educator in the field of bodywork and movement. My hope is to share some insights into the fields I practice.

In Episode 5 of Season 2, I am interviewing a dear friend and colleague, Dr. Maria DeFranco. Maria and I met in 2005 working together in a café in Taos, New Mexico. She was just beginning her practice as a licensed massage therapist. We ended up starting a new spa at the Taos Ski Valley together. Dr. Maria left to Portland to attend chiropractic school. I love seeing how Dr. Maria has developed and grown her OM3 BODY practice that offers excellence in bodywork.  Dr. Maria has creatively combined chiropractic and massage therapy, offering a wide range of holistic boutique treatments in Fullshear, Texas, and Portland, Oregon. Some of her specialties include holistic pelvic care and TMJ care. Which she describes in her podcast with Dr. Julia Ward’s podcast at https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-functional-edge-with-dr-julia-ward/id1794557606?i=1000720918959.

Topics we cover a wide and varied in this episode. We discuss pelvic diaphragm work, self-care for the practitioner, how we approach our work, Bali, and integrating our neurodivergence and how we became aware that we are both neurodivergent. I am very excited to share our love for how we listen and practice embodied presence within our work.

Dr. Maria’s website is www.om3body.com/, and now for the conversation with Dr. Maria.

Somatic Touch © 2023 by Kirstie Segarra is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

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Fascia and Bones: Unpacking the Mystery

Season 2 Episode 4

With Dr. Kirstie Segarra

October 17th, 2025

Welcome back to Fascia and Bones: Unpacking the Mystery.  Some things I love—fascia and bones with a detective mystery. I am a practicing manual osteopath and structural integrator and love working with the connective tissue of the body and the holistic systems of the body. I am also a long-time educator in the field of bodywork and movement. My hope is to share some insights into the fields I practice.

The Fall Equinox happened with a myriad of eclipses and full moon in Pisces, and more. It seemed like a challenging time in Taos as the weather was still presenting warm days as we moved into October. As I rode my bicycle, I watched the brown and tan tarantulas migrating across the high desert. Finding myself upset every time someone sped by in their car, oblivious as they killed another tarantula. Something about walking and cycling keeps the pace slow and more kindred to the connection to the land. This relationship supports a form of embodiment that is relational within presence. Through my years of study and work, I have found myself always returning to the land in which I cultivate and live. It looks over the mountains of Taos, where the land belongs to the Red Willow people of Taos Pueblo. Making offerings is a daily ritual. I have altars throughout my home and practice space as well as bones I have collected throughout my garden landscape. The bones remind me of the finite existence we embody as well as the vitality that runs through all living systems. I have a large quartz crystal buried by my front door that faces east, to anchor in healing of my biological family. It has been there for several years. I placed it during a period of estrangement for two years from my parents and sibling. I will never forget the level of grief I had to endure on my own without support. It is the ritual that held me. To this day, I separate my biological family from the quiescence of my inner life to protect me from the enduring abuse I grew up with. I do not believe there will be a reconciliation now that my mother has developed dementia along with other terminal illnesses, and my father passed away in 2019. So I return to the land as an opportunity to heal in my home here in Taos.

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Welcome back to Fascia and Bones: Unpacking the Mystery.  Some things I love—fascia and bones with a detective mystery. I am a practicing manual osteopath and structural integrator and love working with the connective tissue of the body and the holistic systems of the body. I am also a long-time educator in the field of bodywork and movement. My hope is to share some insights into the fields I practice.

As you may have heard in the previous podcast with Lauren Christman, I have some musings around changing how we talk about anatomy and physiology. Primarily, this is influenced by my study in embryology—the motion of form and function. There is a felt sense and somatic response that happens within me when anatomy is taught from a reductionistic lens—and I am guilty of this too. It is challenging to find new language to describe the relationship between structures and how they were formed. What do I mean by this? For example, my latest obsession is the continued deep dive into neurobiology in the trauma field. If I begin describing the parts of the anatomy, I speak about the vagus nerve, amygdala, nucleus tractus solitarius, periaqueductal gray, and nucleus ambiguous. However, they all grow in relationship and formation to the whole system in the first few weeks of life in utero. When I wear the lens of embryology, the distinction between these processes is more relational. In this podcast, my hope is to unpack the relational lens of anatomy along some recent experiences that invited me to explore this further.

Two recent experiences invited me to think within this lens. The first I experienced was with an anatomy teacher at the Fascia Research Congress, where they were quite combative in how they spoke and challenged the group. I am not sure if this is how they teach in their normal settings, as I haven’t experienced it. I had a visceral response to feeling quite uninvited to engage with the person. I tried to stay present, and I realized after an hour of feeling like the group was being berated, I did speak up in the group to invite a reframe, and the invitation was not received.

The second experience was when I heard another anatomy teacher speaking about the body as if the muscles, insertions, and origins have a certainty to them. It really struck me that we as teachers are not helping move the field forward in a more holistic and embryological model of understanding. I have deeply pondered this, and I am challenging myself as a teacher to find more fluid and holistic models of teaching in my upcoming courses.

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Welcome back to Fascia and Bones: Unpacking the Mystery.  Some things I love—fascia and bones with a detective mystery. I am a practicing manual osteopath and structural integrator and love working with the connective tissue of the body and the holistic systems of the body. I am also a long-time educator in the field of bodywork and movement. My hope is to share some insights into the fields I practice.

In Season 2 Episode 1, I am interviewing Lauren Christman, MFA LMT CCST CBSI ATSI, who is a long-time practitioner and teacher in the field of bodywork in Seattle, Washington. Lauren and I share many parallels with a love of craniosacral, visceral, and structural integration through the lens of osteopathy. I particularly appreciate Lauren’s thoughtfulness in how she languages and speaks about the work we do. You can learn more about Lauren’s courses at craftedtouch.com. In this episode, we share a deep conversation beginning with Lauren’s foyer into touch work in hospice care centered around supporting folks with AIDS. Exploring the idea of “touch without violence”. Exploring teaching anatomy that speaks to relationship from an embryological lens with clarity without being reductive. Exploring the idea of the work we do as a “living body of work”.

Now for the interview with Lauren.

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Welcome back to Fascia and Bones: Unpacking the Mystery.  Some things I love—fascia and bones with a detective mystery. I am practicing manual osteopath and structural integrator and love working with the connective tissue of the body and the holistic systems of the body. I am also a long-time educator in the field of bodywork and movement. My hope is to share some insights in the fields I practice.

This episode is the first for Season 2 of Fascia and Bones: Unpacking the Mystery. My hope is to do a deeper dive in the next few podcasts in how we may work with a Somatic Touch lens in working with clients as well as going down some rabbit holes in craniosacral therapy. In Episode 1 of Season 2, I am getting on my soapbox about how neurodivergent bodies experience trauma release work and why common methodologies do not work for them. We will explore neurogenic tremors a.k.a. shaking and trauma release and weaving back to embryology as a more appropriate model for understanding Somatic Touch and supporting healing.

 As a person who is gifted and definitively has overlaps with Asperger’s now considered autism spectrum disorder (ASD), I have learned through my own experience how different types of somatic release in the trauma field did not seem to be effective with how my sensory experience processes. It is well known that folks that are ASD do not have the same level of pruning neurons in growth—this means the individual is prone to hypersensitivity in processing. Giftedness is often paired with overexcitabilities (OE), which maybe expressed in a variety of ways as sensitivity and responses to internal and external stimuli in 5 domains both psychological and physiological. Another way of saying this is our bodies/brains are different and as such experiencing sensing the world differently.

I am heading to the Fascia Research Congress (FRC) in a week to present my research and learn from other researchers and clinicians. Stephen Porges, MD is a keynote speaker on his Polyvagal theory at the FRC.  He just did a podcast interview on the Thinking Practitioner (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-thinking-practitioner/id1492004207?i=1000718653827). I spent the time to listen to the podcast and one before it to see if they would address the embryological model as well as the neurobiology model I use in my work—they did not. What I continue to question is the use of the phylogenetic explanations by Dr. Porges as his why/how Polyvagal works. He states that the anatomical structures below the diaphragm have a different processing mechanism compared to structures above the diaphragm due to phylogenetics. Whereas phylogenetics is the study of evolutionary relationships among organisms. My reasoning is due to embryological development of the nervous system with the precursor of the diaphragm—transversus septum as well as how the vagus nerve grows. The vagus nerve does not have a front, back, top nor bottom in embryological growth. I have been harping on this for several years in many different papers and writings. I was starting to think maybe I am missing something, why are folks not talking about this more? Thus, I went over to ChatGPT and asked what it thought about what I have been saying.

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In Episode 19, I am concluding Season 1 of Fascia and Bones: Unpacking the Mystery. Season 2 will start back in August of 2025. In this episode I will be sharing a range of information from Dr. Still, the impacts of the Vietnam War, fascia, dementia, cancer and gravity. 

The last few months of my personal life has involved moving my mom to independent care after her health changed dramatically after receiving the flu and covid booster in the end of January. Her system was not able to integrate the vaccines, and she fell sick, and symptoms of dementia arrived with a screeching halt. She was no longer able to navigate simple tasks on her own. An MRI confirmed small vascular disease, which is one of the 5 different types of dementia. This has been a fast-track experience to integrating my own understandings of dementia and navigating some complex systems of “care” for the elderly. Fortunately, I was already aware of resources locally and able to navigate a new place for her to live, in home and medical support with nurses and PT. Then I searched online for tools to simplify daily tasks, such as a memory loss phone, tv clicker, radio, schedule charts and automatic medication dispensers. All of which were to help support her navigating these now confusing daily tasks. Because of how Medicare is structured they do not pay for on-going care and support of elders who have over $2,000 in assets. Thus, all care is out-of-pocket for the provider and/or patient. So, we are preparing my mom’s house to sell to pay for her care. Now if you live outside the United States, you may be shocked by this. Unfortunately, this is how our system is set up because we do not have social medicine. It is a tragedy and as a direct effect on future generations with loss of income, inheritance, financial growth and ultimately the true care of the aging.