Marika Baxter PT, MSPT OCS
For as long as I can remember I’ve felt aware. Of the unseen and the unspoken. And most of my life I believed that this made me different, weird, and certainly not something to admit to or be proud of.
My healing journey started with the physical body. As a gymnast, I experienced many injuries and had a series of knee surgeries in high school. After going through cycles of rehabilitation and having this profession in my lineage, I went to college to pursue a degree in physical therapy. As I continued to heal myself and work with patients, my curiosity grew as to why there often seemed to be these invisible and less objective threads woven into the experience of pain. Why suffering would persist despite doing the “right” exercises, having the “right” manual work done, and even when the physical body was objectively “healed”.
Through my own immersion into these questions, I began to experience that it was not only the movements or exercises that I would do that provided relief. That there was in fact things in my unconscious – stories, beliefs, conditioning – that were coloring my perception of life. And as these things were brought into my conscious awareness, were seen, heard and loved, my experience of life began to shift. I began to embrace and cultivate this awareness as a gift and not as a defect. As I unraveled these unconscious patterns, I began to take up more of myself, so that not only was my relationship with pain changing, I was feeling more of who I really am. I became fluent with the language of my body. And I could feel that these shifts were answering some of the curiosities about healing that had been there from the beginning.
My work is always evolving and seems to currently sit at the intersection of physical, emotional, energetic, intergenerational, and spiritual worlds of healing and transformation. As a certified Realization Process Teacher, I use somatic meditation practices to guide clients into their bodies, to reclaim their own aliveness, and to unravel constrictions that limit their ability to experience themselves and the world from their wholeness. With my background as a physical therapist and Pilates instructor, I use stillness and movement to help people embody all of themselves and to learn the language of their own being.
I look forward to meeting you. With love,
Marika
The traditional story - I graduated from Springfield College with a Masters of Science in Physical Therapy. My comprehensive manual therapy training was through NAIOMT, and I have studied through Kinetic Control, Graston Technique, Kinetacore for dry needling, and many others. I gained an Orthopaedic Speciality Certification in 2012. My comprehensive mat and apparatus training is through Balanced Body Pilates and my aromatherapy certification through Aromahead Institute. I am a certified Realization Process Teacher through Judith Blackstone and have studied with Wendy DeRosa, Loch Kelly, Thomas Huebl, and Matt Kahn among others.
During my career as a physical therapist I've had the privilege of working in the dance medicine world with dancers from NYCB, SAB, Julliard, Broadway, BalletMet and BMA, OSU Dept of Dance, and many dance schools in NY, OH and CT. Through dance wellness workshops, I've had the joy of educating young dancers on staying in loving relationship with their primary instrument, the body.
"I sought out Marika Baxter for Pilates instruction because she is also trained as a physical therapist. As I’d hoped, her multi-faceted understanding of body mechanics has informed her teaching as she shows me how to exercise within my limitations.
Unexpectedly, she has given me more. She has shared her wisdom about how to discover myself through the medium of my body—which is, after all, my “self.” Marika is calm, kind, and generous with her knowledge. I feel lucky to work with her."
- C.S., Connecticut