Marika Baxter PT, MSPT OCS
For as long as I can remember I’ve felt aware. Of the unseen and the unspoken. And for most of my life I believed that this made me weird and wrong. Not something to know and grow.
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 could 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 began to learn the language of my body. I could feel that these shifts were answering some of the curiosities about healing that had been there from the beginning. And that my perception of life was being transformed.
My work is always evolving and seems to currently sit at the intersections of physical, emotional, energetic, intergenerational, and spiritual worlds of healing and transformation. As a certified Realization Process Teacher and IFS practitioner in training, I use somatic meditation practices and self inquiry 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 breath 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
"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
My training - the more traditional story
I attended Springfield College graduating in 2003 with my Masters of Science in Physical Therapy. After graduation I fervently studied manual therapy and Pilates. I draw from these 17 years as a PT as I continue to work with the nuances of being human. Body language, posture, how we move and breathe, all hold information in our beautifully circuitous path toward healing and wholeness. My aromatherapy training was through Aromahead Institute. I am certified in the Realization Process through Judith Blackstone and am currently studying Internal Family Systems with Richard Schwartz. I have studied with Wendy DeRosa in energy healing and living as an embodied empath, and am informed by the work of Loch Kelly, Thomas Huebl, and Matt Kahn among others. During my career as a physical therapist I had the privilege of working in the dance medicine world helping dancers to be in loving relationship with their primary instrument, the body.