Mary Catherine

Mary Catherine (MC) graduated from the Academy of Massage Therapy and Bodyworks and is very happy to be on the Optimal Massage & Movement’s team of professional massage therapists.

MC’s Massage Therapy sessions are individually designed to reflect and respond to each client’s unique goals, form and history, believing our body is our biography and like all great personal stories, can evolve and transform when witnessed and met with respect and care.

Before moving back to PA in 2020, MC worked as a trauma counselor, crisis interventionist and educator at a rape crisis center in the Bay Area and with forensic nurse examiners in NYC working carefully and compassionately with survivors of various ages, ethnicities and genders. She lived in New York City for almost 20 years working in medical education, simulation and the performing arts.

Her interest in the body began many years ago by way of sensation based storytelling that led her to train in Italy in a professional development program that integrated gestalt, bioenergetics, movement analysis, personal awareness and physical theatre. MC has worked with a cohort of international artist/educators based in the US, Italy and the Republic of Georgia in movement analysis and the poetry of the body.

It was her injury as a physical theatre artist in 2012 that initially opened her eyes to other entry points of accessing the body’s innate intelligence and healing. Through her artistic and somatic practices, she experienced the body’s capacity not only to tell our story by the way we move but also to assist in healing physical and emotional injuries. This inner journey led her to receive therapeutic support and then train in and work professionally with the somatic practices (Somatic Experiencing, NeuroAffective Touch, Polarity Therapy and Massage) that she finds deeply relational and restorative.

• Mary’s massage “Pressure Intensity” is between 1-7
• Book Mary for The Optimal Massage, Reiki