Your Body is Medicine

Embodied training for healers

Learn more below

What is Your Body is Medicine?
Your Body is Medicine is a uniquely powerful training program for doctors, nurses and healers to grow capacity for embodied attunement with your patients.

The practices in this training program have been formulated to open tangible knowledge about how the body's innate, nonverbal intelligence communicates, and the foundational role of the communicative body in healing processes.

What is embodiment and the communicative body, and why does it matter in the practice of medicine?

Join Dr. Rana Awdish, pulmonologist and author of two landmark medical memoirs In Shock and After Shock: Learning to Reinhabit My Body After Illness, and Marina ‘Heron’ Tsaplina, founder of Your Body is Medicine,
in conversation. Moderated by Dr. Neda Frayha.

The 60-minute conversation dives into:

  • Why embodiment is largely absent from medical education and the culture of medicine.

  • How to learn to listen to your body.

  • The connection between learning to listen to your body and serving your patients.

  • The importance of embodiment for reclaiming your power and purpose as a doctor, nurse, and healer.

  • A short exercise from Your Body is Medicine that you can do from your own home.

  • The impact of the Your Body is Medicine training program.

  • Why embodiment is the past - and future - of medicine.

Sign-up below to receive the full video conversation on Sunday June 21, 2026

About Marina

Marina 'Heron' Tsaplina is an award-winning interdisciplinary performing artist, writer and scholar in disability studies and medical humanities whose work centers the intelligence of the body within medicine, disability, and environmental healing. She holds a Master's in Bioethics and Medical Humanities and is a certified Somatic Developmental Trauma Therapy Coach. Her embodied training program, Your Body is Medicine, was developed in response to the disembodied crisis in allopathic medicine that impacted her own life with life-long chronic illness.

Her practice, research and pedagogy have developed since 2016 through her time as a Kienle Scholar in the Medical Humanities at the Penn State College of Medicine, as co-founder of the Reimagine Medicine program at Duke University, through a research residency with the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, and through programs that she taught and toured across the country to patient and clinician communities.

From 2024 - 2026, she was an Artist-in-Residence with Dr. Rana Awdish at Henry Ford Health to bring the healing power of embodiment to seasoned clinicians, medical students and healers across the country.
Your Body is Medicine.

  • 'This training is remarkable. It is also ahead of where medical education currently is."

    —Dr. Rana Awdish, Pulmonary Physician at Henry Ford Health and author of two landmark medical memoirs, In Shock and
    After Shock: Learning to Reinhabit My Body After Illness.

  • "This training experience is profound. Marina is a critically important piece of the alchemy, certainly for a first timer like me. Her ability to create a safe, warm, welcoming space that feels juuuuust unfamiliar enough to maintain the power of transformation is a rare gift. I'm so incredibly grateful."

    — Josh Fessel, M.D., Ph.D, former National Institute of Health
    Medical Officer and Director

  • "[Experiencing] the intentionality and power of breath really stays with me from the training."

    — Anonymous physician participant

  • "I was so impressed and appreciative of the pre-workshop prep. It helped me enter into this new experience with a sense of curiosity and safety.

    —Stephanie

  • "What stays with me is the necessity of discomfort; the extent to which I default to a cognitive way of being in the world and an interest in and excitement about reflecting on more embodied practice."

    Stephanie

Interested in joining a
Your Body is Medicine
training cohort?

Book a 45-minute session with me to get a taste of the work, and see if we’re a good fit.

BOOK NOW

FAQs

  • Practitioners in medicine (physicians, nurses, allied health professionals) who yearn to nourish and deepen their practice and understanding of embodied healing.

  • I work 1 on 1 with you individually over Zoom, with the option to join a small-group cohort workshop once a month in order to connect to others in the program, deepen insight and practice.