Marta - Body wisdom and burnout prevention

Marta has over 15 years of experience facilitating workshops, designing and launching innovative healthcare, behavioral health and women’s health programs and products.

Marta designed and founded the transformative Back to Self Program - the first science-based, Stanford incubated, resilience and burnout prevention workshop for women, based on years of research and personal experience with burnout that left her incapacitated for over a year. (see more in the personal statement). Marta worked with top Fortune 500 companies, such as Google Health, GE Health, Pfizer, BCG, numerous health-tech start-ups, world’s top universities, and governments in > 15 countries. Marta was a part of a US government COVID response team in 2020-2021 and co-founded and led two start-ups, in women’s health and mental health. She holds MBA from Stanford and Behavior Science MPA from Harvard. She’s finalized 5 levels of year body energetics training with Lynda Ceasara, BBTRS Biodynamic Breathwork training, Peter Levine's Polyvagal theory method training, multiple Stanford mindfulness and leadership courses, restorative teacher training and is a certified tantra trainer.

Marta experienced a serious burnout and spent the last 3.5 years researching the most recent science and studying with world class teachers practices for recovery from burnout, nervous system and hormonal dysregulation and trauma stored in the body. She designed “Back to Self” to share with other women to the most effective tools to manage stress and heal from early (or serious) burnout and practices to help them prevent what she went through.

Personal statement
On one Thursday afternoon in late August 2022, in the middle of an intense work project, I got up from my desk in my NYC apartment, sat on my bed, and started crying. I didn’t fully understand what was happening. I didn’t really have a reason to cry. Yet, I couldn’t stop crying for the following 8 hours. Confused, scared and quite worried, all I was thinking about were the slides I needed to finish and the client calls I should be taking. Still, I could not force my body to move. Even thought I had no idea what was happening at that time, I knew that my body, finally, said “No”. For the 9 weeks beforehand, I’ve been working 18-hour days, with skipped lunch breaks, high stress, little to no control over my schedule, and switching between work from home with no human contact and early morning flights to Boston and back. But that was only the past 9 weeks. If I evaluated time before that, I would have seen over two years of 80-hour work weeks in a constant emergency mode - many as a part of the US COVID response team - constant crisis, no social support due to COVID lockdowns and inability to fly back home to Europe due to restrictions. And if I was truly honest with myself, I would have remembered years of running start-ups, working with high-powered executives from top Fortune 500 companies on constant emergencies, and traveling across time zones, 15 countries and 4 continents to support the next social impact or government project. Now, I know that my tendency for multitasking, trying to be a “hero”, and prioritizing other’s needs has started in early childhood. I didn’t have such deep understanding in the summer of ‘22.

“I was fine”. Running on fumes, “saving the world” and being there for everyone else.

“I was fine”. Until I wasn’t. Until my body said “Enough”.

Burnout reached alarmingly high levels since 2020. Due to no official medical coding, it’s often undiagnosed or at best, diagnosed as anxiety, PTSD, or chronic fatigue, among others. It disproportionally affects women and minorities. Gabor Mate, MD, leading trauma doctor, states that over-giving, “multitasking hyper-responsibility”, and “an autonomic, compulsive concern for the emotional needs of others, while ignoring one’s own” are “prominent among people with all manner of chronic illnesses, from cancer to autoimmune disease, and fibromyalgia” (See the book The Myth of Normal for more). Most chronic conditions also disproportionally affect women (e.g. Women constitute nearly 80% of the population affected by autoimmune disease, according to NCBI. Similar statistics exist for other conditions).

My burnout was serious. That random August Thursday started a year and a half of recovery – with symptoms of PTSD and chronic fatigue that was so severe I would collapse for a days after even the gentlest activities such as yin yoga or cooking breakfast. It was scary, lonely and incredibly hard.

With little energy that I had, I spent this 1.5 year in desperate search for help and solutions. I studied with some of the best teachers around the world to understand what burnout is, how to heal it and prevent it. From Western to Eastern Medicine, Peter Levine’s Polyvagal Theory on trauma healing and Nervous System regulation, Gabor Mate’s Compassionate Inquiry, Ayurvedic principles and practices, mindfulness, EMDR, Biodynamic Breathwork BBTRS, and deep energy work with Dear Tribe lineage, among others, I learned, practiced and embodied some profound techniques and practices that can help with burnout prevention and healing. I will be bringing those to the classroom.

Don’t wait for your Thursday.

Start taking care of your body, mind and nervous system today.