Marcella Bottero, MA, RCST®, is a body and movement educator. She has been in private practice for over 20 years exploring and incorporating different somatic approaches and how they bring forth one’s greatest potential. Marcella has a diverse pallet of skills including Fitness Trainer, Yoga Teacher, Continuum Teacher authorized by Emilie Conrad, Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapist, and Meditator. Marcella teaches in a supportive, dynamic and effective way cultivating and encouraging each student’s potential to be realized and expressed.
Marcella’s passion is to teach individuals how to listen and learn from their own bio-intelligence. Believing that fitness, health, and movement do not stem from a single technique or approach, Marcella inspires each individual to develop skills of deep listening to their own body wisdom. This listening is essential to how she meets, honors, and supports each person’s uniqueness.
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I am an eternal student and seeker. I grew up in Argentina, lived in Israel for 10 years, and moved to Los Angeles in 1993. I get bored with myself if I don’t have a new goal or a new way of finding truth and movement. My journey has been one of self-discovery through the body as I’ve moved through both traditional and alternative types of training.
When I was young, I was a competitive swimmer. My father was a doctor and I was fascinated by his engagement with the body. After a period in my twenties when I didn’t take good care of myself, partying, eating carelessly, and failing to exercise, I had knee surgery. From there, I had lose the weight I’d gained and find my way back to fitness.
Through training for triathlons, I rediscovered how healing it was to return to a fitness- and health-oriented way of living and wanted to share that sense of wellness with others, so I enrolled in UCLA Extension’s Certificate Program In Fitness Instruction. At the same time, I began working with a trainer to become a competitive bodybuilder, which I did for three years. During this time I also worked for four years conducting rehabilitation therapy in a physical therapy office. After a stint as a staff physical trainer, I began building my private personal training practice in 1998.
In 1999, continuing to explore my own exercise path, I ran the Los Angeles Marathon, and began to realize that as I got older, more exercise wasn’t necessarily better. It was time to explore complementary pursuits.
As an adjunct to the intense meditation practice I’d started in 1995, in 1997 I began to study yoga, ultimately doing intensive teacher training, and I have taught yoga since 2003. I found that bringing yoga to my personal training practice beautifully amplified the work, bringing flexibility, alignment, and balance to core physical and cardiovascular work.
I still felt there was something missing, however, when by chance I discovered Continuum. With Continuum training, for the first time I felt empowered to move instinctively rather than requiring someone else to teach me how to move. Because it was so organic, it served as a liberating force for someone as structured as myself. I have been honored to study with the creator of Continuum, Emilie Conrad, who has qualified me as one of the 70 or so teachers of the practice.
Continuum brought me to craniosacral therapy, which taps into and opens up the same fluid channels in the body as Continuum, but instead with a practitioner working on the body rather than the body finding its own movement. I completed a two-year course of study in biodynamic craniosacral therapy and am currently enjoying a private craniosacral practice.
Through all these experiences, I have come to believe deeply in the biointelligence of whoever’s in front of me—we may not always feel like our bodies know what they need, but if we listen closely enough, they will tell us. Fitness and health do not stem from a single recipe, technique, or approach. My diverse experiences allow me to be more productive, creative, and individualized with my clients, and I love what I do.