There are practitioners who hold space softly, and there are practitioners who tell you the truth. Sami Salerno does both.
As a somatic practitioner, Contact Improvisation teacher, and breathwork facilitator, Sami works with women and wellness seekers who are ready to stop managing their experience from the outside and start feeling it from the inside.
Sacred. Sensual. Silly.
Sami has always had an easy time connecting to her body. Her emotions were another story.
She noticed early on that it was possible to dissociate inside a grounding practice. You could arrive in the body and still leave the mind, and the feelings, behind. Somatics promised embodiment, but she needed something more specific: a way to let emotions live inside the body, move through it, and become an equal part of her expression.
She has been facilitating movement and mindfulness since 2012. But things started linking up in 2022 when she found her way to dance. First embodiment and ecstatic dance, then Contact Improvisation in 2024. Through those practices and the somatic therapists she met along the way, she found what she had been looking for: a way to yoke the body and the emotions together, creating what she calls an open vessel for association and connection, to herself and to others.
What she offers
Sami's work starts with a simple but radical idea: presence is not something that only happens when you dance, move, or breathe. It's a feeling you can access at any point.
Through her workshops and events, she guides people toward safety within their own skin. Not a safety that requires silencing your thoughts, but one that exists beside them. A place inside you that the racing mind doesn't get to govern.
She also works with nervous system regulation and recalibration, both solo and in community. Because coming back to yourself doesn't always happen alone.
She also helped build the Denver Contact Jam, a recurring gathering created to give people a regular place to co-regulate and connect through touch, movement, and play. Community isn't a side effect of this work for her. It's the point.
When Sami is not facilitating, she tries to live by the same principles she teaches: staying present with what's here, letting the outside world matter without letting it consume her, and finding the pleasure in everything.
Play, in all aspects of life, is non-negotiable for her.
Her work is an extension of who she is. Sacred, sensual, and silly. All three, always.
Sami's workshops and retreats are for anyone who's tired of being a stranger to their own body and is ready to change that, slowly, deliberately, and with real support.