Today we’d like to introduce you to Shannon Marsh.
Hi Shannon, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I did not set out to build a wellness practice. I set out to survive my own life, and then I made it beautiful.
I walked through many facets of life which brought their own activation of a nervous system – I served active duty in the United States Air Force and followed my time in service as a risk analyst in high-stakes environments. I am also a woman who has experienced infertility, divorce, all that comes with menopause and raising six children, five of them adopted as teenagers, kids who came to me already carrying their own hard stories. I know what it is to hold everyone and everything together while quietly running on a nervous system that forgot how to rest.
That is where Once Upon a Connection was born. Not from a certificate, though I have earned those too, but from the body. From years of learning, the hard way, that you cannot think your way back to safety. Yes, logic is part of a calm life, but we all have feelings and thoughts, wishes, and dreams, hurt, and pain. You can’t exactly logic your brain and body from reacting to triggers when the triggers push you right back into nervous system activation.
So I built the room I needed. The Sanctuary, my Somatic Wellness studio at The Tower at Savage Mill, is golden light and dark wood and the kind of quiet where a woman’s shoulders drop before she has said a word. I work with women through many modalities to help them build a relationship between their bodies and their nervous systems and find a way back to a connected life that helps them walk in peace and joy.
Each and every client interaction is customized for their needs – we work on somatic mapping – learning to recognize the small signals your body gives you when it feel joy or when it throws up a flag, we work on reestablishing trust in ourselves, we focus on connecting back to ourselves first so we can be more present for those we do so much for. We do this through breath, stillness, Reiki, meditation, movement, embracing our sensual self, and creative practice, the slow and radical act of softening when your whole life has trained you to brace. I do not do toxic positivity. I do not coach. I am not a therapist. I meet women who have made a decision that there may be just a little more to discover about themselves and their world and they are ready to reclaim it.
The art is part of the same work. I am a literary and visual artist and I love design. I create custom fantasy gowns sewn by artisan hands. Beauty, for me, is not decoration. It is another doorway back to yourself.
This is the work of a lifetime, so this fall I am beginning a doctorate in Somatic Psychology to formalize what I have already been living. But the degree is not the point. The point is the woman who walks into The Sanctuary braced against her own life, and walks out remembering she is allowed to come home to herself.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
This one made me laugh – is any entrepreneurial venture ever a smooth road? We know the answer to that is no. And in the work I have pursued is enriched by that very fact – the struggles – all of them provide me with the tools to sit with my clients from a place of empathy and create experiences from the heart, from lived experience. In this line of work, there is so much energy that must go into the actual practice of somatic wellness, that it can feel difficult to find time to run the business behind the scenes – the marketing, social media, trying to describe somatic wellness in a way that resonates and doesn’t have people wondering why they asked 🙂
A first step in somatic healing is creating a safe container – and for my practice that comes in the form of a studio location and the energy that location brings. It also comes through in how we practice once in the studio. Finding my studio location has been a journey – with several starts and stops. But the universe has led me to the magnificent Tower at Savage Mill. I feel the energy it delivers equals safe and secure combined with beautiful and restful. My studio has become a living breathing part of my practice.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
Come back to yourself.
Once Upon a Connection is a somatic wellness studio for women. Whether you need rest, release, reconnection, or all three — this is where that begins.
Through somatic healing, guided meditation, gentle movement, creative expression, and restorative connection work, we support nervous system regulation, trauma processing, and the reclamation of a woman’s relationship with her own body, her sensuality, and her story.
Honoring every dimension of connection — love of self, motherhood, friendship, romantic love, intimacy, and the eternal commitments we make to the people we hold closest.
Every service begins and ends with the same intention: creating a safe, confidential container where you can be witnessed without performing — and reconnect with the woman who has been underneath the noise all along.
Risk taking is a topic that people have widely differing views on – we’d love to hear your thoughts.
I think about risk differently than most people, probably because I have spent over twenty years as a risk consultant. My job has never been to avoid risk. It has been to assess it honestly, decide how much I am willing to take on, and then move with intention. That is a discipline, not a personality trait, and it has shaped every major decision of my life.
And yes, I have taken big ones. I remarried after divorce. I adopted five teenagers who came to me already carrying hard stories. I started Once Upon a Connection with no guarantee the need I imagined was really out there, and I stepped into an entirely new field at nearly fifty. None of those were impulsive. Each one was a decision I weighed carefully, named what I stood to lose, and chose on purpose.
But here is what I have learned, and it is the heart of the somatic work I do now. The goal is never to flood yourself with risk all at once. In somatic healing we call it titration: you take on just enough to stretch, you let your system absorb it, you let it settle, and then you take the next step. That is exactly how I have built my life. I do not leap blindly. I move in measured doses, integrate, steady myself, and go again. Real courage is not throwing yourself off the cliff. It is knowing how much your nervous system can metabolize, and trusting yourself to take the next right step from there.
That is what I teach the women I work with. Growth does not require you to gamble everything. It asks you to take honest, well-measured risks, one titrated step at a time, until one day you look back and realize you have traveled somewhere brave.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.onceuponaconnection.com
- Instagram: once_upon_a_connection
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/onceuponaconnection
