My passion for working with people is meeting them where they are with curiosity & compassion.
As one of my teachers, Gilles Marin says:
"There is no intelligence required for healing. To heal, we don't need to be intelligent, we don't need to be good, and we don't need to deserve it. Healing is pure grace. To heal, we do need honesty. We need to be true to ourselves. We need to be able to admit that we have feelings we wish we didn't have. We need to own these feelings so we can outgrow them, and so we can mature as human beings."
Lets meet you where YOU are.
Samantha Mertler is a Manual Osteopathic Therapist, Registered Massage Therapist, and Chi Nei Tsang practitioner working out of Stony Plain, Alberta.
Her training spans nearly a decade — beginning with a 2200-hour massage therapy program at MH Vicars School in Edmonton (2016), deepening through Chi Nei Tsang study with Peter Melynchuk of Unwind the Belly (2019) and Gilles Marin (2022), and grounded most recently in Manual Osteopathy (2024). Each layer built on the last, shaping a practice that is genuinely difficult to categorize — and that tends to find the people who need exactly that.
Samantha's primary focus is abdominal work and chronic pain. She is particularly drawn to presentations that have resisted explanation — pain that moves, symptoms that don't line up, bodies that have been thoroughly investigated and still don't have a clear answer. Working at the intersection of visceral manipulation, fascial unwinding, and Chi Nei Tsang's understanding of how emotional and physical life are stored together in the belly, she follows what the tissue shows rather than what a protocol prescribes.
She also holds a focused interest in menopause and hypermobility conditions including hEDS and HSD — areas where connective tissue changes shape everything, and where slow attentive work can reach places that more directive approaches cannot.
Outside of sessions, Samantha is a devoted reader of manual therapy research and the kind of person who gets genuinely excited about a new fascia study. She approaches continuing education with the same curiosity she brings to the table — always looking for the next layer of understanding, always a student. When she's not reading or in clinic, she can be found tending to her plants, dancing in the kitchen, and raising her kids.
Samantha practices out of Treestone Massage Therapy and Wellness in Stony Plain, with limited availability in Edmonton at The Garden Acupuncture and Holistic Centre.
