Our Team
Laura Tavernier MD
Laura Tavernier, MD is the founder of Tantien Integrative Medicine in Branford, Connecticut. She is a fellowship-trained integrative medicine specialist who completed the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine Fellowship at the University of Arizona. She has 34 years of clinical experience and is a U.S. Army veteran who served as a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division. Board certification through ABOIM is the gold standard credential in integrative medicine, and Dr. Tavernier sat for this exam in May 14, 2026.
Dr. Tavernier’s earliest exposure to healing began in childhood, inspired by the teachings of her curandera grandmother. After serving six years in the United States Army as a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division, she returned home deeply influenced by her primary care physician—an integrative practitioner who blended conventional and alternative medicine.
Dr. Tavernier went on to complete her medical degree and residency at the University of California, where her mentors and attending physicians strongly supported the incorporation of evidence-based alternative therapies within traditional medical practice. Over the following decades, she witnessed a changing medical landscape that increasingly constrained her ability to provide the kind of care she believed in—whole-person, patient-centered medicine that considers all appropriate, evidence-based approaches to healing.
This belief was profoundly reaffirmed when her spouse endured a life-threatening illness stemming from a misdiagnosis, followed by a remarkable recovery supported through lifestyle changes and alternative therapies. This experience strengthened Dr. Tavernier’s conviction that medicine must treat the person, not just the disease.
Driven by this commitment, Dr. Tavernier pursued formal training in Integrative Medicine through the Andrew Weil Fellowship at the University of Arizona. After completing her training, she founded Tantien Integrative Medicine to practice healthcare as she believes it was always meant to be: patient-centered, evidence-based, whole-person, and inclusive of all effective therapeutic modalities.
The Andrew Weil Fellowship
The Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine Fellowship at the University of Arizona — is one of the most respected and academically rigorous programs of its kind in the world. This is not a certification course or weekend workshop. It is a structured, multi-year fellowship designed for licensed practitioners, grounded in evidence-based medicine, and covering the full spectrum of whole-person care: nutrition, mind-body medicine, botanical therapies, lifestyle medicine, and the integration of conventional and complementary approaches into a single, patient-centered practice.
It is worth noting that Connecticut’s current regulatory definition of integrative medicine does not yet reflect this level of formal academic training or the existence of ABOIM board certification. Dr. Tavernier’s credentials exceed what the state’s definition contemplates — she is not simply a physician who incorporates wellness practices, but a fellowship-trained integrative medicine specialist in the truest clinical sense of the term.
Nicole Tavernier
Your body already knows how to heal. It's waiting for the right conditions.
Nicole Tavernier is a somatic movement educator, Oxygen Advantage®-certified breath work instructor and coach, and Play Zone Pro coach who weaves together nervous-system-led movement, functional breath work, energy-healing modalities, and sound immersions to help people move out of survival states and into greater capacity, resilience, and ease. Her works centers on meeting clients where they are and helping them reconnect with the body’s innate capacity for healing.
This work wasn’t something Nicole set out to find—it became necessary.
Surgeries. Injuries. Misdiagnosis. Each experience made it harder to do what once brought ease and joy.
At a certain point, the search for someone else to fix things gave way to something more honest: listening. Listening to the body, to practitioners who saw through a different lens, to the subtle breadcrumbs that kept appearing and leading forward.
Through that process came a new way of understanding the body—not as separate parts, but as an interconnected system. Fascia weaves everything together. Tension in one area often shows up as pain somewhere else. Patterns of dysfunctional coordination can become embedded in the brain’s motor control centers, and change only happens when the body feels safe enough to let go.
The body also reveals itself as an electrical system. Injury, illness, and scar tissue can disrupt its natural flow, while somatic movement, functional breath work, energetic body balancing, and sound immersion help restore coherence.
One insight reframed everything: the body cannot learn or heal while it remains in a state of shock or fear from past trauma.
Through years of study, practice, and observation, Nicole developed the Functional Living Method™ as a way to help people work directly with the patterns underneath their symptoms.
At the center of her work is the concept of State Flexibility™— the capacity to move fluidly between activation and rest, to meet challenge and recover fully, and to access more of the range the nervous system was designed for instead of defaulting to the same few stress responses. Her sessions are not based on a fixed protocol; they are guided in real time according to what a person’s system needs that day, with the goal of building more range, resilience, and choice in how they respond physically, emotionally, and energetically. She uses functional breath work rooted in Oxygen Advantage® to retrain breathing patterns and improve regulation; somatic movement informed by Feldenkrais and Hanna Somatics to help the body recognize and soften habitual guarding; and energy and sound work to support nervous-system reconditioning, restore flow, and expand capacity. The modalities may vary, but the through-line is always the same: helping the body feel safe enough to do something different.
This is not therapy, and it is not fitness. It is the missing foundation underneath both — a way of learning how to breathe functionally, move functionally, and live from a body that is no longer locked in protection. Nicole offers this work for people who are ready to understand their patterns more deeply, reconnect with their bodies, and build a more flexible, functional way of living.
