What is somatic coaching?
The word somatic is from the Greek soma, which is the spirit residing in the body. Somatics formed in the 1970s as a paradigm shift away from seeing the body as a machine for the mind to control and instead perceived the body as intelligent within itself.
Working somatically is a magical process. It’s about trust. Trusting enough to really listen and pay attention.
During our lives, we build systems of unconscious patterning and wiring. Our nervous system gets used to certain environments and expects them, replicating the patterns from our childhood without us choosing to do so. Our beliefs and habits turn into postures and chronic holding patterns within our bodies - tension, imbalances, anxiety and depression, disease.
Working somatically allows us to explore and understand these patterns and to soften them, allowing for drastic transformation to happen. We work softly, at the pace of your biology, to meet your body where it’s at with compassion. This lets the light in and then change unfolds. I am in awe of this process, which understands the body is a magnificent healing system.
Somatic coaching is a gentle and empowering process which supports you to return to your own blueprint. It supports you to find health and freedom in your body, beliefs, mindset, habits and relationships.
How it works
In The Positive Futures for Health podcast with Althea Finch, I talk about my journey of coming to coach body wisdom, how our inner world transformation relates to the larger world, nature connection and being our own teachers and guides. I also share a grounding practice of how to connect to your own body wisdom. You can watch it or listen to the episode here.
Why it works
We have layers of consciousness.
From the surface and every day to the depths of the primeval. We are extraordinarily complex and startling individual.
Yet beneath this diversity, there is a unifying pulse of life. How do we navigate through this contradiction? On the surface, a life of separation and beneath, utter unity.
The middle is a grey area of thousands of years of paths that have been trodden, cultures emerged and shaped, cities built.
We hold in our blood and bones our entire ancestry and evolutionary history.
We know how to bloom like flowers, fly as winged creatures, flow as fish, hunt as furred beasts, hide in shells. We know how to swim, how to make fire, how to make medicine and to sing.
We know how to be witches, magicians and kings.
Yet when we come into this world, we are told a different story. We are told we don't know. We are taught how to live from an industrialist perspective of creating a workforce for the economy. Our inner voice is firmly shut down. There is little time to indulge in fantasies.
We all have the ability to dream. Without any effort, we can conceive of new realities and forms. What if we were to trust our creative abilities?
Within us, we hold many parts that are defence mechanisms of our earlier experiences, telling us we can't. Carl Jung called these complexes, and sometimes they can feel like inner demons. Rather than exiling them and leaving them behind, these shadows are longing to be integrated and brought into wholeness.
We can work to meet our parts and tend to them so that they can transform into wisdom and work for us, rather than being something we struggle against.
Beneath our layers, there is a freeing current.
Whatever name you call it, it works its way through our dreams, our bodies, through our relationships. Our hearts are always drumming for us.
This inner Self is longing to be trusted and acted upon. It will tease through the blockages that say I can't and thinks that to stay small is to stay safe.
Your inner wisdom sings with the river and the sun and says this world is made for you, you can.
Self-belief is knowing that you are the changing tides and that if it doesn't come from inside you then it will soon be washed away. It takes courage to turn away from that which you have known and turn towards the invisible currents of liberation within you. It takes practice to open up to listen and strength to act upon your intuition.
The world that forms from this place of integrity is like a beacon that guides humanity.
I hold space for your inner wisdom to emerge through the layers of the everyday.
There are many ways to do this - yoga, energy work, shamanism, meditation, body work. It depends more on the way it is done rather than the method.
In our sessions, we work to build your skills to listen and navigate your inner world so that you can tend to your parts, integrating your wisdom and building trust in your self.
From this space, you can expect to feel a sense of inner peace and tranquility, a knowing. You are in your power, a power that is far from dominating but is natural and joyous. You are connected and feel part of nature and the pulse of life. This is where we heal and transform.
