The term somatic essentially means “of the body”.

Somatic therapy practices emphasize internal physical perception and experience of the body. These practices have been incorporated into psychotherapy since the 1970’s and have more recently found their way into coaching.

At the beginning of a coaching session, we take a few moments to settle into the breath and body awareness. This self-grounding offers straightforward way to relax the mind and any stress reactions in the moment creating a calm and open state of awareness and self-trust. From here, we are more able to make conscious contact with our deeper values and our inner strengths and resources.

Most of us are probably aware of this simple benefit of self-grounding, but it can be hard to remember that it’s always available to us. And it is not always easy to access this self-present state when we’re being confronted with challenging situations.

Why is that? Well, the experience of our presence always impacts us more directly than our thoughts about a situation. In other words, our conceptual knowing that is based in ideas can only take us so far in understanding ourselves.

From this felt experience of presence, new mind space with more clarity arises and your most effective next action steps become more apparent, whether you need to navigate a difficult board meeting or improve communications with your CFO or with a friend or your teenage son.

I incorporate a somatic approach into my coaching practice, when appropriate, because I believe that settling into body awareness is the most direct and impactful way to make contact and to leverage our inner resources and strengths.

Our self-empathy is also enhanced through this conscious interaction with our deeper awareness, as well as our sense of connectedness to others. It is a gentle and surprisingly simple way to make contact with our innate sense of personal value that underlies our repetitive thinking patterns that can often be negative. Our habitual thinking patterns tend to limit our ability to see a larger view.

As Albert Einstein observed: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them….”

Zen Body

The seeds that grew into my approach to somatic coaching were planted when I began a Soto Zen meditation and a Zen community practice in 2003.

The first time I entered the Soto Zen temple, I bowed to my cushion and took my seat facing the wall as we were taught to do. After half an hour of sitting in silence, I had a stunning epiphany. It went something like this: Oh wow, I have a body! I suddenly saw that I had been living mostly in my head for my whole life and that there was more to me, and my life, than my repetitive thinking patterns implied.

I was drawn to intensive meditation and self-awareness practice because nothing else had helped to shift the habitual and limited ways I was perceiving the world and myself in it. I was surprised at first to find that it was actually my presence in my own body that needed some attention.

This was the beginning of a path which led me to much new inner understanding and new questions to ask and experience. With the kind and patient support of the Zen community, I slowly began to make contact with the full person I longed to be.