The Art of Somatic Coaching: Embodying Skillful Action, Wisdom, and Compassion

When we turn our attention to the life of our body we’re cultivating a Somatic Awareness and at the same time we’re strengthening our attention. The attention is like a muscle in that it can be trained. Just like going to a gym and doing repetitions with barbells with a certain muscle group to make it stronger, we can make the attention stronger by

“How do I resist life?” “How do I position against change?” “How do I cling to that which is completed and no longer relevant?” The question “How” orients us to look to the continuous river of events that is our body, not to a logically constructed explanation. When we experience how we hold, we can then begin to deconstruct it.

The term somatics derives from the Greek somatikos, which signifies the living, aware, bodily person. It posits that neither mind nor body is separate from the other; both being part of a living process called the soma.

The contemporary phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty characterized his thinking as a philosophy of the lived body or the body subject. Key to his analysis was the notion of embodiment, which draws a distinction from the objective body, which is regarded solely as a physiological entity, and the phenomenal body, which is not just any body, or simp

When we’re at a distance from our bodies we become confused about how to live our lives. This leads to fear, which produces violence, inequitable rights, and self-isolation. The distance we live from our body is the distance we live from our self, from our emotional reality.

Somatic Coaching is also distinct from mind-body-spirit coaching in that it doesn’t see these three domains as separate but the human form as the unified space in which humans act, perceive, think, feel, sense, express emotions and moods, and live their spiritual longing. In this interpretation the body is the energetic space where we build trust a

who is it they are becoming; and fourth, is there alignment of who they are in present time and what they’re becoming, their vision of their life, the practices in which they’re presently engaged? That is, is the competency, capacity, and commitment present to bring their becoming to fruition? Or, are they simply being driven by a hope, desire,

When our energetic pattern is expressed over time it becomes a character trait, a fundamental aspect of our personality, a visible way of being in the world. As the rhythm of our energy shapes us an identity is formed that opens and closes possibilities.

Over the course of his work Geoffrey began to see that the question wasn’t “why” is something the way it is, but “how” is it the way it is? When we see how something is constructed we can see what it has served, but more importantly we can see how to dismantle it if we so choose. The how perspective gave him much more power in observing himself and

From a somatic point of view living any distance from our bodies is dodgy and the consequences harmful, even grave. Now we can scientifically ground, through technological advances in the emerging field of neuroscience, that distancing ourselves from our body places not only our physical health at risk, but our emotional health as well. Furthermore