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

Most of us live out lives that we’ve unconsciously inherited, and we’re mimicking patterns of living that have been passed on to us by family, school, religion, government, economic institutions, and the media. We have lost touch with the rich, subjective life of being in the human body, upon which our entire experience is based. The body, the soma

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

It’s evolutionary in that it asks us to confront our own compulsion for separateness and how separation breeds aggression and violence against our self, others, and the environment. It’s evolutionary because it’s the next step for human beings to embody the principles of harmony that are explicit in nature, and in the cosmos.

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

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

Somatic practices allow insights to become muscular commitments to action. A practice is a conscious choice we make so our behavior and actions becomes part of who we are. Underlying the practice is a narrative we have about why we’re committing to this practice. In other words if someone asked us why we’re committed to a certain practice we would

It’s also important to point out that the sports coach’s instructions are traditionally specific and technical, and stay exclusively within a narrow band of their sport or art. That is, the coach rarely, if ever, attends to mood, emotion, the way of being of the performer, and if they do it’s by chance, rather than by design, and in a broad, superf

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.

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.