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

“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.

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

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.

Choice follows awareness. The more aware we are, the more choice we have.

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

In aikido we call this zanshin, which roughly translates “what is happening between the techniques.”

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

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

The consequences of relying on hope without new practices lead to a downward spiral of frustration, resignation, and hopelessness.