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

Stepping into our body can quickly reveal a deeply ingrained fear of uncertainty, the resistance to letting go to something larger than our self.

In contemporary speak the soma is often referred to as the living body in its wholeness; somatics, then, is the art and science of the soma.

the sum total of our history lives in our body. This certainly is not a new idea in psychology or philosophy, but somatics reveals that this history literally resides in our tissues. It’s more than a philosophical concept; we can experience our history as it lives in our muscular, organ, and nervous systems, and how it becomes explicit in the world

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

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.

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

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