What is Somatic Coaching?
Listen to your body!
What??
Perhaps you find it hard to be open to new body experiences—stretch, exercise, massage, acupuncture, yoga or sexual experiences. Or you cannot feel any difference in your body after you have lost or gained ten pounds. Or you prefer to ignore a burning sensation in your belly, or a consistent cramp in your neck or some other physical irritation.
Carrie Sackett, founder of ZPD
My name is Carrie Sackett and I help people connect with and include their bodily ‘felt sense’ into our coaching work together, leading to significant breakthroughs. Welcome to my blog!
After over two thousand years of separating out our minds from our bodies (in Western culture and philosophy), we are now being encouraged to stitch ourselves back together into a whole.
If you are reading this post, you have probably seen or heard the word ‘somatic’ recently.
Technically somatic means ‘of the body’. However, in the wellness community it is coming to convey ‘embodiment’. That is, actively living in mind/body unity. The idea being that our pathway to wellness may not lie through changing our thoughts, but rather through a more integrated way of being.
Thankfully, there is more recognition than ever—including from neurobiology and trauma professionals—that our body/mind/spirituality/emotionality is inherently connected, inherently a totality.
I help people explore and create with the emotionality involved in “reconnecting” with the body.
Put another way, in working with me, we together help you discover and embody your totality!
Sounds strange, right? It feels weird to even write such a phrase. And that’s probably a good thing. In these times of uncertainty, best to get a little weird. It’s turning out that being “normally” divided of mind and body has contributed mightily to generating today’s very high rates of stress, loneliness and anxiety.
No wonder we are stuck—emotionally, spiritually, physically and cognitively!
If we are going to create new, integrated ways of being, we are going to have to play around and get out of our comfort zone.
Here are some of the ways that my social therapeutic somatic coaching shows up in working with clients.
One of my clients has chronic physical issues. Recently she shared with me how angry she was at her body for betraying her. When I asked her if she was feeling something in her body as we spoke, she shared that she was feeling a tingling in her left foot. I invited her to give what the tingling felt like in that moment. What emerged from our exploration was my client’s deep desire for her and her body to be on the same side, rather than fighting with each other. It was an intensely intimate, impactful and honest moment that we created together.
That ‘it’ (the bodily feeling) could be acknowledged and related to as something that could speak and/or feel attended to, created the possibility of transforming my client’s relationship to it. It created space for her to see that her physical pain did not define all of who she was.
In one of my groups recently a client shared that they’re a really ‘chill’ person. The group became curious on what they meant by ‘chill’ and pointed out that they’re also someone whose hair is falling out due to stress.
Perhaps this young person’s image of themself was different from how they are actually living their life?
As the group made note of and embraced this contradiction, it emerged that the client was always saying yes to family needs. The client wished that as a child someone had taught them how to say ‘no’ to taking on so much caring for others at the cost of negating and ignoring their needs.
Immediately the group offered to join the client in deciding when to saying ‘no’. And, as part of discovering how they might do that together, suggested the client bring into group not only the content of what help their family was wanting her help with, but also, how their body was responding to each different request. That is, the group was encouraging this young person to notice and socialize what they were experiencing in their body.
Social therapeutic somatic coaching focuses on the power of creating in the moment with others, building with what you have, and playing with language to create new meanings together. Exercising those muscles helps people grow and develop.
‘Socializing’ what is going on for us goes beyond ‘releasing’, or letting out, what is inside of us (another western dualism of inside/outside). It is an opening up—with others; a being giving with what is going on with us—to others; a letting ourselves be given to—by others.
By doing with others, we have a shot at closing the emotion/mind/body gap and re-igniting our growth and the planet’s growth.
Audre Lorde’s words ring even more true today than when I first learned them over 30 years ago. “The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.” Neither racism, nor our inherited enlightenment-era conceptual tools can be reformed.
We are living in a moment when a significant number of people across the globe are experimenting to create new tools and seeking out fundamentally new ways of being, talking, feeling and doing. I am proud to be one of those social innovators and invite you to join me in a journey of totality transformation.
