What is body-focused, somatic coaching?

Somatic coaching engages your whole intelligence – not just your mind, but the deep wisdom of your body as well. Aligning your body, mind, and emotions holistically creates a powerful path towards clearing what’s keeping you stuck and moving towards your goals.

What does somatic mean?

The word somatic comes from the Greek word ‘soma’, which simply refers to the body. In this work, we utilise body-based practices, as well as working with the mind, in helping you uncover what’s truly blocking you and helping you move towards the life you truly desire to live.

Why try a more body-focused method of coaching?

It could be argued that the Western world has placed a disproportionate emphasis on the mind for a long time and ignored much of the deep wisdom that your body holds. This is beginning to shift, with the growth in popularity of therapies such as Somatic Experiencing, and books such as Waking the Tiger and The Body Keeps the Score, which explore how trauma is actually stored in the body, and that a more body-focused approach to healing can be beneficial.

But somatic embodiment work can also be used in all areas of personal development, not just healing severe trauma. Limiting beliefs, stuck tensions, emotions, and anxieties are also very present in the body, and often, mind-focused techniques and a positive mindset are not enough to shift them. This is where somatic coaching can be an extremely powerful tool.

How does somatic embodiment coaching work?

Somatic coaching shifts attention to the body – helping you develop awareness of physical sensations like tight shoulders, a constricted throat, or butterflies in your stomach. These sensations often carry valuable insights and strong emotions. By gently noticing and allowing them to be present as you breathe into, move and express these sensations in your body, you create space to liberate these stored tensions.

As this process unfolds, physical tension begins to soften. Limiting beliefs, emotional blocks and other tensions begin to lift. In their place, deeper calm and insights often emerge – new insights, knowings and next steps become very clear. Much like the wisdom behind the phrase “trust your gut,” somatic coaching helps you access your inner guidance by calming your nervous system and overthinking and accessing a deeper level of knowing.

A typical session 

Different somatic and embodiment practitioners will format their sessions differently, but below is a general framework of how an online somatic embodiment session might be run, to give you an idea of what to expect.

Generally, a session might be around 1 hour- 1.5 hours long and can be conducted online. It’s a gentle process with no physical touch needed.

A typical session may start with a short, five-minute drop-in meditation, with the main objective being to reduce our focus on our mind, thoughts and the mental body, and shift our awareness more into the body. You may be asked to shift attention to certain areas of the body and simply breathe into their areas. As you ground yourself out of the head and into the body, you may drop a question into the body and see what comes up somatically in response.

You'll then come out of the drop-in and might have a more traditional coaching conversation, around the specific topic to be covered in the session, as well as where you would like to get to. One key difference between somatic embodiment coaching and therapy is that very little time is spent focused on stories from the past. We are much more concerned about what is happening in your life and your body, in the present moment, as well as your goals and desires for the future.

Having clarified your goal for the session, you may then move on to the actual somatic session. Here, you close your eyes and come back into the body. You identify areas in the body where physical sensations, feelings, energies or emotions feel the ‘loudest’. You gently breathe in, focus and accept these areas, and sometimes bring other techniques, as well as movement and sounds, into this focus. Generally, the sensations and emotions move and shift, and you continue the process in different parts of the body throughout the session.

Often you will cycle through layers, such as feeling physical sensations, then often a more intense emotion like anger, annoyance, or even boredom might come up, followed by a much more vulnerable one like sadness or hopelessness, and finally reach a level of calm, clarity and peace once the trapped emotions have been released.

This is a powerful process which is essentially a skill anyone can learn. Being guided in a safe environment, in a coaching session, can be very supportive and will equip you with the skills to self-coach. Once you have discovered and practised this somatic work, you have a profound knowledge of how to deal with uncomfortable emotions and limiting beliefs. They no longer hold you back, as you are aware of a practical process to help work through the discomfort.

Once you have learnt how to regulate your nervous system, you can also use these techniques in a slightly different way to help you gain clarity and push you forward to the goals you want to achieve in life, so you can be truly grounded and impactful in moving towards the life you want.

Techniques used in somatic coaching

• question-based coaching
• awareness of bodily sensation
• movement
• sound
• breath-work
• posture and movement awareness
• guided meditation

Benefits of somatic coaching 

• reduce anxiety and stress
• calm down the overthinking mind
• greater presence in the moment 
• ability to be more present with others
• deeper connection to your body and its sensations
• development of self-love and self-trust by learning to trust your instincts
• empowerment to coach yourself somatically
• release of limiting beliefs holding you back
• enhancement of emotional intelligence
• greater clarity around next steps for your goals

Next steps

If you’d like to move away from purely cognitive coaching and you’re ready to experience the profound, powerful impact of somatic coaching, consider exploring this modality. This transformative style of coaching can help support you in clearing what is keeping you stuck and moving you towards a truly aligned life.