Many people ask me, what is this somatic coaching you practice? Or are intrigued by my tag line of holistic coaching of the body, mind, and spirit and wonder what I mean by coaching of the body.
It turns out that the experiences we humans go through in life are often stored in our body.
Stored in our body. What does that mean exactly?
It’s all about the survival of the being and how we interact and react to the world.
It means that the body retains memory of the experiences it goes through, both positive and negative. Some of these experiences can be traced back to our lineage, as far back as our grandparents’ time and beyond. Other experiences are more recent.
As an example, descendants of those who lived in Netherlands during WW2, who had gone through a horrific wartime experience of famine and stress, now have a propensity to develop obesity due to mechanisms in the body reprogrammed for famine, but now deployed askew as the storing of nutrients during famine conditions was not needed any more in the plentiful, non-war time present.
Many other examples abound.
Emotional experiences can also be retained in the body. Often the consciousness may not be able to articulate what is the cause of what they see or feel. So using talking techniques, in therapy or coaching, may not be the most effective way to get to the root cause of their issue nor provide a solution.
Instead, we can coach the body directly.
There are many ways to do this, and there are many models which we can deploy, ranging from yoga, to Traditional Chinese Medicine meridians, to chakras, to published mappings of emotional conditions to parts of our bodies where ailments are found. And many more.
Choosing the right model, we can create awareness of what is causing some issue that the client cannot articulate through thought alone. Once we uncover the root of the problem, then we can deploy a resolution which is typically also involving or directly addresses the body.
For example, with some clients we can effectively reprogram their nervous system to respond differently to a particular situation or thought. Prior to the work, the client will experience anxiety, quickened heart rate and shallow fast breathing, and heightened tension in the muscles. Through some simple techniques, we can help the client create a new reaction by the nervous system to the same situation, thereby inserting relaxation, lowered heart rate and calm breathing where just earlier the opposite existed.
So sometimes, that ache in your shoulders might be a strained muscle, or it may be completely something else entirely!
Got some kind of ache in your body that won’t go away, no matter what you do, how many PT appointments you have, or what drugs you take?
Put it in the comments and let’s see what we can uncover through somatic coaching!
Leave a Reply