In somatic coaching, you arrive at a deeper understanding of your longing, purpose, commitments and care. Conversation and specific body-based practices are designed to help you shift habits of being, to enable you to recognize your own wisdom and understand how to step into your most creative, joyful voice. Full, embodied expression–which can mean writing a book or re-writing a life, leading an initiative or working through a new creative endeavor–requires focus. Somatic coaching helps hone and clarify your unique voice to speak from the heart and soul of what matters to you.

We all have many commitments and many ways we describe ourselves and what we do. We have a lot of competency, but do we integrate that competency with what we most deeply care about, with who we are at the core? As a somatic coach, I provide a safe arena with loving support so you can come to know your fullest imaginative, embodied self, to identify and work through any challenges you face and to engage with yourself anew.

In somatic coaching, the old self or shaping of that self is honored and appreciated, even as you recognize that there might be something more that wants to come into form. Through dialogue, attentiveness, observation, writing and body-based practices, you can begin to release long-held beliefs, habits and ways of holding that, although they have served well throughout your life, may not be serving in the present. At first we work with awareness practices that help you to realize existing patterns and places of contraction, with the underlying belief that once you shine a light on something, your understanding and acceptance can grow, and then you can come into a place of choice.

There's no blame here; we are all shaped by our histories that are both personal and societal. Once you become friends with how you are shaped–how you see the world, how you tell your stories, what relationships you seek, what actions you take and cannot take, what you allow and don't allow yourself–then you can decide if you want to do a little shape-shifting, or not! My teacher, Richard Strozzi-Heckler always says "energy follows attention" and "awareness leads to choice". When you give an aspect of yourself attention that has previously been dormant or numb, you literally wake up with an aliveness that was not accessible before. Once you are in your aliveness, aware of your habits and grooves, you can more readily choose new ways of being.

Within the process of engaging somatically, openings in the soma, or body-self, appear. Sometimes openings happen simply because you have shifted your attention to a specific holding in your body, and the body is ready to release that contraction. Other times in conversation you may suddenly have an "aha" moment when you realize a belief you've held or a story you've lived by no longer works for you. It's amazing to place the body's knowing beside your emotional knowing and let a new vision appear.

Once the body-self has nurtured awareness and has experienced opening, then it's ready to take on new practices. In a sense, you are what you practice–whether you're writing every morning in a journal to support your commitment to writing, rising early to do your sitting practice to help hone your ability to pay attention, or alternately you're grumpily driving off to a job you would have liked to rid yourself of many years ago! These are all practices. We craft practices within the context of our coaching that help move you into the commitments you have for your life at present. Practice helps to shape the new self.