Somatic coaching is a broad term. To me, it’s about bringing awareness to the connection between body and mind in order to spark real, lasting change. What I love about this work is how natural it feels once you get the hang of it.
In this article, we’ll look at what “somatics” actually means, how somatic coaching works, and why the nervous system is at the heart of it. You’ll see examples of different somatic practices, the benefits people often experience, what a session might look like, and how somatic coaching pairs with the Safe and Sound Protocol (SSP). We’ll wrap up with some somatic’s FAQ’s.
What Are Somatics?
Quick history lesson: The word soma comes from the Greek, meaning “body.” Somatic literally means “of the body” or “relating to the body.” Interesting, huh?
In practice, somatics is about becoming more aware of the subtle signals our body is always sending. Most of the time, we run on autopilot; and we need to, otherwise we’d be overwhelmed by every single sensation. But in the process we often tune out some pretty important cues: the ‘inner swirl’ before a tough decision, the tightening shoulders, the sudden energy drop.
When we learn to notice and interpret those signals, they can feel like a kind of shortcut, almost a magic formula, for understanding what’s really going on in our lives and what needs attention. In short, Somatics is about reconnecting to our inner messaging system.
Examples of Somatic Practices
Somatics takes many forms, but the shared thread is body awareness. Here are some common somatic modalities you may already be familiar with:
- Somatic movement (Hanna Somatics) – gentle resets for chronic tension patterns.
- Yoga (especially therapeutic or somatic yoga) – breath and movement that restore balance.
- Feldenkrais Method – subtle movements that rewire old habits.
- Breathwork – regulating the nervous system through conscious breathing.
- Dance and movement therapy – using expression and rhythm to process emotions.
- Body-based psychotherapy – weaving bodily awareness into talking therapy.
- Body-Mind Centering – Bonnie Bainbridge-Cohen – directly explores the connection between body and mind.
Different paths, same destination: helping the body feel safe enough to release old patterns and let new ones take root.
What Is Somatic Coaching?
Coaching is often framed as setting goals, fixing your mindset, or “rewiring” your thinking. And that is a crucial part of creating change. But what so many people bump into are those elusive subconscious blocks. They sound mysterious, even a bit intimidating, like some hidden vault of mental and emotional material we can’t reach.
In reality, those blocks almost always have a physical counterpart.
Here’s why: when you have an emotional reaction below the level of conscious thought, your physiology shifts. Maybe your muscles brace, your stomach churns, or your breath catches. Those changes create felt sensations in the body, signals that your system is carrying something important. Which means your so-called “subconscious blocks” aren’t abstract at all. They’re tangible. They’re right there in your body, waiting to be noticed.
That’s why somatic coaching can feel like the quickest way through your inner barriers. With the right tools, guidance, and space, you get lightbulb moments not just in your head, but as a clear shift you can feel in your body.
Somatic coaching is a structured but flexible process that gets mind and body communicating again. Where traditional coaching might lean heavily on thoughts, goals, and strategies, somatic coaching keeps checking in with what the body is actually saying.
So what does that actually look like in practice? Well you might be talking about a work deadline, and I’ll invite you to notice your breath as you speak. Or you might describe a relationship dynamic, and we’ll pause to explore the feeling that arises in your solar plexus as you think about it.
Why Insight Alone Isn’t Enough
“If I understand my childhood, why am I still triggered by it?”
Cognitive insight is valuable. Naming the root of your struggles, childhood experiences, difficult environments, unresolved losses, can bring clarity.
But the body often doesn’t resolve simply because the mind has. Our cells, tissues and neural pathways organise around lived experiences. Muscles brace, tissues adapt, postures shift, all designed to protect us at the time.
Unless the body is given signals of safety, it continues to recreate those same protective patterns, even decades later. This is why you can “know” the story but still feel the same old reaction.
Somatic Coaching creates the environment for both body and mind to register the shift and move forward.
What Are the Benefits of Somatic Coaching?
Because it works through the nervous system, somatic coaching often creates benefits across many levels of life.
When your nervous system is balanced, everything else, from nutrition to exercise to therapy, works more smoothly.
Who Needs Somatic Coaching?
Honestly? Pretty much everyone nowadays could benefit from somatic coaching. Learning to hear your body’s signals early on can prevent a whole range of problems. In the past, before medicine was there to suppress symptoms, people naturally rested, paused, or changed course when their body told them to.
Animals still do this. In the wild, animals run, shake, rest, and drink water to regulate their systems before stress turns into chronic illness. That’s why they rarely develop the long-term autoimmune and stress-related conditions so common in humans.
Domestic animals…not so much….my dogs would literally eat a whole bar of chocolate given the chance…which is NOT regulation.
And perhaps that is a case in point…as we come further away from our natural origins It is all too easy to lose sight of our own body’s safety signals.
And where we’ve lost touch with that instinct….Somatic coaching helps bring it back.
So who might benefit?
- Anyone dealing with chronic pain or chronic health issues.
- Those struggling to break through mental or emotional patterns from the past or present.
- People navigating big decisions who want more clarity.
- Anyone who feels burnt out, stressed, or invisible in their own life.
- Those carrying fatigue and stress from the chaos of recent years or their past.
- People who can’t easily read their body’s signals and feel caught in fight, flight, or freeze before they know it.
- And people who simply want to grow, transform, and move forward – not because something is “wrong,” but because they know more is possible.
How I Do Somatic Coaching
No two sessions are ever the same, because they’re built around you. I work with a few simple principles to guide the process, but the approach is always flexible. The aim is to meet you where you’re at, and use whatever feels most supportive in the moment.
Here are some of the approaches I will use in our work together:
Listening first: Ultimately my role is to provide space to listen deeply. And to mirror back so that you can hear yourself.
Micro-shifts: small tweaks (a breath, a movement, a dietary change) that ripple out big effects.
Holistic tools: somatic movement, yoga (gentle and strength-based), breathwork, nutrition, lifestyle tweaks, and talk-based reflection.
Bottom-up + top-down: signalling safety to the body while making meaning with the mind, so patterns can actually shift.
Self-trust as the goal: the real measure of progress is your ability to trust and act on your own signals.
What Might a Session Look Like?
Your session will be as unique as you are, but a typical flow might be:
1. Check-in: what’s most current for you today.
2. Grounding practice: a few breaths or gentle movements to settle the nervous system.
3. Exploration: noticing where tension, sensations, or gut feelings arise as you talk about your life.
4. Integration: reflecting on how those sensations connect to current patterns.
5. Practical takeaway: one or two simple tools to weave into daily life.
The focus is always on making change feel manageable, not another overwhelming “program” to stick to.
How Many Sessions Might I Need?
One session can bring change. People often notice a significant shift after around three sessions. For many, a full course may be three to twelve sessions, depending on how deep you want to go. Others continue working with me at a slower rhythm, gradually spacing appointments over months or even years, to anchor the changes into daily life.
The process is not about rushing; it’s about pacing with your nervous system. Each person’s system has its own timing for when it feels safe enough to let go of old patterns and explore new ones.
Safe and Sound Protocol and Somatic Coaching – the perfect partnership
Your nervous system is like the operating system behind everything you do. It decides whether you feel safe enough to rest, connect, and heal — or whether you need to stay braced in survival mode. For many of us, we’re stuck in near constant survival mode. And from this place we often end up sick, drained, and disconnected.
The Safe and Sound Protocol (SSP) works directly with the nervous system through specially filtered music. By signalling safety, it helps your body shift out of constant survival and into a steadier baseline where healing and connection become possible. On its own, SSP can be transformative, but it’s most powerful when the changes it sparks are noticed, supported, and lived out in daily life.
That’s where somatic coaching comes in. Coaching helps you tune into the shifts happening in your body so you can really feel what’s changing. It gives you tools to recognize subtle signs of safety, and to know when to pause, when to lean in, and how to anchor in the moments that matter. In other words, SSP lays the groundwork, and somatic coaching helps you build on it.
For example:
- You might finish a listening session and feel just a little softer in your shoulders or more at ease in your breath. Coaching helps you notice and savor that, so it becomes a resource you can come back to in everyday life.
- Or, SSP might stir up some discomfort such as restlessness, anxiety, or old emotions surfacing. Instead of feeling overwhelmed, coaching gives you ways to pause, ground, and move through it with support.
Together, they create lasting change:
SSP signals of safety and change to your nervous system.
Somatic coaching helps you notice and integrate those signals.
Somatic Coaching vs Somatic Experiencing
“Somatic experiencing” has become a bit of a buzzword in healing spaces, but it isn’t the same as somatic coaching. They’re two distinct approaches, each with its own methods, but both share the same goal: helping you reconnect with your body and its natural wisdom.
Somatic Experiencing (SE), created by Dr. Peter Levine, is a therapeutic approach designed to renegotiate trauma. It’s often used in clinical or therapy settings to process specific traumatic events.
Somatic coaching is trauma informed, but isn’t trauma therapy. While it honours the past, it focuses on the present, on how your body is reacting now, how that shapes your choices, and how you can shift toward where you want to go.
Somatic Coaching FAQ
Let’s dive into some of the most commonly asked questions we receive around somatic coaching.
I struggle to feel my body, does that matter?
Not at all. The body is always responding, whether you notice it or not. A trained somatic coach helps you see what you don’t see and hear what you can’t yet hear. There’s a lot of intuitive listening involved, not in a prying way, but in a way that helps you hear yourself more deeply. Often conditioning or worry about others makes us hide what we really feel; a coach helps you gently uncover and trust your own signals.
My body keeps letting me down, I don’t trust it.
If your body has been unwell or unpredictable, it’s normal to feel betrayed. Somatic work reframes this: your body has been protecting you the only way it knew how. The process rebuilds trust step by step, through small, repeatable experiences of safety and relief. Over time, your body learns it can rely on you, and you learn you can rely on it.
Does somatic coaching make pain worse?
No. What sometimes happens is greater awareness of what’s already there. And awareness is the only way transformation happens. If we keep pushing pain down, the signals have to ramp up, which dysregulates the nervous system even if we’re not consciously feeling it. With support, increased sensation often releases quickly once it’s acknowledged. The body usually presents only what it’s ready to release, which makes somatic work one of the gentlest and safest ways to resolve stored emotion or pain.
Will this feel intrusive or make me relive painful memories?
Not if it’s done well. Somatic coaching is about safety. We don’t dig for what isn’t ready; we follow what the body naturally presents. The focus is not on reliving trauma but on regulating and releasing what shows up in the present moment.
Do I need to be flexible or good at yoga?
Not at all. Somatic coaching often uses tiny, practical shifts, breath, posture, simple movement accessible to anyone.
Is this all a bit woo woo?
Actually, no. Polyvagal theory and neuroscience confirm that nervous system states shape physiology, thoughts, and behaviour. Somatic coaching works with this directly, making it practical and grounded.
How soon will I notice results?
Many people feel calmer or clearer even after the first session. Meaningful shifts often begin around three sessions, with deeper, lasting changes consolidating over time.
Somatic coaching is about reclaiming a conversation most of us forgot how to have, the one between mind and body. For many, that starts with gut feeling: the hunch you dismiss, the tension you ignore, the exhaustion you push through.
By listening instead of overriding, you calm the alarm bells of your nervous system. You rediscover your needs, your instincts, and your natural resilience. And the same sensitivity that once left you depleted becomes the compass that guides you forward.
You don’t need to push harder to heal. You need to listen more deeply. Your body has been telling you the truth all along.