Somatic Coaching — Kieran Harrop Coaching & Consulting

We are rational beings. Most of us are highly trained and socialized to use our thinking minds to solve problems as they come up in our lives. We are trained in our schools to excel at rational and analytical thinking. In somatic coaching we are not fighting the intellect but opening a space to bring online our intuition, capacity to feel, and our capacity to sense ourselves and the aliveness that courses through all life. This animating energy has been called chi, prana, spirit, or simply life force.

Somatic coaching is all about connecting to and aligning with the wisdom and intelligence of that life force. To see how it connects us with all living (and non-living) beings. Somatic coaching connects us with that which emanates from within and without. Embodiment, being in our bodies, connected to our hearts, souls and inner knowing is a source of wisdom that is much deeper than the workings of our minds.

The Coaching Process

Coaching is the most powerful technology we have for people to expand and grow. The International Coaching Federation (ICF) defines coaching as “as partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential.”

We are who we believe we are. You can’t tell people to change or even tell yourself to change. We get stuck in our thought patterns and stories. A coach will ask questions and reflect back your stories in a loving, non-judgmental way that will allow you to stop and see your stories and what could be beyond. Coaches want to help you see your patterns, not introject their point of view or opinions. You don’t need advice, you just need to see beyond the story you are living by.

The first step is to gain clarity for your goals for coaching. What will be of most value to you and the important people in your life, for each specific coaching session and for all our sessions together? These goals may change over the course of a coaching session. This is a natural part of the process. Who you are in this moment and your associated goals and challenges will change over time.

There is an assumption in our culture that development stops when we become adults. This couldn’t be further from the truth. We have the exciting opportunity to evolve, heal, and grow throughout our lives, as leaders, parents, partners, as human beings. We can evolve in our spiritual, social, physical, psychological, artistic, creative, and linguistic dimensions, to name only a few. Really, the opportunity for inner and outer growth is without limit.

Once we are clear about your goals and what you want to achieve in our session, we look at what is happening right now. What is the reality of this situation? What assumptions, beliefs, thought patterns, and ways of being are stopping you from realizing your goal or creating challenges for you? Often, behind the barrier or block is a trigger, unwanted emotion, a conditioned tendency that developed as a survival or protective mechanism when you were younger, but is no longer serving you and/or blocking you from realizing your aspirations.

In somatic coaching, we lean into that conditioned tendency to notice what it feels like in your soma. What part of your body is activated? Is there a shape or a temperature? Is it moving or still, expanded or dense? So often our habitual reaction to a conditioned tendency is to ‘fix it’ or escape it in any manner of addictions, from working to eating to thinking to entertainment to drugs to sex. In coaching we lean into the conditioned tendency we allow it, give it space, befriend and nurture it. We recognize where it lives in our body and honour it as part of ourselves.

From that place of compassionate acceptance and love, the conditioned tendency transmutes, shifts on its own. This is the alchemy of coaching. We face and welcome all part of ourselves and treasure lies waiting within. Once we befriend our conditioned tendency, allow it to be, space opens for other ways of being. New possibilities arise. This is sacred ground. You are vulnerable and connected to your higher Self. Here is the void of Being. Who are you? What do you want? What wants to happen? Who do you choose to be? This is a sacred space of creation, not from the thinking mind, from conditioned thought patterns, but from the depths of your heart and soul. Often, coach and coachee may sit in silence in this sacred space of connection with the soul, breathing in that space, that void, the pure essence of who we are.