Somatic Coaching

Somatic coaching might be a fit for you if you’re looking for a collaborative container for body- and other somatically-oriented approaches to working with your emotions, thoughts, sensations (including pain), transitions, transformations, or relationships to self, others, movements, and land.

This work is particularly well-suited to folks who are:

• exploring and strengthening boundaries

• building trust and discernment of their own needs, capacities, gifts, and limits

• managing the effects of burnout related to activism, community organizing, or service

• looking to explore and transform relationships to pain or chronic discomfort (physical, emotional, relational)

• interested in working with emotional, psychic, or spiritual material in ways that get past/around/under/beyond/through words

• drawn to work with intergenerational/ancestral material through their bodies

• building capacity for and/or tapping into the magic of chosen silence or stillness

• exhausted, repelled, or unsatisfied by mind-only talk-based approaches to exploring challenges and strengths

• working with excavating & transforming patterns shaped by lifetime & intergenerational trauma and survival

Somatic coaching may not be a fit for you if you’re looking for psychotherapy or a directive modality (i.e., me telling you what to do or suggesting that there’s a “right answer”).

My offering of somatic coaching is rooted in several key principles, which I seek to integrate into every aspect of the process:

-Invitation: I don’t tell you how to be, feel, or move; instead, you’re invited to express from the inside and consider whether and how you’d like to try something on.

-Noncoercion: There isn’t a right or wrong way to practice or have a body. There are abundant (often unseen or hidden) options, and you get to decide what is interesting or useful to you, without added pressure.

-Choice: This is the name of the game. Your agency drives our path, and anything offered welcomes a genuine consideration of whether you want to move closer or away toward something—whether a practice, a sensation, or a conversation.

-Relational presence: I’m also a body in the room. Weaving attunement, gentle attention, and my own grounding practices, the work we explore is inherently relational in that we engage together, as two beings. Within that intersection, your interests and needs are always the center.

-Internal Body Awareness: Interoception, or internal body awareness, is one of my key interests and threads in the broad field of somatics. I believe that interoception offers critical information in any effort we make to set boundaries, care for our emotional worlds, give our gifts sustainably, integrate wisdom from ancestors and those around us, and make meaning of our experiences in this complex world. Internal body awareness can be cultivated in innumerable ways based on what’s compelling and accessible to someone (read: breathwork is cool if you’re into it, and there’s so much more out there!).

-Feedback: Feedback is a couple of things. It is, of course, information you might choose to provide to me about your experience of our working together. Relative to this form, I live a commitment to creating spaciousness for your feedback, and I respect any feedback you to choose to provide as a gift. It’s then my responsibility to respond to that feedback with care, self-reflection, and transparency.

Feedback is also the information your bodymind offers you when you practice, try something new, or ask a question. I believe that this kind of internal feedback is crucial information to help us make choices in alignment with ourselves, our values, and the world we wish to build.

-Body as Microcosm and Macrocosm: I believe in a fractal geometry which holds that, when we work with any part of the system, we are affecting the entire system. Within somatic work, this means that, in one way, we can work with a specific area of the body (like your left foot, or that sensation in your sternum) with confidence that the whole body is being impacted by that exploration or shift. Simultaneously, it reflects an energetic that, when we tend or transform a single embodied relationship or experience, something in the larger web, lineage, community, or collective body is also shifted. The reverse is also meaningful, then: there may be value in looking to the larger collective body to help make meaning of sensation in your body.

-Intuition & discernment: There is space for the subtle, the energetic, and the hard-to-articulate. Whether arising as sensations, memory, gut knowings, striking connections, or something else, I honor the kinds of wisdom that are devalued by rationalist & patriarchal ideas of truth. Most of us have been taught—by overlapping systems of violence—that our wise, creative inner voices are untrustworthy. If we want to unlearn that scorn and weave their offerings into how we move through the world, then we have to practice listening and trusting. I practice and model this listening with you through my own body, and welcome you to explore in ways that work for you.

I’m a tender, creative neuroqueer weirdo with a quick smile, sometimes-unexpected comparisons, and a penchant for lists. I’m a Capricorn-Cancer-Capricorn in a big way, and my neuroqueer social processing means that I often think & speak with my gaze pointing up & away.

Shaped by many years of healing practice and precious feedback from folks in my orbit, I understand myself to be a dynamic listener and intuitive co-weaver who can offer a grounding, resonant presence, effervescent curiosity & delight, incisive ecological analysis, warm silence, multiple perspectives, and gentle space for you to feel into what’s true to you.

As with all of my offerings, somatic coaching enthusiastically affirms queer & trans bodies, bodyminds of all sizes, shapes, and neurobrilliances, and your own agency and wisdom as the drivers of our explorations. It embraces the embodied complexity of culture(s), language, oppression, and privilege as they express through your body—and mine, and what it means when we meet each other.

You can learn more about me here, or feel free to reach out. I’m always happy to chat so that you can get a feel for me, my bodymind, and how I engage.

Somatic coaching is distinct from therapy. While both seek to support folks in building desired capacities and shifting undesired patterns, somatic coaching is distinct from therapy services in a number of ways. To quell the risk of writing about this difference excessively, I’ve highlighted a few key points below. If you have additional questions about this, please feel free to reach out!

A key difference to highlight: therapy is structurally a medical service; somatic coaching is not. Coaching services do not include “assessment, diagnosis, or treament of medical or mental illness.”

What this means functionally: as a service legally intended to diagnose and treat (mental) illness, therapy is beholden to a dynamic infrastructure of medicalized frameworks, including assessments, diagnoses, medical records, surveillance/monitoring by insurance, and regulation by the state. As one important benefit of this particular structure, therapy may be available through insurance benefits.

By contrast, somatic coaching doesn’t require or presume illness, doesn’t include any clinical assessments or diagnosis, can include but does not inherently require specific goals to address named problems, and is not beholden to administrative pressures from medical-legal structures like insurance. Particularly in an era of heightened surveillance—particularly for folks most marginalized, pathologized, and criminalized—engaging in healing practice outside of such structures may be an advantage. A clear disadvantage for many, however, is that it can’t be billed to insurance.

“Somatic coaching” is kind of hot right now as a thing, and it can be hard to know exactly where a given practitioner is coming from in terms of lineage and understanding of our bodies and healing approaches as inherently politicized.

I facilitate somatic exploration and support at the intersection of several types of lineages (decolonial, antiracist, ancestral, as well as academic) which I integrate to shape a framework that is invested in dismantling white supremacy and imperialism as they express through our internalized landscapes and collective bodies. I take the lead from my teachers who center healing justice principles and critique & reject the values and domination of the wellness industrial complex (and its violent, interrelated systems).

For me, the ultimate goal of somatic work is not about “regulation” that serves to make us compliant, small, and able to pretend that things are okay that are not. For me, somatics is about practicing truthtelling: that things are complex & dynamic, that we create safety together, and that our bodies have much to say & teach. We can use somatics to build resources for thriving within our real bodies and contexts in their complexity.

The strategy of working with a singular body, when the collective and hurt are so big, is because each of our bodies is an entire community and, simultaneously, a microcosm of our larger communities. We work here because it’s through each of our bodies that we work, rest, dance, and love together transform the world.