Somatic Coaching
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Somatic Coaching draws from the NeuroAffective Relational Model for working with complex trauma (NARM) to help you embody your authenticity, increase connection, support self-regulation, and access greater agency and freedom from limiting patterns.
The term “somatic” refers to emphasizing your felt experience -- slowing down, listening deeply and trusting the innate intelligence of your wholeness. Somatic coaching helps you resolve inner dilemmas and integrate your intellectual knowing with your felt experience in your body.
We focus in the present moment. There is little need to rehash the past, as whatever remains unresolved will show itself in present patterns. We begin by clarifying your intention, what you most want for yourself, which organizes and orients our work together. Sessions are an opportunity to cultivate greater presence, connection and authenticity. The process, known as “facilitated self-inquiry”, invites unconscious patterns into awareness, opening opportunities for greater agency and meaningful change.
You are supported to integrate your body experience, emotions, and ideas about who you are. The model of somatic inquiry is both a trauma recovery model, and supports development, learning, healing, and disidentification, which is correlated with what spiritual paths refer to as self-realization. Through the process, you discover for yourself when you're connected with child consciousness (unintegrated states from the past) and when you're connected more directly with your essential self in a given moment.
The term “somatic” refers to emphasizing your felt experience -- slowing down, listening deeply and trusting the innate intelligence of your wholeness. Somatic coaching helps you resolve inner dilemmas and integrate your intellectual knowing with your felt experience in your body.
We focus in the present moment. There is little need to rehash the past, as whatever remains unresolved will show itself in present patterns. We begin by clarifying your intention, what you most want for yourself, which organizes and orients our work together. Sessions are an opportunity to cultivate greater presence, connection and authenticity. The process, known as “facilitated self-inquiry”, invites unconscious patterns into awareness, opening opportunities for greater agency and meaningful change.
You are supported to integrate your body experience, emotions, and ideas about who you are. The model of somatic inquiry is both a trauma recovery model, and supports development, learning, healing, and disidentification, which is correlated with what spiritual paths refer to as self-realization. Through the process, you discover for yourself when you're connected with child consciousness (unintegrated states from the past) and when you're connected more directly with your essential self in a given moment.
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A Quality of HeartfulnessHeartfulness is both an intention for compassion and a natural outcome of residing in a compassionate embodied state in the disidentification process. As you dive into what you want and what is getting in the way of what you want with curiosity, holding both sides of a dilemma, you gradually identify less with the self-shaming and blaming mechanisms that previously led to a shut-down energetic, allowing compassionate connecton to gradually arise and be felt and enjoyed.
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What do you most want for yourself. . . What is calling you deeper into your life?
~ expanding your capacity for connection, joyful relationships, purpose, contribution, inner freedom, sourcing inner safety, empowerment, ancestral connection, or something else ~
Your wants, needs, motivations and callings express your sacred life force. Responding to the life flowing through you re-connects you with your creativity and empowers you to bring yourself and your gifts fully into your relationships and world.
~ expanding your capacity for connection, joyful relationships, purpose, contribution, inner freedom, sourcing inner safety, empowerment, ancestral connection, or something else ~
Your wants, needs, motivations and callings express your sacred life force. Responding to the life flowing through you re-connects you with your creativity and empowers you to bring yourself and your gifts fully into your relationships and world.
The Neuro Affective Relational Model for working with complex trauma is an elegant model: a specialized psychobiological approach to working with developmental trauma which integrates top-down and bottom-up inquiry to connect with and unwind patterns that have developed as survival strategies. Survival strategies are helpful mechanisms of protection and organization when they first emerge, often in childhood, and later show up as symptoms / diminished experience of aliveness, connection, and freedom. Dr. Laurence Heller is the founder of the NeuroAffective Relational Model© (NARM). He holds a Ph.D in psychology and was in private practice for over 30 years.
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"The metaprocess for the NARM model is the mindful awareness of self in the present moment. The client is invited into a fundamental process of inquiry: 'What are the patterns that are preventing me from being present to myself and others at this moment and in my life?'"
-- NARM Training Institute Website |
Following are a few aspects of how NARM is structured:
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Four Pillars
Pillar 1 - Intention Pillar 1 is about connecting with our own (or the client's) motivation, with questions like: What do I want for myself? What state or inner experience do I want to create? What is my intention? Pillar 2 - Asking Exploratory Questions Pillar 2 deepens inquiry, or drilling down into experience, thinking, source, as it arises or is experienced in the present moment with curiousity, kindness, and presence vs. assessment, as so often there are assumptions we are making or important embodied information we are absent to. Pillar 3 - Reinforcing Agency Pillar 3 is about cultivating adult consciousness and conscious choice, including discovering what is within our control now, the emotional completion process, and sorting out past from the present and potential future. A symptom of developmental trauma is self-shaming which can occur at the level of thinking and/or physiologically. Reinforcing agency supports integration and connecting with a conscious, felt sense of choice in relation to our experience. Pillar 4 - Reflecting Positive Shifts Pillar 4 encourages us to notice when our nervous system and body settles, and our state becomes more relaxed, flowing, open, and safe, so we can relax into enjoying that integrative state. Moments of integration allow our physical and emotional bodies to 'catch up' with our thinking. |
Five Organizing Developmental Themes*
There are five developmental life themes and associated core resources that are essential to our capacity for self-regulation and affect our ability to be present to self and others in the here-and-now:
To the degree that these five basic needs are met, we experience regulation and connection. We feel safe and trusting of our environment, fluid and connected to ourselves and others. We experience a sense of regulation and expansion. To the degree that these basic needs are not met, we develop survival styles to try to manage the disconnection and dysregulation. * Sourced from the NARM Training website |
