Something i didn’t know i needed

I didn't really know what somatic coaching was when I started it. I'd heard the word somatic thrown around in wellness circles and assumed it was something adjacent to yoga or breathwork useful probably, a bit niche, not obviously for me.

What actually made me book the first session wasn't a recommendation or a podcast or anything particularly considered. It was more that I'd run out of road with a certain kind of work. I'd done therapy, I'd worked with coaches, I'd read enough books to fill a shelf I'm slightly embarrassed about. I understood myself reasonably well, or at least I thought I did. I could trace my patterns back to their origins, explain them clearly, even help other people see similar things in themselves.

And then I'd go and do the same things anyway.

The insight would land and just sit there, not quite reaching anywhere that changed how I actually behaved. Which was frustrating in the specific way that things are frustrating when you can see exactly what's happening and still can't seem to stop it.

I found Alexis. I looked her up, read a bit about somatic work, understood maybe forty percent of it, and booked a session anyway.

The first thing that surprised me was how little talking there was, or at least how differently the talking worked. I'm good at talking about myself. I've had a lot of practice. But somatic work kept pulling me away from the explanation and back to something more immediate, what's actually happening in your body right now, not what does it mean or where does it come from, just what's there.

That sounds simple. It isn't, at least not for someone who's spent years using understanding as the primary tool. My brain wanted to analyse the sensation before I'd even fully felt it. I'd notice something in my chest and immediately be three steps ahead, constructing the narrative, working out what it was telling me. My coach would gently bring me back. Just stay with it for a moment. What's actually there.

What I've slowly been learning is that the body holds things the brain has already filed away. Patterns that feel completely understood at a cognitive level are apparently still very much alive somewhere below the neck, still firing, still shaping what I do in moments when thinking is too slow to intervene. The gap between knowing something and knowing it in your body turns out to be significant, and it closes differently to how I expected not through more understanding but through something slower and more direct.

I'm still early in this work. I don't think I'll ever be done with it, which used to be the kind of thing that would have frustrated me and now feels more like relief. But what's already different is hard to explain cleanly, which is probably appropriate given the whole point is to get out of my head.

The best I can say is that I feel less like I'm managing my inner life and more like I'm actually in it. Which sounds like a small thing and isn't.