Let me start with what somatic coaching is not: it is not someone telling you what's wrong with you. It is not lying on a table while someone moves energy around. It is not a replacement for therapy and it is not therapy in a different outfit.
Somatic coaching works with the body's own intelligence. Your nervous system stores everything, every pattern, every protection, every response you developed to keep yourself safe. Most of these were brilliant survival strategies. Some of them are still running when they're no longer needed.
The work is not about thinking your way to a new pattern. It's about feeling the old one, understanding where it lives in the body, and allowing it to complete. Because patterns don't release through insight. They release through the body.
This is not alternative. This is not fringe. It is simply work that starts in the body rather than in the head.
What that actually means on an ordinary Tuesday
Somatic simply means of the body. So a somatic session is one that keeps checking in with what the body is doing while you talk, rather than treating the body as a thing you arrived in.
Most of us have the opposite habit. We notice the thought and ignore the shoulder. We say we are fine and the jaw says otherwise. The body has been reporting all along and nobody has been reading the reports.
Here is what it looks like in a week that has nothing dramatic in it. You open an email and your stomach drops before you have finished the first line. You get in the car after work and realise you have been holding your breath since lunchtime. You walk into your mother's kitchen and become 14 again in the time it takes to put the kettle on.
None of that is a thought. It is faster than thought. That is the thing people miss.
Why the thinking route stops short
The usual order is to work out why. Where it came from, who did what, what it means. Understanding is genuinely useful and most people arrive already holding a great deal of it.
And then they say the sentence I hear most often, which is some version of: I know all this, so why am I still doing it.
That is not a failure of effort. It is the wrong tool for the job. Insight is stored in one place and the pattern is running in another, and the two are not well connected.
A pattern is not a belief you hold. It is a sequence your body learned, in a situation where it mattered, and it fires before the thinking part of you has been consulted.
What people try first, and why it does not hold
They try harder. More discipline, more reading, more analysis, an earlier alarm. It works for a fortnight because effort always works for a fortnight.
They try to argue with it. They catch the feeling and explain to themselves, reasonably, that there is no danger here. The feeling nods politely and carries on.
They try to get rid of it. This one is the most tiring, because the pattern was built to protect something, and anything built to protect you will defend itself when attacked.
The thing that was never tried is the simplest one. Letting the thing be felt, in the body, for long enough to finish.
What the work is actually like
It is undramatic. People expect intensity and are often surprised by how quiet it is.
We start with whatever is going on for you. Not a history, not a form, not a timeline. The thing that is live this week.
Then we slow it right down. Where is that in your body. What size is it. Is it moving or still. Does it have a temperature. Those questions sound strange the first time and then they do not, because the body answers them immediately and precisely.
And then we wait with it, rather than at it. Something that has been braced for years tends to need a moment to believe it is allowed to stop.
What tends to shift
Not the memory. The memory stays as it is. What changes is whether it still runs the room.
People tend to notice the small things first. They get to the end of a difficult conversation without the hangover. They sleep through. They catch the old reaction starting and find there is a gap where there used to be none.
That gap is the whole thing. It is not big and it does not announce itself, and everything else follows from it.
Who it suits
People who have already done the understanding and want somewhere for it to land. People who are tired of being articulate about something that has not changed.
It is not an emergency service and it is not a substitute for clinical care. If you are in the middle of something acute, that needs proper support first, and I will say so.
What to notice this week
Pick one ordinary moment. Not the hardest one. Opening the laptop, or the 10 minutes before the school run.
Notice where you feel it. Jaw, chest, stomach, shoulders, throat. Most people have 1 place that is theirs, and they can name it within about 3 seconds of being asked.
Then do nothing about it. Just let it be known that you noticed. That is the beginning of the whole thing, and it costs nothing.
More like this
What spiritual coaching is, and what separates it from life coaching. https://www.annalouwellness.com/love-and-relationships/what-spiritual-coaching-is-and-what-separates-it-from-life-coaching
TRE, Brainspotting and Flash EMDR, what they actually are, in plain language. https://www.annalouwellness.com/love-and-relationships/tre-brainspotting-and-flash-emdr-what-they-actually-are-in-plain-language
Why I trained in TRE, Brainspotting, IFS and breathwork, and what it means for the women I work with. https://www.annalouwellness.com/love-and-relationships/why-i-trained-in-trauma-informed-coaching-and-what-it-means-for-the-women-i-work
If you want to know what that looks like in practice, write to me at anna@annalouoflondon.com or message me on https://wa.me/447738470156. We start with whatever is going on for you.