Somatic Inquiry

What is Somatic Inquiry (SI)?

 

Soma means body. Body-based healing practices provide a sophisticated augmentation to traditional mind or talk-based approaches.

 

Somatic Inquiry, a body-based healing practice, is a specific approach to asking the body questions. Whereas the mind might answer a question with reason and logic, the body answers with physical sensation.

 

Here’s an example:

“What happens when you think of a time where important people let you down?”

Mind answer: “I feel angry, and I begin to ruminate over all the times this has happened to me before.”

Body answer: “My throat is tight, and I feel an aching in my stomach.”

 

What’s the difference?

The difference is that with a mind answer, we eventually reach a ceiling of insight where we can no longer add to the meaning that we’ve already made from an experience. When insight alone is no longer fruitful in changing our emotional or behavioral reactions, then that’s an indicator that our mind answer is in misalignment with our body answer.

 

A body answer reflects the activation of our gas and brake pedals in the autonomic nervous system, which is responsible for our fight, flight, freeze responses. (For more information on how the nervous system gets stuck in fight, flight, freeze, please read our page on Somatic Experiencing).

 

Why does that matter?

By listening to the body, we get deeper answers than what we can get from the mind alone. When people are struggling with self-sabotaging behaviors, Mind-Body Coaching can help them to listen to the deeper issues so that they can respond in an attuned way. This gives us direct access to the core drivers for self-defeating behaviors. With this direct access, we more effectively and economically adopt newer behaviors that support living the life you wish to live.

 

How is this different from traditional life coaching?

Traditional life coaching is designed around setting performance-based goals and implementing behavioral plans to achieve change. While these skills are integrated into Mind-Body Coaching, recipients of this kind of Mind-Body Coaching over traditional life coaching are able to meet their goals with greater ease, due to the blockages within their bodies being cleared.