When Somatics Meets Coaching: The Practice of Choosing for Yourself
By Sara Somasca | BASE YOGA
When someone faces a difficult decision, receiving advice can bring relief. But there is another kind of support that can remain useful long after that particular dilemma has passed: learning a process for recognizing their own needs, exploring their preferences, and making choices for themselves.
This is what a somatic approach can bring to coaching.
Somatics brings attention to the body as we experience it from within. Alongside thoughts and words, it invites awareness of sensations, breathing, posture, and movement. Within coaching, these experiences can become additional sources of information as a person explores what matters to them.
Sometimes, the difficulty in making a decision is not a lack of options. It is the difficulty of recognizing our own preferences among the many expectations we have learned to consider.
What would my family think? What should I want at this point in my life? Would choosing differently disappoint someone? Am I allowed to change my mind?
These questions can occupy so much space that another question becomes harder to hear: What do I need, and what matters to me here?
The body–mind connection offers another way into that conversation.
We often describe an experience by saying, “I feel it in my gut.” The brain and digestive system do communicate in both directions. The vagus nerve, which extends from the brainstem into the chest and abdomen, is an important part of this communication, alongside other nervous, hormonal, and immune pathways. Our bodily and emotional experiences are connected, although a particular gut feeling cannot be reduced to the vagus nerve alone. (frontiersin.org)
Researchers use the term interoception to describe how the nervous system senses and processes signals from within the body. This includes signals related to heartbeat, breathing, hunger, and other internal states. Interoception contributes to emotional experience and decision-making, helping explain why a decision can involve more than conscious reasoning. (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
Yet bodily sensations do not arrive with instructions attached. A tight stomach, a change in breathing, or a feeling of relief needs to be understood within the person’s situation. Research by Dunn and colleagues found that greater sensitivity to bodily signals could help or hinder intuitive decisions, depending on whether those signals favored advantageous or disadvantageous choices. Awareness alone did not guarantee a better decision. (research.ed.ac.uk)
The opportunity within somatic coaching is therefore to explore these signals with curiosity, alongside thoughts, values, and practical circumstances.
Consider someone who tends to say yes to requests before checking whether they have the time or energy. They may know intellectually that they are allowed to set boundaries, yet still find themselves agreeing automatically.
A somatic exploration might invite them to slow down and notice what happens as they imagine saying yes. Do they notice tension, a change in posture, or an impulse to respond quickly? What thoughts accompany that response? What happens when they give themselves permission to pause?
No single sensation determines the answer. The exploration creates room to recognize a response that might otherwise pass unnoticed—and to consider whether it fits what the person wants to choose.
The coach’s role is to support that inquiry without assigning meaning to the person’s body or directing them toward a preferred outcome. Questions such as “What do you notice?” and “What does that mean to you?” leave space for the person to discover and describe their own experience.
That distinction matters. Even a well-intentioned suggestion can become another expectation someone feels they should follow. A process that preserves their agency allows them to disagree, remain uncertain, decline an exercise, or discover an option the coach had not imagined.
Through this approach, the person can practice a sequence they may return to beyond the session: pause, notice their experience, explore its possible meaning, consider what matters, and choose a next step. Reflecting afterwards gives them an opportunity to learn and adjust.
This is a practice that develops over time. It does not require a clear bodily “yes” or “no,” and it does not promise certainty in every dilemma. Sometimes listening reveals conflicting needs. Sometimes it reveals the need for more information, support, or time.
Thinking remains part of the process. Somatics broadens the conversation by including how a person experiences a situation physically and emotionally, alongside how they understand it intellectually.
Offering options can be helpful. What gives the work lasting value is helping the person develop their own way of evaluating those options.
The next dilemma may be different, but the person has a process to return to: a way of listening, reflecting, and responding with greater awareness of their own needs and values.
At the meeting point between somatics and coaching is this possibility: supporting people with tools they can continue to use as they practice choosing for themselves.
Sara Somasca | BASE YOGA