Somatic Coaching

For heart-centered individuals who are ready to re-connect with their body and intuition, so they can experience a sense of belonging and ease in life.

Estrangement from our bodies can show up in various ways throughout our day to day life.

  • Preference to tend to others, but struggle to ask for and trust other providers for mutual care

  • Having little capacity to move through difficult experiences and sensations within the body, causing avoidance of confrontation and stagnancy in developing deeper connection

  • Difficulty identifying emotions, needs, preferences, and boundaries that are essential to communicate in relationships

I have the feeling that since you’re here, you’d like to experience life in a more secure, connected, and heart centered way. I sense that you might want to reconnect with your emotions, including joy, so that you can engage with loved ones and community in a way that feels aligned with your values.

I’m also going to guess that you’d like to get a handle and understanding around your cyclical patterns that prevent you from moving in the direction you desire.

Disconnection from the body is often overlooked in health care spaces.

For most people, much of the trauma resolution process is focused on recovering mental health. Attention is rarely spent on our physical body, unless pain is present.

Additionally, if someone has experienced physical injury, the treatment usually ends after returning the body to what is considered “functional form”, but our health care system is seldom concerned with mending the relationship to our bodies.

Rachel, wearing a blue denim shirt, looks directly into the camera. They are light skinned, with dark brown hair and green eyes. They are smiling and have their hand on their heart.

This is where Somatic Coaching comes in.

In our work together we can fill in the gaps from health care, develop a deeper connection to body and build a strong foundation that allows you to move through the world in a more centered and connected way.

This is the care I take.

In addition to receiving traditional care, I work with somatic practitioners who witness my behaviors, reflect my experience and provide compassionate practices centered in choice.

“Rachel is an expert listener, space holder, and guide into the wonderful world of somatics. Her patience, guidance and support is second to none.”

-Drew D.

Payment Options

  • Standard Rate

    $150 a session

    What you'll receive:

    60 minute sessions, shared notes, & text support

  • Supporting Rate

    $180 a session

    What you'll receive:

    60 minute sessions, shared notes, & text support

  • Community Rate

    $120 a session

    What you'll receive:

    60 minute sessions, shared notes, & text support

    *additional sliding scale available upon request for LGBTQ+ community members

Benefits of a Somatic Practice

Greater Capacity

This practice can build your capacity for the inevitable challenges life brings so that you can engage in your present moment with awareness.

Growth in capacity can improve your sense of self agency and feeling security in body.

You’ll also be able to establish boundaries that hold this expansion in ways that honor your integrity.

Deeper Connection

With focus on your sensations and experience, you can develop a deeper relationship with your emotions, intuition and self-healing abilities.

This connection allows you to be able to recognize subtle signs of activation so that you might recognize your choice before response.

With re-connection to yourself, you’ll be able to identify and articulate your desires, and needs. You’ll know what you need to be care for, and you’ll know what you want in this life.

Relieving

Working in this way has been shown to help with the integration of traumatic experiences and relief of resulting expressions such as: grief, pain, anxiety, IBS, and other psychosomatic symptoms.

With this relief, you’ll be able to recognize and experience more than unpleasant sensations.

You’ll be able to notice and celebrate joy.

Book your initial session

This 60 minute meeting provides the opportunity to discuss the highlights of your interest in somatic coaching and allows us to co-create on a plan of support that meets your personal goals.

Coaching Path Breakdown

  • We begin by building practice foundations with:

    • Resource building and learning sensation language

    • Developing the felt sense surrounding choice

    • Building a connection to center and establishing personal boundaries

  • Once we have a sense of stability, our sessions continue with:

    • Applied practices using all of the insight, tools, and techniques learned in earlier sessions

    • Processing of the more challenging experiences and patterns held in your body

    • Creating dynamic practices that are personalized to your experience and goals

  • Moving on we can integrate everything that came before with:

    • Uncoupling practices

    • Physiological resolution of past events

    • Tracking and mapping unique patterns

This practice begins simply, by slowing down and noticing the messages coming from the body.

In our sessions we used various tools, techniques and resources that include but are not limited to:

  • Somatic exploration is a guided practice of experiential reflection that does not require navigating the narrative of thoughts and memories.

    This work is deeply influenced by the Somatic Experiencing method.

  • Neuromuscular bodywork is an active practice aimed at body awareness and re-patterning limiting shapes and movements.

  • Therapeutic movement is curious action that invites exploration of static posture and expressive motion with:

    • responsive movements that meet you exactly where you’re at with invitation to expand

    • foundational postures that build relationship with stability

    • dynamic exercises to further develop joint range and expansive patterns

  • There is a vast world of research for the nervous system and approaches to health. In our sessions, I center Polyvagal Theory and additional supporting claims aimed at whole system integration

I created this offering to serve those who often say:

  • I don’t feel connected to my feelings or physical sensations

  • I don’t know what I need in order to feel cared for by my loved ones

  • I don’t have the capacity for even the smallest conflict

  • There are some experiences that I just can’t describe with words

  • I want to connect in a deeper way beyond cognitive behavioral processing

  • I don’t recognize my body after my injury/surgery

FAQs

  • While somatic coaching is a great compliment to traditional talk therapy, it does not replace clinical attention. Licensed psychotherapists treat individuals based on their assessment of a person’s history, behavior, and symptoms.

    Additionally, clinical treatment is highly valuable for those experiencing mental illness and seeking diagnosis, and/or medicinal therapies.

    In contrast, somatic coaching does not aim to analyze the cognitive process rather discuss lived experience and educate the individual on helpful methods of intervention.

    With somatic coaching, body-based practices and methodologies are centered, with the implementation of tools and resources to support your goals.

  • The root of the word “somatic” is “soma”, which translates to “body”. So, one could say that a somatic experience is of the body, or a bodily experience.

    When someone is describing their work as “somatic” like myself, they are describing the orientation of their approach. For example, somatic work is not a top down, or mind centered approach.

    Somatic work focuses on current experience of sensation, feeling, emotion, visualization, and meaning.

  • I can not, and I do not believe trauma is something to release, rather resolve.

    I feel it is important to note that there is a vast amount of misinformation swirling the internet about what trauma is and how to “release” it. What I know from my training and experience is that this is not possible. There is no tool, button, or hip opener that can cure any one, let alone everyone. Otherwise we would have a better sense of what world peace might look like.

    What I am hoping to offer you is support through feeling the hard things, guidance through integration, and practices that help you keep connection to sensation in this world.

  • Short answer: yes and no.

    I believe the words “regulate” and “release” to be pretty attractive outcomes when it comes to wanting to rid oneself of uncomfortable feelings. Of course I want this for myself and others, but I just don’t think it’s that simple.

    The work “regulate” reminds me of the social narrative that expects us to control ourselves and “get it together” in order to get back to work.

    While most of us need such resources in order to function, and work to survive, I like to reframe emotional regulation, as emotional relationship.

    This describes the act of being able to sit with the difficult and notice choice. This means that your anger, sadness, resent, disgust and all of those other bigger feelings are welcome and valid.

    With a somatic practice, we might better hold ourselves with compassion, recognize our emotions, patterns, and activations.

    Whereas before, they possibly ran the show and brought shame along.

    Emotions will always be here with us on this ride of the human experience, but acceptance of that might be a good first step to noticing them.

  • Unlike mental health professionals, I am not bound to working remotely within the state of my license (which is in massage therapy).

    As Somatic Coaching is not a hands on modality, and meets virtually, I am able to work with anyone who can join a session based in the central time zone.

Private clients have shared experiencing an increased sense of belonging & grounding along with the ability to find peace during anxious moments.

Schedule your first session today.