COACHING

Coaching is the great re-connection: to self, to our body – and with that, to a radical kind of presence and immediacy.

,Presence‘ is an interesting promise. Should be easy, to just be here: since we already are. Yet, we aren’t – not fully, at least. We aren’t, because we haven’t fully landed in the body. Most of us, we live a slight distance from it. And by losing touch with the body, we lose connection to the Self.

So this is where we begin. The process of somatic coaching is connecting back to the inner body: re-kindling full body contact to your own self. This inner body is one’s own sensations, the so called ‚felt sense‘. The inner body can be traced, moment to moment: it is a branched, nuanced somatic experience.

There is grand wisdom to it. This inner body is where our deep knowing lives, our intuition, and implicit memory. It orients us in the world, provides a compass – and it’s where we feel alive. Pleasure, delight, joy, ecstasy, excitement: they all arise from within the body.

I work with creatives who kill their work with fierce self criticism and rumination spirals, who want to work intuitively, find play again and live full bodied lives. With highly sensitive people who wish to gently build greater capacity of their super perceptive body. With those who find it difficult to be in touch with their bodies at all. Those who find themselves so stressed that stillness, or rest, or even a pause feels impossible. Those who know they need radical inner change.

Some approaches to coaching are ultra pragmatic: set goals, then go after them. Some somatic schools see the solution to ‚being too much in the head‘ in: thinking less. That’s not how I work.

Being in your mind ‚too much‘ simply means you are being in your body too little. So – you don’t have to get out of your head. You have to be in your body more. Somatic Coaching works in the deeper layers of the self, on the site of imagination itself. We are exploring the possibility of an existence that is led by the body.

I believe in the capacity of words. Sensing, and being able to name what you sense, is the foundation of the intimacy with our self. Words can be magic spells, doors into a different reality. A new understanding can shift your experience so radically that it can feel like you’ve entered another world. Because – you kind of have.

Language guides perception. It matters greatly.

To me, it’s like this: the self is a practice, not a ready made entity. In coaching, we are concerned with this practice.

The process looks different for everyone, but two general movements are always the same. It is a coming home – to something we have lost, but once had: playfulness, radical presence, immediacy. And – it’s an invention, and as such an artistic practice. It’s a process of landing both in your body and owning your conceptual mind. I call it: Embodied Thinking. It requires two things: the ability to go radically meta, and to be totally embodied – both at the same time.

The tools and methods I work with are body-mind-connection, the felt sense, tracking of the autonomous nervous system, finding emotional literacy as well as somatic practices, breathwork, and becoming as versed as can be in self-regulation (that on is big). The way I use concepts and frameworks is informed by my studies, my teaching and mentoring in the arts and my own writing practice. I work trauma informed, yet I am not a therapist. I will always refer a client if I sense they rather need working with a trauma therapist or benefit more from working with a different practicioner.

Any questions, I can be reached at kk@katrinkruse.com