About Somatic Coaching

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What is Somatic Coaching?

Somatic coaching is a body and energy-centered approach to change that integrates awareness with development. The way you hold yourself, breathe, speak, and move reflects the lessons your body has learned over a lifetime- wisdom shaped by where you’ve been and what you have known. In partnership with a coach, you explore what matters most to you, notice how those values and patterns live in your body, and practice new ways of being that foster healing, resilience, presence, and purpose in action. By integrating awareness, dialogue, and body-based processes and practices, somatic coaching helps you shift habits at their root — in your mind, muscles, voice, stories, strategies, presence, tissues, and spirit. At the core of this work is the knowledge that you are whole, have always been enough, and have adapted to what life brought your way.

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How Shaping Happens

At birth, your body is open, flexible, and full of potential. Over time, experiences and cultural messages shape how you carry and hold yourself. Perhaps you learned to shrink back, give endlessly, brace against the world to feel safe, puff up, or hide. These patterns live in the body as posture, breath, muscle tension, habits of speech, and interpretations of experience. They may once have been protective, gotten you things, but they can also limit your full expression or push others away. 

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The Coaching Process

1:1 somatic coaching is a partnership. 

A session often starts with dialogue, much like therapy, and then quickly brings attention to bodily sensations, moods, breath, and patterns of holding. Based on what surfaces, we integrate processes and practices that support embodied change. They reveal subtle layers not accessible to the mind: yearnings, aversions, wants, habits, emotions, images, memories, metaphors, or shifts in energy and temperature. Over time, you develop a more nuanced understanding of what and how your body “knows” and how that informs you. 

Somatic coaching is an active, experiential process. It’s not just about talking — it’s about practicing new ways of being. Change is accelerated through repetition and practices between sessions, which help new patterns become natural and lasting.

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Why Somatic Coaching?

Somatic coaching is well-suited for anyone seeking to:

  • Reconnect with their body’s wisdom

  • Heal what has been holding them back

  • Access resilience in the face of challenge

  • Move toward longings and purpose

  • Develop embodied confidence and presence

This approach is not about fixing what’s “wrong.” It’s about reclaiming your body’s intelligence, reshaping patterns that no longer serve you, and cultivating the embodied presence to live fully as the person you are meant to be.

Somatic Coaching FAQs

  • Therapy is about diagnosing and treating mental health conditions, and often centers on pathology. Coaching focuses on possibility, growth, and the future.

    • Therapists often analyze patterns through a clinical lens.

    • Coaches share observations and reflections while centering the client’s perspective and goals.

    • Both may explore past experiences, emotions, and patterns, and both can support future goals—just in different ways.

    Coaching and counseling can complement one another. Many clients work with both a therapist and a coach, either in parallel or collaboratively. Since I was trained as a therapist, that background informs my coaching, though the roles remain distinct.

    If you’re unsure whether therapy, coaching, or both would be best for you, I invite you to schedule a complimentary 15-minute clarity call.

  • Both approaches bring awareness to the body and nervous system:

    • Somatic therapy often focuses on trauma resolution and soothing survival responses.

    • Somatic coaching may also touch on healing, but goes further to build capacity for growth, aliveness, and presence. It emphasizes transformation, not just regulation.

    In my coaching, I guide clients through somatic awareness, opening, and practice—so you can reshape conditioned tendencies (in body, thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors), increase emotional capacity, and feel more grounded and alive.

    • Somatic Coaching supports personal growth, leadership, and life alignment. We integrate body awareness into goal-setting and behavior change using practices like centering, grounding, and movement to build presence, resilience, and choice.

  • “Now I notice and trust the subtle cues my body gives me that reveal emotional truths or stuckness”

    ~ Matt

  • “Dana will meet you exactly where you are—with presence, compassion, and skill—and help you access the version of yourself you want to lead from. The work we did changed my trajectory. My team doesn’t know they have her to thank for it.”

    ~ Ryan

  • “To be honest, at first I thought that somatic coaching was just not for me. But in time I realized that my resistance was actually discomfort with recognizing and staying with my own experience”

    ~ Deepa

SomaSolidarity provides both
Personal & Executive Somatic Coaching

personal coaching
executive coaching