It’s hands-on is the bodywork. You can do hands-on bodywork and never converse with a person at all which is actually an okay thing to do because sometimes that’s exactly what the client needs. The client needs just to detach from their cognitive processes and just have a really great body working session to go into a deep, deep, deep state of relaxation and inner changing internally.

One of the difference is between having something done to you and something done with you. The hands-on techniques are something we do to our clients, whereas the somatic coaching we do with our clients, and it’s different. We can actually affect the tissue in very similar or the same ways through somatic coaching and make profound shifts in people’s physiology. And there’s a great benefit to having the done-to-you approach and also the done-with-you approach. It really helps to differentiate you, to differentiate your services, to be able to offer clients different things, take some of the pressure off ourselves to constantly be doing in the done-to-you, done-to-you, done-to you. It can be really fun. It can be a way to, even if somebody doesn’t want to transition from done-to-you services to done-with-you services completely, to open the creative solutions that you’re offering your clients by doing both.

It is important to have gateways into working more deeply with people in terms of their core patterns. If you don’t want to do that, that’s fine. Just keep doing the bodywork. But there are two really great gateways to getting into deeper core, reconstructing work with people. One are somatic practices. We’ve talked about those at length in other podcasts. But the other one is bodywork. Bodyworking is an amazing gateway to be able to get into someone’s subconscious experience quickly and pretty easily and efficiently in order to help create deeper change.

Also, you might not realize this, but your clients might already be working with coaches outside of your sessions. But when they’re outside of your sessions working with coaches, because of what happens with brain waves in a massage session or a manual session, brain waves typically slow down when you’re in a body working session. And when brain waves slow down, it’s easier to access those core patterns underneath. So when your clients are out working with coaches and they’re doing intellectual approaches, brain waves are operating pretty high. And when brain waves are operating high, much less capacity to get through that gateway down into those deeper things for change. Just another reason why the somatic processes and methods are so much more effective in creating deeper change for people.

One of the most powerful ways is you bring the consciousness, the conscious mind, into the conversation. With the body working, a lot of times we’re having this direct conversation with the client’s subconscious mind. And by the way, the subconscious mind includes the body. It is the body. We’re having a direct conversation through our hands with a portion of the person’s overall being, the subconscious mind. And then when we do coaching skills, we can bring in even more wisdom because we’re also bringing the conscious mind in, the intellectual mind in, the mental emotional mind in to be able to have a conversation. We have other facilities coming online, and it really helps the person to create sustainable change in their lives. It can be just super powerfully holistic when you really think about it.

Also, realize physical healing is never solely physical. If you cut your finger and your finger’s healing, that’s not solely physical. Because right now in this place, you have a body, which means you’re living on a physical plane. If you’re reading this, you have an emotional experience, maybe not overtly, right now, but you’re feeling something about some way right now. You have an emotional experience, and you most likely also have some connection with a force outside of yourself, which you might call a spiritual experience or a sense of meaning or purpose of what you do in the world. We’re always living on three planes of existence simultaneously. And so physical healing is never, ever done just physically because we’re never just physical beings. We’re never just a body.

Bodyworkers, you know this, of course, because your clients come in, they tell you how stressed they are, and we know they hold that stuff in their body. There’s that emotional body component. It works both ways.

So physical healing, when you understand that, must always include other pathways. When we do somatic coaching, we understand that our thoughts, our emotions, and our bodies are all intertwined. They’re always intertwined with one another, and we can actually foster more effective physical healing by also working with the emotions and our thoughts and the whole physiological patterns that we’re dealing with. Every physiological pattern has four parts: sensations, thoughts, words, and actions. When you work with all four of those parts and you do that masterfully, that will definitely enhance physical healing.

It’s really incumbent upon us as professionals if we work with people’s bodies in any way to be having the conversation about trauma sensitivity because post-traumatic patterns live in our physiology, aka our bodies. If you’re a body worker, then you are working with people’s bodies. Any time that you work with a person’s body directly, what you are doing, either inadvertently or intentionally, is working in a person’s trauma history. Because the body is the subconscious mind we have trauma patterns in our bodies. 90% of people on the planet have experienced some significant trauma in their lives. So the people coming to you are definitely likely have experienced trauma.

If you look at the connections between adverse childhood experiences and chronic disease, you’re more likely a person who has more than what we call four aces on the advanced or the adverse child experiences rating measure, is 300% more likely to experience chronic pain in their life. As a body worker, how many of your clients experience chronic pain? Probably a large percentage of them, which means a large percentage of them likely have a trauma history that you’re maybe not even aware of. That trauma history lives in their physiology, and it’s being expressed as chronic pain.

When you’re working in people’s bodies, you could be inadvertently actually bringing that information to the surface of someone’s consciousness. You’re like the neighborhood bartender. You’re the person, not just because you’re in somebody’s tissue, but you’re a safe person, all of a sudden, people are telling you about stuff that you are not trained to handle. A lot of body workers will come to us and say, 'I’m trying to decide whether or not I should go get a degree in psychology'. And a lot of the reason for that is because people bring them stuff. People bring them stuff all the time that they’re not equipped to handle. What happens when you don’t know the somatic coaching skills to be able to handle what people bring to you, by the way, is that bodyworkers in general tend to default to giving advice. And that may or may not be helpful to your clients. If you get some training in the coaching skills, you’ll be able to ask really powerful, awesome transformational questions and not risk giving somebody advice that’s not helpful or worse, harmful, when we don’t even know what we’re talking about. When you know the somatic coaching skills, you can ask powerful questions, you can help somebody to transform their lives in a powerful way. You can really make a difference when people are bringing you big stuff.

Bodyworkers are uniquely positioned to make a really profound difference in people’s lives if they have this education and if they have this knowledge to be able to protect people from being retraumatized unintentionally. But even better than that, if you’re using somatic coaching as a part of your practice as a body worker, you can be trained intentionally to help tap into areas of information in a person’s body to help them transform deeply on that physical level. To help them heal faster and more completely, to help them reorganize the patterns that are driving their pain experience or tension experience to begin with.

Rather than trying to think about how you can save your hands, how about how can you claim your total brilliance and grow into a place where you’re really developing even more mastery, can serve clients more deeply and completely, and actually create an even better business model for yourself? Because what you are really asking is, "How do I maintain so I don’t lose?"

There’s a glass ceiling you’re under that you don’t even understand you’re under. Coaching is unregulated. So there are coaches who have no educational experience. There are coaches who have tons of educational experience. There are coaches who have no educational experience, who are out there charging more than you for doing things, and they may not even be very good at it. This glass ceiling of income may not be your driving force motivator, but other people are charging probably even more or the same as you do and are not doing such amazing stuff. You could do amazing work with people and make even more money. It seems counter-intuitive, but actually, bodyworking can have some cap on it in the market that coaching doesn't. You have the capacity to take the cap off of your income.

You probably aren’t as interested in the money as a motivational quality for you. We see that with most of the bodyworkers. Bodyworking friends are motivated by things like making a big impact in people’s lives, really making a difference, and they’re interested in freedom, personal freedom. It’s one of the reasons they are bodyworkers. They work for themselves a lot of times. They want freedom in their lives. You can create more freedom and impact in your own life and in the lives of your family. It seems a little counter-intuitive, but also with your clients, the less you’re going to do for them.

As you mature as a body worker, a trajectory that you’re going to have to put yourself on because nobody will put you on this trajectory. But you can choose to put yourself on a trajectory of maturity and growth as a body worker and become a somatic coach who actually starts to transition out of doing things to clients, and you can empower them even more as you start to do that, especially because of your experience. And because you have that background in doing for people, you’ll be able to take all of that experience and help people make profound transformations in different ways. You never have to stop working if you don’t want to. And you can have that freedom to be able to still make really powerful impact with the work that you do, and maybe not even have to work quite as much, but still be able to bring an income and with a lot more flexibility and creativity. You don’t have to leave what you’ve been doing. You get to take everything and all your experience with you to continue your growth trajectory as a professional.

Yes a 100%. If we believe that we’re purely physical beings, then you would think that coaching wouldn’t help. Because if you thought, "I’m a purely physical being, then won’t only physical modalities help?" But the research shows, again and again, that coaching and therapeutic methodologies actually help people decrease their levels of chronic pain and tension. We have to understand that pain itself is never purely physical. Pain is a construct that our brain creates based on certain parameters within our autonomic and somatic nervous system. Pain is multimodal, in other words. Pain always includes emotions. Pain always includes our mental thoughts. Pain always includes how we relate to our meaning and purpose in life. All those domains are affected through somatic coaching. So can somatic coaching help your clients with tension and chronic pain? Absolutely, 100%.

This idea about, "should I go back to school for a PhD in psychology?" Most of the people who go back and get their psychology degree or their clinical social workers degrees, they’re working with people with diagnosis or they’re working with people in a therapeutic realm that actually isn’t what they actually want. They’re actually looking for coaching. They just don’t know that’s what coaching does. At the Somatic Coaching Academy, we’re diving deep into the psychology, basically through the physiology and the spiritual, energy medicine, psychology, to be able to help talk about topics like personal growth that are really interesting to you. And you get to personally grow as a person while you’re helping other people to grow and doing the coaching. That incredible relationship of mutual growth is really quite profoundly unique, I think, to the coaching industry.

So if you’re a person who loves professional development, I think you’re really going to love coaching. If this is you, if this is speaking to you right now, I would suggest is go have a demo session with us and try it. Try a coaching session. If you don’t love it, you’ll know. But I suspect you’re going to be like, "This is what I’ve been looking for. Because we have people tell us all the time once they get into the work, this is the missing piece. I didn’t know what it was, and I didn’t know what to call it, but this is it."

Let me share a story with you about a result. A few years ago, I was working with a client. He’s a farmer and had debilitating back pain. It incapacitated him. He could not get out of bed for a couple of months. But he did get out of bed enough to be able to get to my office. Barely, walking with a walker into the office. A young guy, not an old character, in his 30s-40s. He had incapacitating back pain that came on for, no reason. But here’s the thing. I knew this person beforehand. He had been in my clinic before with a tight back and we had just been doing body working sessions like, 'let’s loosen the back up, do some trigger point release, some deep tissue' and then send him back out into the farm. He’s going to work his body again. At some point, he’s going to come back because he feels stiff or he’s a little in spasm or something. But this episode, he was completely incapacitated. So now he’s like, "What is going on here? There’s something deeper going on." And so I invited him, asked him, "Are you ready to go a little deeper with this?" And he’s like, "Yeah, of course I am now because I’m sick and tired of this. I can’t get out of bed now."

(Which is usually how people change, by the way. They need to have enough pain to change.)

So he’s in the clinic and I’m working on him, and we find the spot on his back that seems like it’s the center of all the problems. He also had an MRI and it showed a profound disk bulge in his back, too but he did not want surgery. This was during COVID so the surgery was pushed back several months anyway. He couldn’t get in. He was on a permanent pause. And so he’s like, "But let’s take the time to dig deeper in with this." So remember, he’s in the clinic. I’m working on manual work. I’m working on trigger points in his back. We find the center point that seems like it’s the spot that is the core of everything. And we get to that point, I just start asking him some questions. I start asking him a specific set of questions. And the specific set of questions leads him to an awareness about the core belief system he has that’s linked to that spot in his body that’s creating the chronic tension. We test it out a little bit, and sure enough, it’s like whenever he experiences this belief, this part of his body gets tight.

It’s right in his low back and it’s right around the area where he has this disk bulge. Manual therapists know that disks are supposed to bulge. They bulge when you lean to the right, disk bulge to the left. When you lean to the left, they bulge to the right. When your facets are working the way they’re supposed to work, they bulge normally. But when you have muscle spasm, it locks up the facet system. Now when you bend to one side, the disk doesn’t bulge where it’s supposed to bulge. It bulges back out of the nerve root. This chronic muscle tension can start to now create what we call kinematic patterns in the vertebral system. Then it creates a problem with the nerve structure.

Here we are asking a specific set of questions on this spot, he comes to an awareness about things, and immediately his tension drops, probably 25%. Immediately, the compression of the nerves in the area, drops. Immediately, he has relief. Now, he’s able to go back. We do some follow-up exercises with him, start to give him some tools to start working based on the coaching that we’re doing, starts to have some transformations around that. We’re still doing bodywork. He’s doing some coaching. He’s doing some behavioral change. We’re changing everything in that pattern.

Long story short, now he has zero pain, back full-time working on the farm. His chronic pain is in a whole different realm. He wouldn’t even call it chronic pain anymore. Now he has soreness from working on a farm, but it’s not chronic pain. Never had surgery. Completely reduced that disk bulge back down into a healthy normal range. He’s aware of things now that happen, and he can tell ahead of time when he’s going to start to have those problems with his back because now he’s aware of the patterns and the belief systems that would create that to occur.

What I want to encapsulate here is that’s the results you can get when you start weaving somatic coaching in to your body working sessions. That body working, again, is a gateway to deeper change, which you have to just know are these specific sets of questions to ask someone while they’re on the table with you as you’re tapping into their subconscious mind because that’s what their body is. That can start to create new awarenesses up in the conscious mind that create behavior change. Different things can start to occur for someone with remediation of chronic tension, remediation of pain.

Also please don’t try that unless you’re trauma sensitive. You have to know what questions to ask. If you don’t know what questions to ask, you can actually create a problem for people.

Yes. One of the things that our students love so much about studying here at the academy actually is how practical it is. And we actually we teach quite a bit of science. The science is being taught in a way that you’ll sit in the class and you hardly even know it’s science. We have people who are a little bit nervous about the amount of science they might be learning. They don’t have to be nervous because it’s just so practical and we deliver in such easy to understand ways that they don’t have to be nervous about it. One of the key things we want you to be able to do is we want you to be able to help your clients understand how this stuff works.

We go very deep into the human energy system and how beliefs are woven into the fabric of someone’s physiology. There’s that background information that someone can use and then explain to their clients how your beliefs, your emotions, your thoughts, are all linked together with what’s happening in your body - the energy system. We do a lot of work around that.

This is a good question to ask because resistance to change can come up for us as we’re studying these things. We expect that all of our students are going to be on some personal transformation journey themselves as they walk through the program in the process of being able to become a person who can help other people do these things. There’s a lot of support here at the Academy. You can listen to the last three podcast episodes where we talk a lot about the different kinds of support here at the Academy. One of our values is “we got you”. Everything we create, we’re baking in support. Including support like, 'how do I find my materials? How do I ask questions? What if I have an issue that arises in me? What if my nervous system gets dysregulated as I’m learning?' We have all kinds of manner of support baked into each of the programs. It would take us a while to describe all of them.

There’s also a virtual network that is a robust network that all of our students and graduates are a part of and love to be a part of. I’m sure they’re right now talking on the virtual network. There’s this personal and professional camaraderie that happens there. You can ask content questions, you can ask business building questions, and you can ask personal questions about your own trajectory. So we’ve got you not just in your classes and not just in your cohorts, we’ve got you in the virtual community. It’s literally open 24/7 whenever it is that you have something going on. Our students and graduates get nurtured in that community with all kinds of things. One of the things we offer is monthly open office hours. We usually talk about business building. We also talk about content and different aspects of somatic coaching. It’s a great opportunity to connect in-person or on Zoom with the community. We’ve never had a student tell us that they feel unsupported here. It’s very much baked into the culture.

There is open coaching for people who are on program, they can come to get coached themselves to experience it for themselves. When people are in the level 2 and level 3 programs, we encourage you highly to come to monthly open coaching with our team so you can get coached. Also, there’s the opportunity to work with somebody privately if you’d like to add on to your tuition to be able to get some private coaching.

There’s quarterly skillshares for graduates. There’s all kinds of ongoing support for people as they go through the program.

Yes. We have a number of students who come and take our Level 1 Somatic Practice Essentials program. And that’s the part of the somatic coaching that they want to take into their practices. And that’s an opportunity. You’re not opening up. It’s not coaching. You’re not actually asking questions. You’re not having a dialog. You’re doing somatic practices with people. And that’s a powerful way to have releases and epiphanies and soften the tissue.

Our level 2 program with cross mapping is certainly not intensive client dialog. That’s guiding someone into a deeper resetting of their own nervous system. It doesn’t include any trauma narrative, so there's no rehashing old stories. Not even getting into patterns. It’s to help people just start to rework things in their system. The cross-mapping method that’s taught in the Level 2 program is one that bodyworkers easily take and integrate into their existing sessions when they are going to do nothing else with us. Actually, we used it long time ago when we were still doing a lot of bodywork, and we’d use cross mapping with our clients.

One of the things to consider is if you’re going to go to school to get your master’s degree, you’re going to spend tens of thousands of dollars, at least. So you’re already going to have to figure out that investment. Somehow the connect around figuring out that investment seems easier for people to make believe than if they’re going to come into a program like this. It’s interesting how we’re wired to think about things. There are lots of different ways that people think about their investment with the Somatic Coaching Academy. But the one thing I want to say is it’s not really about you having the money ahead of time. It’s about being resourceful, not having resources. Because there are always more resources available to us than we can see at any given time. It isn’t until we make decisions that we’re going to move forward with things that we can see the resources that have already been available to us that become visible once we make a decision to change. It was about becoming resourceful rather than having the resources.

How do people pay for their investment? All kinds of manner. They put on the credit card, they get a loan, they have gifts or loans from family members. They use their retirement funds. They have nest eggs and other means of savings that they weren’t thinking they were going to use that for that they do. People have written grants. Like I said, selling something that you already have. We’ve had people actually sell belongings to start to stimulate the money coming in. There’s tax refund. There’s money everywhere. If we really think about it, there’s lots of opportunity. The question is, are you going to put yourself in a position where you can actually expand even more your abundance and your overall holistic wealth in your own life by making decisions to move your career and yourself forward in these kinds of ways? Because when you do, the universe will always meet you with the opportunity to have the resources you need to be able to move forward.

So the question is, what do you really desire? What do you really want? Is this what’s calling to you? And if it is, make a decision and then be resourceful. Our team is always willing to problem-solve with you. Your tuition is paid for by a deposit and then payment plans. Almost just about everybody pays in payment plans. So all you have to do is figure out the deposit.

We actually expect throughout the course of your training, you’re going to be able to recoup your ROI pretty darn quickly with a lot of the programs. And we actually tell you how to do that in most of the programs, too. If you were going back for a master’s degree in psychology, how long is that master’s degree going to take? You’re not probably earning anything. You’re not using that what you’re learning until after you graduate. You could be in school for one year, two years, three years, and you’re just pumping money into the education, and you’re not actually earning anything until you’re done. We’ve specifically designed our program so that level one somatic practice essentials, you can start learning money, earning money out of the gate after two days with what you’ve learned immediately. Then through cross mapping, you start learning that information, you start using that right away, integrating that in. We have it set out in a way where we have an expectation that you will start going out immediately and using the information to start recouping on your ROI. We’ve actually planned it that way. We’ve had people who by the time they’re done with their whole certification, they’ve paid for it already by what they’ve earned from what they’ve been learning inside of the program.

Learning and earning. We’re really good at helping people, especially people who are bodyworkers, grow their businesses. As the founders, it’s where our background is. We have a lot of knowledge and capacity to be able to do that. There are so many resources. There’s these turnkey things in each of the programs so that you can get started right away.

In short, yes, absolutely. A lot of people who are interested in mind-body healing don’t just want to be a passive participant in the process. As a bodyworking professional, we’ve talked about this doing-with and doing-to. The doing-to model is you’re going to come in, I’m going to do something to you, and you’re going to be a passive recipient. It might feel great while someone’s on the table, but then they get up, they leave, they go do whatever they do in life, they come back the next week, and they’re back in the same boat again. And nothing’s really changed. A lot of people are like, "I want to be an active participant in this." If you have somatic skills and you combine those with body workers', you’re going to start to attract people who actually want to be engaged participants, who want to do what you’re suggesting to them to do rather than being resistant to doing home exercises - "I don’t have time to do it. I don’t have time to do it." Yes, you’re going to attract more people in who want that level of of engagement with you. Professionally, it’s just so much fun to be able to offer your clients those kinds of things.