Spiritual Somatics Coaching Techniques: Unpacking
Fear & Resistance
Resistance in the field is usually rooted in fear. Our job as coaches is helping clients to identify the fear, understand where it comes from, and to release this fear from their field so that they can become unstuck.
One way to think about our role as coaches is “fear chasers.” We sit with clients in their material, listen to their Ego stories, and sniff out any lingering fear beneath the surface that is unconsciously structuring their behaviors and thought patterns. We stay curious, ask questions, practice innocent perception, and sit with them in these crevices of their consciousness without judgement. We sit in the fear with them until they are ready to move through it.
From a spiritual perspective, fear is illusion. Fear stands between us and everything we want to call in for ourselves! Fear is often a rite of passage. As we see beyond the fear, as the illusion falls away, we become unstuck and move further along in our journey.
For the 3-dimensional physical body, fear feels very real. The body is wired to be a protector, and to be skeptical of new experiences and changes that feel too risky. It takes practice and discipline to feel and process these fear-based responses so that we can honor them without allowing them to run the show.
Most fear is leftover vibration in the body from a situation that has not been fully processed out of the body. This includes ancestral experiences. What this means is that much of our fear programming is not our own! It also means that it is hard-wired in pretty deep. It has thick roots. It feels big. Since it evades our rational mind and memory from this human lifetime, it can feel very intimidating.
But just like anything else, fear is just a vibration! And it’s a very low vibration. As we work to bring clients’ unconscious fears into the light, they are often much less scary than they feel when lurking beneath the surface.
Fear Responses
The more tuned into our own responses and what they look and feel like in our body, the more perceptive we are able to be of when other people are having a fear response. As you work with clients across Doshas, you will be able to more readily decipher how fear responses show up for people.
The four main fear responses include:
Fight (Fire/Projection)
Flight (Air/Avoidance)
Freeze (Air/Kapha Overwhelm)
Fawn (Kapha/Trauma Survivor Placate/Accommodate)
As we work with clients on their material, we can ask them to “try on” recent triggers to decipher their go to fear responses.
You can do this by guiding them into their bodies and asking:
• Where do you feel sensation and what are the qualities of these sensations?
• What are the mind stories that arose for you in this situation?
• How did you respond?
As you listen to their responses, make notes of the energetics and the habitual responses. You can say something like, “Okay, so it sounds like you went into a Freeze response in this situation. This tends to result from feeling overwhelmed. And that’s okay! It sounds like it was overwhelming!”
Fear responses aren’t “good” or “bad.” They just are. It’s simply data on how we have been programmed to respond.
When working with clients on addressing their fear responses ask them:
• Is this response working for you?
• What would it feel like to experiment/play with more fire/air/earth/water in this situation?
Reworking the situation with them. If they veer towards fight/fire, invite them to respond differently with more air or earth. If they veer towards fawning/earth, invite them to respond with more fire.
Assure them that this is simply practice to try on what it might feel like to respond in a new and different way. They might make a mistake too much fire, or too much air! That’s okay. This isn’t about perfection or “getting it right.” It’s about rewiring and consciously shifting the energetics of our interactions so that we can shift unwanted dynamics in our life.
Pain Body
Again, the more we work with our own pain bodies, naming them, identifying them, acknowledging them, the easier it becomes to recognize when clients are in their pain bodies.
A pain body is simply Eckhart Tolle’s concept for an accumulation of fear and unprocessed low, dense vibration in the field that takes on a life of its own in the host’s energy field. Pain bodies feed on negative thoughts, and other people’s negative thoughts and emotions. In the logic of a pain body, pain is pleasure. A pain body requires pain to feed.
When people have not done shadow work, they are terrified about these thoughts, words, and actions that don’t align with their sense of “goodness.” When the pain body gets activated, it
essentially swallows us up, and we merge with it. From this entangled state we think we are the pain body, which allows to pain body to feed even more off of those fears that we are a terrible person.
Working with clients to identify their pain bodies can be one of the most rewarding parts of our job as coaches! Generally when clients read about the pain body it resonates with them immediately, and you and sense deep relief oh, there’s language and people talking about this! It’s not just my secret!
Working with the pain body is one of the first ways in which we are able to begin cracking the Ego wide open. We can’t go into pain bodies right away because we need to establish a sense of safety and trust with the client before we go into the places that scare them. Even as we do, it can be helpful to give the pain body a name and identity and to work with them with a sense of humor.
As coaches, we want to have a conversation with the client about the concept of the pain body, answer their questions, and work with them to identify their pain bodies. Usually after a few sessions you can begin identifying some of their pain bodies, maybe it’s the “I’m all alone” pain body, or “I’m a terrible person” pain body. Maybe it gets activated by a specific person, or a specific theme (food, sex, getting yelled at, etc.).
Generally, I have clients work with identifying their pain bodies on their own as homework. Then when we come back together we do some deeper feel and process work to identify what function the pain body is serving, where it’s coming from and why.
I find Internal Family Systems/Parts Work very helpful here. While the pain body can feel scary and “bad,” through the lens of IFS, these wounded parts are really just out of control protector parts that are trying to keep the client safe. When they are swallowed up in a pain body you can encourage them to ask themselves:
• What pain body is activated right now? What activated it?
• What are you afraid of? What are you trying to protect me from?
• What do you need to feel safe right now?
The less we resist and repress them, the less control they have over us. While it takes a while to disidentify with them and to process them out of our field, bringing them into conscious mind is an important first step in the process.
We never want to engage with a client or anyone else when they are merged with a pain body!
Reactivity Chain
The Reactivity Chain is also one of the more productive tools to work through with clients. This tool links together several individual tools so that clients can track how they ended up where they did.
The Reactivity Chain consists of looking at a situation to get the data and tracking:
• Initial Vulnerability
• Stimulus Trigger/Somatic Elicitation
• Fear Response
• Mind Stories/Emotions
• External Reaction
• Consequence
When we are in a habitual response of reactivity there is a sense of urgency and inevitability. Our nervous system is congested and we hop on the same train we’ve been riding for years. As we begin to bring more consciousness into our well-rehearsed reactive patterns we can slow our response down, and realize we have the power to make a different choice at any point!
We can coach clients through asking themselves questions about their reaction:
• Initial Vulnerability: Have I been taking care of myself? What is my energy level and capacity at?
• Stimulus Trigger: What was the actual event or moment where my body became activated?
• Fear Response: What expression did my fear response take? How do I know?
• Mind Stories/Emotions: What were the stories and emotions this trigger elicited?
• External Reaction: How did I react? What did I say/do?
• Consequence: What are the external and emotional consequences to my reaction?
The beauty of the Reactivity Chain is that even when we full on merge with our pain body and habituated responses, we can still learn from those choices and break down our response into small pieces to get the data.
Eventually we might be able to catch ourselves before we get to the External Reaction, or even note our initial vulnerabilities before hitting a triggered state. The more versed and practiced we become, the more skillful we are at conserving our prana, and using that prana for more of what we want instead of what we don’t want!
Fear Chasing
The fear that lurks in the background of our daily life powers us down a lot. Doing fear chasing with clients allows us to get into their unconscious to start bringing these unconscious fears into the light so they know what they are working with.
You can do this by:
• Eliciting their fear with details (naming their material)
• Playing it to the extreme
• Sitting with it and feeling it together
Some guiding questions for this process include:
• What do you mean by X? (Have the client explain their fear)
• Okay, let’s say this does happen. . . (Catastrophize with the client to identify the underlying fearbased belief, exaggerating the impact and playing it to the extreme)
• What’s the worst part of that? What feels scary about that? What are you most afraid of in this scenario? (Deep dive into the underlying fear-based belief)
• Feel and Process (invite client into their body to try on what this feels like, and where)
• What if X isn’t true? What if Y is true instead? (After having them try on their deepest fears, invite them to consider that they are not true, and suggest a possible expansive alternative to provide them with a point of contrast in their body)
As we do so, we are holding a safe container for clients to identify their deepest fears. It’s important to not be attached to “solving” anything here. You are just bringing these unconscious fears into the light so that they have a better sense of what they are working with.