What Somatic Coaching Actually Is (And Why It's Different from What You've Tried Before)

For digital nomads and expats navigating life across borders

Eye-level view of a serene landscape with a winding path

The moment I knew something was missing

I had done the therapy. I had read the books.

I had moved countries more times than I could count on one hand, built and rebuilt my life in new cities, and collected a library's worth of insight about myself along the way.

And still, every time I landed somewhere new, the same thing happened. My mind caught up fast. The transitions took a real toll on my body.

There was a particular kind of low-grade exhaustion in those early weeks — the kind that comes not from doing too much but from having to be alert to everything. Every errand. Every sign. Every basic interaction that would have been automatic somewhere else.

No amount of perspective-taking or journaling touched it. Because it wasn't a thinking problem.

That's what eventually brought me to somatic coaching. And it's why I built a practice around it for people doing exactly what I was doing: living across borders, figuring it out, and wondering why nobody talks about what this actually feels like on the inside.

So what is somatic coaching?

Somatic coaching works with the body as the primary tool for change.

Most coaching starts in the head — identifying beliefs, reframing thinking, setting goals. That approach has real value. But it has a limitation: insight doesn't always transfer. You can leave a coaching session with a genuine breakthrough and step back into your life completely unchanged, because the understanding stayed in your mind and never made it into your nervous system.

Somatic coaching does it the other way around.

Rather than working toward insight and hoping the body follows, we work with the body first — building the physical experience of a different way of being. The insight emerges from that, and it sticks differently because it was never just conceptual.

Why this matters especially if you're internationally mobile

When you're in the middle of a transition, your nervous system is already working overtime.

Navigating a new city, building new routines, decoding a culture, doing it sometimes in a language you're still learning — these are real cognitive and physical demands. Most people know from experience that when you're under that kind of load, it's hard to absorb anything new. The capacity to integrate what you're learning gets squeezed.

This is why "just talk about it" so often falls short for people in transition.

The body needs to arrive first. Safety in the nervous system creates the conditions for everything else — for connection, for curiosity, for the kind of self-awareness that can actually change something.

What sessions actually look like

No two sessions are identical, but the general shape is this:

We start with where you are, not where you think you should be.

That might look like a grounded check-in — noticing what's present in the body before we move into conversation. A brief breath practice. Some orienting work. The point is to get out of the story long enough to actually feel what's there.

Then we work with whatever you bring.

Maybe it's the loneliness that doesn't have words yet. The relationship that's quietly under strain because one of you is thriving and one of you is disappearing into logistics. The identity question of who you even are when you strip away the city, the language, the social context you built yourself in.

We don't just talk about these things. We get curious about where they live in the body. What shifts when you actually slow down enough to feel it.

And we build practices.

Somatic practices, mindfulness tools, movement-based awareness — things you can actually use between sessions, and that travel with you into the next transition. That's the part I found most missing in every other approach I tried. Something portable.

What it's not

It's not therapy, and it's not a replacement for it.

Therapy does something important and different: it tends toward healing, toward the past, toward understanding the roots of patterns. Somatic coaching is future-oriented and skill-building. The two can work well alongside each other, and I'm always clear about where the boundary is.

It's not a quick fix.

Anyone who promises fast results for the kind of disorientation that comes with international living is not being straight with you. What I offer is a real, learnable set of skills that deepen over time and compound. Each transition tends to be easier than the last, not because it gets simpler, but because you arrive with more capacity.

It's not about being okay with everything.

The goal isn't to bypass the hard parts of living internationally. It's to build enough ground inside yourself that you can meet the hard parts without being pulled under. You don't have to love the uncertainty. You just need to be able to stay present with it.

Who I work with

I work with digital nomads and expats navigating new cultures, new experiences, and the ongoing process of finding themselves in the midst of it all.

People who have been doing this long enough that the adventure has gotten complicated.

People who are good at their lives on paper and can't figure out why they still feel so scattered. People who moved because of someone else's opportunity and are trying to locate themselves inside that transition.

And people who are doing fine and just want to do this better — to stop white-knuckling every new city and build something more sustainable.

Why I do this

I spent years as a digital nomad and eventually settled in Colombia and then Chile. I know the specific texture of the loneliness that comes in week three, when the novelty has worn off and the connection you're looking for hasn't arrived yet. I know what it's like to watch your partner thrive while you try to locate yourself. I know the shame that comes with struggling when you also know you're the one who wanted this.

I started teaching yoga years ago, and something shifted when the living came first and the words came later. Practicing before I could fully articulate why, and finding that the articulation followed. Somewhere in that process, I found the thread that eventually led me to somatic coaching.

That lived experience is what I bring into every session. I know what it takes to build a real practice in the middle of an unsettled life, and I know what it feels like when it actually starts to work.

How to start

A discovery call is 30 minutes. We talk about where you are, what you're navigating, and whether working together is the right fit.

Book A Discovery Call