Abu Zayd Al-Balkhi wrote it in the 9th century.
A physician and philosopher working in the Abbasid caliphate, he produced a text called Masalih al-Abdan wal-Anfus — sustaining bodies and souls. In it, he described something that anyone working in modern psychology would recognize immediately: that physical ailments and psychological states are not separate systems. That the body and the النَّفْس — the living, thinking, feeling self — are in constant conversation. That treating one without attending to the other is incomplete medicine.
He wrote this eleven hundred years ago.
We are now in a moment where embodied cognition is one of the fastest-growing areas of psychological research. Where somatic approaches to therapy and coaching are being taken seriously in clinical and organizational settings. Where the "mind-body connection" has become not just a wellness cliché but a documented neurological reality.
Western coaching is catching up to something. What it doesn't fully know — and what I think is worth naming clearly — is that the intellectual tradition it's converging with was already thoroughly developed in a language and civilization it hasn't yet looked at carefully.
Let me be precise about what I'm saying and what I'm not.
I am not saying that coaching should be Islamic. التفكير الحسّي — Somatic Thinking — is practiced by coaches and clients of every faith and no faith. It does not require belief in Islam to work. Its methods are grounded in physical sensory experience, observable behavior, and the development of presence — not in theology.
What I am saying is that its philosophical architecture has ancestors. And one of the most significant branches of that family tree grows from the Islamic intellectual tradition — not as spiritual metaphor, but as rigorous epistemology.
When I built Somatic Thinking over the course of two decades, I drew from three wells: Western coaching science and embodied cognition research, thirty years of martial and healing arts practice, and the classical Islamic understanding of the self. These were not parallel inputs that I combined consciously. They were the water I grew up in — Egyptian, Italian, multilingual, moving between traditions — and when I looked back at what had shaped my understanding of development and presence, I found all three already there.
Here is what the Islamic tradition understood that Western coaching is now arriving at from the other direction:
The النَّفْس — the nafs — is not a fixed entity. It is not a soul in the theological sense of something separate from the body, waiting to return to God. In the intellectual tradition I'm describing, the nafs is clay. It is continuously shaped by choices, encounters, attention, and practice. It is not what you are. It is what you are becoming.
This is structurally identical to the foundational premise of Somatic Thinking: that the self is not a fixed thing to be optimized, but a living capacity to be expanded.
تزكية النَّفْس — tazkiyah — describes growth through refinement. Not through addition. The Islamic intellectual tradition was deeply skeptical of the idea that you become more by accumulating more capabilities, achievements, or knowledge. Real development, in this view, works differently: you remove what obstructs clear seeing. You clear the surface of the mirror.
Compare this to how Western positive psychology currently describes wellbeing: as something you build toward. Skills, resilience, strengths, positive emotions. All addition. All forward motion.
The Islamic tradition would say: you already have what you need. The question is whether you can see clearly enough to know it.
مراقبة — muraqabah — is the practice I find most directly parallel to the somatic work I teach. Usually translated as "self-monitoring" or "contemplation," its actual meaning is more active: attentive, present, disciplined observation of one's interior states as they arise. Not analyzing them. Not fixing them. Not transcending them. Witnessing them.
This is exactly what I mean when I teach coaches to attend to their إشارات حسّية جسدية — the physical sensory signals in the body — during a session. Not to act on them immediately. Not to interpret them prematurely. To notice them as information arriving from the contact between their inner world and the client's.
Muraqabah is not a meditation practice. It is a relational capacity. And it was being systematically developed and taught in Islamic intellectual circles while the West was still centuries from formulating anything resembling a professional coaching framework.
I want to be careful here. I am not making a claim of ownership or priority. Human development traditions across cultures have always noticed similar things, from different angles, in different languages. What I am doing is tracing a genealogy — because genealogies matter. They tell you where ideas come from, and why some ideas have more depth than they appear to.
When I hear coaching professionals describe "presence" as if it were a recent discovery, or "embodied cognition" as if it emerged from neuroscience laboratories in isolation, I feel something that I can only describe as the quiet protest of a tradition that deserves to be named.
This tradition deserves to be in the room.
If you're curious about the intellectual roots of Somatic Thinking — not just the methodology, but the philosophy of human development it rests on — I've written about it at length on the methodology page. And the free Somatic Thinking workshop is a place to experience, not just understand, what this lineage makes possible.
Some things you can only know by inhabiting them.