Let me show you the whole of Somatic Thinking with a single butterfly.
You're walking, and a butterfly crosses your path. Watch what happens, step by step, in less than a second.
You sense it — light reaches your eyes. You perceive a shape, a colour, a flutter of motion. You give it meaning — butterfly: delicate, bright, spring, alive. Ideas and feelings form — I love these; I'd like a closer look. You decide — I'll step nearer. And you act — you move toward it. That is the Human Interaction Cycle: the six steps your body and mind run through to meet anything at all.
Here is the part that matters. When each step lines up with what is actually there — it really is a butterfly, you perceive a butterfly, you treat it as a butterfly — you are in sync with reality. That alignment has a name: presence.
But the cycle can slip. Imagine the same butterfly — and somewhere in you a memory stirs; you were startled by a bat once, in the dark. Your perception bends. You see a bat. You flinch, step back, and miss the gentle thing that was actually in front of you. Nothing about the butterfly changed; your meaning-making did. In that moment you are no longer meeting reality — you are meeting a modified copy of it. And a modified copy is exactly what the absence of presence feels like.
This is why I keep asking, with my clients and with myself: What if you perceived the butterfly — and called it a bat? What if a bat came, and you called it a butterfly? What if it crossed your path and you never noticed it at all? What, in you, distorts the butterfly?
Neuroscience has been circling the same truth. Perception is not a clean recording of the world; the brain is always making its best guess and projecting it outward — some researchers call it a "controlled hallucination." When the guess matches what is really there, we see clearly. When an old fear or a future hurry writes the guess for us, we see our copy instead. Somatic Thinking simply gives you a way to notice the difference — through the body, in real time.
You met the three companions earlier. Watch them meet the butterfly. Grandma Wise, fully here, takes it in as it is — butterfly, in sync. Mr Control, busy with an old fear, turns it into a bat. Exploity, already racing toward what's next, never sees it land. Same butterfly; three different worlds. Presence is letting Grandma Wise look first.
Which is why wishing to be present is not the same as being present. Presence is not a hope; it is an alignment you can feel — and, with practice, choose.
So the next time something crosses your path — a person's word, a flash of anger, an opening you didn't expect — you can slow the crossing down and ask the quiet question at the heart of Somatic Thinking: Is this a butterfly, or have I turned it into a bat?
And sometimes the bat is already in the room — the flash of anger has caught, and meaning has run ahead of you. Here Somatic Thinking shows you the other face of the partnership: you don't only read your body, you can change it, and the feeling changes with it. The clearest teaching of this I know comes from the Prophet ﷺ — a sound tradition: when anger comes to one of you while he is standing, let him sit down; if it leaves him, well and good; and if not, let him lie down. Look at its precision: standing → sitting → lying down, a graded shift in the body's posture that brings the feeling down a degree at a time. You don't put the anger out with more anger at yourself; you change the body, and the mind follows. That is the partnership running both ways: as your body shapes your feeling, you can move your body and your feeling softens. And — like most of Somatic Thinking — it is lived in the body more than it is read.
When you're ready, the door is open.
Where to next?
- Read on: Beyond the Goal →
- Experience it: book a session →
- Become the coach: Somatic Thinking Coaching Education (STCE) →
Somatic Thinking was created by Samer Hassan and first set down in Coaching Presence (Dr. Tünde Erdős, Open University Press / McGraw-Hill, 2021) — a book built on Dr. Erdős's pioneering doctoral research into coaching presence.
