Think of the last time your body knew something before you did. You walked into a room and your shoulders rose before anyone said a word. A name came back the moment you stopped chasing it. You "had a feeling" about a decision you couldn't yet explain — and you were right.
That isn't a passing mood. That is your body doing what it has never stopped doing: sensing, and making meaning, faster and more honestly than thought.
Somatic Thinking is the practice of living in partnership with that body — letting it sense, and trusting what it senses, until presence becomes your ordinary state rather than a rare, lucky moment. Soma is the Greek word for the body. We are, each of us, meaning-making creatures who meet life through a physical form. Modern research has a name for the heart of this: embodied cognition — the finding that the body shapes the mind, not only the other way around. Somatic Thinking is both a philosophy and a coaching method built on that truth.
Here is the quiet mechanism. In every moment you receive life through your body, make sense of it inside, then act back into the world through your body again. The body is the bridge between your inner world and the outer one. We can trace the crossing in six steps: you sense, you perceive, you give it meaning, ideas and emotions form, you decide, and you act. Most of us live only at the two ends — the first sensation and the final act — and skip, unaware, over everything between. Somatic Thinking slows the crossing down until you can feel each step. (How a single butterfly teaches the whole cycle has a post of its own. →)
And once you slow it down, you notice you are rarely alone in there. Three companions shape how you meet any moment.
A fair warning first — and let me give it to you myself, as the one who made them. I call these three the Experience Shapers — or your temporal perspectives, if you prefer the technical name. When I created them, what mattered to me most was that even my own children could understand them. So don't be surprised if their names make you smile — or even laugh.
Three states that shape your experience
Exploity — tilted toward the future
Always leans forward, toward what's next — the plans, the possibilities, the thing you're rushing to. It lives in the future.
Mr Control — tilted toward the past
Holds the line on what you already know — what's right, what's certain, what worked before. It lives in the past.
Grandma Wise — anchored in the present
Simply, fully here — not expecting, not defending, only sensing what is actually in front of it. She lives in the present and embodies presence.
None of the three is the enemy; you need all of them. Psychologists have long mapped how we live across past, present, and future; Somatic Thinking gives those three a face and a body — and shows you how to let Grandma Wise lead when it matters most. Presence, in the end, is not silencing the other two. It is knowing which one is speaking — and choosing.
This is what Somatic Thinking is for: not a technique you perform, but a capacity you recover — sensing more clearly, meeting your life more honestly, and regaining an old, trusted companion you were taught to overlook: your body.
When you're ready, the door is open.
Where to next?
- Read on: What a Somatic Thinking Session Is Really Like →
- Experience it: book a session →
- Become the coach: explore the 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.
