Coaching practices for Somatic Resource

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Somatic Resource, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• When everything in me feels keyed-up and raw, I keep waiting to feel actually good somewhere before I dare go near the hard feeling
• When something hurts inside, I get pulled straight into the story of why
• I’m stuck endlessly in my head
• My scans keep coming back clean but the pain is absolutely real, and it moves around and flares when I’m stressed
• I can talk about my feelings all day from the neck up, but the real stuff seems to be locked in my body

Practices that may help

1. Find your resource (a comfortable or neutral body sensation)
   Before approaching any difficult sensation, locate a place in your body that feels okay or neutral right now.
   Pendulation, Made Practical
2. Track the felt sense during pendulation
   As you move between resource and difficulty, notice how each sensation changes in quality — this tracking is the therapy.
   Pendulation, Made Practical
3. Somatic Experiencing, Honestly Explained
   Somatic Experiencing, developed by Peter Levine, proposes that overwhelming experience leaves incomplete survival energy "stuck" in the body, and that gently completing and discharging that activation — in small, titrated doses, moving between activation and calm (pendulation) — helps the nervous system settle. The body-awareness skills it teaches are low-risk and increasingly studied, but the evidence base is still emerging and the "stored energy" model is a clinical theory, not established physiology. These are self-regulation skills; trauma work belongs with a trained professional.
4. Somatic Tracking, Made Practical
   Somatic tracking, developed by Alan Gordon as the central technique of Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT), involves observing bodily sensations — especially pain — with open, curious, non-fearful attention. The goal is to change the brain’s interpretation of safe signals from dangerous to neutral, which can reduce or eliminate neuroplastic pain. A 2021 randomized controlled trial (the BOULDER study) found PRT produced significant pain reduction vs placebo and usual care for chronic back pain, with 66% of PRT participants reporting being pain-free or nearly pain-free.
5. Track body sensation (the felt sense)
   Follow raw physical sensation with curiosity — tingling, warmth, pressure — rather than the storyline.
   Somatic Experiencing, Honestly Explained
6. Identify whether pain is likely neuroplastic
   Before practicing somatic tracking, determine whether the pain fits the profile of brain-generated rather than structural pain.
   Somatic Tracking, Made Practical
7. Tracking shadow material through the body
   Notice where in the body suppressed reactions live — tension, constriction, or deadness are somatic shadow clues.
   Shadow Work
8. Pendulation, Made Practical
   Pendulation is a Somatic Experiencing term for the deliberate oscillation between a difficult or activated body sensation and a neutral or comfortable resource — a place in the body that feels okay right now. Moving back and forth between the two, rather than staying fixed in the difficult sensation, trains the nervous system to tolerate distress in small doses and recover, gradually widening the window of tolerance. The approach is established clinical practice in SE; large RCT evidence specific to pendulation is limited.
9. Use breath as a built-in resource during pendulation
   Let the exhale and the feeling of the breath serve as the resource when no comfortable body area is available.
   Pendulation, Made Practical
10. Apply somatic tracking to difficult emotions as well as pain
    The same curious, non-fearful attention that retrains pain responses can be applied to emotional sensations in the body.
    Somatic Tracking, Made Practical

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