Coaching practices for Somatic Tracking After a Loss

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

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

• I sit with the sensation and nothing bad happens, but my brain never seems to draw the conclusion from it
• It’s not pain exactly
• My scans keep coming back clean but the pain is absolutely real, and it moves around and flares when I’m stressed
• Everyone keeps telling me to move on and get over the loss, but the grief is huge and it won’t go
• I’ll sit and work on this for an hour straight expecting it to fix things, and instead I end up strained and more fixated on the pain than when I started

Practices that may help

1. Follow tracking with explicit safety reassurance
   After a tracking session, offer the brain a direct safety message about what it just observed.
   Somatic Tracking, Made Practical
2. 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
3. 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.
4. 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
5. Treating grief as a form of gratitude
   When something ends and you feel grief, recognise that the grief is proportional to the love — and let it be both.
   Mono no Aware: The Pathos of Things
6. Practice somatic tracking in short, frequent sessions
   Five to ten minutes of tracking several times a day is more effective than long rare sessions.
   Somatic Tracking, Made Practical
7. Deliberately engage loss-oriented work
   Set aside dedicated time to directly face the grief — the emotions, the absence, the meaning of the loss.
   The Dual Process Model of Grief, Made Practical
8. Retell the story of the death and its aftermath
   Construct a coherent, detailed narrative of the loss — including your experience before, during, and after.
   Meaning Reconstruction in Grief, Made Practical
9. Look honestly for what has grown or changed for the better
   Without minimising the loss, notice any growth, change, or perspective that has emerged from it.
   Meaning Reconstruction in Grief, Made Practical
10. Track body sensation (the felt sense)
    Follow raw physical sensation with curiosity — tingling, warmth, pressure — rather than the storyline.
    Somatic Experiencing, Honestly Explained

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