Whole-person coaching.
The part of you that knows first is not the part that talks.
Whole-person coaching is coaching that treats a person as a body, a feeling and a history rather than as a set of goals. In practice that means a session opens in the body before it opens in argument, that what you notice and cannot yet say is treated as information, and that the conversation is allowed to arrive somewhere neither of us planned. The terms people search for it under are transpersonal, somatic and embodiment coaching. This page says what those mean, what actually happens in a session, and where the work stops.
The finding is older than the fashion.
In the nineteen fifties and sixties, working alongside Carl Rogers at the University of Chicago, the philosopher Eugene Gendlin asked a plain question about recorded therapy sessions: what separates the people who change from the people who do not? The answer did not turn out to be the method, the diagnosis, or how articulate anyone was. It was whether the client could get at an unclear, pre-verbal, bodily sense of the thing that had brought them in. Gendlin called it the felt sense, and in 1978 he wrote a book teaching people to find it.
That is the whole argument for opening a session in the body, and it is worth stating carefully, because it is not a claim that the body is wiser than the mind. It is a claim about sequence. The thing you have not resolved is usually available as a sensation before it is available as a sentence, and a conversation that goes straight to the sentence tends to arrive at what you already knew how to say. Five minutes of attention before the talking starts is not a warm-up. It is how the session gets at material the talking would have walked past.
Four ways in, and you choose.
Attention on the breath
The plainest door and the one most people take. No technique to learn, no counting unless you want it. Enough to notice where you actually are before you report where you think you are.
A few lines, read aloud
From your own tradition where you have one, from the conversation where you do not. Reading aloud slows a person down in a way silent reading does not, and it puts a second voice in the room.
Side by side, outdoors
In San Diego this is often the whole session rather than the first five minutes. Difficult things are easier to say walking than across a table, and the body doing something takes the pressure off the face.
Nothing at all
The one people skip and the one that most often changes the session. Sitting for five minutes without filling the room is uncomfortable, and what surfaces in it is usually the thing worth the hour.
Something may arrive that neither of us planned.
Work of this kind sometimes goes somewhere that was not on the agenda. A memory arrives. Something you had decided about yourself turns out to be a sentence somebody else said once. You cry in a session about a decision you thought was logistical. This happens often enough that it should be said in advance rather than discovered.
So it is asked as a question before the work starts, and the answer is allowed to be no. Some people want a bounded, practical engagement about one decision and nothing else, and that is a legitimate thing to want; the four-session Decision format is built for it. What cannot happen is being taken somewhere unannounced. The agreement is that you know the door is there, you decide whether to open it, and you can close it again at any point without that costing you anything in the room.
What this is not.
Coaching works forward from where you are. It does not treat a condition, and it is not a place to process trauma. If what surfaces needs a clinician, that gets said out loud in the session and help finding one is part of the job. Plenty of people do both at once, and that works well.
Somatic therapies are clinical modalities with their own training and their own scope. This is not one of them and no such credential is claimed. The body is in this room because a person is a body, and because of what Gendlin found about where change begins.
A spiritual director accompanies you inside a tradition, usually as someone formed in it and accountable to it. That is a real office and this is not it. Your tradition is welcome in the room and stays yours to interpret; nothing here adjudicates it, and no tradition is supplied to anyone who arrives without one.
A defined arc of long conversations with someone whose job is to hold the structure, ask the question that opens the door, and test what comes out for whether it is real. The body is how the session starts. The rest is dialogue.