What is Embodiment Coaching?
Embodiment Coaching is a lot like Life Coaching. You come to me with certain challenges, frustrations, goals and dreams, and it’s my job to help you discover (or uncover, rather) how to work through those challenges to get closer to those dreams.
Through meaningful dialogue and insightful questions, a good life coach will help you to see your current perspective on things and the results you’re getting, so that you can better understand what needs to change and how to change it.
Now more than ever, a good life coach is sensitive to how trauma and past experiences are affecting you and can help you process and integrate some of those experiences to create a new story, a new future that is brighter and filled with more possibility.
A good life coach encourages you, meets you where you are, and is solutions focused.
With embodiment coaching, we achieve all of this by working directly with the body.
How does it work?
My primary method of coaching is through a ground-breaking technique called UZAZU Embodied Intelligence.
UZAZU Embodied Intelligence is a system designed to help people make the connection between the mind (thoughts, beliefs, what we are aware of) and the body (nervous system, how we physically and energetically respond to things) so that you can navigate the highs and lows of life more easily.
It does this through a series of 9 core postures that combine the three physical dimensions of being and are accompanied by vowel sounds that deepen the physical and energetic experience inside each posture.
Each posture makes physical (and thus increases our embodied awareness) these essential modes of being that we engage in and relate to as humans:
Embodied Experience (Feeling your feelings and sensations)
Mindful Self-Compassion (Holding non-judgemental space for our feelings and sensations)
Self-Agency (Taking action)
Self-Esteem (Feeling good about our actions)
Supportive Connection (being in relationship to one other person)
Adaptive Communion (being in relationship to a group or whole)
Purposeful Contribution (what you offer to the world)
Co-Creative Engagement (how you collaborate with others and the world around you to create something bigger)
We discover together whether you are showing up to these modes in a balanced or unbalanced way.
Balance is largely measured by how our nervous system responds to each posture, and whether we find ourselves:
Over-Activating- doing something to an extreme, flooded with sensation
Or
Under-Activating- not doing something enough, numbed to sensation
Once we have a read on how you’re showing up, we use a variety of movements, breath, and postural flow practices to re-balance- the nervous system returns to a calm but alert state. We also work with provocations- saying a statement out loud and tracking how you physically, mentally, and emotionally react to it. This helps us both understand and shift the underlying tensions or limiting beliefs at play.
Finally, UZAZU takes into account the context and area of life these balances and imbalances show up, so that the work doesn’t become arbitrary or hypothetical, but that it directly relates to your real life and your real challenges.
Through an overarching change process, we zero in on where exactly you are feeling these imbalances:
Getting over activated or triggered when having a disagreement with your mother
Feeling under activated or unmotivated to start that passion project
Sensing your inner critic surface when you don’t feel like you’ve done your best at work
Being enmeshed with a new romantic partner
Feeling anxiety about talking to your intimidating boss
We use the UZAZU protocols to cultivate a more balanced response to these things.
We then rehearse showing up in a more balanced way the next time we find ourselves in these situations.
It is a highly practical, creative, and affective framework for learning more about your own body/mind intelligence. It empowers you to choose how you respond to things so that you can feel less helpless, and it’s a method for re-connecting with yourself and others in profoundly beautiful ways.
Testimonials
“From our initial communication and then through the sessions, Ashley’s been a wonder to work with over this last year.
Instead of a prescribed and rigid system, she took the time to listen to me and where I’ve been, offering options on where to begin exploring and encouraging me to proceed at a pace that worked for me. As such, I’ve never felt rushed, instead having the space to build on what I’ve resonated with the most, all while being seen and being able to relate to someone else.
It’s been such an “eye opener” to practice UZAZU, I’ve been able to better access various emotions and further understand their physical cues, all thanks to various postures and vowel sounds which form part of the practice itself. It’s not something I’ve come across before, I mean the emotions, totally, but as a practice, it really stands out from anything else I’ve ever done.
In other practices, emotions are usually something to be set aside or ignored, whereas Uzazu’s gentle questioning and exploration really facilitated a communion with the energies I’ve often found it hard to take the lid off after quickly bottling them up.
Thanks to this practice, I’ve been able to better encompass various elements at once, for example self compassion along with the space to express sadness.
It really has helped me in an important way, in times of stress and severe depression it’s lit a path I can follow back to myself, a path built with the very things I was so sorely missing after these last few years of isolation and withdrawal.
Ashley’s guidance has really helped me to find my inner brightness again, to know that even if things are difficult, the act of making time for myself, really does help to bring colour back into my life and interactions with others.
I would wholeheartedly recommend Ashley and her UZAZU Embodied Intelligence practice to anyone in the same boat.”
Alex Ireton
London
