I've been moving around a lot these last few months.
Barcelona to Madrid to Mallorca, and now here in Scotland, visiting the lands of my ancestors and finding something unexpected.
As I move through these landscapes, I keep thinking about what shapes us. Often without our awareness.
In the somatic coaching work I do, we have a term for this: Sites of Shaping.*
These are the places and structures that have conditioned us: family of origin, academic institutions, workplaces, governmental systems, and the -isms woven through the cultures we inhabit. They land in the body. They become posture, tension, habit, reflex. The way you hold your shoulders in a meeting. The feeling that you can't say no. The voice that stays small even when you have something to say.
Most coaching never touches this layer, staying at the level of mindset, goals, strategy. But the body is already holding the whole story.
And until we include that, we're only working with part of you.
What the land does to us
Moving through such different landscapes and cultures these last months, what strikes me is how much the land shapes us, and how rarely we notice. Like air. Like the water we swim in. It's only in the contrast, stepping from one place or culture into another, that it becomes more visible.
The quality of the light. The length of the days. The pace at which people move through a street. The weather you live in, and what it calls your body to do. What the land grows, and how food is made from it. The kind of architecture built to shelter from the elements. Whether nature is close enough to touch or something you have to drive to find. Whether the elements contribute to a culture that says slow down, you belong here, we take care of each other, or one that quietly insists you keep moving, keep producing, keep performing.
In Spain, it gets impossibly hot in the middle of the day. The siesta isn't laziness; it's the body in an intelligent relationship with its environment. In Scotland, the environment is harsher: colder, wetter, less forgiving, with unpredictable weather. And yet what I keep noticing is how much the culture tends to each other. Free organic tampons in almost every public bathroom. British Sign Language on videos in touristic places. Accessibility conversations woven into public spaces as a matter of course, not afterthought. As if the difficulty of the climate taught something about the necessity of collective care.
Here in Scotland, I feel something softening within me. Something in the quality of the light, the beauty of the land, the kindness of the people. My nervous system responds and softens before I've decided anything.
Shape is literal
This is what I mean when I talk about shape. Not just the shape of an idea or a goal, but the literal physical shape of a body that has been formed by everything it's moved through. The postures we hold, the way our tissues carry tension, where our eyes go, how our voice sounds when we feel safe versus when we don't.
We can change shape. That's the work, what I get to do with clients, and what I'm doing myself right now. But first, we have to see what shaped us.
An invitation
I wonder: what are the Sites of Shaping in your own life that you rarely stop to name?
The landscape you grew up in. The institutions that formed you. The culture that told you, quietly and consistently, who to be.
How is it still shaping you, right now?
I'd love to hear from you. Just hit reply and share what comes up.
Be well,
ElizaBeth
* The term Sites of Shaping comes from my training at the Strozzi Institute.