Right after completing the Somatic Experiencing training, I visited Montserrat, Catalunya, to rest and integrate.
Montserrat is a mountain home to a Benedictine monastery over 1,000 years old, a Black Madonna statue from 880, ermitas tucked into the rock face, hiking paths, and climbing routes that seem to go straight up. It's just outside Barcelona, and if you ever make it there, it's well worth a day trip or more.
One afternoon I was making my way up to a viewpoint at the top. I say "making my way" deliberately, because what I found wasn't one clear trail. My map showed a single route. What existed on the mountain was something far more alive: a web of intersecting paths, some of them goat trails, some of them water routes, all of them weaving in and out of each other, all of them eventually arriving at the same lookout.
What I've noticed hiking here in Spain with friends is this. We start at the same place, we end at the same place, and the path each of us takes to get there is different. What looks like one route on a map is actually many smaller, intersecting routes.
To me, this is a beautiful metaphor for what it means to be human.
We're all born. We all die. We share some trajectory with the people around us, maybe even some destinations. But we are not designed to get there the same way.
We belong in the group. And we each walk our own path.
Trusting your own path tends to become urgent when the map you've been following stops working. When it no longer matches where you are, or where you need or want to go.
The tension most of us carry isn't between belonging and individuality. It's not knowing how to have both at once. So we either lose ourselves trying to fit in, or we isolate trying to stay true to ourselves. Neither feels quite right, because neither is the whole picture.
Where somatic work changes things
Your body has always known your path. Not as a grand plan, but as a felt sense. A yes that lands differently than a performed yes. A no that lives in your chest before your mind catches up. A pull toward something you can't yet name but can't ignore either.
When you learn to listen to that — and I mean really listen, not just notice and override — you stop needing the map to tell you which trail is yours. You start to trust your own navigation. And paradoxically, that's when connection stops costing you yourself.
You can be in the group and remain yourself. Rooted and in relationship. Present and connected, yet unique.
This is exactly what I hold space for in my somatic coaching work. Two things, really, that belong together: completing what's unfinished in the body, so you're not navigating your future from the residue of your past, and learning to trust the felt sense that knows which path is yours.