Impactful Integration (Part Three): AI-Generated Visual Metaphors for Sustainable Change in Coaching - Case Study One
Using AI-generated images to support clients in their integration after a somatic coaching session.
For the past few months, I have been working on a project using AI-generated images to support clients in their integration after a somatic coaching session.
Catch up on Part 1 and Part 2 where I cover the background of the project, the symbolic resonance of visual metaphors and why integration is such a key part of the coaching process.
This is Part 3, and our first case study. Introducing Ruth (not her real name) and Reframing Time.
Case Study One: Reframing Time
Ruth came to a session with the question: ‘How can I manage my time running a business and still be able to nurture my relationships?’ She was working from home which meant the boundaries between work and homelife were blurring. She had a feeling of ‘I’m not doing enough for either my work or my relationships, feels like I’m half-assing both!’.
By the end of this process, the very concept of time and how she uses it was transformed. Ruth found a way to approach time in a playful way. This had a profound impact on her balancing life.
Let’s see how the session unfolded…
I offered some ‘Focussing’.
Developed by psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin, Focussing is a body-oriented coaching tool where the client closes their eyes and the coach leads them in a body scan. (This is where the client is invited to bring attention to their feet, then their legs, then the support of the chair beneath them, then up their spine, down their arms and around the rest of the body.) After this body scan, the client focusses on any internal sensations that arise. The client tries to name these ‘felt senses’, without meaning making, and we follow them. The aim is to understand how these sensations are connected to their emotional state or life situation. We dig to find the story behind the story which can be told by these subtle clues in sensations in the body.
Clients use descriptive language (‘fizzing, heaviness like a weight, warmth rising’ etc.) to get curious about the sensations. By naming the sensations this helps the client ‘disidentify’ with them. They aren’t heavy, they are sensing something in them that is heavy. A subtle distinction but it invites a sense of lightness to the exploration and permits the client to stay experimental.
The client listens to the data held in their body and this can lead to insights in how they view their situation, or even resolutions to problems.
It’s always a surprisingly informative process when the client is in conversation with their body. And for some it becomes very visual.
So there was Ruth asking her body ‘how can I manage my time?’, and she was following some vibrations moving up her body into her throat. She arrived at an image of a grey ball in her throat that she wanted to cough up. Similar to a cat trying to expel a furball. At this she said ‘the problem isn’t time, it’s how I feel around time.’ An important distinction, a shift in understanding was happening.
From there she recognised the frustration at not seeing results quickly enough in her work and considered putting boundaries in her calendar. But the question ‘where is this from?’ appeared. Interestingly, the idea of prioritising her homelife (as her partner would have liked her to) felt like pressure. And she exclaimed ‘Work — that is my priority!’
She saw the ball in her throat being coughed up and turning into a burst of colours. ‘It’s playful and joyful,’ she smiled. She knew now that she wasn’t allowing herself to focus on what she actually wanted to prioritise… which was work. Galvanised, she was going to take some steps to remove some social commitments, and speak to her partner about this chapter of her life being less about socialising and more about diving deep into her business.
I asked Ruth’s permission to create an image for her and we re-met a few weeks later for me to show it to her.
Ruth’s Somatic Integration Visual Session
Ruth recalled that after the session, “time felt different.” She had been suffering from a flu for example and usually she’d be anxious that resting meant she couldn’t work. But now she attended to her snotty nose and took the time to nap with less worry. Time seemed to feel more easeful (a word us Somatic Coaches love to tap into!) and not as constrictive, “The pressure that came with time was a lot less. I felt more relaxed, like the concept of time had changed in my mind.”
(She noted that in a breathwork session in the following days she actually kept coughing, like the metaphorical furball stuck in her throat was giving her a little reminder. Gleefully she gave into these little coughs, with a knowing nod of thanks to her body.)
I asked Ruth to come into some mindful presence in her body. Bringing her awareness to her:
interoception (internal sensations)
proprioception (her body in relation to the space it’s in including its posture)
exteroception (how she’s receiving the world through her senses of sight, sound, taste, touch and smell).
I then pulled up the image.
I had created it from the words that she spoke during her initial session. Utilising the careful descriptions of the balls, the colours and time. I also used my intuition on what style and features to include. For example, Ruth wears thick red-framed glasses and she smiled a lot during her Focussing. I hoped with this personal anchoring, and the sense of joy, she would further relate with the image which would aid her coaching process.
“Oh my god. I really resonate with the rainbow felt balls… with how they are exploding. I love how the clock fades out.”
Ruth initially sensed an urgency to get the ball in the throat out of her. She described it as a yuckiness. But she started to see how, “I’m more joyful when it’s out” and that the lines from the ball in the throat are like arteries. Even though this ball is heavy and she doesn’t want it there it’s connected to her and what’s happening around her.
Ruth, using her interoception, focussed her attention on her body and noticed a spaciousness in her stomach. “I see the little balls coming out of the space which felt empty in my belly. It feels pleasurable.”
I invited her to savour that. As a body-oriented coach, I encourage clients to find and anchor pleasurable signals from the body as a route to healing. A way to embed new learnings, a place to go back to outside of the coaching room. A Resource.
“It now feels like it’s moving around, little balls everywhere. It’s kind of fun.” she smiled. I invited her to follow the fun. “I love that!” she exclaimed.
Ruth was translating her visual representation into an embodied experience, and now she connected it to memory. “Being with the fun I used to have as a child, that quality of just being and playing and being curious of the fun that unfolds without trying.”
She began to connect this with her concept of time, “The quality of time… now I’m looking at the inner child quality. Time still feels spacious. When I’m having fun I don’t care about time.” She was realising the concept of time as more flexible than the rigid pressure she was feeling before. Time stands still when you are having fun.
A mantra popped out, “It’s not that serious… follow the fun!”
She described something clicking into place. A shift of sensation. She noted that she didn’t remember the details of our first session but now seeing the image she said, “It was like it was literally trying to tell me something which I couldn’t access before. It’s an integration of the ‘felt sense’ I had before.”
“Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about." Oscar Wilde.
Ruth’s profound shift
“I realise how serious I am in my business. But in my life I’m not like that! There’s an injection of social expectation in the business world to be serious. But I need this fun! Follow the fun in my business which will help me ‘still’ the time.”
She noted that after her first session she walked away with a new concept of time and wanting to prioritise her business but this brought it to another level. “I actually feel the experience of fun with the little balls in my body and my inner child playing.”
The final resonant detail was the wisps of clouds that appeared, “I love the clouds at the bottom, so interesting, seems like the fuzziness of it all is a sense of the dreaminess.” It was symbolic to Ruth of a ‘higher self’. The clouds were dreamlike and, “in a dream things happen more naturally” she said. Speaking of how you don’t question the weird way things are in dream landscapes. The clouds being linked to the explosive fun of the balls was connecting the idea of Ruth’s higher self also being able to have fun.
The power of co-creative integration
Ruth explained that if she had done some artwork herself she would have been tied up in resistance to her creative process. By me creating the image for her, using her words and the felt senses I was left with following her session, it removed this resistant factor for her.
This, in any event, is still a co-created process. I couldn’t make the image without Ruth, and Ruth couldn’t integrate in the way she did without me making the image. It’s not better or worse than the client doing the art themselves, it’s just different. Instead of sole-integration it’s a method of continuing the co-regulation between client and coach in the integration phase of Ruth’s learning process.
Ruth was left feeling witnessed in her process on a much deeper level. She felt less alone, because I journeyed with her during her integration.
Ruth also reported that in the week following this session she felt less restricted around time, even making her calendar more colourful and adding in a block for ‘play time’. Play time could include some movement or simply a moment to tap into that childlike fun bouncing around in her belly.
Taking her learning into her business world, “I feel a sense of natural unfolding in the way my days go now and to, sometimes, trust that inner child more as a CEO :)” Ruth was expanding her notion of what a CEO had to be. Unpacking an outdated and restrictive definition of ‘boss’. What if CEO Ruth led with a sense of childlike curiosity in her strategic decision making? What new avenues could emerge then?
Ruth now had an exciting new outlook on managing her business.
Stay tuned for the next case studies, following four more clients and the co-creation of their Somatic Integration Visuals.
Part 4: Case study 2 — Earth Goddess
Part 5: Case study 3 — Swarming Flies
Part 6: Case study 4 — At a Crossroads
Part 7: Case study 5 — The Artist’s Store Room
Just itching to try this out?? You can book a somatic coaching session with me via this link: So you want to get somatic?
Lastly but by no means leastly… I have been invited to showcase the Somatic Integration Visuals, and their related case studies, at the upcoming DAR Fest exhibition in Brussels from 1–25 Feb 2024 at the Octopus Heart Center.
Happen to be in Belgium? Come check it out! Event details are here. You can catch me doing a live Q&A on 17 Feb at 5.30pm.
Somatic Integration Visuals - Glossary
Block: Refers to the ‘issue’ (or area of the client’s life or specific problem) that the client is stuck on. Something the client can’t seem to move past, no matter what they try.
Bodymind: We are integrated neuro-psycho-biological beings! in somatic modalities we don’t treat the conceptual thinky mind as separate from the embodied experience of life. We invite our clients to show up as an integrated whole.
Embodied Self-awareness: The holistic understanding of yourself through physical sensations and experiences of the body. Being conscious of your body's movements, feelings, and presence in space, and recognising how these physical sensations relate to your emotions, thoughts, and overall sense of self.
Focussing: A body-oriented coaching tool the client is invited to focus on any internal sensations that arise. The client names these ‘felt senses’, without meaning making. The aim is to understand how these sensations are connected to their emotional state or life situation. We dig to find the story behind the story which can be told by these subtle clues in sensations in the body. By naming the sensations this helps the client ‘disidentify’ with them. The client listens to the data held in their body and this can lead to insights in how they view their situation, or even resolutions to problems.
Integration: intentional incorporation of new insights into your lived experience. It isn’t necessarily an action-based process. It’s more about incorporating, merging with, activating, embedding, unifying and even empowering something you are newly learning about yourself. In a holistic and intentional way. It’s ‘being with’ this new understanding and letting it, on an embodied level, sink into your being.
Resource: These are invaluable in the process of improving your embodied self-awareness. Resources can be things like going to nature, speaking with a good friend, dancing, breathing, carving alone time, journaling. Resources can also be internal felt senses that are resourceful for you (we can gather these when we do more somatic activities and healing).