The childhood game of peekaboo is more than just a game; it’s one of our first lessons in boundaries and the dance of connection.
As main facilitator, Kate Appleton explains, this simple act of hiding and revealing is how a child learns to regulate proximity, deciding when it feels safe to connect.
As adults, we often lose touch with this intuitive, energetic sense of our boundaries, especially in the “flat screen” world of virtual interactions where rich sensory data is missing.
Her core insight is a foundational principle of all relational work: to truly connect with others, we must first be deeply connected to ourselves and our own physiology.
Our ability to be present with others is anchored in our ability to be present with ourselves.
This principle, that deep connection with others begins with deep connection to self, is a foundational pillar of the Attachment & Somatics Practitioner Certificate Program.
We teach you the precise somatic skills to anchor in your own physiology, so you can show up as a grounded, effective practitioner in any setting.
Doors for the August cohort are open now.
Comment ATTACH and discover how to connect with yourself first, so you can better connect with others.
Credits: This is an excerpt from a class in our Attachment and Somatics Practitioner Certificate Program with our main facilitator, Kate Appleton.
Trauma and Somatics
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Trauma and Somatics teaches coaches, therapists, and other practitioners how to use a Trauma-Informed approach in their businesses.
06/25/2026
We live in a culture that champions self-regulation.
We tell our clients to “just breathe,” meditate, or use an app to manage their anxiety.
But what happens when, for clients with deep attachment wounds, this advice consistently fails?
The truth is, our nervous systems are wired for connection.
We first learn to regulate not on our own, but through the attuned presence of a caregiver.
This is co-regulation, and for those who missed this crucial experience, self-regulation can feel impossible.
Their nervous system has never learned a true baseline of safety.
The Attachment and Somatics Practitioner Training teaches you how to provide this missing experience.
You will learn to become a powerful agent of co-regulation, using your own presence to guide your client’s nervous system toward safety and, from there, build their own lasting capacity for self-regulation.
We are beginning enrollment for our August cohort of Attachment and Somatics.
This higher level container goes beyond understanding the nervous system and attachment styles and teaches the wisdom of the body so you can help facilitate true change inside of your practice.
COMMENT ATTACH to learn more.
When you can track a client’s nervous system in real time, the work stops feeling mysterious.
You can see when someone is approaching overwhelm.
You can feel when shame enters the room.
It’s easier to slow down and redirect, and you sense when to gently return to the edge of what’s difficult.
Instead of pushing through the story, you begin working with the body’s signals.
And when you follow those signals, something important happens.
Clients feel understood.
There’s a relief when the conversation moves away from what their system can’t yet hold.
This is the difference between talking about trauma and working somatically with it.
06/23/2026
Somatics is a word that gets used a lot right now, attached to almost everything in the healing space. The definition I work from is simple.
Soma is a Greek word for the living body, the body as you experience it from the inside, not as an object you look at from the outside. Somatics is the field that explores working with that living process.
Most people expect somatic work to be only about processing trauma. That makes sense. Trauma is one of the biggest obstructions we carry. But the destination of this work isn’t just to become less traumatized. It’s to become more alive.
The work isn’t catharsis. It isn’t forcing a release.
It’s the slow, patient process of helping a system build the capacity it didn’t have when the overwhelming thing happened so the body can finally do what it was trying to do all along.
Most of your clients were never taught to turn toward what is difficult. They were taught to manage it and to override it.
Our culture values pushing through and getting back to high functioning as quickly as possible.
And so the sadness sits in the background of our lives, not gone. Just waiting for release.
The body does not forget what the mind refuses to feel. It holds the unprocessed energy of our experiences as tension, as chronic pain, as the low-grade sense that something is always slightly wrong.
We mistake the management of feeling for the absence of it.
But the body has its own intelligence and that intelligence knows that emotion is not a problem to be solved. It is a process to be completed.
Grief that moves through the body does not leave the same mark as grief that is held back.
The capacity to feel is not a vulnerability. It is the whole point.
06/18/2026
Here’s a practice you can try in your very next session.
When a session begins, most clients haven’t arrived in their body yet. They’ve come from traffic, from a difficult conversation, from a morning that didn’t go the way they planned. And when you invite them to settle in, what often happens is that they orient to the room with their eyes but not with their nervous system.
Orienting is something the nervous system does on its own when it feels safe enough to look around. The eyes move slowly. The head turns. The breath finds a little more room. The body is doing something specific in those moments: it’s checking whether it’s okay to be here.
Most of us do this so quickly, and so automatically, that we stop noticing it happens at all.
The practice is simple.
Before you begin the content of a session, slow your gaze around the room. Let your eyes move without agenda, noticing what’s actually there rather than what you expect to see. Let them land somewhere and rest. Then notice what changes in your body when you do.
Invite your client to do the same.
You don’t need to explain the neuroscience.
You just need to slow down enough to let the room become real for both of you.
Try it in your own body before you guide anyone else through it. That’s how any somatic practice starts to take root.
I took a trip down memory lane last night and found this Gem of a video from the first free challenge I created back in 2018.
Oh how I love going back and watching myself in videos like these.
No one starts out comfortable on camera. I was incredibly nervous, had never done something like this before, and used my cellphone for these videos.
I had a cheap workshop light, one of those with the silver aluminum and the clip on the back, that I used for this video in two places. One in front and one as a backlight. I also used a black stretched piece of cloth for that background on the wall.
I edited the whole thing myself, made the backing track, and pushed myself hard to finish the 7 day challenge.
No one bought the program that I offered at the end. Not one person.
No one.
But the publicity I created on social media taking about the things I was teaching, brought in a few interested private clients who became long term clients.
That momentum turned into over $100k over the course of a year from various 1:1 clients. Completely unexpectedly.
We can’t know what will come of us continuing to take another step forward, until we actually take the step.
Keep going.
Just keep going.
The most unexpected things happen when we put ourselves out there.
06/17/2026
The in-between is not a problem to solve but instead the most important phase of the work you do.
Keleman called it the middle ground, the unformed space between what was and what’s coming. It has its own intelligence and it asks for something different from you than competence or answers or technique.
It asks for the capacity to be present to what is not yet ready to move.
The practitioner who can tolerate the middle ground in themselves is the one who can hold it for their clients.
That is not a small thing but it may be the most important.
If you work with high performers as clients, they are often looking for something different with you than most.
These types of clients aren’t broken.
They’re high achievers. Analytical and strong, driven in ways a lot of people are not.
They’ve done the work and many have built something real, but they’re still hitting the same ceiling.
Many reference the last 5%.
That last 5% is different from everything that came before it.
You can’t think your way there and you can’t discipline your way to it.
It isn’t a strategy problem that can be solved with a plan but instead, it’s almost always something older.
A pattern the body learned before the person had a choice about it. Something that made sense once and is now the invisible ceiling on everything they’re trying to reach.
That’s where the somatic work that I do and teach lives.
Not in the 95% that willpower can touch. In the part that requires something different, often slower, maybe unconventional, but everlasting.
06/15/2026
We’re almost halfway through the year and for a lot of your clients, that means reckoning with the things that were supposed to be different by now.
The version of themselves they were going to become starting January first.
But the nervous system doesn’t reorganize because your clients decided it should.
It reorganizes through experience. Through repeated contact with something different, through enough safety and enough time to let old patterns release and new ones stabilize.
The modern world wants to rush this into a 12-week container, but that process is slow and nonlinear and it doesn’t care about the calendar.
The patterns your clients are still carrying right now, the ones that haven’t shifted despite their genuine effort, those patterns make sense.
They formed for a reason. They helped someone survive their particular history, and they won’t change just because the year is half over and the goal is still unmet.
What actually supports change is different from what the culture sells.
It starts with curiosity about what the existing pattern is doing, what problem it’s solving, and what it would cost to let it go.
It builds capacity slowly, starting from where the person actually is rather than where they think they should be.
It makes room for the messy middle of genuine reorganization, the confusion and the setbacks and the moments of feeling worse before feeling better.
That’s built through a relationship with the body, and it’s available right now, in the middle of the year, to you and your clients, exactly where you are.
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