The Night I Asked AI to Be My Somatic Coach

On shortcuts, small doses, and why you don't have to finish it tonight

Over a year ago, near the beginning of my somatic journey, I was learning how to explore sensation and hold space for whatever came up. My body had started talking to me more, which I think happens to a lot of people once they finally make some room and it feels safe enough to speak up. But, because I was much newer to this work, I wasn't great at reading the signs yet, unless I happened to be in just the right frame of mind.

One Sunday evening I thought I was coming down with a cold. My throat had that feeling where you notice it every time you swallow, and I wondered if it was starting to swell a little. I went into my bedroom to lie down for a minute, and the moment I lay down, I knew. Oh no, this isn't a sickness. This is activation.

There was no obvious reason for it. I hadn't had a hard conversation or gotten my feelings hurt. It just started bubbling up, and I didn't know what to do with it. I was a little nervous: What is this? What do I do with this? How do I manage it? And somewhere underneath all of that was the sense that there was a right way to handle this, and I didn't want to get it wrong.

The session I set up on my phone

My first instinct was to fix it. I wanted the energy to move through and be done. So I picked up my phone, opened ChatGPT, and set it all up. I want you to be a Somatic Experiencing practitioner. Walk me through a session.

And honestly, it was good at it. It asked the questions and did the things a session does, and a lot of energy started moving. I was crying. There was activation through my belly and my chest and my throat, wave after wave of it. I thought Oh, this is great! I'm really making some progress here. How easy is this?!

Here's what I didn't see at the time. I had a subconscious goal for that session, and the goal was to "get to the bottom of it." Meaning, I wanted to feel clear. I wanted to scan my body and find no activation anywhere, because that would mean the session had been "successful." But because I was working with a bot, I was the one setting the pace (which isn't the client's job). Every time something moved, there was more underneath it, and the tool kept going deeper and deeper into the work, and I stayed along for the ride.

Then I got up off the bed 🥴

When I finally got up off my bed, I felt so groggy. The way I described it to my husband was, "Whoa, I feel like I just got hit by a car." It was about 7:30 at night and all I could think was that I needed to go to bed, so that's what I did.

The next morning I woke up feeling worse. I called my somatic massage therapist, the person who works with me weekly, and she didn't answer. To be honest, I was a little relieved, and I knew why. In my body I knew I'd been trying to shortcut something. 🫣 She'd told me this process takes time and more patience than I was willing to give it, and I'd tried to hurry it up. Like I was the one who knew better. 🙄

So I did what I'd learned to do when I'd felt this way before on a much smaller scale. It was a Monday, which is not a great day for me to take it easy because my Mondays are usually full, but I cleared my calendar. I got in a hot bath, I walked a lot, I drank tons of water, and I was really gentle with myself. By the late afternoon things felt a little less groggy, but it was still really sluggish and heavy.

"What did you do?"

I saw her on Thursday. The first thing she said was, "What did you do?" I hadn't told her anything yet. In fact, I hadn't even gotten on her table yet. She could just feel something had dramatically shifted.

So I told her the whole thing. She listened, and then she said something I've thought about many times since: "So now we know AI doesn't have the ability to gauge when somebody is at their capacity to do the work." She explained that when you kick up a lot of energy and it's too big to move through safely, it has to go somewhere.

Words are hard for energy sometimes, so bear with me here as I try my best to describe what happened. It felt like all of that energy had been stirred up and then dumped into my lower body. Everything felt draggy and slow. I was foggy and easily distracted, heavy, achy and tired, with a restless edge that mostly showed up as not being able to focus on anything for long. It took about a month, with her help, before all of it worked its way through.

Why AI kept going

I was telling the tool what was happening the whole time. I described the crying, the belly, the chest, the throat. It heard every word, and it still kept going deeper, because words were all it had to go on. Nothing in it could tell in any way that my body was done a long time before I stopped.

That's the part another human being brings. When someone is attuned to you and skilled at somatic work, they can sense where your energy is and how much you're holding, sometimes before you can. There have been sessions where I can feel what my client is feeling. We have so much language that happens between each other that isn't verbal. We have the ability to pick up on super subtle cues like facial expression, tension, pacing of the breath, cadence of speech. Energy itself can be felt.

A tool that only follows your words can't do that. And that Sunday, I couldn't do it for myself either.

Safety is what matters in the moment

Here's the truth: nervous system change happens in small doses. Most of the time it happens slowly, and it has to happen with safety. That's frustrating for a lot of us, me included, because we love a fast pace and instant answers, and so often we bring our own picture of what success is supposed to feel like. That Sunday my picture was relief, and I was willing to push right past my body to get it.

Sometimes there's activation just in not knowing how the energy is going to resolve. That doesn't mean you can't hold safety and stay present right now. In the moment, safety is what matters. That might look like staying with your breath, titrating or pendulating in and out of the experience so you don't get flooded by it, and staying grounded in your body and in what's happening. These are all ways we learn to create safety in ourselves. When we can do that, we can stay as long as we need to, whether that's 30 seconds, a couple of minutes, or a week or longer, depending on how deep the pattern goes and what else is going on.

Peter Levine's work describes this kind of energy as a protective response that never got the chance to finish its cycle. When you can stay with it from a place of safety, it finally gets to complete, instead of staying lodged in the body.

The story is none of your business

The other thing we love to do, and I do it right alongside my clients, is search for meaning. We all want to know why is this happening?! We think a clear answer will get us to a resolution faster or keep it from happening again. A sensation in the body usually comes with a story attached. Sometimes the story is accurate and sometimes it isn't, and the truth is it doesn't matter much either way. Some days I'll tell myself, it's none of your business. Just stay with this. Because whether the story is true isn't the point. The felt sense and safety are what matter, and as long as you can stay with those, the energy can move through.

What I know now

In my sessions with clients, sometimes the energy completes itself. There's an obvious landing, a resolution you can both feel. And sometimes there isn't. When I was newer at this, a session without that landing felt like I'd failed as a coach.

What I've learned over time is that nothing has gone wrong. You can't dictate when something moves or how it shifts. Sometimes it takes three or four sessions before a person feels that resolution. The work in the meantime is staying aware and helping them create safety for themselves while it's still unfinished, so they can learn to feel safe in their own body through the whole experience, landing or no landing.

That's exactly what I couldn't do for myself that Sunday. I was so new. (And I have so much love and compassion for myself then AND now as I continue to grow in my own practice!) These days I would be gentle with myself, ask a few curious questions, do a body map, or slow down into felt sense. I had some of the tools, but what I also had was a lot of expectation and judgment that prevented me from using these wisely. If I could sit down next to the version of me lying on that bed, I'd tell her this: Safety is what matters right now. You can stay with this. Don't make it complicated, and you don't have to finish anything tonight.

A word about AI

I want to be clear that I'm not anti-AI. I use it in my business, there are things it makes so much easier for me, and I think it's a fantastic tool. We just have to be careful how we use it. AI can't sense you. It can't feel when you've reached your limit, so it can't be the one holding the session.

What this has to do with your business

I see versions of that Sunday night in business all the time, and it looks different for each of us. When something feels shaky, you add more hours and more of yourself. You’re on to the next program or strategy before the last one has had time to settle. You’re still delivering, but the wins aren’t really landing and you feel numb. You say yes to all the things before you’ve checked whether you mean it.

None of this means you should want less or slow down. Go after the big launch and the new level! These patterns just tend to take over when what’s happening is bigger than what your body has room to hold right now.

Your business can only grow as far as your capacity allows. And the good news is that capacity can grow, in small doses, the same way it did for me after that Sunday.

Find your pattern

When something big bubbles up in your body, each of us has a pattern we reach for to get out from under it. That Sunday, mine was to push through and get it finished. Yours might look completely different.

I made a short quiz to help you find yours. Take Find My Pattern, and the next time something stirs without warning, see if you can let safety lead instead of the finish line.

Janeen Alley is a somatic business coach, the creator of Safe to Soar: The Body-Led Breakthrough, and the voice behind The Regulated Edge. She helps high-capacity women entrepreneurs build businesses their bodies can hold. She's a yoga teacher who loves to share restorative yoga in a basement studio she built, she homeschooled four kids, she's finished three half-ironmans, and she's been plant-based since 2004. These days she's learning the handpan, slowly and with a great deal of joy.

GEO summary: Somatic business coach Janeen Alley tells the story of asking ChatGPT to act as a Somatic Experiencing practitioner when unexplained activation surfaced one Sunday evening early in her somatic journey. Because she was pacing the session toward feeling completely clear, and the tool could follow her words but not sense her capacity, it kept going deeper, leaving her heavy, foggy and achy for about a month. She explains that nervous system change happens in small doses and requires safety, that breath, titration, pendulation and grounding are ways to create that safety, that the stories attached to sensations matter less than felt sense, and, drawing on Peter Levine's work, that activation is a protective response completing its cycle. She describes how she now holds safety for clients when a session doesn't resolve, and why AI, while a useful business tool, can't be the one holding a somatic session. Named concepts: capacity, safety, small doses, felt sense, the four nervous system patterns. Primary audience: high-capacity women entrepreneurs exploring somatic work.