Kim Kimball Coaching

In my years as a Doctor of Physical Therapy, I had so many patients come to me wanting to be “fixed” without having to change a thing.

They wanted to keep doing the thing that injured them, and have me magically heal them so they could return to that activity, good as new.

The Amazon warehouse worker who refused to change his posture during repetitive daily tasks, and felt that seeing me twice a week should make 40+ hours a week of working in that posture just go away.

You can strengthen and stretch around a joint, but no matter how much you do, if you don’t change the underlying issue, the pain will always return.

The “healing” and “somatic” spaces are rife with this same mentality.

We try to “regulate” away something that needs to be stared in the face, accepted as true, and changed.

We try to “expand our capacity” to tolerate things our bodies were never meant to tolerate.

The woman who carries the entire mental load of her household. Every appointment, every birthday, every “did we run out of,” every emotional temperature check on everyone in the house. She tries to fix her exhaustion with a morning meditation practice, instead of asking her partner to actually carry half the weight.

What if your nervous system is actually responding appropriately to something that’s asking you to *change it*, rather than learn to tolerate it or expand your capacity for it?

Perhaps you’re meant to change your pattern of over-functioning instead of learning to “stay calm” while you have too much on your plate.

Perhaps you’re meant to change your relationship to your work rather than tolerate how things are now.

If you recognized yourself in this, a Threshold Mapping Day is built for exactly this. A space to look at what’s asking to change, not another way to tolerate it.

🔗 in bio.

I followed my deepest grief all the way to the bottom. It turned into ecstasy.

I recently suffered a life-altering loss. One of the losses that divides your life into “before” and “after.”

In the midst of it, I’ve experienced how the seed of Life is always blooming, then decaying, then blooming again, over and over, continuously. And how this too is beautiful.

How death and decay and destruction contain a beauty all their own, part of Life and aliveness that cannot be avoided.

I’ve danced with my own resistance to feel the depths of my pain, and I’ve softened into it. Not always, but I’ve found pockets of deep surrender in ways that were previously inaccessible to me.

I’ve allowed this loss to soften me rather than harden me. To crack me open wider rather than snap my heart shut like a suitcase.

I’ve allowed this experience to change me.

We all want the outcome on the other side, but we resist the profoundly uncomfortable process of change it requires. That process is its own form of death.

I’m done resisting.

In my deepening surrender, I chose myself in the midst of a decision that would have cost me myself.

I would have white-knuckled, over-functioned, pushed through, ground myself into the ground.

My Self, softened by the aliveness of grief, chose the path of self-honoring.

I never expected to find ecstasy in my grief, or to reclaim my aliveness there.

Reclaiming my grief has been a reclamation of my Self.

Before I became a somatic coach, I was a practicing Doctor of Physical Therapy for 13 years.

I spent many, many years with my hands on bodies, healing.

The medical model didn’t fit my soul or the ways I wanted to work, and I left that world.

When I got into coaching, I did a hard pendulum swing for a while, as we all tend to do.

I spent my days immersed in the realm of the mind and the thoughts.

Eventually I wove in the body with somatic coaching, which felt like the pendulum was starting to rest somewhere in the middle, the body and mind’s interplay instead of being these separate, individual halves that never meet.

When I was practicing physical therapy I was disturbed to find so many practitioners thinking emotions and thoughts had no impact on pain or the healing process.

Now as a somatic practitioner, I’m equally disturbed by the landscape of “regulation” and how the body has become something to be tamed.

We sit in stillness, “listening” to our bodies, but never allowing our bodies to respond, to move, to express, to react.

Maybe if we were listening to our bodies, we would say NO.

Maybe if we were listening to our bodies we would move away from that person/place/or thing.

Maybe if we were listening to our bodies we would scream, cry, or growl.

These are all healthy responses to listening to our internal experience, and allowing ourselves to *act* on that information, and do what we need for our thriving.

Something new is coming that I’m so excited about. More movement, more in-person, more of this next iteration of work. If you want to be the first to hear about it, my email list is where that lands first. 🔗in bio.

Kim

few years ago I was sure our marriage was over, and I was right.

Our marriage had to die as it was then to be reborn anew.

It’s only through being willing to lose it all that we regained everything, and more.

Today is our 8 year wedding anniversary.

We have lived every element of our vows: richer and poorer, sickness and health.

We’ve hurt each other deeply and had to grapple with how our wounds hurt each other. Parts of ourselves that we didn’t know existed before we got married came forward, and we had to figure out how to make space for each other’s wholeness while honoring each other and our union. It stretched us beyond what I knew was possible without breaking.

We stand in our marriage today, true to ourselves and true to each other. We have done so much individual and collective work to be here, in a marriage that feels like home, where we know each other’s deepest wounds intimately and choose to be a salve to each other instead of weaponizing those wounds against each other.

We’ve moved from being unaware of each other’s faults to aware of them, while still choosing to see each other through the eyes of love.

I will never not be enchanted by someone choosing to spend their life with me. All their ordinary days and ordinary moments that make up a beautiful, glorious, full life.

And not only to spend their life with me, but to do all the work necessary to die to ourselves and every version of our marriage that we outgrow, and still vow to find each other, again and again.

This year tastes like victory on my tongue, and it is sweet.

Choose your own aliveness.

Choose your joy.

Even before you’ve gotten to the “root” of your trauma or your childhood or both. Especially then.

The whole damn point of this healing journey you’re on is to live, and your life is happening right now. Not when you get it all figured out. Not when things get easier. Now.

I got serious about prioritizing my own aliveness during a particularly ruthless three years that would not let up. Instead of waiting for things to get better, I shifted my attention toward my own aliveness in the middle of the s**t storm and learned how to let them coexist.

I can’t convey in words how much this practice changed my life and my mental health.

Yes, keep doing your healing work. Also read the damn fiction book. Make the art. Sit in the sun. Belly laugh with your people.

That is healing in itself.

Give your aliveness some space amidst the inevitable challenges of life.

If you want support learning how to hold both, that’s a lot of what we do inside Crossing the Threshold. 🔗 in bio when you’re ready.

XX,
Kim​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

When I was a little girl, I’d feed Baby Alive and change her diapers. I can still remember the smell of the food she’d mechanically swallow as I spooned it in.

I would stay up all night nursing the runt of the litter with a tiny bottle every few hours, unable to withstand the natural selection.

I’d mother the sickly hunting dogs my dad would bring home.

All I ever knew was mothering. It was as natural to me as breathing.

I got married at 35, and four years of fertility challenges followed. I didn’t know if I’d ever get a chance to mother the way I felt I was born to do.

My son was born a few days before my 40th birthday and my soul blew open.

The immense need and the immense love. The bone-deep exhaustion. The ecstatic, animal aliveness. I’ve never felt more human or more dehumanized, more connected or more hollowed out.

This love asked everything of me and I answered yes.

My body. My soul. My heart. My life. I’d give it all again.

After 26 hours of labor, I pushed my son out and we waited to cut the cord until it stopped pulsing and went white.

And I remember thinking: this is the closest he will ever be to me. Every moment from here he’ll be getting further away.

And he has. Solid food instead of my milk. Walking. Preschool.

These are signs of a healthy life and I am so proud. And they break my heart.

I let them break me open. Willingly. Every time.

There’s a stretch in every transition where nothing quite fits anymore. What was solid isn’t. What’s next isn’t here yet.

Most people try to push through it or skip ahead to the part where things make sense again.

This episode is about learning to stay with yourself in that in-between instead.

I sat down with Mel Glaze, therapist and founder of Crosscurrent Counseling, to talk about what it actually feels like to be in a liminal space, what happens to your relationships and coping patterns when everything feels uncertain, and how to understand the different parts of yourself that show up when life gets hard.

Mel works with people navigating identity, grief, and transition — and it shows in how she talks about this stuff. Nothing is oversimplified.

If you’re in the middle of something right now, this one is worth your time.

Ep 45 is linked in bio. I’d love to hear what comes up for you if you listen.

Last weekend I went to a dance party with college friends I haven’t seen in years. This is what happened:

When I stepped into the room, my body registered it as a coming home. There was a safety with these people. They’d known younger, less masked, less hardened versions of me.

Wes is not the kind of DJ who plays cheesy radio hits. He plays tracks he’s mixed himself. Music most folks have never heard of, the stuff that makes you *feel*, that gets you out of your head and into your body, that invites you to *move*.

The lights pulsed and flashed. The beats dropped.

The glow sticks on my wrists oriented me that I am a person, and I am here.

I merged with the music.

*Full piece in the newsletter that drops Friday. 🔗 in bio to subscribe*

There’s a point where the work you’ve built stops feeling like yours.

Nothing has necessarily gone “wrong”, but something in you knows it’s no longer right.

This conversation with is about that.

I sat down with Tami to talk about what it looks like when your work starts to unravel, and how that can bring you back to yourself in a way that changes everything.

We talk about burnout, overgiving, losing yourself in your work, and what it takes to build something that actually supports you.

If you’ve been feeling that disconnect, this one will likely land.

I’d love to hear what it brings up for you if you listen.

Have you ever wanted a quick burst of clarity and coaching support instead of ongoing coaching?

I offer a Threshold Mapping Day for exactly this purpose.

When you find yourself in the midst of a transition of some kind (a relationship ending, a decision needing to be made, a career change, a business pivot, Matrescence, faith deconstruction, etc) and you want to get clear on what’s ending, what’s asking to emerge, and reconnect with your body so your next steps can naturally unfold, this is for you.

$150 for a full day of focused support with 100% money back guarantee if you don’t walk away with clarity.

We spend an entire asynchronous day on Signal 1:1, and you walk away with clarity, next steps that are rooted in your own embodied wisdom, and a deeper understanding of what this threshold is asking of you.

“I received a breakthrough on a years-long pattern in 15 minutes of working with Kim.” — R.T.

I only offer 4 threshold mapping days a month (1/week) to make sure I’m able to give each person my full attention.

You can read more about it and sign up for yours at the 🔗

Allow yourself to be held in the midst of your transition, be seen, and get some momentum flowing.

Feel free to DM me with any questions.

XX,
Kim