Edition seven: Feeling our way: Phenomenology, purpose and the wisdom of the body.
Purpose is often uncovered not through thought, but through felt experience.
There are moments in coaching when a client goes quiet, not because they don’t know the answer, but because they’ve just felt it. It lands in the body first. A slow exhale. A tingling in the chest. A sudden stillness. We’re not always trained to trust these moments. But here, in the work of uncovering purpose, they’re gold dust.
At The Excitable Soul, we often talk about purpose as something you uncover, not invent. It's not a job title or a clever slogan. It’s the thread of meaning that runs through your life, often quiet, often subtle, but always there. The challenge? It's rarely purely logical. It’s felt. Intuited. Glimpsed. This is where phenomenology becomes not just philosophy but practice.
Phenomenology is essentially the study of lived experience. It asks us to notice what it’s like to be us, from the inside out. What is it like to carry this longing? To sit with this fear? To step toward that hope? It invites us to pay attention without rushing to explain or analyse. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty put it, “The world is not what I think, but what I live through.”
In purpose coaching, this way of seeing helps us slow down and tune in to the kind of data that doesn’t speak in words, think sensation, emotion, resonance, dissonance. We might ask: Where do you feel pulled? What feels off? What keeps returning to you, unbidden, yet insistent? When we drop below the noise of obligation, achievement, and comparison, the body has things to say.
One of the tools we use at The Excitable Soul is constellation coaching. It’s a way of making the internal landscape visible, laying out the people, moments, choices, and patterns that live inside us and stepping into them, one by one, not as concepts to be discussed, but as experiences to be felt. It’s in these moments when someone quite literally steps into the space of an old belief or a forgotten loyalty, that something often shifts. A deeper truth is accessed. One we might never have reached by talking alone. As Bessel van der Kolk puts it, “The body is the place where our stories live. It speaks in sensation before it speaks in language.”
And that brings us to story. We don’t make sense of life by listing facts. We do it by telling stories. Not just once, but over and over, subtly editing them as we try to make sense of who we are. Cultural psychologist Jerome Bruner once wrote, “We seem to have no other way of describing ‘lived time’ save in the form of a narrative.” But our stories aren’t neutral. They’re shaped by what we’ve needed to believe in order to belong, survive, or be loved. We tell them to explain pain, to protect ourselves, or to prove that we matter. And often, those stories stay unchallenged until we revisit them with curiosity, not judgment. That’s when we begin to notice: where was I pretending? Where was I protecting? And where was I living in alignment with something that really mattered?
Neuroscience backs this up. Joseph LeDoux, who’s spent decades researching emotion and memory, describes emotions not as raw reactions but as complex interpretations, shaped by context, memory, and the signals of the body. In other words, our emotions aren’t distractions from clarity. They are clarity. The flutter of unease, the heat of anger, the quiet joy - these are signals. Trail markers. Invitations to pay attention to what matters. As LeDoux puts it, “We think of emotions as intrusions. But in fact, they are interpretations - and they speak the language of experience.”
So what does this mean in practice?
It means you don’t have to think your way into purpose. You can feel your way there. And it starts with noticing:
What makes your breath catch?
Where do you feel most you?
When did something shift in your body before your mind caught up?
Allow yourself to sit with what feels unclear but strangely compelling. That flicker of recognition, that quiet ache, that surge of energy when something just lands. That’s your inner compass stirring. That’s phenomenology in motion.
Purpose work doesn’t begin with perfect clarity, it begins with presence. With paying attention. With noticing what moves you, what calls you, what feels alive in your bones.
“Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”
At The Excitable Soul, this is our invitation to you. Tune in. Trust what you feel. Tell your story. Let the meanings that have always lived inside you rise to the surface — feel your way.