Category Archives: Coaching Tools

Foundation #2: Awareness

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Open hands holding a flower

Foundation #2: Awareness. Bodyfulness + mindfulness = awareness. Awareness is attention. Attend to your life. Tend your soul.
 

Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows. ~Henry David Thoreau

(Three foundations – embodiment, awareness, and ownership – are fundamental. The four healing shifts – more soul, more acceptance, more intention, and more creation – are powerful. But the shifts without the foundations are like building a house on the sand. I’m diving deeper into these seven facets of healing throughout November and December. You can subscribe here if this was forwarded to you.)

Separating bodyfulness* from mindfulness is helpful, but it’s not truly accurate. We’re intertwined, of course – combined bodies and minds. It’s helpful to separate them, though, when we’re learning to notice our patterns and processes, and to tend ourselves.

Your body, your Earthling body, is your ground of being. We’re feeling creatures who think, says Dr. Jill Taylor Bolte in her new book, Whole Brain Living. Our minds work better when they’re in service to our bodies.  

Now that you’re feeling your body a little more, let’s invite your powerful mind to the dance.

A Silly Story
Years ago, when I was a newby middle school English teacher, I was assigned to coach the school’s Brain Bowl team. I knew absolutely nothing about coaching Brain Bowl. Luckily for me, the Brain Bowl season didn’t start until March, so I could put off dealing with it for months while I learned to teach English. But I could feel my body tense every time my brain remembered Brain Bowl.

I began to picture Brain Bowl as a rattlesnake sleeping under my bed. You really don’t want rattlesnakes under your bed, right? If you’re not going to move out, you simply have to deal with them. Finally I did, by taking the obvious step of asking for help from the relieved senior teacher who’d shunted his unwanted duty onto me. The rattlesnakes under the bed began to slither on out.

That image has endured. I can still feel the frisson of fear running through my body when I imagine rattlesnakes sleeping under my bed. It’s my body’s way of telling me that something important I’d rather not think about needs my attention, and it’s time to deal with it.

Bodyfulness brings my attention to what needs healing. My mind works to understand and heal the sources of suffering.

Trauma
 “The body keeps the score,” says trauma expert Dr. Bessel Van der Kolk. When you bring your attention to your body, when you choose to be mindful of your body, uncomfortable feelings will almost certainly arise. Our bodies are repositories of trauma. Humans sequester scary stuff in our bodies until we can deal with it, so you probably have unprocessed fear stored in your body. As you bring mindful, compassionate attention to your body, these emotions and stuck places will show up.

The good news is that bit by bit you can surface and resolve the trauma. First things first: If what shows up is overwhelming, back off for now and find a trauma-informed therapist to walk beside you. If stored trauma is making itself felt, it’s wanting to be healed. You can do this, and it’s easier and safer with company.  


Adventures in Physical Therapy
 As most of you know, I had surgery on my right hand a couple of months ago. I was sitting doing my seemingly interminable physical therapy Saturday morning while my husband read aloud Richard Rohr’s weekly email. In this email, Fr. Richard references Buddhist psychologist Tara Brach’s “applied meditation” RAIN, about which I have written before. R stands for “recognize,” A for “allow,” I for “investigate,” and N for “nurture.” It’s a powerful practice, and I’ve used it often.

As he was reading about RAIN and I was doing my PT, I recognized that I’ve been treating my hand, which is still quite stiff and swollen, as an enemy. I recognized that I’d been feeling ashamed of my hand’s wounded state. I detested the scars, stiffness, and swelling. That’s a strong word, and it’s also accurate.

(Feeling ashamed of illness, brokenness, and helplessness goes back to my childhood, but it doesn’t matter where it comes from. It’s not necessary to understand the genesis of a thought that causes suffering to begin to unravel its hold.)

My poor hand, to be treated so meanly. I was going through the motions of caring for it – massage, exercise, desensitization – while inwardly resenting the hell out of it.

RAIN helped me see that pattern. That old, deep, fossilized pattern became visible because I recognized the feeling of loathing in my body. Now I can heal the pattern, one PT session at a time.

This week I’ve been practicing breathe prayers while I do my physical therapy. I’ve been breathing in healing and breathing out stiffness. I’ve been breathing in healing and breathing out swelling. I’ve been doing my exercises to the beat of my heart. I’ve been loving on my hand and treating it with compassion. This feels better. 


Pain, and Joy
So far I’ve been talking about the hard stuff that awareness helps us surface and deal with. But consciously practicing bodyfulness and mindfulness leads us not only to our pain, but also to our joy. The sources of our joy will likely be just as irrational as the sources of our pain, when we pay attention to our body’s joy. A warm shower. A walk in the woods. Playing around with words or paint. Purple twinkle lights around the bathroom mirror. Puppy videos on YouTube. Whatever.


A simple practice
Stop what you’re doing. Do a quick body scan from feet to head. What do you notice What sensations do you notice in your body? What emotions do you feel? Are you aware of any thoughts? Take a moment to note what you sensations, emotions, and thoughts on paper or in a notes app. Do this several times each day. Set an alarm on your phone if that would help.

Listen to what your body is telling you, then bring mindfulness to those messages. That’s all awareness is. Start small. Just notice. That’s all. You don’t need to be fancy and formal. Just keep track, somehow, of what you notice. Are there consistent body sensations? Consistent thoughts? Consistent patterns? Just notice.

Bring compassionate awareness to your daily embodied life. Little by little.

If you’d like to talk about any of this, simply “reply” to this email. I’d love to know what you think. 

*I owe the wonderful word “bodyfulness” to Christine Valters Paintner, the abbess of Abbey of the Arts, a virtual contemplative and creative community. See especially The Wisdom of the Body.

Resources
Dr. Tara Brach on Fear and Trauma
Dr. Tara Brach and RAIN
Whole Brain Living, by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor
The Body Keeps the Score, by Dr. Bessel Van der Kolk
The Wisdom of the Body, by Dr. Christine Valters Paintner

Photo credit: Lina Trochez on Unsplash

Foundation #1: Embodiment

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Baby held in big hands, Anne Geddes

Your body is the only thing you have for your entire life. Know your self as embodied. Know your body. Honor your body. Listen to your body. Celebrate your body.

You come into this world in a little wrinkled body, and you leave in a large wrinkled body … if you’re lucky. ~Wayne Dyer

But gosh, sometimes it’s hard to feel lucky, isn’t it?

Embodiment is the first foundation of my Coaching Intensive for a reason.

The process of disconnecting ourselves from our body begins at birth. We learn not to trust our body’s messages as we’re socialized in a capitalist culture. What your body wants is damned inconvenient for a product-driven, resource-draining patriarchal economy, so you’re taught not to listen to it.

This body-vacating, head-driven way of living is especially true for those of us socialized as women.

As women, we’re taught to be pleasing, which means small, quiet, helpful, compliant, and outwardly-focused. We’re taught that our bodies are not ours to do with as we please, but as others please. Our parents, our teachers and pastors, our husbands, Congress and the Supreme Court, the random dude on the street who ogles our breasts, the plastic surgeon who tells us we should want our pre-baby vagina back — all presume to take ownership of our bodies. After a while, our bodies never feel like ours, except in secret.  

Our body’s voice becomes the enemy’s voice, a voice we have to resist and tame. So we diet, we exercise hard, we ignore our sexual preferences, we hate on our wrinkles and folds. We fit into the small, quiet, helpful, outwardly-focused box labeled “feminine.” This process of disconnecting us from ownership of our bodies has been going on for so long it’s invisible. It’s the air we breathe.   

Abdicating ownership of your body is how you’ve learned to stay safe in a culture which only values your body as a commodity. It’s not your fault.

Stop reading and take a moment. Feel into your body. Is my bleak description accurate to you? Are you angry? Are you sad?

Again, vacating your body—seeing it as an enemy to be vanquished through self-criticism, diets, over-exercise, ignoring its cries for help—is how you’ve stayed safe in a culture that wants your body for its own uses and occasionally uses violence to get it. Being disembodied is not your fault. But, now that you see what you’ve been taught as the lie it most assuredly is, reclaiming your body is your responsibility.

Here’s what’s actually true.

Your body is yours to care for, direct, and enjoy. Yours, and no one else’s. Embodiment, being embodied, fully inhabiting and adoring your sweet pod, is necessary for healing.

Your body doesn’t lie. It only tells the truth. You came into this life only capable of telling the truth. Lying is a skill you acquired as your brain matured, and you became more savvy about how to get along in our sick culture.  

Our minds tell our bodies that only our minds know the truth, and over time we believe the lie. What’s true? When you “let the soft animal of your body love what it loves,” you will turn toward home.

Underneath decades of accreted socialization and associated untruths, there you are. The real you. The embodied you. The you that carries who you really are and what you really want.

That’s why this is where we start. We re-center our knowing in our bodies, because our bodies are where joy, wisdom, and truth live.

Your body is waiting for you. Go home. Go home.

PS. The Body Compass tool is the first thing I teach new clients, and we use it throughout our work together. Contact me to schedule a free no-strings-attached Clarity Call where we can explore how to access your body’s truth-infused wisdom. 

Photo credit: Anne Geddes

How to heal your life.

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Woman raising fist in triumph

These eight actions will heal your life. 

Three Foundations:

  • Embodiment. Your body is the only thing you have for your entire life. Know your embodied self. Honor your body. Listen to your body. Learn to love your body.
  • Awareness. Be courageously present to your life: body, mind, heart, soul, spirit.
  • Ownership. Examine your theology. Deconstruct and reconstruct as you choose. Reclaim your rightful authority over your beliefs. 

Four Healing Shifts:

  • More soul, less façade. Explore the difference between your essential self and your social self. We all have both, and we need both. Learn which one is driving your bus, and how to change drivers if you choose to.
  • More acceptance, less resistance. Explore your beliefs about the inevitable changes of being alive in a human body. To live is to change. Much of our suffering comes from misunderstanding and resisting change. 
  • More intention, less reaction. Explore how your thoughts are causing your feelings, not the other way around. This is good news, because you can learn to choose your thoughts. 
  • More creator, less victim. Explore the victim triangle and the empowerment dynamic. Create the life you want, instead of passively settling for the life you have. 

Put it all together.

  • Design a solid, personalized, do-able plan to create what you want in your life.

These eight actions are the core components of my Coaching Intensive, a culmination of everything I’ve learned in my six decades of loving, suffering, learning, and delighting in my one life.

I’d love to share them with more of you and dig deeply into them, so this space will be devoted to exploring them in depth, one each week until the end of the year.

Currently my Coaching Intensive is only available in a private coaching format. I’ll have a special announcement soon about another way you can work with me to implement these eight healing actions, starting in January. (If you just cringed because that feels salesy, I promise I’m not being coy. I’m just still working on the details.)

PS. Thank you for sticking with me as my right hand heals from its surgical intervention. I’m typing with nine fingers now! And emerging from my chrysalis full of words and ideas! 

Ground yourself in your soul’s deep wisdom.

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Woman with tattoo of arrow on wrist overlooking a lake

What do I believe in when church doesn’t work for me anymore? Do I have to abandon everything I’ve loved and that has fed me for all these years? What about Jesus? What about God? What about prayer? Where will I find community? How do I do this?

These are the questions clients and readers ask me over and over. Not knowing the answers to these questions keeps them in the pew long after they hear the call to leave. They feel lost, afraid, and vulnerable when they think about leaving. They know what to expect in church. Church might not feel good anymore, but at least it’s familiar.

Why so much fear? Here’s why. You’ve been taught to fear. You’re so freaking used to accepting others’ truths as gospel, because that’s how you were trained. Your parents, teachers, and pastors didn’t teach you to think for yourself, especially about God and religion. Of course you feel terrified of leaving the comfortable fold. Of course you look to others for permission. Of course you don’t believe you’re up to the task of doing your own theological work. Because you’ve been told, both explicitly and implicitly, that you don’t have the right. That you don’t have the education. That you’re just not smart enough. That you need to leave God stuff to the guys, sweetheart.

Who are you when you’re no longer who you were? Who are you, out here in the wilderness? Who are you, floating in this Sea of Ambiguity?

First of all, you’re okay. Yes, this feels scary, and you’re okay. You’re just in Square One of the Change Cycle. You’ve done this before, and you can do it again. You’re okay.

We navigate through uncharted territory by following a compass. In this case, the compass is your soul, the part of you who knows the way home.

Here are three simple ways to ground yourself in your soul’s deep wisdom.  

Be in your body. Women’s bodies, especially aging women’s bodies, have been denigrated for centuries by patriarchal religion and capitalist culture. That’s some toxic bullshit right there. Please, get back into your body. Love her. Listen to her. Body scans. Walk. Run. Yoga. Sweaty work. Warm baths. Delicious food. Beauty. Move your attention from your head to your body, my sister. Your soul speaks through your body. (The first tool I teach clients is always the “body compass.” Your body can’t lie, because it doesn’t use words. Only brains and minds lie, because it takes words to lie. I’m happy to walk you through this exercise on a Clarity Call.)

Meditate. Meditation grounds you in your truth, as opposed to someone else’s truth. When you meditate, you begin to separate what you know to be true from the cultural messages you’ve absorbed. You begin to discern your soul’s wisdom bubbling up through all the thoughts. You begin to separate the fear from the call. You can start meditating by simply sitting still and paying attention to your breath. It’s simple and incredibly powerful.

Lectio Divina. Give your brain something to do in service of your soul. Lectio Divina is just the fancy Latin name for “holy reading,” and it’s super easy to do. You can bring the Lectio process to nature, to images, and to text. Everything speaks, when we learn to listen. Here’s a free ebook I wrote several years ago with background and directions. (We’re doing some Lectio to begin today’s Zoom Community Conversation. Subscribe here for updates, including events like this one.)

You’ll be okay. As you begin to trust yourself – body, soul, and mind – you will be sourced from a deep holiness who’s always there for you. You will be guided by your own deep wisdom, which is both unique to you and as common as dirt. Let me know if I can help.

Photo credit: Natalie Rhea Rigg on Unsplash

Real self-care is often doing things you don’t like.

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Woman sitting alone on the top of a mountain.

From wise-beyond-her-years writer Brianna Wiest:

“Self-care is often a very unbeautiful thing. It is making a spreadsheet of your debt and enforcing a morning routine and cooking yourself healthy meals and no longer just running from your problems and calling the distraction a solution.

It is often doing the ugliest thing that you have to do, like sweat through another workout or tell a toxic friend you don’t want to see them anymore or get a second job so you can have a savings account or figure out a way to accept yourself so that you’re not constantly exhausted from trying to be everything, all the time and then needing to take deliberate, mandated breaks from living to do basic things like drop some oil into a bath and read Marie Claire and turn your phone off for the day. 

A world in which self-care has to be such a trendy topic is a world that is sick. Self-care should not be something we resort to because we are so absolutely exhausted that we need some reprieve from our own relentless internal pressure. 

True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake, it is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from. 

And that often takes doing the thing you least want to do. 

It often means looking your failures and disappointments square in the eye and re-strategizing. It is not satiating your immediate desires. It is letting go. It is choosing new.

It is disappointing some people. It is making sacrifices for others.

It is living a way that other people won’t, so maybe you can live in a way that other people can’t.  It is letting yourself be normal. Regular. Unexceptional.

It is sometimes having a dirty kitchen and deciding your ultimate goal in life isn’t going to be having abs and keeping up with your fake friends.

It is deciding how much of your anxiety comes from not actualizing your latent potential, and how much comes from the way you were being trained to think before you even knew what was happening. 

If you find yourself having to regularly indulge in consumer self-care, it’s because you are disconnected from actual self-care, which has very little to do with “treating yourself” and a whole lot do with parenting yourself and making choices for your long-term wellness. 

It is no longer using your hectic and unreasonable life as justification for self-sabotage in the form of liquor and procrastination. It is learning how to stop trying to “fix yourself” and start trying to take care of yourself… and maybe finding that taking care lovingly attends to a lot of the problems you were trying to fix in the first place. 

It means being the hero of your life, not the victim. It means rewiring what you have until your everyday life isn’t something you need therapy to recover from. It is no longer choosing a life that looks good over a life that feels good.

It is giving the hell up on some goals so you can care about others.

It is being honest even if that means you aren’t universally liked. It is meeting your own needs so you aren’t anxious and dependent on other people. 

It is becoming the person you know you want and are meant to be.

Someone who knows that salt baths and chocolate cake are ways to enjoy life – not escape from it.” ~Brianna Wiest

Sometimes the thing you least want to do is have that scary conversation.

Sometimes the thing you least want to do is face the gap between where you are and where you want to be.

Sometimes the thing you least want to do is accept death—yours, a loved one’s, a dream.

Sometimes the thing you least want to do is kindly greet a part of yourself you’ve kept hidden for a very long time.

When we do hard but necessary things, we become stronger, bigger, more whole.

PS. Subscribe to my weekly letter for the latest news on openings in my coaching schedule, new offerings, retreats, workshops, classes, and monthly Community Conversations. Thanks!

(Want to respond? Simply reply to this email. I’d love to know what you think.)

Photo by Denys Nevozhai on Unsplash

Seven good questions.

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Open hand over body of water at sunset

When you schedule a Clarity Call with me, I’ll ask you to answer three questions. Many of you tell me that those three questions alone provide you with powerful clarity before we ever begin working together.

1. What’s going on your life that’s causing pain or suffering?

2. What do you want to happen?

3. What obstacle(s) prevent your desired outcome?

Writing is thinking. Just writing down what’s going on, rather than letting it spin and spin in your mind, helps you see patterns and gives you insight into your own heart. Clearly articulating the issue helps us stop avoiding it and begin to give it our attention in a meaningful, healing way. We give ourselves regard and respect when we take the time to write down what’s hurting and where we’re struggling.

The second question comes from author Pam Grout, so long ago I can’t find the reference. These six words are powerful because the only way to have what you want is to know what you want. When you describe what you want in clear words, you’ve already begun to create it. You’ve begun to take your power back.

And question three gives you insight into what’s going on in your mind that’s keeping you stuck. I teach that thoughts create feelings, feelings lead to actions, and actions produce results. When you articulate your obstacles, you see them as either stuff you’ve made up in your mind that isn’t true, or as reality that must be accepted. Either way, you’ll know your next step.

These questions are why just 45 minutes together on a free, no-strings-attached Clarity Call can be life-changing. No kidding.

These next four questions, from psychotherapist and Holocaust survivor Dr. Edith Eger’s The Choice, are the focus of the last session in my three-month Coaching Intensive. They also underpin “Get Your Thing Done.”

1. What do you want?

2. Who wants it? (You, really, or someone else?)

3. What are you going to do about it?

4. When?

Coaching relationships begin and end with questions. Along the way, of course, there are many more questions. Good coaching is rich with good questions.

You might have noticed there’s not one “Why?” question among them. That’s because I find “Why?” questions generally unhelpful in coaching. “Why?” is more a therapist’s territory, which I am not. “Why?” can be a useful question to answer. “Why?” can also keep you stuck when you use it as an excuse not to take necessary action.

“What?” and “How?” are more my jam as a coach, which I most decidedly am. Throw in a little “When?” and we’re really rocking. “What?” and “How?” and the occasional “When?” will move you forward.  

You don’t need me when you answer these questions, although saying something out loud (letting me or someone else “hear you into speech,” to paraphrase bell hooks) leads to greater awareness and greater accountability to our wild heart’s wisdom. There is power in using your voice to articulate your clarity.

Take some time to answer these questions. Answer them in the privacy of your journal, share them with a trusted friend, or talk them through with me. Revisit these questions regularly. Give yourself the gift of listening to yourself. Give yourself regard and respect. I think you’ll find yourself growing and healing as you see and hear yourself ever more clearly.

PS. Subscribe to my weekly letter for the latest news on coaching openings, new offerings, retreats, workshops, classes, and monthly Community Conversations. Thanks!

Photo credit: Billy Pasco on Unsplash.

The crucial difference between pain and suffering.

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Purple heart-shaped prickly pear leaf

“Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.” This statement drives my clients bananas, and not in a good way.

After giving you three ways and then three more ways crappy theology might be causing you to suffer, I want to be clear about how I understand the difference between suffering and pain.

Many theological, spiritual, life-coachy teachers use them interchangeably. I wish they wouldn’t. There is absolutely nothing redeeming about suffering except that maybe eventually we get tired of it and we learn how not to do it.

Pain, on the other hand, can be the beginning of healing.

Pain is what you feel when you hit your thumb with a hammer—nerves fire and send distress signals to your brain to activate your body’s healing response. Suffering is when you call yourself an idiot because you hit your thumb with a hammer.

Pain is the elemental grief you feel when your mother dies, and you miss her bodily presence in the world. Suffering is the sludge you begin to swim in when you think she shouldn’t have died, or that she did dying wrong.

Pain is what you feel in your knee when bone rubs against bone. Suffering is when you think you shouldn’t have arthritis in your knee, or that you caused the arthritis in your knee, or that people who have arthritic knees are old and useless.

Pain and suffering feel different in your body. Pain opens you up and moves through you, making you bigger in the process. Pain is time-limited. It rises and subsides. Suffering closes you down and shrinks you, and it can hang around for decades, until you finally see it for the choice it is and do the work to release it. (Want to explore this together? Contact me here to schedule.)

Pain is creative and healing. Suffering is victimhood and it will kill you.

Pain opens you up for rebirth, for the next stage, iteration, creation of who you are becoming. Suffering keeps you stuck and stagnant and refusing to ride the holy wheel of change. Too bad, because resistance to change is ultimately futile. Change is the way of the universe, and refusing to go along with the divine program will only cause you to suffer.

Pain is a human response to something outside of us—aging, death, illness, loss, injury. Suffering we do to ourselves.

One Buddhist term for suffering is the “second arrow.” The first arrow strikes us from outside. We shoot the second arrow ourselves, at ourselves.

My dad’s fatal accident and my mom’s too-young cancer death were painful. They came from outside of me and were events over which I had no control. But I caused my own suffering when I made these circumstances mean things about me and about the nature of God. When I made them mean that I was expendable and didn’t deserve love, and that the Universe is capricious and cruel, I was causing myself suffering.

Their deaths were the first arrow. I didn’t know that all I needed to do about their deaths was grieve them. To feel the incredible loss, and to explore the contours of these new holes in my heart. My only job was to feel the pain, and to heal.

What sane alternative do any of us have to events outside our control that cause us such pain? Resisting reality causes suffering. Judging ourselves causes suffering. Shooting that second arrow into ourselves causes suffering.

Go ahead and feel the pain, knowing it will pass. Your heart is big enough, I promise you. 

Pain heals you. Suffering only keeps you in hell.

A few resources:

Here’s Buddhist psychotherapist Dr. Tara Brach on the subject of pain and suffering: https://www.tarabrach.com/the-dance-with-pain/

Practitioners of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) call suffering “dirty pain.” In this Unf*ck Your Brain podcast episode Kara talks about the difference between clean pain and dirty pain, and how to get yourself out of dirty pain. https://unfuckyourbrain.com/clean-v-dirty-pain/

Photo by Sarah Wolfe on Unsplash

PS. My weekly letter is where you’ll find updates for my coaching business – openings, events, and new classes. You can subscribe here. Thanks!