Posts Tagged ‘spiritual practice’
THE PRINCIPLES AND PROCESS OF PERSONAL COACHING
By David B. Wolf
What Actually Happens In A Life Coaching Session?
Most life coaching sessions, in my experience, begin with the client expressing a life area on which they want to focus. The life coach then enters the client’s world and demonstrates understanding of the client’s perspectives, emotions, and inner conversation. Such a climate of empathy becomes the driving force for transformation and self-realization for the client, and often for the coach as well.
Self-Introspection
In this safe environment the client gets to courageously introspect, lifting the lid to parts of the self that have until that point been less than conscious. With this raised awareness, and the supportively challenging presence of the life coach, the client encounters and addresses issues, fears, inspirations, patterns and connections, and maybe self-deceptions and unacknowledged strengths. Countless times we have witnessed this process lead to clarity about identity and life purpose, as well as resolve to boldly stretch limits and move forward to create a life consistent with one’s highest vision.
Focus On Experience
Melissa opened one life coaching session stating that she wanted to examine a specific relationship in her life, and asking the life coach for feedback on how I perceive her in connection with interpersonal relations. I shared my perceptions with her, and then endeavored to understand Melissa’s situation. In this attempt my listening focused not so much on the story or external details, but rather on Melissa’s experience and feelings, and on the meaning that Melissa gave this experience. My hope and intention was that Melissa felt safe, respected and secure, to honestly explore.
Self-Reflection Leading To Insights
This self-reflection resulted in fresh insights for Melissa. These realizations were painful, though also exhilarating for her to experience. She saw that in this particular relationship she did use principles and practices, such as win/win, full personal accountability, and avoidance of common roadblocks to communication consistent with highly effective interpersonal relations, and that the other person, most of the time, didn’t evince or employ such principles. Further, Melissa realized that her frustration, hurt and resentment stemmed from disappointment that this other person was not more evolved in his way of interacting with her.
With deeper consideration Melissa recognized that accompanying these feelings of hurt and disappointment were feelings of superiority. She got to feel right, better than the other person. Subtly, Melissa was playing the same right/wrong game for which she severely judged the other person. This was quite impactful for Melissa to acknowledge, and it led to contemplation and conversation about her insecurities that fueled her need to feel superior.
Commitments
This session closed with the client committing to herself and the life coach to complete a specific exercise that would facilitate her to concretely identify self-defeating beliefs surrounding the patterns she noticed during the session, and to doing focused journaling within a day after her contacts with this other person. Every productive life coaching session contains cultivation of self-awareness, and most effective sessions also include a specific plan of action.
Where Could Life Coaching Be Beneficial?
The above example relates to life coaching around relationships. The same principles and process are naturally applied to other areas of focus, including financial management, health, and spiritual practice. I encourage you to bring to mind an issue or challenge in your life that is emotionally-charged. Consider what it would look and feel like for you to parallel Melissa’s process, of taking inventory of what’s happening in an honest yet compassionate spirit. The next step includes peeling off the layers and seeing what’s beneath, and then playfully challenging yourself with a detailed action plan. In this process, you can also reflect on where in this self-coaching process your blind spots might be, and where a transformative coach, outside yourself, might be beneficial.
FROM SUE
“In this course I realized many things about myself that I was keeping deep inside, or that I know but didn’t really want to face or name. I mostly learned about my “dark side”, the things that I couldn’t be proud to say I have, I learned about my deepest fears, and where they are really coming from. I learned about my desires in life, my hopes and my dreams. I also learned how to look at life from the positive side and how much the thoughts I have or the way I see things influence the way my life will manifest, turn out to be. I learned that I am a pure, powerful, beautiful person who has full power and control over her life and there is nothing and nobody to fear. I am sure that if I will continue to practice what I have learnt in this seminar I will be able to fully realize it and make it really happen. I am sure that this course will have a good effect on my spiritual practice, and will help me become the person I want to be.”
Sukhayanti
FAITH AND BEING
by David B. Wolf
“What’s wrong with striving for material comforts and affluence, like a big house, a boat, or the car of my dreams?” This question was posed towards the close of a personal transformation seminar.
“Why would you endeavor for such things?” I responded. The ensuing conversation revealed that amenities such as those mentioned, as well as other tangible attainments such as a position in an organization, fashionable clothes, and a healthy bank account, were commonly sought to achieve experiences such as security, power, self-confidence and a sense of personal value.
A Weak Position
I commented that this sounds like a weak position. The essential message is “I am not intrinsically a secure, confident, valuable person. To experience strength, worthiness and specialness I need various external trimmings.” This consciousness indicates lack of essential faith in oneself.
Genuine faith in self is apparent in a lifeview that starts with being rather than having. This approach to existence knows that to experience fulfillment, contentment, joy and vitality, I don’t need to do or have anything. I am inherently fulfilled, content, joyful and vital.
Chasing Security And Happiness
It’s not that there isn’t activity, accomplishment and acquisition in the be-do-have paradigm. In fact, when living from being, my doing and having are imbued with potency, because they flow organically from my being. They are not separate endeavors, contrivances to obtain from the outside what already exists inside. Naturally if I am being the vibrant, trusting and confident person that I am, I will do what vibrant, trusting and confident people do, and have what they have, such as a life of adventure, satisfying relationships, and abundance. In be-do-have we live the truth that wealth is not about having more; it is about needing less. We choose security and happiness; we don’t chase security and happiness.
Reflection on our approach to life- for example have-do-be, or be-do-have- points to where our faith lies- in our spiritual essence, or in external objects and symbols. From a place of being we might acquire such objects or symbols, from choice and inspiration, not from need and fear.
Faith Is Inescapable
Our nature is to have faith, and how we live reflects where we place our faith. When we turn the ignition we display faith that there is not a bomb wired to the car. Each element of our lifestyle- e.g., diet, recreation, financial management, spiritual practice or lack of it- shows our faith, what we believe will provide us a life of fulfillment and happiness.
Our choice is where to place our faith, and we can consider this question with respect to inner being or external having. In the Bhagavad-gita Krsna exhorts Arjuna to “Be transcendental…be without anxiety…and be established in the self,” indicating that for a contented and fulfilled life, living from our transcendent spiritual core is the most reasonable choice. Epictetus said “The essence of philosophy is that a man should so live that his happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things.” Such teachings move us to live from being, trusting that the externals will come my way; and even if that doesn’t happen according to my plan, I’ll be okay, and more than okay, because my security and value is a function only of what can never be destroyed. That is a worthy place for faith.
SATTVA AS A BASIS FOR SATISFACTION
Excerpt From Relationships That Work: The Power Of Conscious Living
- By David B. Wolf
As spiritual beings, a balanced and complete life includes cultivation of spirituality. Research has shown that spiritual practice correlates positively with better physical and mental health. Building spiritual habits entails scheduling time for spiritual practice, whether in the form of prayer, meditation, reading, attendance at congregational gatherings, silence or time with nature. If spiritual life is relegated to something we do if there is time after responding to our emails or completing household chores, it won’t happen.
A spiritual program that has worked for me for the past twenty-five years begins with rising early, by 4 or 5 a.m. This practice is itself invigorating. When I don’t do it, I definitely feel the difference. Another staple of my spiritual diet is about ninety minutes of early morning meditation. I have found that mantra meditation is most effective for me. The senses are centered around the mind, and mantra chanting engages several senses and abilities—including hearing, speech and touch, if the mantra is counted on beads such as a rosary. This makes it easier for our minds to focus on the vibration of the mantra. A mantra is a sound vibration that frees the mind (“mind” is derived from the first syllable of “mantra”) from material entanglement, from the modes of rajas and tamas, and elevates our existence to the spiritual platform. We have explored how we create our life with our words, and how our mode of speech determines the atmosphere of our internal and relationship world. Attentive mantra chanting is another means to spiritualize our life through sound vibration.
Jill Bormann has conducted research on mantra meditation with various populations including military veterans. She describes meditative time with a mantra as a “Jacuzzi for the mind. It’s something you can use to focus and calm yourself at a moment’s notice, and it doesn’t require money, it’s non-toxic, it’s inexpensive—a person just needs to practice it and make it a part of their lives.” Jill and other researchers have found that regular recitation of selected mantras significantly helps manage psychological distress and increase life satisfaction. The veterans with whom she worked chose from a variety of mantras from diverse traditions, such as Ave Maria and Ohm Shanti Rama.
My personal favorite mantra for meditation is one of India’s most beloved, The Maha Mantra, which goes Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare / Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare. Quantitative group and single-system research conducted by Dr. Neil Abell and myself has shown that chanting this mantra correlates with reduced stress and depression as well as with increased sattvic qualities such as peacefulness, fulfillment, emotional balance, mental clarity and sense of life purpose. Recitation of this mantra has been shown to be compatible for realization of our spiritual identity, supporting us in connecting with the innermost stratum of the living soul.
People are sometimes surprised that I spend more than two hours per day in direct spiritual practice, thinking that this would not leave sufficient time for other endeavors and projects. My experience, for over a quarter century, is that if I don’t devote at least two hours a day to activities such as chanting and reading spiritual literature, that connect me directly to spirit and to the source of my existence, then I actually have less time and energy to do things. My spiritual practice vitalizes and strengthens me, fills me with a sense of urgency about life, of not wanting to waste a moment. Also, spiritual practice, or sadhana, helps me to view and experience all my efforts in relation to God and spiritual development.
Each type of food has its characteristic mode. With reference to diet, sattva guna is complemented by foods that require a minimal amount of violence to obtain. Thus a vegetarian diet tends to increase our sattvic consciousness. There is a Buddhist aphorism— ahimsa paramo dharma—non-violence is the highest virtue. After witnessing the slaughter of an animal, Leo Tolstoy wrote, “This is dreadful!…that a man suppresses in himself, unnecessarily, the highest spiritual capacity—that of sympathy towards living creatures like himself…” To help us cultivate empathy and actualize refined spiritual consciousness, awareness of what we consume is vital.
We are influenced by the people we associate with, perhaps more than we realize. Developing sattvic habits and refining our character is facilitated by developing close relations with others who are similarly committed to the cultivation of self-realization. If we want to grow, to play a big game with our lives, it helps to surround ourselves with people who will support and challenge us to be the best that we can be. These are true friends who will not sell us short, and who actively encourage us to live in excellence. Just as a medical student will closely associate with other medical students to help achieve his or her goal, just as a businessperson interacts with other businesspeople, so an aspiring spiritualist seeks out the affiliation of like-minded spiritualists.
