It could be said that I am a "coach of many colours" - working, as I do, across a wide range of coaching disciplines.The question above, therefore, is a rather important one, particularly for me, as I have been asked to explain it a number of times since I nailed these particular colours to my mast!
What is it ALL about?
Well I believe it starts with an Understanding about ourselves at a spiritual level - or that place where we might say our Soul dwells. This spiritual place, that I might also describe as "The Cosmic Domain," is the domain of Universal Mind or where everyone, all of us, is united in the grand scheme of things. I've also heard it described as The Collective Unconscious.
So there's a lot of titles for this formless place that has, seemingly, been around for ever - and has certainly been in the Minds of Men since mankind began contemplating the beyondness of all things.
There's a wonderful, eternal or spiritual perspective taken by the French philosopher, theologian and cosmologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), which is encapsulated in this, his most famous quote:-
"We are not human beings having a spiritual experience
We are spiritual beings having a human experience."
There are two other fundamentals that are with us every step of this journey. One is the power of Thought as a never ending and formless energy, and the other is Consciousness. Consciousness, through our sentience, gives us the capacity to feel, perceive, or experience subjectively.
This, essentially, is the human experience that Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is talking about - it is our relationship with our thinking and our level of Consciousness at any moment in our lives.
So how does this translate into "Real Life" you might ask?
Inside Out
We are born as spiritual beings and we set out upon a journey of distinctly human experience. We learn about all the things that occupy our small corner of the world, and we also learn how to navigate ourselves within that world. Most of all we learn how to express ourselves within that world through the power of verbal language.
We discover, very quickly, that this verbal language is the coded way we can communicate with everyone within that world - including our Self. We now have the means of turning things we can only feel with our senses - via sensual language - into words. we can now make sense of what everyone else is trying to say to us, and also we can now communicate with ourselves beyond our Inner Language of Self.
Round about now with our developing selves, we also start to establish our relationship with the power of Thought, that shows up in the form of our thinking. When our thinking becomes enmeshed and entwined with our verbal language, we then become almost seduced by the nature of Outside In. And with Outside In we set out on the road of believing our thinking to be a reflection of what is Real in the moment. Since it seems WE are the centre of our 'universe' then what we feel is happening to us is caused by things on the Outside of Us. This is what I mean by Outside In.
Our modern, material world, is full of the simplest illustrations of things outside of us being the main cause of things happening inside of us.
Take the power of the Now, that pivotal moment in our experience where EVERYTHING only ever happens.
We have the capacity to only ever be ONE thing at a time in every NOW moment.
So why would we not be happy, as a choice? Makes sense, doesn't it!
Yet - we put off our happiness Right Now by saying to ourselves "I'll be happy when I've got ... the house, the car, the relationship, the job, the money, the right amount of money, the clothes, the degree, the ability, the perfect whatever."
This choice that we have is something of a divine gift. Yet if we don't know we have the choice then how can we exercise that choice? Instead we merely shrug our shoulders and whisper to ourselves, "Because, at the end of the day, I'm only human, after all."
We affirm to ourselves that we are Human Beings and this is a Human Experience.
So, in terms of our Spiritual Being having a Human Experience, you can certainly see how Outside In takes us further and further into the Human Experience and further and further away from the Spiritual Experience.
Of course there are people for whom the Human Experience is a totally adequate way of living their entire life. Yet there's more to Life than THAT - and we all know this and feel this somewhere deep down inside. There are moments in our lives when we come face to face with our Spiritual Selves - we make an Inner connection - and for some of us we keep that connection going, and we become aligned with our TRUE Selves.
The Human Experience persists
The thing is - we may regain the Understanding we were born with and reconnect with the Inside Out nature of reality - however, the Human Experience persists. And it persists mainly because we are LIVING it! It is there every day, every moment of our Consciousness, in every thought we have.
And this is why we will always have moments of frailty as well as moments of clarity. When our Understanding is out of equilibrium, or off centre, or out of kilter, then our clarity will diminish and our frailty will increase. When our frailty increases we lose our sense of wellbeing and security. When our clarity returns we realign with our sense of wellbeing and security.
It is a simple though not always easy equation.
And with easy and hard - like that - here I'm reminded of Robert M Pirsig's quote in his book
Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance ...
"Is it hard?"
"Not if you have the right attitude. It's having the right attitude that's hard."
The Video
In this video from December 2016, I talk about "demons of wayward thinking" that beset me in the midst of a dark, dark night. These are the times in our lives when we are either very much alone with our thoughts in Mind - or FAST ASLEEP! And it is very easy to endlessly plough the fields of our thinking at 4am, especially when that thinking is Wayward.
In the commentary I point at the awful nature of the demons, and the surest way to clarity.
That, in essence, is the nature of my conversations with clients when I am working as a Spiritual Coach. To point people towards their relationship with the power of Thought as made into the form of their thinking - and to realign them with the Inside Out nature of reality that we were all born with as Spiritual Beings.
