A bit over a year ago today I started a journey down a path I never really envisioned myself walking. For over a decade, I’ve been a professional writer, a co-author, a product reviewer, a technical writer, a blogger, a literary essayist and an elite endurance athlete. Never-ever in that map of my own identity did I—or could I— see myself as an entrepreneur, a business owner and/or a coach, but somehow, that’s where I’ve arrived.
This week I received the best news: I am officially a certified Soul-Based Coach with my own LLC, a series of workshops I offer with my creative collaborator and Soul-Based Coach colleague Kelsay Elizabeth Myers... well, in addition to all the other stuff (the writing, the running, the cycling, the craziness.)
When I heard the news, I was at work, sitting in my office (which still feels a bit foreign to me after over a year of working from home) and I felt as though a downpour of summer rain washed all over me. Heavy, light, refreshing, surprising, and completely unexpected: it was all I could do to keep from crying. I told my director I needed some air and walked around campus, wondering what it meant that I had accomplished this thing that, one year before, had seemed completely impossible.
But that made me pause, too: why don’t I believe in myself anymore? I mean, I do; otherwise, I wouldn’t have signed up for the program in the first place (there’s a longer backstory behind that) —but once upon a time, I would have toed the line at a race I had no chance of winning, or apply for (and go to) a graduate program not knowing how it would all turn out. Do we grow more protective of our lives as we get older, I wonder? Are we more aware of the risks involved in our endeavors? Or, more aware of what will happen if we fail?
Anyway, I didn’t fail, not this time, even though I often wondered if I would. My doubts usually took the form of wondering if I wasn’t smart enough to hold another person’s metaphor landscape in my mind, or if I wasn’t strong enough to trust in not-knowing how a session would unfold—and in fact, existing in that beautiful mystery.
And yet, as I write all of this, I also wonder if the universe hasn’t also been leading me down this path for many, many years. So much of my experience as a writer—both in my literary and professional work—prepared me for facilitating others through the complicated, non-linear, and very wise system of body and soul knowing.
Writing the Truth
Months after I graduated with my Master of Fine Arts degree from Saint Mary’s College of California, I thought nothing remarkable was going to happen to me, at least not in this life. I’d turned my thesis into a book, but I had no idea what to do with it. I was still living in the bay area in a small cottage. I worked for a talent bureau doing mostly administrative duties. And then, one day in a single moment all of that changed.
One of the literary projects the agency was representing was not going well. I can’t go into details of how or why, but they needed a rewrite on the completed manuscript basically yesterday. I was asked: could I write a book? Well, yes, technically— I’d just gotten my MFA! And, I’d already written a book, my first memoir— but writing my life versus writing the life of another person is a different task entirely.
Yet, somehow I landed my first ghostwriting job, which offered me a glimpse into the intimate inner life of another person. Not only the narrative of it, but the deep emotions that rested in not only the mind, but also the body. This led to other writing projects, also (often) in the mental health field where the storyline often followed the course charted by healing, health and wholeness.
Many years later, I became a grant writer for an organization that managed residential treatment centers for at-risk adjudicated and/or foster youth. The proposals required me to understand—at least at a working level—the therapeutic modalities used for youth exposed to trauma. Modalities that fostered a sense of real, physical safety which enabled a foundation of trust upon which cognitive-behavioral approaches could begin to offer alternatives to past, anti-social behaviors that came from criminogenic and risk-laden home lives.
Soul-Based Coaching, at least some of it, is formed upon the observations involving working with people who have experienced trauma. If you’re like “Whaaaaaat?” here is the basic idea: trauma creates a feedback loop in the brain so that the person constantly relives that reality. Asking them to talk about it invites that experience and actually works in the opposite way that it should.
David Grove, a psychologist in New Zealand, recognized this and noticed when he asked patients to talk about their experiences in metaphor, they could but without the awful “revisiting” part. To be clear, I don’t work with those who are still experiencing their trauma. I am not qualified for that. But, the understanding of how that works has deepened my capacity to work with clients who want to change their lives for the better in whatever capacity.
Metaphor, equating one thing in terms of another, added the distance necessary for reflection. This is the beginning of understanding Soul-Based Coaching. It is not anything but you: how you describe life. Or, how you understand your life. Feel your life.
Or, to borrow a question I often ask in a coaching session: “And when your life is like that, it is like what?”
The Bravery to Change
I ran twelve miles this morning. I wasn’t sure I could. When I fell on my rollerskates last year and made a handful of tendons and nerves unhappy when I fractured my pelvis. They still are, sort of. But I ran 12 miles in the mountains at under 8-mile per minute pace. It felt beautiful. Like a gift.
My body felt like it was falling into something it wanted. Step after step. Like there is something in these miles I am meant to feel and to know. The wild free. The love that is not connected to anything but me. This particular run used to give me a lot of anxiety because I had to meet a certain pace and splits the entire time. I’m old now, so that wasn’t the case.
Today I felt like a happy cloud, floating. No expectations- I was all light and spirit. This is what coaching has felt like, too. The smell of the pine trees, the sound of the river rushing below the trail I ran. Nobody was there but me.
That’s the point, though. I’m there. I’m me. I’m totally me in the world. Embodied. What I want and what I am: I can see that path between the two. That is the power of Soul-Based Coaching. I can see it, feel it, visit it. And when you can do that, you can find the way through, the way that is right for you.
That is what it means to access soul-knowing, at least how I understand it now. The sum of your life, paired with your breath, and what you can do in the present moment. There is forward, there is back, and side to side. Where do you want to go?
Striding the final miles in my long run today, I know I want to move forward. Even if it is toward the unknown. I want these miles. I want the possibility on the distant horizon. Soul-Based Coaching has taught me that we are worthy of those horizons we imagine if only we attend to the paths that lead us there. Even if we cannot know they are there, waiting.
All it takes is the courage to take that first step.
Are you ready?