‘The only pain there is, is the pain we experience right now.’
This is very obvious to me, but I try not to get blinded by it.
(And I definitely don’t use it as a stick to hit people who are already hurting.)
At least not anymore.
Dogmas are often dangerous and simplistic and in many cases they result in offensiveness within other people (even if the offensiveness is effectively caused by our thinking, as many readers might agree on), and that is also very true for spiritual ideas and philosophies.
They can be both beautiful and limiting.
It’s just that there is much more to life than principles and theories and methods, and it seems to me we can find amazing value and opportunity in respecting and following that, even if we lose the seemingly solid ground of our precious concepts.
For instance: although I have dismissed and denied this for quite a while in my coaching, at this moment I believe there is a time and place for talking about or even ‘revisiting’ the past and acknowledging experiences.
Not as a sacred starting point, but simply because it can be helpful.
Sometimes people just want to talk about the fucked up things that happened to them, and sharing them with someone who is both caring and mostly emotionally neutral, can be very comforting and liberating.
Avoiding anything because of a particular set of rules seems to limit the playing field of our conversations.
Even while we always only live in the here and now, we carry stuff with us (albeit ‘just’ in our minds), and in a very real sense we are products of what happened in our lives, and how we made sense of that in the moment.
Who most of us think we are is molded by many misunderstandings and cultural fallacies, the urgent need to fit in and being liked or to feel safe, and millions of other thoughts and ideas we have accepted as values and truths.
There really IS something like a psyche, or the deep and rich emotional worlds we obviously encounter on a daily basis in a very personal way, although it is not a material entity you can scoop out of the brain and put in a jar.
Being human is a tremendously rich experiential phenomenon, and every theory about how we work and what makes us tick will always just be just that: a theory.
A description is never the real thing, and desperately holding on to a particular explanation or trying to fit life into a set of ideas, however awesome it appears to be, just diminishes our chance of seeing beyond what we believe to be true, and exploring the unknown depths of our existence.
People who subscribe to a particular way of looking at life, even if it’s a very positive one, are always at risk of becoming at least slightly dogmatic and biased (this is just a fact and not something I have transcended by any means).
Still, with all of this said, and in the midst of the confusion I might have created, there is also a lot we can hold on to.
Let’s move on to the cool stuff.
I think spirituality serves a powerful purpose and amazing potential.
The value of a spiritual component in coaching or therapy, I believe, is very broad.
It is a necessary part of getting rid of limiting beliefs and understanding life and what it entails to be a human being.
Finding a deep meaning in life is tremendously healing and transforming, and I see again and again that people who have lost that direction or purpose, feel mostly bad and confused and limited.
Now I have been very dismissive about the usefulness of psychology and psychiatry and things like tapping and EMDR, but I have also seen that my mind is changing.
Not because I believe that these forms of treating our deepest fears and confusions and pains are the ultimate solution (I don’t), but because I know that there can be, like I mentioned before, a time and a place for everything.
And what helps, helps, even if it doesn’t fit your program of choice.
Most important, however, is what connects all the different things we can do or say or believe: the intentional vibe of a conversation.
Because in general, feeling acknowledged by someone is often extremely powerful and helpful.
Being listened to by a nonjudgmental heart shifts the energy from negative and constricted, to hopeful and positive.
Unconditional trust and respect from a coach or therapist (or any human being for that matter) is directly felt by the person who is sharing.
To me, this all comes down to what you could call ‘spiritual maturity’, or, a bit less grandiose, ‘spiritual integration’.
It’s when spirituality is no longer a thing you try to do or be, but something that is simply true on a most profound level.
It is something you have become or are becoming more and more, because it has somehow invited you to connect and you finally listened.
I feel very, very confident about the inner healing capacity of the people I talk to, and the past years have shown without a doubt that this trust is tangible.
No matter what your therapeutic ideas or framework might be; coming from a place where you feel comfortable in your own purpose and love for life and for the person opposite you, is a prerequisite.
It creates a simplicity and peace and ease that helps people get out of their heads and relax.
Miracles happen in that space.
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(Photo by @sendi_r_gibran, for Unsplash)