where knowledge ends, coaching begins

You have probably heard the old cliches, even in New Age circles: life is a school, and we are here to learn lessons; life will repeat the lessons until we get them; we graduate from one lesson to the next, and one life to the next.
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Have you ever wondered what life was before there were schools? Children, of course, still grew up. They discovered their bodies, the people around them, the world stretching out from horizon to horizon and the stars wheeling overhead. They adapted and evolved and enjoyed the miraculous cascade of experiences the world presented. But life was not a school and we were not here to learn lessons ...
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Can you remember what this was like? You developed the capacity to maneuver your body with incredible pleasure, to roar and shout and sing and hum, to imagine and to play, to even speak, to negotiate the incredibly fearful and complex world of adults and still to love -- all before a single lesson.

And then we began to learn. We learned to sit still and pay attention. We learned to shut down our feelings when they are excessive or inappropriate. We learned to believe our thoughts, and to live our lives according to what our knowledge told us a human being should be, instead of listening to the actual signals from our bodies and our world. And then we told ourselves our whole world is nothing more than a school -- a place for learning.

It is not wonder, then, that we spend our lives looking for teachers -- someone who knows something we don't. We want to understand, to know, to figure out, and to find the answers, even though none of this has ever made us more adaptive, or given us any sustainable happiness.

What else is there? Unlearning, Experiencing and Enjoying.

In the old days, the Toltec Seers called these "recapitulation," "gathering power," and "dreaming," but these terms have become encrusted with so much mythology, superstition, and technology, recapitulation boxes and dreaming chambers, gimmicks and guarantees, that they only require more learning. So let's get back to the fundamentals of awareness. Adaptation requires awareness, and awareness requires unlearning, experiencing, and enjoying.

When we hear the word unlearning, we often think that we are being asked to forget everything we know, or somehow "stop the internal dialogue." In my experience, neither of these is really possible, short of brain damage! After every clever meditative exercise in silencing the mind, the mind comes in to congratulate itself on being so silent.

The brain is designed to remember and to imagine. Our ability to take the world in, represent it through symbols, and use those symbols to remake the world is an extraordinary act of magic, not a disease to be cured.

What we can do, however, is question our memories, beliefs, and even the impulse to know and understand. When we bring curiosity and wonder to our own mental activity, we are no longer compelled by it. We are free once again to experience the world nakedly -- and miraculously, all by itself, the learning process and the internal dialogue begin to unravel, all by themselves.

Experience, too, must be practiced. We have been so accustomed to sharpening, focusing, and fixing our attention and shutting down our perceptions and feelings, that we can hardly sustain contact with naked experience for more that a few moments. Softening and spreading the attention and breathing into the riot of feeling in the body requires that we go against a lifetime of conditioning. But what a payoff! Suddenly, we are alive again! We begin to enjoy the simple pleasure of being alive, and we allow that enjoyment to move us through the world, creating lives of fulfillment and ecstasy.

At last, we can abandon the need for teachers. At the same time, we discover how powerful it is to be in the presence of someone who has mastered the skills we are seeking to master, people who have unlearned to the point where they are no longer compelled by their own mental activity or anyone else's. People who have practiced softening the attention, deepening feeling, and experiencing nakedly to the point that happiness and peace come naturally and easily for them. Such a person can help us unlearn and experience by providing us with a clear mirror for our own process. Instead of adding their own knowledge to our collection of lessons, they inspire gentle curiosity and wonder about our mental activity, and invite us again and again to attend deeply to our own experience.

There are many wonderful processes out there that support us in unlearning and experiencing, but our tendency is to add them to our repertoire of spiritual identifications and attachments without really taking them to the point of dismantling the old structures of learning and half-living. It is like giving a thief a badge and a revolver, so he can arrest himself! We end up applying wonderful tools like the work of Byron Katie, the Sedona Method, or the presence exercises of Eckhart Tolle only to the places of greatest suffering in our lives, while keeping the processes that cause suffering firmly in place. Only with a mirror outside of ourselves, a mirror with clearer vision than our own, can we dismantle the process of suffering itself. And this is the work of a coach.

In my experience, this kind of coaching has been the most powerful tool for my own evolution. For a long time, I used my coaches as a source of validation . . . loving voices to combat the voices of judgment in my head. As I slowly began see myself as they saw me, I no longer needed validation. My point of view of myself and my world began to shift: I no longer believed myself, and began to trust my own experience and my own pleasure. Day by day, I discover my own life becoming a masterpiece of art.

I see the same process unfolding in the people I coach. Our conversations sound more like the pillow talk of lovers than the process of teaching, and we laugh often at ourselves. There is a wonderful, wild joy in questioning our own thoughts and giving ourselves permission to live without inhibition. More and more, I see each person I work with abandoning old beliefs, relaxing into their own lives, and creating with extraordinary courage and vision. They are not clients; they are initiates, which means that they are beginning again in each moment, discovering themselves and their worlds.

If you are interested in exploring this process with me, please contact me!