how Does Buddhist-Inspired Coaching work?How I Help You Balance the Worldly and Spiritual Goals of Your Life
Dharma-inspired coaching is an example of skillful means where we take a recognized form of professional help and support — coaching — and we set up an alchemical process that uniquely serves the needs of the dharma student. In many ways, this is so different from conventional coaching that it needs its own language.
A dharma-inspired coach, trained in the dharma, strives to help their client balance on the thinnest edge, or fulcrum, imaginable. On one side lies the extreme of falling into the ego’s lust for money, power, and sensual desire. And on the other side, lies the extreme of denying the world, and one’s own potential, criticizing our own will to fulfill our potential as being “too materialistic.” Goals with a Modicum of Ego For example, all coaching makes an effort to help a client identify their goals in life, how exactly they want to become more high-functioning. But only with a fellow dharma student can we really talk about the delicate and subtle undercurrents of our motivation. As we know, the way the ego works is often very subtle. We often need help to see how much or how little our goals are tainted by the desires of the lower ego. How much are they influenced by our belief in the permanence of our worldly existence? If our coach does not know what this means, then they may not be able to help us engage in the world with a clear vision and without many layers of doubt. Being in Love, Parenting, and Other Challenges of the Heart -- How Does Healthy Attachment Bring Healthy Detachment? Another value that a Buddhist-inspired coaching process offers is the view that transcends the paradoxes that often lock up our conventional, dualistic thinking, and thereby inhibit action. One of these mental blocks exists around the delusion that by fully loving, (and fully becoming attached to our loved ones), in some way retards our spiritual growth. Nothing could be further from the truth. . . It is not news, certainly, that psychology has proven beyond any doubt that healthy attachment is integral to the full development of the child. Since the 1940’s we have known that having a secure and loving attached relationship with a caregiver is essential to normal infant growth and their ability to thrive. In fact, ‘failure to thrive,’ is a diagnosable condition often used by social service agencies in their analysis of the health of a family. Unfortunately, fewer people are aware about how essential attachment is to adults forming loving relationships, and even less about how loving attachment can evolve and mature into loving detachment, a dharma virtue if ever there was one. Reminding the Client of the Higher, Unseen Powers We also may need a fellow practitioner to talk to us about dedicating the merit of a given activity, or the necessary purification that we might need to align ourselves with the higher unseen powers. . . |
