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As a young adult I often stayed at the beautiful Marin Headlands hostel just north of San Francisco. I was there one weekend while a large group of missionaries was passing through. We were all sharing the same kitchen space and I was chopping some broccoli when a cute young woman around my age approached me. We started talking and I thought it was going well. I have always enjoyed conversing about spirituality and religion, even with people of different beliefs than my own.
At the time I was immersed in learning about Advaita – nondualism – which was blowing my mind. Nondual philosophy asserts that, although we perceive many things that may feel separate, in reality everything is an expression of a single Oneness experiencing itself in infinite ways.
Some people call this Oneness God or Goddess or Source or Divine or Dao. What’s important isn’t the name but the experience of this connection, and how it redefines how we see reality.
I had in my suitcase a book called Aghora in which an eccentric spiritual teacher explains that since everything is God, both sex and eating are simply acts of “putting God into God.” So, when this missionary woman asked me what I was doing, I guess I thought I was being clever by replying, “Oh, just chopping up some God.”
She was clearly taken aback, so I explained that if the whole universe is an expression of one God, then broccoli was of course included, and therefore I was chopping up some God to put into God (myself). She was speechless for a moment, then said – a bit louder than was called for, I thought – “God is not broccoli!” and walked away.
There were several lessons for me in this story, starting with (1) nobody likes a smug person pushing their buttons, and (2) if you truly want to make a difference in the world you need to meet people where they are. But aside from my social failure, maybe the most important lesson was that there’s often a huge difference between the description of an experience and the experience itself. In other words, to understand something intellectually tells us nothing of how we’d be affected by experiencing it.
In lectures, I used to explain how physics seems to “prove” nondualism, hoping that even the nonspiritual types in the class would be won over. I’d point out that while each of us feels we’re separate from everyone else in the classroom, we and the world around us are all just different configurations of the same fundamental stuff – subatomic particles or even more fundamental fluctuations of energy. It’s a powerful idea, but I doubt it’s caused many people to conduct themselves differently towards their neighbors.
For me and most people I know, life changes have come through direct experiences of this Oneness in non-ordinary states of consciousness facilitated mainly by meditation, yoga, ritual, self-inquiry, immersion in nature, music, acupuncture, art, pain, dance, conscious breathing, interpersonal connection, and entheogenic substances. Ordinary reality (even with impressive-yet-unactualized spiritual concepts) appears random and soulless by comparison.
I didn’t have the chance to ask, “If God is not broccoli, what is broccoli?” We tend to draw vague, subjective lines around life and then deem one side worthy of our reverence and the other unworthy, but the abolition of such lines isn’t automatically liberating. I’ve seen people, myself included, latch onto the idea that everything is Divine and then fall into nihilism. Because, if it’s all God, why try? Why care? Why choose one path over any other?
This kind of thinking is a sure sign that we’re operating from a mental concept and not actually experiencing what it represents. It would be similar to take a psychedelic mushroom and hold it between your teeth, telling yourself, “So this is what psychedelic mushrooms are all about. Meh.”
Your homework is to determine whether or not broccoli is God. Since “God” is a spiritual concept, it can’t really be assessed in ordinary reality. Everyday thinking needs to fall away. You can get there using any of the approaches I mentioned above.
Be well,
Peter
P.S. I’d like to share one of my favorite quotes on nondualism from Tantra scholar Christopher Wallis in Tantra Illuminated (slightly abridged for space):
“Since reality is One, and everything is equally an expression of the one divine Light of Consciousness, every experience by definition is an experience of God… If we propose that some things are more God than others, like concentrated orange juice versus watered-down orange juice, then we must propose the existence of something that is not God that waters down divinity. But no such thing can be found, at least in this philosophy, because 1) the definition of God here is the unbounded Light of Consciousness, 2) everything that is known to exist is an object of experience, and 3) every experience is by definition pervaded by consciousness. Therefore, this – whatever is happening right now – is as God as it gets. Now, if you are in a miserable or banal life situation, you may be disappointed by this announcement. But notice I said, ‘This is as God as it gets,’ not, ‘This is as free as it gets.’ Freedom means actually experiencing the divinity in each moment.”
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I once had an acquaintance who loved to tell people what to do. I never asked her what to do, but I got told what to do more times than I can remember. She could use any opening as a way to fix your life. “What you need to do . . .” she’d start, and then she’d go on to prescribe a break-up, a diet, a new career, or a parenting method. I know she meant well, but the implication behind this unsolicited advice was, “You can’t manage your own life.”
A mutual friend once commented, “She would make a good life coach.”
I couldn’t help saying, “I disagree.”
While I’m sure there are people out there who would love to pay someone to tell them exactly what to do, in my opinion that’s not what good coaching looks like.
Life coaches do a lot of things. They help clients identify their goals; work together to develop a plan for achieving them; track their progress; assist them to uncover and release patterns that aren’t working; hold space for them to get to know themselves better; witness them in their strengths and weaknesses; hold them to their agreements; reflect on their communication style and explore ways to improve it; encourage a growth mindset; help them discover their gifts, values, and purpose; and more.
As I see it, a coach’s role is to help a person be the best version of themselves. Like teaching someone to fish versus simply giving them a fish, the highest goal for the client is personal evolution – not reliance on the coach’s advice.
The life coach who understands this is inevitably on the same path themselves. I’ve witnessed it through the years that we’ve been offering the Dragontree Life Coach training program. In the process of becoming a good coach, you learn so much that you want to apply to yourself. You’re naturally drawn to “walk your talk,” to embody the principles you use to guide others. You experience that when there’s coherence between how you live and how you coach, your coaching is more effective. And, over and over, you hear yourself say something to a client and a voice inside says, “I need to hear this too.”
The great coaches I’ve known find it tremendously gratifying to know they’re making a positive difference in their clients’ lives. And even while they can say, “I’m pretty good at this,” they have the humility that comes from having seen that the most brilliant transformations often resulted not from the times they told a client “I know what you need” but from the “I honestly don’t know” moments. They never stop learning and growing.
If you’d like to find a coach to help you be the best version of yourself, click here to browse our directory of Dragontree Life Coaching graduates.
Be well,
Dr. Peter Borten
[post_title] => What it Means to be a Coach
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In previous articles we looked at ways to see more dimensions of an issue in order to facilitate its resolution. After sitting a few times with spiritual teacher Leslie Temple-Thurston about 20 years ago, I learned this “squares” approach in her book The Marriage of Spirit and have used it and expanded on it ever since. Rather than seeing “two sides of the coin,” we’d do well to look at (at least) four interconnected aspects to any challenging pattern. While our attachment to one positions tends to keep us stuck, when we see that we contain all of these aspects, this quickly dissipates the intense “charge” around the issue and we can let it go.
Since issues around money and abundance are so prevalent, I thought I’d share a square on the dualities of attraction and aversion intersected with scarcity versus abundance. It’s easy for most people to feel into the attraction to abundance (upper right quadrant) and the aversion to scarcity (lower left quadrant).
What about the aversion to abundance and the attraction to scarcity? It may seem incomprehensible that you’d be drawn toward scarcity (upper left), but it’s within all of us. Maybe when you’re poor it makes you feel you’re more “real,” more relatable, more connected to the common person, or more right about the belief that life is unfair.
It may also seem incomprehensible that you’d be averse to abundance (lower right), but perhaps you have fears about a truly abundant life: maybe it will be harder, maybe it will be unfamiliar, maybe you’ll have no excuse not to be happy. Maybe you think abundance would change you in negative way. Maybe you think people would expect you to support them.
If you feel challenged by abundance and scarcity, I encourage you to spend time visiting with each of these four states. Write freely about each one, acknowledging that all four are within you. See what arises in your body as you steep in each zone. If you have our book, Freedom, you can use that body-centered releasing process to neutralize the feelings that come up. As you make peace with the whole complex, you’ll feel less “baggage” around the idea of having an abundant life.
Be well,
Peter
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As a young adult I often stayed at the beautiful Marin Headlands hostel just north of San Francisco. I was there one weekend while a large group of missionaries was passing through. We were all sharing the same kitchen space and I was chopping some broccoli when a cute young woman around my age approached me. We started talking and I thought it was going well. I have always enjoyed conversing about spirituality and religion, even with people of different beliefs than my own.
At the time I was immersed in learning about Advaita – nondualism – which was blowing my mind. Nondual philosophy asserts that, although we perceive many things that may feel separate, in reality everything is an expression of a single Oneness experiencing itself in infinite ways.
Some people call this Oneness God or Goddess or Source or Divine or Dao. What’s important isn’t the name but the experience of this connection, and how it redefines how we see reality.
I had in my suitcase a book called Aghora in which an eccentric spiritual teacher explains that since everything is God, both sex and eating are simply acts of “putting God into God.” So, when this missionary woman asked me what I was doing, I guess I thought I was being clever by replying, “Oh, just chopping up some God.”
She was clearly taken aback, so I explained that if the whole universe is an expression of one God, then broccoli was of course included, and therefore I was chopping up some God to put into God (myself). She was speechless for a moment, then said – a bit louder than was called for, I thought – “God is not broccoli!” and walked away.
There were several lessons for me in this story, starting with (1) nobody likes a smug person pushing their buttons, and (2) if you truly want to make a difference in the world you need to meet people where they are. But aside from my social failure, maybe the most important lesson was that there’s often a huge difference between the description of an experience and the experience itself. In other words, to understand something intellectually tells us nothing of how we’d be affected by experiencing it.
In lectures, I used to explain how physics seems to “prove” nondualism, hoping that even the nonspiritual types in the class would be won over. I’d point out that while each of us feels we’re separate from everyone else in the classroom, we and the world around us are all just different configurations of the same fundamental stuff – subatomic particles or even more fundamental fluctuations of energy. It’s a powerful idea, but I doubt it’s caused many people to conduct themselves differently towards their neighbors.
For me and most people I know, life changes have come through direct experiences of this Oneness in non-ordinary states of consciousness facilitated mainly by meditation, yoga, ritual, self-inquiry, immersion in nature, music, acupuncture, art, pain, dance, conscious breathing, interpersonal connection, and entheogenic substances. Ordinary reality (even with impressive-yet-unactualized spiritual concepts) appears random and soulless by comparison.
I didn’t have the chance to ask, “If God is not broccoli, what is broccoli?” We tend to draw vague, subjective lines around life and then deem one side worthy of our reverence and the other unworthy, but the abolition of such lines isn’t automatically liberating. I’ve seen people, myself included, latch onto the idea that everything is Divine and then fall into nihilism. Because, if it’s all God, why try? Why care? Why choose one path over any other?
This kind of thinking is a sure sign that we’re operating from a mental concept and not actually experiencing what it represents. It would be similar to take a psychedelic mushroom and hold it between your teeth, telling yourself, “So this is what psychedelic mushrooms are all about. Meh.”
Your homework is to determine whether or not broccoli is God. Since “God” is a spiritual concept, it can’t really be assessed in ordinary reality. Everyday thinking needs to fall away. You can get there using any of the approaches I mentioned above.
Be well,
Peter
P.S. I’d like to share one of my favorite quotes on nondualism from Tantra scholar Christopher Wallis in Tantra Illuminated (slightly abridged for space):
“Since reality is One, and everything is equally an expression of the one divine Light of Consciousness, every experience by definition is an experience of God… If we propose that some things are more God than others, like concentrated orange juice versus watered-down orange juice, then we must propose the existence of something that is not God that waters down divinity. But no such thing can be found, at least in this philosophy, because 1) the definition of God here is the unbounded Light of Consciousness, 2) everything that is known to exist is an object of experience, and 3) every experience is by definition pervaded by consciousness. Therefore, this – whatever is happening right now – is as God as it gets. Now, if you are in a miserable or banal life situation, you may be disappointed by this announcement. But notice I said, ‘This is as God as it gets,’ not, ‘This is as free as it gets.’ Freedom means actually experiencing the divinity in each moment.”
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