I call my approach awareness-based coaching. My clients utilize the circumstances in their lives as the raw material for waking up and healing.
In the traditions I study — including Tibetan Buddhism — the purpose of formal seated meditation practice is to cultivate familiarity with awareness. The Tibetan word gom, which gets translated as "meditation" in English, is the same word as the verb "to become familiar with" — in this case, with awareness.
Once you familiarize yourself with awareness to some degree, or "recognize" awareness, you take that recognition into your life. That recognition changes how you perceive yourself and the world around you, and it changes how you behave.
What gets recognized more and more deeply is that everything you experience is made of awareness, and arises from an indestructible canvas of awareness. This isn't a claim that a typical physical reality isn't real — but all of the sound waves and light and everything else coming in triggers nerves to fire, and all of this neuronal firing gets synthesized into an experience. In a very real way, your entire experience is made of your mind.
On its own this knowledge doesn't do much, but directly experiencing this truth massively changes how you experience yourself and the world, and how you live.
When you identify with parts of your experience and push away other parts, you block the recognition of awareness, and you obscure the qualities of awareness. As you deepen your recognition, those qualities become operative in a wider and wider range of life circumstances.
My approach starts with looking at life situations where there is emotional reactivity, suffering, stuckness, or confusion. I teach my clients to open into a level of awareness such that deep fundamental okayness is available. This usually dramatically reduces the stress and suffering of the situation. Unconscious distraction and rumination melt away, and the body is able to settle.
In the first session or two, my clients typically learn a micro-meditation technique for use in their daily life, then start implementing 2–3 minute practice sessions a few times a day in situations where they want to bring in greater awareness.
Then, for each arising situation, we investigate what quality of awareness is missing or obscured, and we explore the beliefs and patterns of tension or attention that are occluding that quality. Once that quality is online, we also talk through the practical steps you can take to bring the situation into alignment.
Some clients want to develop or deepen a longer daily meditation practice, and engage with me as a meditation teacher in addition to as a coach. Others are happy with the micro-meditations and our conversations mainly focus on bringing whatever life challenge they're experiencing.
A good physical trainer will be able to identify how you're performing a movement that is hurting you, talk to you to help you conceptually understand what's happening and what you can do differently, and then guide your body through exercises to help you get an intuitive feel for the new way.
The work I do is analogous — for your mental and emotional posture.
At the conceptual level, I precisely articulate mental and emotional patterns in a way that my clients understand. At the non-conceptual level, I guide my clients into having a direct, felt experience of more effective ways of operating, and help them clear out the emotional blocks preventing the new way.
One client had bad news he had to deliver to his team, and had been losing sleep over it. He didn't want to be overly emotional and disturb his team — but he also didn't want to appear cold and robotic.
We worked on experiencing effective and ineffective ways to hold and express emotion. He felt what it was like to express emotion in the way that leaves a team distressed, and felt the effective way of allowing emotion while experiencing a strong sense of inner support — fostering connection and confidence.
After our session, he was able to deliver the challenging news in a way that increased trust and open communication in the team.