Coaching The Heart
For years, I asked myself a series of questions:
Who am I supposed to be when I grow up?
What am I supposed to do?
What is my purpose?
What is my calling?
Why do I coach? Because I lived with a persistent uneasiness. Sometimes this uneasiness would lift for hours, days, and even months at a time. I would find something like writing or teaching that made me feel alive. And when I felt alive, my heart bloomed in my chest and the world had color. For that window of time, I felt like I belonged in my body and in my mind. I woke up in the morning with a drive to do the thing I loved. And then “life” would take over, and I would find myself in a job, a city, a relationship, or a home that I dreaded, but I would keep doing it because it seemed to be the right thing to do-- for my bank account, my family, my boss, my husband, my children-- for everyone except me. My vitality would dim, and then it would leak out. My heart retracted. The magic slipped out of my grasp, and I found that my hands were full of all the wrong things. The quicksilver, twitching fish of my own beating heart was down at a depth I couldn’t reach for years.
I coach for the agony of ennui and the bloom.
One day I became so uncomfortable with the distance between the life I was living and a nameless feeling of yearning, that I had to change. Whether it broke me, or I broke it, the pattern needed shattering. I was so restless and dissatisfied, I wanted to open my skin and climb out. I wanted to break glass. The pressure was intense. In my experience, many female-identifying people reach midlife with a nearly intolerable level of discomfort and dissatisfaction that we have exhausted ourselves trying to contain. Suppressing that nagging feeling in the gut is almost a full-time job. We ignore the ache between the shoulderblades. We build a very tiny compartment for that ennui, we minimize it, and stuff it all in there, and then we stick that pressurized little box down at the bottom of our life, where the dust bunnies breed. That little box is a ticking time bomb. Late at night we hear it. If we are very lucky, that ennui expands. The hunger for something bigger, something more beautiful, something more satisfying gets so big, it busts things wide open. Then we look around, blinking and wiping the goo out of our eyes. If we are smart, we seek help to sort out the mess we are now wearing.
I coach because I want to be there when you are bursting at the seams and ready to change. Somebody received me when I was a fresh, hot mess. My coach welcomed me and my slop with open arms and the assurance that I had everything I needed, right there in the slop. She said the mess wasn’t really a mess, it was just the ingredients for growth. She gave me her acceptance and operated with the assumption that I could and would figure it out. She gave me her ear. And then she gave me a mirror. Before I knew it, she invited me to dream out loud. And when I could finally hear my own voice, she challenged me to stay tuned to that frequency. “Hear that? It’s wisdom talking. You know.” She offered me pen and paper, and said, “Now it’s time to draft your plan.” And once I had a plan in hand, she said, “Okay, so what’s in your way?” And when I told her, she held out a single match and said, “I have plenty more. What are you going to burn first?”
When Dorothy lands in OZ, she walks out of black and white into dazzling technicolor. When you are working with a great coach, there are technicolor days. And there are days when you discover that you have dropped a house on someone. And there are those other days when you are running as fast as you can, only to fall asleep in the poppies. No matter what happens-- whether or not the flying monkeys are yours-- your coach is there. Like a fairy godmother, she doesn’t know what you’re going to do, but she knows what is inside of you.
So what is inside of you?
Your heart. And it has the answers. IF you listen. A good coach helps you quiet the noise so you can hear and follow your heart.
Beware the silence. When we can’t hear our own heart, we quietly quit on ourselves and relationships. We stealthily abandon dreams. We settle and justify. This is truly quiet desperation. We bear crosses that are not ours. We reward our egos for selfless acts of settling. We play smaller and smaller. We get agitated, petty, angry, and vengeful. We bitch and gossip. We stop talking about the things that matter. We lean hard and harder into sarcasm. We hurt because we hurt. We lick our wounds and indulge our hunger like lotus eaters hell bent on anesthetic forgetting. We go numb. We shop, we eat, we scroll, we drink. Nothing sates us because we are trying to fill a spiritual bucket with material stuff. We are not waking up the heart, we are sleepwalking. In our passivity, we aggressively avoid truths that live inside of us. Broom, meet rug. This avoidance disconnects us from our spirit, and from being heard, seen and celebrated for who we truly are. We give up our power when we stifle our singular and special heart.
I coach to wake up the one heart in your one beautiful body that is ready to beat and bloom in your one precious and wild life.
Marlais
