What is the nature of coaching or therapy sessions? Is this where we go in order to sort out all the things that are wrong with us? Is it where we go to get fixed?
Or is something more at work here?
No one can ‘heal’ another person.
Healing is nothing more or less than this: the willingness to take a journey of deep return - back to our essential nature, back to our own innate harmony - and we, as individuals, are the only ones who can take that journey.
What a coach or therapist does is offer a place of sanctuary. They hold space - a time outside of time, somewhere for us to rest and recover ourselves, where we can harmonise to our deeper being, listen to the needs of our soul and feel our way forward. A space where we come - not to be healed by another - but to recover our connection to the healing that exists within ourselves.
Over the years, I have observed the power of this space and the magic that can happen within it - both as coach and client, as healer and healee. I have witnessed how it can open a portal into another way of being and seeing, reconnecting us to infinite wisdom and possibility, which then go on to have the most profound ripples in our daily life.
What follows are a few of my reflections on this. I hope that within them you find something that inspires and helps you - if you either hold space for another or are having space held for you.
Stepping Outside Ordinary Time and Space
The healing space is no ordinary space. Indeed, it’s a portal we enter in order to leave behind the linear and ordinary, and regain our connection to something more.
This is a space we can come to when we are tired and lonely . . . dis-spirited. We feel some inexpressible hunger for something deeper, richer and more inclusive of our wholeness. We come here when we sense that we are off-balance, getting pulled too far into the very human world of forms, objects and circumstances. When we are in danger of forgetting ourselves as souls inspirited. We come here to recover our presence. We come here to align to our truth.
We may arrive here thinking to bring along the ‘bag of what’s wrong with us’ - to lay it down and pour over its contents as traditional talking therapies would have us do.
But within the silken energy of an aware and present space, held by another, something else happens and a gradual remembering occurs. We discover that we actually came here to reclaim the knowing that we were never any of that - never ‘wrong’, never ‘broken’, never in need of fixing - and that the frightening stories that have been running in our mind are no reflection whatsoever on us or where anything in our life is leading.
We come here to leave all this behind.
Instead, we enter a space where we can feel for the touch of that what accepts all of who we are, where we are and how things are, and recover the remembering that we are far more than any of this. The touch of something infinitely loving and divine that lifts up our life and hands it back to us, fresh and new.
This is not something that the therapist can give us alone; it is something that happens within the space of our meeting when we come together with intention, connecting at the soul level, quiet and open, and available to seeing what emerges.
Here, we find wisdom arising naturally through both client and practitioner. A wisdom that includes, illuminates and elucidates the tangles and weave of every part of our life, and makes sense of the deeper currents moving within us and around us.
A wisdom that becomes more accessible the more we grant it access to us.
The healing space is the space we enter to reconnect to our own essence.
The role of the practitioner is to open the door for this to happen - welcoming us in with quietness, calm and gentle curiosity. Helping us to navigate the ups and downs of our own energy, to feel for what shines and to make peace with what doesn’t.
The role of the one who comes seeking this space is to open to possibility, to be prepared to let the ordinary go, and be willing to risk meeting our own beautiful depths.
If you think this blog post would be helpful for a friend or family member, please feel free to share the link. And if you have any thoughts, comments, or wish to share any insights with me after reading this, please let me know - I would love to hear how this has landed with you.