Q & A
What is Soul Centric Transpersonal Coaching and how can it help?
Soul-centric coaching is experiential, and integrates Lisa's skill as a hypnotherapist, healer and coach with depth methods from Jungian, Transpersonal, and Archetypal psychologies. Tailored to your individual needs, she may use somatic, symbol, or shamanic methods, including Focusing, active imagination, hypnosis, shamanic practices, dreamwork, guided interactive imagery, guided visualization and meditation, and expressive arts work.
Soul-centric Coaching engages the wider field of intelligence that includes your unconscious and somatic unconscious. Using this wider consciousness to source information from your soul's wisdom and your inner healer aligns you with your true potential. We'll find strategies to deal with your unique challenges and you'll be guided to discover creative solutions to achieve the results you seek. This guided experiential process helps you become self-motivated, provides unconditional support, identifies your strengths and helps you build upon them.
Why hire a a coach to guide you?
Quite simply, it will empower you to create the change you are seeking. The coaching relationship engages a uniquely attuned energy field that empowers insight and action. We can't create true change or wholeness using the mind that's been blocking us. Self-help is unlikely to create durable change because we're blind to the unconscious mechanisms that hold us fast in our patterns and can't see them on our own or alter them in a way that's useful.
Soul-centric coaching offers you the support, education, and structure to create change in your life. The process provides you with new perspectives, energies and resources which enable you to deal more effectively with challenges.
What makes Lisa's Soul-centric coaching different from other types of coaching like spiritual coaching, intuitive coaching, soul coaching?
It differs in the scope and direction of the work. Traditional coaching works primarily with the conscious mind, while Lisa specializes in working with the unconscious mind and the wider field of intelligence using evidence based techniques. In each session you'll be guided into a liminal state of awareness and experience a journey into the deeper mind.
Lisa's coaching and healing work is an opportunity for you to receive deep listening and inquiry that can offer a wider perspective and understanding of the day to day or big picture in your life. Having an impartial, compassionate sounding board is an opportunity to experience yourself in a different way, apart from the roles you may hold at work and at home. There's a mentoring aspect of the relationship engages the nurturing energy often associated with the fairy godmother or wise woman archetype, something that is often very lacking in modern life.
Soul-centric coaching is based on Jungian, Archetypal, Transpersonal and Depth Psychologies and Lisa's specific training with the Institute for Soul Centered Psychology and Coaching, the Institute for Applied Depth, the Jungian Archetypal and Cross-Cultural Studies certificate program with Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, as well as her extensive training in hypnotherapy. Lisa brings to her work the intuitive and energetic skills honed over multiple decades of client sessions in her private practice and in her work at Canyon Ranch.
What is the meaning of "soul" in this context? Donald Kalsched, a Jungian analyst and expert on trauma, articulates his ideas about the soul quite beautifully. He says, "The soul seems to represent an animating essence or true self at the center of every person." He also describes it as “a sacred something at the core of our potential wholeness as human beings." And finally, he writes that soul is a "seemingly essential and sacred core of the personality that continually appears in the dream material."
What are "depth methods"?
Jungian, Depth, Transpersonal, and Archetypal psychologies have developed many methods for working with the wider human consciousness and unconscious mind. These include active imagination, dreamwork, and work with the energies of symbols, archetypes, and myths as well as looking at the presence of synchronicity and stories in your life. Somatic methods used include the body/mind process of Eugene Gendlin's Focusing work and the felt sense skill (see below), a cellular awareness process, and a mindfulness based somatic body scan. Shamanic methods include guided shamanic journeying, and symbolic methods include engaging the images and symbols accessed in your experiential work as well as with creative expression (drawing, painting, movement). You may choose to explore what the pioneering psychoanalyst Carl Jung called "complexes", and how they are working in your life, or engage in shadow work (the way you feel and act that you're not consciously aware of). Grounded methods of working with fear, anxiety, grief and resistance are all part of the "depth method" toolbox.
What is Depth Psychology?
Depth Psychology is an interdisciplinary endeavor, drawing on literature, philosophy, mythology, the arts, and critical studies. Through the study of dreams, images, symptoms, slips of the tongue, spontaneous humor, meaningful coincidences as well as interpersonal engagements, depth psychologists attempt to understand the language and the dynamics of the unconscious as it manifests in clients and in the world.
What is Transpersonal Psychology?
"Transpersonal Psychology is concerned with the study of humanity's highest potential, and with the recognition, understanding, and realization of unitive, spiritual, and transcendent states of consciousness” Lajoia, D. H. & Shapiro, S. I., 1992
What is the Felt Sense and Focusing?
Focusing is an amazing mind body method developed by psychologist and researcher Eugene Gendlin in the 1970's that's grown into a world wide organization today. The more well known Internal Family Systems method is an offshoot of Gendlin's work. The International Focusing Institute website says: "With Focusing, we invite ourselves into a certain kind of awareness. In our everyday lives, most of us spend a great deal of our time with our attention on tasks or issues. Many of us ignore or even try to silence our inner, bodily-felt experiencing of all that is happening in our lives. In contrast, the Focusing attitude is an invitation we offer ourselves to be open and centered on the whole of what is happening in the present -- most especially the usually-ignored body’s inner sensations. When doing Focusing, you silently ask, “How is the whole of me experiencing all of this?”
What is the "intelligent field", "the wider field of consciousness" and the "imaginal realm?"
We have a much wider bandwidth of consciousness available to us that is unseen. Our nervous systems are wired for it, and yet the demands of daily life keeps us limited to what we can see. We see what we expect to see, and thus much remains hidden and inaccessible.
The term “imaginal realm” was coined by Henry Corbin, a theologian and Sufi mystic famous for his writings on Islamic spirituality. Note, imaginal is not imaginary! Episcopal priest and mystic Cynthia Bourgeault says "Put more simply, it separates the visible world from realms invisible but still perceivable through the eye of the heart. In fact, this is what the word “imagination” specifically implies to in its original Islamic context: direct perception through this inner eye, not mental reflection or fantasy. .... The imaginal realm is a meeting ground, a place of active exchange between two bandwidths of reality. That is ...the way in which it can be most fruitfully understood. The imaginal penetrates this denser world in much the same way as the fragrance of perfume penetrates an entire room, subtly enlivening and harmonizing."
In person sessions in my lovely Pittsfield, MA office or on-line via Zoom.