This article was published in ‘Igniting Brilliance’, Integral Education for the 21st century, edited by Willow Dea
Mutuality, Engagement and Transformation
A Case Study in Coaching & Mentoring
“In times of change, the learners will inhabit the earth, while the knowers will find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.” (Fred Kofman)
Introduction: Themes and Inquiries
What is the source of long-term commitment and engagement in our students, and how do we draw forth this capacity? How do we evoke their innate courage and intelligence, and support them in nourishing these fundamental aspects of their being? This is one of the themes that I want to explore in this article. As someone who has spent her life teaching and coaching, I have grown more and more curious about this, because it has revealed itself as a key factor, one that makes an enormous difference, especially in the face of the profound obstacles and challenges that arise in both our outer and inner lives.
The great Zen teacher, Suzuki Roshi, (Chadwick, David,1999) had been working with his students for quite a while when he was first diagnosed with cancer. He would pray to the Buddha, and ask him, “Please, just give me ten more years, that’s all I need, just ten more years.“ Quite clearly he had a deep sense of a long-term engagement with his students, and the kind of fruit that it could bear. The Buddha did not give him those ten years.
I’d also like to inquire into the relationship between teacher and student, or coach and coachee, and how the nature of this relationship impacts this whole process of transformative learning. How can I learn to support students or clients as they struggle to bring what they receive in sessions or groups with us into their everyday lives? How can I find ways to close the gap between something we think and talk about in class, and something we can contact directly when we really need it?
I’d like to explore these questions using inquiry in quite a specific way, which is the way I offer it in all of my courses and workshops. This approach to inquiry is a spiritual practice, not an academic exercise. This kind of inquiry is integral—we bring our whole being into our engagement with these questions: heart, body, mind and spirit. We have the opportunity to actually live with these questions, to bring them into the centre of our work and our lives, without expecting a fixed answer or conclusion. Instead, as I inquire, I find that I am not so certain of what I think I know–the limited viewpoints through which I am perceiving myself and the world are expanded. This can include even the fixed sense of who I take myself to be. In this process of inquiry, my own identity can reveal itself to be open, fluid, and quite mysterious.
Case Study: Sean Williams
I’m not sure now how Sean heard about me, or how he knew that he wanted to commit himself so thoroughly to the work we did together. Maybe he didn’t know at the beginning– perhaps he was just riding on a hunch, and his commitment grew as he allowed himself to become more and more engaged. The first thing Sean did with me was an eight week Gift of Presence course. The Gift of Presence is what I call an integral approach to awakening unconditioned awareness, based on the work I have done in Advaita,(Müller, Max,1962) Yoga, (Feuerstein, G. Trans. 1989) and in the non-dual traditions of Buddhism: Zen,(Merzel, Dennis Genpo, 2003) Dzogchen and Mahamudra.(Fenner, Peter, 2007) I have also been strongly influenced by the Shambhala teachings, developed by the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche.(Keen, Cynthia, 2002) And many of the ways in which I am reflecting on this case study have been inspired by the Radiant Mind work I do with Peter Fenner. (Fenner, Peter, 2007)
In The Gift of Presence students learn to access and then to gradually embody the non-dual ground of being, the state of timeless, effortless presence. There are many ways in which this work is based on an Integral model. One of the most basic is that an embodied non-dual awareness is one that has no preference for the transcendent or the relative level of life. An organic kind of integration starts to happen when we are not fixated on either the formless transcendent dimension, or the human side of our experience. Sometimes we call this ‘standing with one foot in each world.’
The Four Core Modules
The Gift of Presence works with the four core Integral modules of body, mind, emotion and awareness or spirit. All of the work that happens in the course is strongly grounded in the body and the breath, and in the subtle intelligence that begins to reveal itself naturally, through this kind of mindfulness. In Integral terms this aspect of practice is one that focuses on the ‘subtle body.’ The subtle body is a whole way of experiencing or feeling, through the living energetic field of the body. This is not abstract, but an actual phenomenological reality that presents itself to our immediate awareness as we practice. Becoming aware of this subtle body expands the whole sense of identity, which is often fixated on the physical or gross body only.
This approach also works on the level of intellect, though cognitive deconstruction, on both the personal and impersonal levels of being. There is an inquiry into fundamental values, similar to what is referred to in the Integral approach as discovering your ‘ultimate concern.’
Ultimate Concern
In the work I have done over the years, I have found, over and over, that people are disconnected from their ultimate concern, from what they really care about, from what matters most. In fact, in our society, we have very few practices and opportunities for people to discover for themselves what the most important thing is. Not for someone else, but for them. This begins very early on in the post-modern world. Somehow people are expected to magically know what their area of ultimate concern is, just by going through our school system.
In many of the indigenous societies, the young people go through a powerful initiation, and are then sent away to wander, far from village, family and tribe, so that they can find out, without being influenced by anyone else, what really matters to them. In one sense, part of the work we do in my courses is this wandering, looking for signs and clues that will make this ‘ultimate concern’ more visible.
The work that focuses on relationship and the emotional body happens in small groups and in dyads (partner work). Quite often this turns out to be shadow work, because it is the disowned aspects of our own being that create most of the suffering that happens in relationship.
Beginning to work
When Sean showed up for our first session, I experienced him as one of the most disconnected and contracted people I had ever met. I could not understand how he had ended up there, in this room where we were all gathering, ready to participate in the course. He did not seem to have any of the natural capacities that support people in this kind of practice. He was very shy and withdrawn, profoundly cut off from both his body and his feelings. I felt a sense of numbness in the field of his energy, and under that, a great deal of pain, helplessness and despair. He spoke openly about having very little joy, connection or motivation in his life.
I’m someone who responds well to challenges, but that first evening with Sean was not easy. I found myself really questioning what I could offer him in the context of this group. At the same time, I noticed something else: Sean evoked a natural and spontaneous respect in me, and a fondness, a tenderness in the heart. Whenever he spoke, I felt his intelligence and integrity very strongly. He seemed almost incapable of being dishonest, and quite keenly aware of the state of his body and mind, without a lot of excuses or denial.
Trapped in the cocoon
By the end of that first eight week course, there had been a few moments for Sean—moments of aliveness, connection with others, moments of laughter and softness. I was happy for those moments, and at the same time, I felt sad that what I perceived as his fundamental state of ‘stuckness’ was pretty much untouched. I experienced Sean as trapped inside a cocoon of his own creation, a small world of fixed conditioning that was smothering the life and vitality in him. In an effort to protect and care for himself, he had withdrawn into a state of isolation and separation that was deeply familiar and very difficult to release.
In Integral terms, I perceived a strong element in Sean of the ‘sick boy.’ This means that many of the qualities connected to the healthy masculine principle had been distorted and were functioning in a destructive way. Strength had become rigidity, independence and autonomy had become isolation and an inability to reach out or communicate. The healthy feminine principle that expresses itself as flow, play, compassion and connection seemed to have been buried long ago.
I spoke to the group on our last night together, about how it can seem sometimes like not much has happened for us, until we look a little deeper and see that invisible seeds have been planted—seeds that will flourish and flower in their own time.
Embodiment through communication–the lower left quadrant
A few weeks later Sean registered for my Heart of Communication course. I was shocked. The work in both of these courses rests on the foundation of unconditioned awareness. In The Heart of Communication we are exploring this awareness through the vehicle of communication, intimacy and self-expression, opening to and cultivating a vulnerability, an honesty, and a willingness to allow ourselves to be deeply touched and transformed by others. The emphasis is on allowing the fixed and solid sense of our identity to open and expand to include the collective and universal levels of experience. In Integral Language, I can say that The Gift of Presence begins in the top left quadrant, with the subjective experience of ‘I,’ and The Heart of Communication begins in the bottom left, with the subjective experience of ‘we.’
One of the metaphors we work with is from the Indian tradition: Indra’s net. (Cook, Francis H.1977) Indra, one of the Hindu gods, has a net that stretches across the universe–that is the universe itself. The vertical threads in this net are time, the horizontal threads are space, and in each place where they intersect is a living being, sparkling like a jewel. With Indra’s net, our familiar frames of reference begin to dissolve: each jewel or living being in this vast net reflects every other jewel inside itself.
In the ‘we space’ I am aware of myself as a space that embraces and includes much more than just my individual being. The field of my awareness opens and I am able to receive the experiences, the feelings and thoughts of others, into my own being. “As we explore this developing awareness, we find that our “body”–far from being restricted to “me”–is actually, in some strange way, inclusive of the other embodied ones, the other people in the world.” (Ray, Reginald, 2008)
Silent Conversations
One thing that happens in this ‘we space’ is that I begin to hear the silent conversations that go on all the time, underneath the explicit ones. There are many different kinds of silence, and different kinds of conversations that happen in these silences.
When Sean registered for the second course with me, I could feel a silent conversation begin. As we began to work together again, the same silent conversation continued: it expanded, deepened and became an essential part of what was unfolding.
It began something like this:
Shayla: Wow, Sean, you’re going to do it all over again. I’m surprised. The last course was really hard for you. And you’re willing to go through it all again.
Sean: Yes I am.
Shayla: What is it that’s bringing you back?
Sean: Something changed, something opened—just a tiny bit. In the middle of all my hopelessness I feel something, yet I don’t know what to call it. And I trust you … even though I still feel very hopeless.
Shayla: I am honored by your trust Sean. I care about you a lot. I respect you. But your conditioning is very strong. I can’t promise you anything. There are no guarantees in this kind of work.
Sean: I understand. And I think what allows me to be here is that I don’t hear you asking me to be different than the way I am.
Shayla: That’s true. I am not asking you to try and change in that way. You’ve already tried that. Now we are trying something different. We’re just going to see what happens when we shine the light of our non-judging awareness on each moment of our experience, when we allow ourselves to be truly intimate with what is.
The Heart of Communication course was even more challenging for Sean than The Gift of Presence. He was facing what seemed like insurmountable obstacles in his marriage at the time, and I told him quite frankly that I had a lot of compassion for his wife. I realized that he was doing this work in part because of the immense struggles he faced every day, just trying to communicate with the people around him.
A Real Life Practice
My deepest interest in this transformation of consciousness hinges on the difference between two levels of practice. The first is a more formal or traditional practice, in which we do whatever we are doing for a certain length of time each day, or maybe a few times a week. Whatever our practice is, it is something that happens within a particular time and space, with a clearly defined beginning and end.
The second level of practice is one is which we are simply willing to work with ourselves, just as we are, moment to moment, day after day, right in the middle of everything that is going on. Most of the ‘homework’ I offer people in my courses–the exercises, contemplations and inquiries, can be done right in the middle of life. They actually need to be done that way, not cross-legged in a silent forest grove. If we cannot work with what actually arises in our lives–the real, messy, chaotic situations we are faced with, life becomes very difficult.
I was in a health food store a while ago, when a young mother and her three or four year old daughter came in. The little girl started getting upset about something, and this escalated into a full blown tantrum, with the child on the floor of the store, kicking and screaming and pulling things off the shelves. All of the adults in the store were frozen, and the mother was trying to control her child with very little success. I called to her across the store, because I wanted the others to hear.
“It’s so hard, isn’t it?” I said, “being a parent in a situation like this. I remember how helpless I sometimes felt as a mother, and how ashamed. We feel helpless too, because we can’t do anything, and for the moment, neither can you. For me, it just helps to remember that it’s nobody’s fault.”
The mother turned and replied to me briefly, while the rest of the people in the store relaxed and started talking again. I left, and a few minutes later, the mother came running up behind me on the street and thanked me. “What a difference that made,” she said, “just to hear you acknowledge it like that took all the shame I was feeling away.”
This is what happens as we learn to access our deeper resources. We no longer get entangled in the kind of thinking that creates loops of suffering: “This should not be happening,” or “There’s something wrong with me because I can’t control what is going on. “ We are finally willing to work with life as it is.
Sean had two small children and a full time job, so he had very little formal time for practice. But he did engage in the work whenever he could find the time, to the best of his ability. He would return to each session with questions, and often clear and succinct reports on his failures. The more I worked with him, the more I could sense his pain, his isolation and his despair. And the strength of his motivation. I became aware of an immense power in him that had been distorted, turned against himself. Many times it would have made sense for him to say, “I can’t do this anymore—I give up.” But he did not.
Accessing Natural Resources: Shadow Work
One of my jobs as a teacher or coach is to help my students access their deepest and most natural resources. Our work together strengthens the connection to, and the recognition of, these deep capacities and qualities. How do I nourish these aspects, these dimensions of being? How do I help my students to recognize and call them forth? And how can I support them in seeing the other side of each quality, in opening to an awareness that does not exclude any part of themselves?
Our gifts and our challenges are intricately connected. Our greatest strength is our greatest weakness, and our greatest weakness is our greatest strength. In the non-dual understanding, polarities are inseparable–we can’t have one side without the other. So I need to support my students in opening to their own wholeness, the totality of who they are. This involves a willingness to inquire into the other side, that which is hidden– either the positive or negative energy which has been disowned.
Here we find ourselves working with the shadow. For me, this begins with becoming familiar with an awareness that does not exclude any part of ourselves. Our conditioned mind can only function in terms of good/bad and right/wrong, which is why it is always excluding what it considers the negative parts of our being and of our experience. As our core sense of identity opens and expands, we are able to access unconditioned presence, the open ground of being. From this place we can experience intense feelings without being thrown around by them, and by our negative judgments about what they mean.
As I worked with Sean, I engaged with him on all these levels. I encouraged him, in many different ways, to consider letting go, just for a few minutes, of the heavy judgments he carried about himself and his way of being in the world– to open, even briefly, to a willingness to be with himself as he was. I invited him to see what happened when he allowed himself to simply feel whatever he was feeling, and to open to that experience in the body. Together we engaged in a process of inquiry regarding his core thoughts and beliefs. And I was looking for ways to mirror back to him the innate gifts he was carrying, the qualities that were intrinsic to his natural way of being.
The main gift that Sean offered me was his persistence, his stubborn refusal to give up on himself. I felt as if the depth and ferocity of his ability to persevere was actually working on me. In the Shambhala tradition (Trungpa, Chogyam,1984) they describe this energy or capacity as ‘windhorse,’ something that enlivens us, lifts us up, and cuts through obstacles. I recognized it as a positive dimension of the healthy masculine principle. It was a palpable, mysterious, implacable force that had awakened in him, and now in me. I felt awed by it, intrigued, perplexed. I would ask him about it, try to understand what was driving him, what brought him back, again and again to this room where he had to face so much pain, struggle and unease.
As time passed, I experienced our relationship more and more as a sacred contract, an unspoken agreement, that kept deepening as we worked together. I could feel it in my heart: as long as Sean was willing to continue working with what life was bringing to him, I would be there too, allowing the way that I showed up with him to change, evolve and transform as we went along together.
Cognitive Work
The module of mind was one I used a lot in my work with Sean. I found it quite easy to work with his innate intelligence–it was so strong and alive in him. I encouraged him to question everything, especially the things I was saying. He responded very well to this kind of suggestion. I began to work with his cynicism, which is often the other side of an intelligence like his. Slowly, he began to see for himself how his cynicism was actually blunting his intelligence–locking him into a rigidity and a certainty that was blocking the free flow of his inquiry. I could feel a new perspective opening up in him—a way of looking at his own cynicism and realizing that it was just another fixed position. Underneath the cynicism and despair was something else. Often it felt to me like a tiny stream in winter, flowing beneath layers of snow and ice. Little flashes of sweetness, tenderness and vulnerability would sparkle through the grim surface of Sean’s experience, announcing the presence of something the conditioned mind knows nothing about.
Trust, Respect and Mutuality
At a certain point I realized that a great part of his ability to persist was connected with me—and his simple trust in me as a teacher. This is the last theme I am exploring here, and perhaps the most central for me. It’s certainly not a new one in the field of education. The subject of trust has been addressed in a myriad of ways.
What I have discovered about trust is something that emerged during this period of working with Sean, and it has been growing and unfolding for me ever since. This kind of trust emerges from a relationship based on mutuality, and a willingness to be vulnerable and transparent. In essence they are the same thing.
For me, mutuality is an understanding that has to be there in my cells and in my bones, on the deepest level of my being: we are absolutely equal, and ultimately non-separate. In each moment of communication, your being and my being interpenetrate. We influence each other, and are ultimately participating in a vast, universal web of infinite spheres of influence. As a human being, you may have capacities, skills, gifts or experiences that are far superior to mine in many areas. But as beings, as expressions of the same life, the same presence, the same awareness, we are equal, and we influence and impact each other, mutually and without end. When I know this to be true, this knowing is part of what I am transmitting to you in every moment.
Then it becomes very difficult to hold myself above you, to pose as someone who holds some kind of superior position. I am keenly aware that real wisdom is not a commodity–it is a living thing that does not belong to anyone. On one day, or in one moment, that wisdom may come alive in me, in the next moment it could be expressing itself through you. A genuine willingness to learn from our students–this is the ground of true education.
I experienced this mutuality in a very natural way with Sean. I experienced him as shut-down, cut off, and full of suffering, and at the same time, I felt this ongoing spontaneous respect. It was a deep respect for his being that just kept on growing. It was not something I could have manufactured—it was just there. He knew it and I knew it. Sometimes, once in a long while, I would express some of this to him, but not very often. I sensed it would be difficult for him to receive that much kindness. So most of the time, it remained part of our silent conversation.
The other aspect of this mutuality is my willingness to be vulnerable–to reveal myself, just as I am, again and again, even when parts of my identity have no interest in doing that. The more I teach, the more this willingness in me grows. With Sean, it just became clearer and clearer that it wasn’t possible to be any other way.
Transformative Insight
One evening we were working in dyads. I was encouraging an inquiry that was grounded in the body, a willingness to ask and question without grasping for any sort of answer from the mind. Something happened for Sean at one point. “Oh, I see.” he said. “I think that I really want to reach out and connect, but what I actually do is retreat. I go into this cave inside myself, and hide, because it feels safe there, even though it’s incredibly lonely. I’ve been doing this since I was a child.”
I encouraged him to stay right where he was and to keep opening to whatever was happening for him. “Now I’m aware that I really don’t want to go there anymore, “ he said. “That’s kind of scary. It feels like stepping out, into the world, naked and unprotected.”
“Which one is stronger,“ I asked him, “the impulse to protect yourself, or to reach out and connect”?
“Right now,” he said, “the impulse to open and connect is much stronger. I don’t even have to think about it. I’m just going to see if I can actually remember this, the simplicity of this, when I am trying to speak to someone outside this room.”
Sean spent the next few weeks exploring this key insight. In the family constellation work of Bert Hellinger, (Hellinger,Bert, 2001) what had begun to awaken in Sean could be called the simple reaching-out movement of the human heart. This movement is often crippled in our childhood, especially in men living in cultures like ours that emphasize the value of strength and independence over connection and co-operation. What Sean reported to me was a slowly growing capacity to open to other people, and remain present, even when he wanted to retreat back into the solitary confinement of his cave.
About halfway through The Heart of Communication, Sean’s mother had a stroke. She was in the hospital in a city five hours away, where Sean and the whole family were going to visit her. Sean called me before they left, to tell me that he might be gone for a while. “We have no money right now, so it will all have to go on the credit cards,—a cheap hotel and the kids all day long, and the hospital. I don’t think it’s going to be very much fun,” he said.
They were gone for several weeks, returning in time for our final session. Sean arrived that evening, very present and alive. I could tell he was happy to be back. He told us a story about something that happened on one of their last days in the city.
“We were driving home from the hospital one afternoon. It had been a long, exhausting day for all of us. The kids were really tired and grumpy, and we were all desperate to get back to the motel, have dinner and crash into bed. We were downtown, right in the middle of rush hour, and the truck broke down. I couldn’t believe it. Horns were honking at us, the kids started screaming, and I couldn’t get the ignition to start. “
“I felt this huge wave of indignation and self-pity arise in me. I just wanted to have a temper tantrum and tell the universe what I thought of the way it was treating us. But something happened. I was watching the connection between my thoughts, my feelings and my body, and I heard myself asking, “Do I really want to believe this thought? What happens to me when I believe this thought? Who am I ?”
“I wasn’t looking for answers,” he said, “but immediately everything shifted. I wasn’t angry, bitter and at the end of my rope any more. I dealt with the situation, and we went back and slept.”
Good work and Great Work
This was the moment, the revelation, not just for me, but for everyone in the room. We had all been carried into that experience in the truck with Sean, knowing the kind of frustration such a scene would evoke in us. Nobody spoke. There was just silence in the room, all of us looking at Sean in wonder.
“How did you do that?” I finally asked. “Where did you find the power to stop and inquire, in a moment like that one?”
“I don’t know,” he replied. “I really don’t know. It just felt like something else was called for.”
These are the moments we are waiting for. They arrive unexpected and unheralded, like the moment when Rosa Parks( Parks, Rosa, 1992) was asked to go and sit at the back of the bus, and she said “No,” because something else was called for.
I found myself that evening, standing right in the centre of a moment of genuine transformation. The nature of this kind of change is right at the heart of my own work and the Integral vision as well. My experience with Sean was profoundly open-ended. The challenge of working with him evoked something in me: an ongoing investigation, a genuineness and a spontaneity that impacted all of us together. He called me into new territory, where the consequences of my actions were not predictable. I didn’t know where we were going. I was not able to control the environment, so I was right inside the change that was occurring. I was being carried along by the same river we were all swimming in. My only choice was to be open, transparent and courageous, without clinging to any ideal, or any idea of outcome. In this ‘we space,’ I am totally responsible for the wake I am leaving, and so my choices reflect that, even though I have a deep sense of no agenda and no control. I’ve referred to this way of being with students as ‘mutuality.’ We can also look at it as the essence of collaboration or partnership.
In working with children and adolescents, a lot depends on our capacity to enter into the kind of dynamic and spontaneous interchange with our students. The ‘identity systems’ of young people are much more fluid and undefined. This leaves a natural ground from which to work that is full of possibility, vitality and magic. Core beliefs and fixations in young people can be revealed and allowed to dissolve; new ways of perceiving themselves and the world can unfold quite naturally, when the field of learning is opened up in this way.
Michael Bungay Stanier,(www.boxofcrayons.biz) the Canadian coach, describes this as the place of “great work.” We do good work when we are confident, competent and full of knowing. Good work is something wonderful and necessary, but it needs to leave room for the emergence of great work. Great work happens somewhere else, and it is an opportunity, full of grace, to benefit others, to help this world, from a place that is tender, raw and full of mystery.
I’d like to finish this article by including an email I received from Sean a few weeks ago, almost five years after we finished working together.
Hi Shayla,
This was a moment of speaking from the heart:
Last month my brother in law and his twin brother had celebrated their 50th birthdays. The conspiracy to celebrate their birthdays reserved a big part of a brew-pub restaurant, and I knew that decorum demanded that I give a speech. I picked a couple of funny moments that I thought illuminated deeper parts of their characters and wrote a little speech around that. But I didn’t bother to memorize it. Rather I familiarized myself with the essence of how I felt about these moments and about them. Getting ready to go out, I stuffed my printed sheet into a pocket somewhere, but it never made it to the restaurant. And I knew that it wasn’t important. When the time came to speak I was so at home with the material and my feeling for these two wonderful men that I was able to speak through the speech directly to the 40 or so people there. People came up to me for the rest of the night and said that I made the best speech of the night. You were with me then in some way.
Sean
March 30.09
5,614 words
Shayla Wright
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