What Is Spiritual Growth?

It has taken me years of learning and self awareness to be at the place of spiritual growth that I am at today. So, what is spiritual growth?

I'm just becoming aware, maybe at a deeper level than I have been before, the pitfalls of what is often called a spiritual bypass. Spiritual bypass- the desire to go directly to spiritual feelings, explanations and thoughts without experiencing the feelings in between.  (Much prettier and less messy - like the picture to the left. It's even decorated with a flower.)

Here are some examples of how we do it to ourselves:

• We are so scared of feelings, we use something to keep us from having them. It might be a substance or might be just a way of clenching down and keeping them out.

• We decide we are so healed and have done so much work on ourselves and our past, we don't need to go there any more.

• Since we didn't have a very rough past, we think we aren't like those others who did and we don't really have any feelings much to deal with

I think that about covers it. (You know who you are.)

Anyway, that being said, I'm going to copy what I wrote just a bit ago:

"Nobody wants to let me talk about my fears of death or let me muddle my way into acceptance. I just looked up throat in Louise Hay. It says, 'avenue of expression. Channel of creativity.' So that's why my throat hurts and I feel like I've lost my creativity like a little cat who might be in the house somewhere under a bed hiding but also might be gone - even dead. So I've been enjoying editing what I've already written and being amazed that I wrote what I wrote and expressed it so well. Maybe this fear is what is holding back my flow. Not the fear so much, but the lack of expressing it. It feels like my faucet is almost closed.

So here goes:

I am afraid of dying. What if it hurts? What if there is nothing after? What if I'm not really spiritual, just afraid of dying? What if Bart's cold body is in our bed? Who would I call? What would I say? How would I call Anna? What if I become too needy and my kids don't want to be bothered? What if the pain of Bart's dying is so sharp it ruins me? What if death disrupts my life? What if he gets sick and can't work or is non-functioning? What if I do? What will happen? I feel like I'm up against a wall of water like the parting of the Red Sea and I'm running out of the steam to keep it at bay - my positive grateful attitude is wearing thin - gratitude with feeling is hard to find. Denial is gone. Mortality is here. I can't keep walking around it like the elephant in the living room. It's bigger. More unknown. Surprising. Maybe evil. Everyone who has died in my life seemed magically gone. I insulated myself from their pain or I rode or floated on top of it. I can't do that any more. I've never really felt grief and it scares me.

I want to feel up to facing whatever is and face it dead-on, face to face. I don't want to lose my highs and lows and yet I want to stay in a positive  place. Have I confused something here? Am I trying to give myself a spiritual bypass? Have Bart and I colluded in shutting out my feelings? We don't like anger. He doesn't like mine. I don't like his. Have we overdone it? I want to fully live the human experience. Feelings are part of it. The only way is through - not around. I feel so much better."

Everyone has a different way to grow spiritually. It is affected by so many aspects of life that it is ever changing from person to person.

What is spiritual growth for you?

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

What Is a Spiritual Life Coach?

Personal Spiritual Life Coach

It's not about religion. I don't care what religion you do or do not belong to. It is about that invisible power that makes you alive - your spirit. So a spiritual life coach is very tuned into your being-ness. As a spiritual life coach myself, I have literally developed my intuition so well that I often know things about you that you don't have clarity on yourself.

The question may arise for you, "How can she really know me if we don't sit in the same room?" I will respond that coaching over the phone has refined my ability to zero in on my clients. My already fine-tuned intuition and sixth sense has become even more finely tuned with all the years of phone coaching. There is a focus and stillness in the connection via phone lines. There is much research that proves our ability to effect others at a distance.

That's what having a personal spiritual life coach is all about - spiritual and personal growth. Personal spiritual growth might be called spiritual fulfillment or spiritual growth. Unless you are talking about technical courses to learn computer or programming skills or business management or any other hands-on kind of skill - all of which is quite useful - you are probably talking about growing yourself as a person.

And that would mean your spirit - your something that makes you a human - has been made to be able to handle life in a more functional manner.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

The Scariest Word in the English Language: CHANGE!

Benefits of Working with a Life Coach

Although dealing with change in our lives is not easy, it is necessary and there is no getting around it.  Your life will change all the time in hundreds of different ways and the only thing that you can control is how you handle the changes.

If you are not happy with your life, get over your fears, your past, your self-doubt and CHANGE IT.  The key is to sit down and figure out what exactly it is that you do want and what actions you need to take to change it.  For most of us having that conversation alone in your head doesn't seem to work out very well. It's usually helpful and even necessary to have the help of a good friend or a life coach so that you will be honest and thorough with yourself.

Remember, what you think you want now will probably change many times throughout the course of your life. But all this change will help you find out how to deal with change.

Dealing with change begins with acceptance of the current situation. Work with a life coach or a therapist if you can't reach acceptance yourself. Since life brings constant change, the inner resources to deal with change need to be developed.

Daily start to look for what you have to be grateful for in your life instead of focusing on your struggle and negative mind chatter. The basis of an inability to deal with change is fear. Try to "be with" the situation and the feelings. Stop resisting. You know the old saw: What you resist, persists.

Know that the changes you are going through you have created in your life with the way you think and change your thinking to match your goals and soon change becomes fun and easy as the changes with which you are succeeding and following through on, will help you accomplish your goals. The Law of Attraction says "like attracts like". Prolonged focus on negative thoughts and feelings will attract more negative change into your life. It's time to turn 180^o and pursue the exciting adventure that is your life.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

What did you learn from it?

I was going for a walk the other day and noticed I was asking myself why I created a really difficult old friend visiting the previous weekend. These days, it isn’t surprising to you when someone asks, “Why did you create that?”

 It’s not a bad or wrong question but there’s always been something about the question that bothered me a bit. Now I know what it is. Implied in that little question is “you dope”. It’s kind of saying, “That was a really lame and hard thing you created for yourself, you dope. Why’d you do that?”

Then I realized I didn’t care very much why I had created the situation but what I did care about was what I could learn for the future from the experience. Maybe it was a little dopey of me to expect someone I had been friends with over 40 years ago to be a person I would necessarily enjoy spending a weekend with at this time of my life.

So what I learned from the situation is:

1. Just because I might have agreed a couple of months ago to do something I didn’t really want to do now, I could have changed my mind.
2. To really trust my intuition about situations with people. I have an intuitive gift about people and situations. Use it. Follow it.

3. If I don’t do #1 and #2, forgive myself and move on.
So next time you hear yourself ask, “Why did I create that?” remember that only if the answer will positively change your future behavior, i.e. you learn something from it, is it a valid and self-empowering question.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching 

6 Reasons to Hire a Life Coach

There are many reasons that having a life coach is a beneficial thing. It brings an objective voice to your life that has (hopefully – see NOAGNDA ) no other agenda to follow other than to help you find and achieve what you want in your life.

Friends and family can be great support but they don’t always agree with what you actually want and may feel that they know what would be best for you and make you happy. A coach (again, hopefully) will never do this.

• A life coach can help you pull your life out of a rut that you may be stuck in. You may find yourself bored and not enjoying your life or your work anymore. A life coach can help you figure out why and how to fix it.
  

• Another way a life coach can help you is by helping to organize your goals so that you can actually get what you want and not just dream about it. Many people seem to have lost their vision in life and feel like they have no purpose.
• Life coaching can help pull your purpose back out of you and get you back on track.
  

• Many people turn to a life coach during big transitions in their life such as retirement, job change or divorce. Coaches often have or create in the moment tools to help you keep your coaching-acquired skills as you leave your coaching experience and continue on with your life.
• People looking for more passion or value in their life may turn to a coach to help explore why these things are missing in your life.
• Another reason someone may turn to a life coach is if they have been engaging in destructive behaviors , a coach may be able to help them figure out why and make some changes.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

Life Coaching - Commiting Yourself Before You Begin

Life Coaching - Commit Before You Jump

Before you spend your hard earned money on life coaching, make sure that you think very carefully about it. Coaching is an investment. It can be expensive and if you are going to spend your money on it, be ready to make the investment of your time and energy into it. A life coach can only do their part to help you find your own answers and help you come up with the actions necessary to reach your goals.

• You have to answer the questions.
• You have to work on goal  setting.

A coach can only give the tools to work with; you have to do the work on your own and if you are not going to follow through and do it, then coaching is a waste of your time and money. Don't fool yourself. You will only end up feeling badly about yourself and probably feel badly about life coaching as a profession. You will think, "It didn't work." I used to be in 12-Step programs where they often said, "It works if you work it". The same is true for coaching.

And, if you are going to make the investment, it is worth your time to research coaches. Find a life coach that you are comfortable with and that you will open up and be honest with. A coach can't help you if you aren't honest with them about what your goals are and what you are hoping to accomplish - and most importantly who you really are. And if you are unsure of that, the right life coach can help you uncover your Real Self. Life coaching is a wonderful way to continue your life journey - with a partner.

You University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching 

What Is Life Coaching?

Everybody's talking about it.

Wikipedia says: Coaching is a method of directing, instructing and training a person or group of people, with the aim to achieve some goal or develop specific skills. There are many ways to coach, types of coaching and methods to coaching. Direction may include motivational speaking. Training may include seminars, workshops, and supervised practice. Craig Miller, a former counselor turned business coach, says he thinks of therapy as taking a person in the present backwards to learn what has been holding them back and then helping them back to neutral. While he sees life coaching as helping people go from neutral on into their future.

I see life coaching as very individual to each and every coach. It is an alliance - a partnership whereby the life coach acts as guide, support, objective observer, listener between the lines of their client in order to help that client achieve what they want to achieve in their life.

They may want to boost self esteem or build self confidence. They may be looking for a career coach or support while changing jobs or starting a business. They may want to deal with their procrastination problems that keep them from building their business. They may have relationship issues where they want to work on a relationship, leave a relationship, get back into a dating life after a divorce. They may want support as a new parent or help in parenting a teen. They may want support for blended family or step-parenting issues. They may want a kind of adult re-parenting themselves. They may want to lose weight or improve their body image. And the list goes one.

From my perspective everything a person wants to do in their life can be accomplished once they uncover what is blocking them. What is most often blocking them started when they were children and two things happened:

• for some reason their feelings were not heard and honored
• as a result, they formulated mistaken ideas and beliefs about who and what they are and their worthiness

Our solution is to have people attend YOU University which is done with a coach.

Now that you're done, I have one thing left I'd like you to do.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching