Think Spiritual coaching when the burning desire is for acquiring conscious realization of your connection with Being, Source, Higher Power. When you want more than what the world has to offer, when you want to know who you really are, when you want to know who or what God is, or whether there really is a God. When you have an unquenchable desire to understand your place in the grand scheme of things and how you best fit into that picture.

When you are confused, discouraged, depressed for want of real meaning and peace in your life. When you know in your heart you are living at only the smallest percentage of your capacity and you know something inside you is holding you back and you can’t, for the life of you, figure out the obstacle or remove it. When you have no vision to aim at, or when your dreams have been shattered. When you know you are only going through the motions, speeding as quickly as possible toward your grave because you know of nothing better to do. When you are grieving over loss and can make no sense of the apparent indifference of existence.

When you are broken and desperately in need of a healing. When you are bitter, resentful and angry at life or others for their malevolence, trauma or indifference toward your health and well-being. When you’ve lost hope. When you know to the core of your being there is more to you that just this fragile, vulnerable, powerless, temporary mortal frame being banged and buffeted about by the vicissitudes of random fate and blind destiny. When you absolutely know you must get to know the greater part of yourself and that is more important than anything else this world has to offer. When you feel like you’re going insane and all of your years of psychotherapy, self-help books and best thinking have gotten you there. When you would rather die seeking the truth than live forever in ignorance, no matter how comfortably.

What qualities should you look for in a spiritual coach? Someone who is a master with no apparent flaws with a perfect track record of human attainment? Not only are perfected masters hard to find, they are usually booked years in advance. What you should look for in a spiritual coach is someone who can most effectively point you toward the wisdom and truth within yourself and who is adept at using the widest possible set of skills and processes for awakening your highest Self. A true spiritual coach never points at him or herself as the way but always directs the attention of the seeker within their own consciousness where the answers and the realization lies.

There is, as yet, no formal curriculum for being a Spiritual coach. It is not taught at university and for a variety of reasons, it can not be. No one can give a certificate that bestows spiritual coaching competence. It cannot be acquired theoretically or conceptually. Only life experience combined with long-term persistence in putting spiritual principles and practices into practical application toward solving the inevitable difficulties and limitations of life, through triumph and tragedy, produces a truly competent spiritual coach.

It is for this reason, while a spiritual coach should obviously be experienced, knowledgeable, genuine, effective, trustworthy and have a solid track record, they don’t need to be, nor should they be exalted or enlightened or special. In fact, it is much better that they aren’t. A really effective spiritual coach is a regular person who has been able to demonstrate a manageable degree of worldly attainment, who has made plenty of mistakes and overcome them through humility (or humiliation, as necessary), a working knowledge of progressing toward higher consciousness and the gift of helping others do the same.

I love spiritual coaching and believe I am effective at helping others because I have had to put spiritual principles and practices at the center of my life to manage and overcome serious flaws in character and behavior, childhood trauma, and a deep misunderstanding of who I am and my place in the scheme of things. The first 40 years of my life did not go well for me, to say the least. I was broken, discouraged, demoralized, and lost. The fortunate combination of unremitting suffering along with the smallest degree of hope forced me to take up a spiritual life and to do my best to clean up the wreckage and be set on a path that really goes somewhere.

And the truth is, the spiritual life has worked for me beyond my wildest imaginings. I can honestly say, 20 years later, I’m a new person with a new outlook on life, a new regard for the past, and a present state of being that is filled with grace, gratitude and the ability to make a positive difference in the lives of others. I found my true calling in life as a Yoga teacher, Yoga studio owner, life coach and spiritual coach. Helping others is the great joy of my life and I am blessed beyond measure to be able to do so. For the longest time, it seemed as though my life was going nowhere, meant nothing and was irredeemable. Surrendering to Something greater than myself and practicing a spiritual life rescued me.

However, I have done nothing perfectly nor even ideally for the past 20 years. I have made big mistakes, blundered my way through poor decisions, stepped on subconscious landmines of trauma buried in my psyche, dealt with severe depression and loss and staggered through the suffering and difficulties and ignorance that come standard with a fully-lived human life. But spiritual principles and practices have never failed me and have always brought me through to a higher, brighter, expanded and more loving condition of being. This is the great promise of the authentic spiritual life and it is an unfailing law of being that will lift anyone, anywhere, at anytime out of difficulty and limitation and restore harmony when they willingly and humbly put the spiritual life first.

Perhaps you want to come up out of difficulty, restriction or trouble. Perhaps there is a calling within you to come up higher and remember and awaken a dormant Power within you that will guide you, soothe you, inspire you, educate you and place your life on a new plane of meaning, value and harmony. Perhaps you are ready to begin the adventure of a lifetime, the only adventure with existential meaning and eternal value.

Perhaps you can’t live any longer without knowing the truth about yourself, who you really are and your place in the grand scheme of things. Perhaps you have urgent questions and you’ve been asking a long time without hearing any answers. Perhaps you want to know if there is a “God”, who that God may be and what your relationship to a possible God might be. Perhaps it’s time to alleviate the suffering and find the simple joy of being that lies at the very core of your being, if you will but seek it.

Perhaps it is time for Spiritual coaching. “Ask, and you shall receive. Knock, and the door will be opened to you. Seek and you shall find”.

If you are ready for spiritual coaching, I can help you in a variety of ways and I can customize the approach to suit your particular temperament and situation.

Here are five primary ways I can assist you in finding the connection to the power that can solve your problems:

1. I can listen and be a witness for your experience. While this may seem simple, being heard and honestly expressing your inner world in a safe and understanding environment by a trained listener is in and of itself one of the most dynamic and transformative healing experiences. So many humans are carrying the debilitating baggage of repressed or secret emotional and psychic distress. Releasing this internal disturbance through honest conversation with someone who really knows how to listen opens the door to catharsis and the significant reduction of anxiety and stress within the psyche that blocks conscious contact with the wisdom and knowledge that lies dormant within. It is actually quite surprising how many people have never had a thoroughly honest conversation with another human being.

I am empathic by nature; after thousands of honest conversations with thousands of people for the purpose of psychological, emotional and spiritual healing, I am able to read below the surface of conditions and external appearances and intuit the causative factors that may be holding an individual apart from realizing their true nature and finding their true place in life. While this may seem a bold claim, it is really quite natural and normal. All humans have this capacity for empathic understanding which can be used help heal and restore others, it is simply a matter that some, through life-experience, focus and practice, have developed the faculty of empathic reading for the purpose of helping others see through their blind spots to the truth.

2. I can guide you through an extremely effective life inventory and introspection process that will identify both your strengths and weaknesses. By clearly identifying the weaknesses in our makeup and honestly shining the light upon our all-too human flaws, frailties, shortcomings, bad habits (this list could go on ad-infinitum), we then become eligible to heal and overcome the faults of character that inevitably have led to negative patterns of behavior that are responsible for the entire fabric of our life story. It is exactly this sort of inventory and introspection that gives one the ability to understand and overcome painful and recurring life dramas, especially the variety that seem to keep happening over and over again no matter how hard we may try to avoid our familiar life narrative.

By identifying and clarifying our God-given strengths, gifts and talents, we are much more easily able to express these strengths for the well-being of ourselves and all who surround us. When we are willing to honestly acknowledge and claim the gifts and talents that Providence has supplied us and let go of false humility and timidity, we can authentically and boldly move out into the world and successfully pursue what we know in our heart we were put on earth to accomplish. When we truly know our strengths and are no longer afraid to show them to the world, we align with the power within ourselves that is expressing those strengths through us.

3. I can help you find a God of your own understanding. If the term “God” does not work for you, you may replace it with Source, Being, Creator, All-That-Is, Higher Power, Universe or any other name that suits you. It is axiomatic you will only find God within your own experience and within your own understanding. This extraordinarily important principle means that you may seek your own concept of God, it is no longer necessary or optimal to seek for an ideal of God based on the opinions, dogma, biases or misunderstanding of others. That you may seek a God of your own understanding is an incredibly liberating process, it frees you from the constraints and restrictions of any previously held concepts regarding God that you inherited, adopted or denied before you were able to honestly contemplate this most vital life issue with an open mind and sincere heart.

It is my deepest core premise as a Spiritual Coach that a person has the absolute freedom to choose any ideal or concept of God (Source, Being, Creator, etc.), or none at all. However, the concept of God that one freely chooses, or not, is the most influential decision, with more consequences and ramifications on the quality of life that one lives, than all of the other choices and decisions they will make in their life. With this in mind, the serious and deliberate inquiry into what one thinks about God, or the concept of God, and the willingness to update and upgrade one’s beliefs and understanding of God can very well be the most transformative and uplifting exercise one may ever engage; it may change your life faster and more dramatically than you can imagine. Again, it is quite surprising how many humans have never studied or introspected on this most important issue.

As your spiritual coach, I can assist and guide you through a process of clarifying your understanding of your Higher Power to identify what thoughts and beliefs are no longer serving you, are outdated or were unconsciously inherited without intelligent deliberation. I can offer and introduce you to concepts of God-Source-Love-Being that can revolutionize your personal relationship with your Higher Power and make it vastly more real for you. The conscious and deliberate replacing of old ideas of God for new, more intelligent and more loving ideas changes the world you see around you. The more your concept of God aligns with the Truth, the more harmonious and balanced your life will be while the attendant suffering of life will be reduced and when experienced, used for maximal conscious evolution.

Meditation – The Key that brings it all together

4. I can help you build a consistent, effective and life-long practice of meditation. Why is this important? I personally have a forty year plus consistent practice of meditation and from my experience, meditation is the most dynamic, powerful and transformative spiritual practice. Meditation does not simply change you, it transforms you into a new person, not necessarily overnight but consistently and reliably over a lifetime. When every spiritual master and spiritual teaching in human history points to meditation as the primary and foremost means of achieving higher consciousness, we can take them at their word.

Meditation allows for the crucial quieting of the mortal mind in order to make a connection with Universal Mind or one’s Higher Self. In the absence of this connection, the human mind is left to its own limited devices and suffers accordingly. In the presence of the connection with Spirit via meditation, the mortal mind is continuously updated and refreshed with the qualities of being we most need for successful and harmonious life, i.e., love, intelligence, wisdom, creativity, vitality, truth, health, abundance and peace. In the absence of true meditation, most humans are consigned to habitual patterns of perception and action that can produce only the same limited and often negative results over and over again for a lifetime. If you want out of the rut of chronically limited or degraded experience, you simple must meditate, there is no sufficient alternative.

As your spiritual coach, I can help you find the system of meditation that works optimally for you. Through guided meditations, I can give you tangible and real experience of what meditation is so you know what you’re looking for and can reproduce it on your own. Through offering a wide array of techniques suited to your disposition and temperament, I can help you develop precisely the system of meditation that reduces the resistance to going within and enables you to groove the habit so that it sticks for the long term and therefore gives long term and life-changing results. Finally, I can assist you with meditation accountability; it is a simple and proven fact that having an accountability guide/teacher results in a much higher degree of success in building a consistent, durable, life-long practice of meditation.

5. As your spiritual coach, I can help you get off of “auto-pilot” mode. By this I mean, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Conventional coaching typically addresses auto-pilot mode by having the client deliberately take new and often alien actions to break out of chronic habits of behavior. While there is certainly merit in altering actions to produce new results, without a fundamental change of consciousness, the likelihood of returning or relapsing into chronic negative modes of behavior is great. This is why so many complain of having the same intimate relationship over and over again no matter how many partners they shuffle through. Or why so many exist at the same relative level of financial scarcity no matter how often they switch careers or how much money they make.

In spiritual coaching you learn to the depth of your being that your outer conditions, the people, places and things of your life are but the outward expression of your inner states of consciousness and the futility of trying to adjust, change or modify your outer world without the necessary improvement and transformation of your mind. Genuine spiritual work on updating and upgrading your consciousness with respect to the concerns of life that really matter is truly the definition of working smarter rather than working harder. All the action and new behavior in the world cannot make up for fundamental flaws and distortions of understanding, character or perception that are at the root of all trouble, lack, disease and suffering.

As your spiritual coach, I can help you to recognize, acknowledge and get to work on the fundamental distortions of perception that have been lurking below the surface level of consciousness that are unwittingly driving your beliefs, your motives and your actions and therefore producing the conditions and circumstances you find yourself in. When these most deeply held patterns of perception and faulty premises are uprooted and exposed to the light of awareness, it is then and only then that true and lasting progress can be made on the path of improvement. It is safe to say that most humans have been trying to solve their most pressing life problems by using the same state of mind that produced the problems in the first place and this is the definition of futility. It is quite possible that a month working with an effective spiritual coach can give insight and epiphanies that lead to an entirely new quality of existence that years of struggle, therapy, and hard work may never resolve.

If you’ve read these preceding five thousand words, something has caught your attention. Only a small fraction of individuals will take the time and invest their focus on a comprehensive essay on the quality of their soul such as this. These words have been arranged and delivered with the intention of identifying and attracting precisely those who are ready for not just change, but transformation. Transformation is the radical rearrangement of perception and awareness that precedes the unfolding of fresh, new life experience. Transformation is the raising of consciousness that makes you into a new version of yourself, stronger, smarter, more courageous, energized, vastly more effective at making real the desires and destinies that have heretofore been lying dormant in your heart. Ultimately you will realize these desires and your destiny, the only question is how much longer will it take? Months, a year, a few more years? A couple of decades? Your next lifetime?

Many people die with their music left unsung. While this is a tragedy from a limited personal perspective, from a spiritual perspective, nothing is ever lost. There is literally no end to the endless lives you can live in pursuit of awakening and successfully realizing and expressing who you really are. However, there is no bottom to the suffering that can accrue in the endless time wasted wandering in delusion and separated from conscious contact with your Source and the peace and genuine happiness that comes from remembering who you are. When you can no longer afford, physically, emotionally, psychologically and spiritually to live in the suffering of separation and the absence of living the meaning and purpose you know you were meant to live, you are ready to wake up. You are ready for spiritual coaching.