Embracing the Living Labyrinth

Labyrinth at the Garrison Institute in Garrison, NY

I used to have a practice of walking a labyrinth in a park near my house. After many rounds, I became conscious of a subtle feeling of disappointment arising each time I found myself traveling the outer ring after minutes of walking. Despite knowing that I would, of course, reach the center if I just kept going, I’d notice myself thinking at that point that the journey was taking forever. And then I’d turn a bend, and there I’d be, just steps away from the center!

The deep fulfillment that comes from "finding our purpose," or "following our calling" is the spiritual journey, and this is never a straight line. This is why walking the labyrinth is a powerful ritual. It’s a metaphoric physical space that mimics the life journey. One path leads in and out. We can see where we’re headed at the outset — it looks like it’s only a few steps away — but we can’t go there directly.  Instead the path winds and turns so that as we follow, it looks at times like we are traveling farther and farther from our intended destination.  

And so it goes in life. As a coach my job is to help you clarify where you want to be going, stay on course, and trust the process of going there, even when it looks like you’ve headed in the opposite direction. 

The coach training I received in 2019 placed a big emphasis on on helping clients set and achieve goals in a rather linear fashion with tools like mindset, planning and accountability. While short-term goal setting can be useful at times, in my experience, actually making progress toward the lives of our dreams requires a great deal of unlearning and capacity to catch the curveballs life throws us more than it does doggedly setting our courses toward specific, measurable outcomes. 

As I follow the labyrinthine life path myself, I’ve become less confident in the value of short term goals like “get 10 new coaching clients by March 1” and more trusting in my deep longing to “offer meaningful support to people in their journeys of becoming more whole” to guide me.  As I stay centered on my path, I meet many seeming obstacles along the way that appear to send me off course: doubt, anxiety and a deep sense of hopelessness are some of mine. Once we clarify what our big dreams actually are, life will help us see what’s in the way - the beliefs, mindsets and unhealed wounds that are why we don’t live that dream already.  If we don’t know what we’re looking at it is very easy to find confirmation in our conditioned stories about ourselves and the world.

This is where coaching comes in. To release the limiting beliefs and deeply embedded patterns in our psyches that currently prevent us from living the lives we long for, we need to be conscious of what these “obstacles” are. There’s no better way I’ve found to become clear about my unconscious programming than to share my concerns and dilemmas with a skilled coach. 

The coaching I’ve received has literally helped change the course of my life. A session last spring, for example, helped me acknowledge for the first time that I no longer wanted to run my landscaping business, which initiated a series of recognitions that led me to my new life in Philadelphia. 

In another coaching session I received last spring, I realized that the real reason I had not pursued coaching professionally in earnest was that on a deep level I believed work was supposed to be struggle, as I had watched it be for my parents, and I felt guilty about doing something I enjoy so much, that actually makes me feel relaxed and easy.  My big fear, it turned out, was that if my main gig was coaching, my life would be too good!  It took some steps after that to get comfortable doing the thing I love as my day job, but that series of coaching sessions paved the way. 

I’m still always a little awe-struck by the raw honesty and profundity of my clients’ insights each time. (And they do arrive, large and small, in nearly every session.) Coaching helps to calm and regulate the nervous system and open up space while we look at the biggest challenges of our lives. After spending an hour with someone struggling with a particularly thorny inner conflict, they often show up at the next session in a much more relaxed state and report that since our last meeting, the answer has become clear and they’re ready to take action aligned with their decision.  

If you’re motivated to keep walking to your own center and ready to face the obstacles appearing on your life path now, please reach out! It would be my joy and pleasure to support you. 

I am offering a promotion right now to bring in new coaching clients. Book a set of 6 sessions (either weekly or biweekly) and get a $150 discount. Or book a set of 8 sessions (either weekly or biweekly) and save $200!!

Click here to schedule a FREE discovery coaching session with me.