Inner Coaching

Of course I need at least some working idea of what spirituality is if I am to explore its relationship to coaching. The temptation was to immediately look up a definition in the dictionary, ask Google or Chatgpt. But that didn’t feel terribly honest. Maybe I’ll do that later but first I needed to ask myself how I would define spirituality. After all I must be carrying around some kind of working definition to get this far along the path and I do have a faith. So I must have some ideas. But they don’t seem to be in my consciousness and I don’t think they are very coherent or ordered. Maybe the things of spirituality resist order and definition.

So I have decided to take a clean page and a smooth juicy fountain pen, (always an exquisite combination), and draw diagrams and write words and see what happens.

So I did, and kept making a mess on the page and took a new page and kept going making another mess with more words and connecting lines and it all took no longer than fifteen minuets.

(At one point I tried to write a definition of spirituality as a Christian and then a definition, pretending I wasn’t a Christian – to make a ‘secular’ definition. But I found I couldn’t do that – I couldn’t step out of the faith and heritage I have inhabited for so long.)

Then I needed to put all these jottings and diagrams into some kind of order and sentences. This is what I came up with. I came up with four sentences:

Spirituality is:

• an AWARENESS of depth, complexity & time in everything,

• an ATTENTION to that which is inside me, around me, beyond me,

• a MOVEMENT of meaning making beyond the ego to the eternal and ultimate,

• A PRACTICE of doing, being and belonging

So I will begin to unpack these four statements in future journal entries.