[Sandy Shea]

Initial Post
• How do Nature-Connected Practices and Grief Counseling principals interface?
In reflecting on Grief and how our culture encourages us to bury it, get over it, fail to acknowledge it, etc, I was struck by the experience of a client and her 14 year-old son, he who has recently undergone shoulder surgery. As the son lay in hospital with 6 screws in his young body, I couldn’t help but notice the comments on facebook from family members. Most of them were along the lines of “Get well, you’ve gotta get out there again, get back on the snowboard again, You’ve got this, you’re the man of the house.” True empathy for his situation (his loss of physicality, potentially his loss of pursuing his dream to be a professional snowboarder at a young age) was absent in those comments, and it shed a lot of light on my client, who needs to stay constantly busy, and who failed to note any trauma on the intake form despite a serious encounter with cancer herself. There is a story in this culture around grief, trauma, and what to do with them. We bury it and hope that will help, but they just come back as complicated grief (Workaholism, for example). I find the list of complicated grief signs on pg 102 of the Toolbox to be so helpful in trying to decode what my client is trying to show me. So, Nature-connected practices are perfect for addressing clients in grief—for creating situations where nature is companioning them and bearing witness. Nature is entraining their nervous system, and allowing their process to unfold–Literally, going to the wilderness of the soul of your client. So, my goal for the next few sessions with this client is first to provide more resources about grief/trauma and how it manifests, and second, to spend less time talking inside, and spend more silent/quiet time on wanders, or sitting, in nature.

[Sandy Shea]

Summary Post

The Brain Intensives continue to reverberate in my life and with my growing work with clients. I’m reading several books at once and starting to make some more connections between mindfulness, intention setting, ritual, power of story and the ability of the brain to help us to imagine and deeply feel our way into our new vision in powerful ways. I also have enjoyed reading others’ experiences in these areas and look forward to the next two webinars where we can share more!

[Sandy Shea]

Initial Post
• What steps did you take to establish the Coaching Relationship and focus the session?

My client is a very talkative and self-motivated late 40s mother of two who owns 2 very successful restaurants in Crested Butte. She came to me wanting to cultivate and grow a greater sense of work/life balance, and inner calm. From the beginning, we’ve been working on lots of ways to meditate, remain mindful, in the body, in the moment, etc. Two days ago was our fifth session.

My sessions with her have been marked by a lot of nonstop ‘shop talk”, and although she was changing her routine, she was regularly meditating, and she was being less triggered in stressful situations, by now I was becoming dissatisfied with my approach, that my client appeared not to be often in touch with her feelings, or in the moment, because our sessions were all about her past. I became concerned I might not be intervening enough, that we weren’t circling back to the goal often enough, or serving the client’s overall needs. I wanted to direct the session more, especially at the beginning.

Because this client loves to talk, and because there’s a 7-10 minute walk from the car to my home, we usually engage in chatter all the way up. Often in the past I have not been mindful enough and have let this chatter continue to follow us right into my coaching space, and trample over the first minutes of the session. But on this day as we crossed the threshold into the mudroom, I modeled a very slow, silent demeanor in removing my boots, and I encouraged her with a hand gesture and a big smile to please take a seat inside. Soft Kirtan music and the faint aroma of incense helped set the tone for our nervous systems to calm, and become more inward focused over time. In this case, we sat in silence for 4-5 mins.listening to the music until it was over. After another 30 seconds of silence and not moving, I handed her a sheet of paper with the questions;

“What would you like to be the outcome for this session today? How does that relate to your goal? (Please write me back (☺). No hurry.”

Because we had already talked about her verbal proclivities, I felt comfortable enough with this client to try this experiment which asked her pfc to engage non-verbally in the Now and override her tendency to let her verbalizations (memories) about the past get the best of her. Plus, I needed a way to just slow her down and find out what we wanted to focus on! As it turns out, the approach worked really well and helped the client focus on their immediate true feelings about what they wanted that day. The session focused on her sharing her accomplishments since we began together, and us celebrating how far she had come from her old reactive self. We used this to check back in with, and tweak, the goal, and to begin working on an intention for her New Self moving forward.
It also cool that this very ‘type A’ client credited her meditation/breath awareness practice, with her ability to feel more connected in nature and to see mirrors/metaphors of her own life experience on our wander out on the land. This is a very motivated individual who has adhered to a repeitive new behavior for long enough that she is experiencing her own brain changes. Those neurons are starting to fire together in new ways. Inspiring.

[Sandy Shea]

Final post
In thinking about trauma and others’ posts, I come away with a newfound appreciation for how widespread trauma is and how it varies so much from person to person. So, with this in mind, I’m feeling the call to be ever-vigilant for the signs of trauma in my clients, regardless of what opinion or feeling I may have about whether an incident is traumatic for someone, or not.
The body doesn’t lie, and I’m working with my own trauma responses, starting to notice where they occur in my body and what the somatics of the experience are. This is already giving me better insight into my client’s experience, and is helping me to help them identify when traumaatic response is happening, and how to develop and use resources and grounding tools in their own journey.

[Sandy Shea]

Initial post

My client K is a 47-year old female restauranteur. Her business encompasses 2 restaurants and she employs about 130 people 7 nights a week in the high season. K is very hands on and greets almost every customer. She works long hours alongside her staff, who know that K can be demanding. K does have high standards, and also takes customer comments very personally, and can be deeply hurt by someone’s rude or impatient remarks concerning her product or service.

K had radiation therapy for breast cancer and tests show it now is gone. She recently had a ‘miracle’ birth of her 2nd child, whose embryo was frozen for 3 years prior to radiation therapy. My intake form asks about trauma, and I noted she’d left it blank. She replied that the cancer was not traumatic–just another thing to meet and overcome, like how she approaches work.

K came to me for coaching help on techniques to slow down and be more calm at work, and to get support having a more balanced life between work and home with new family.

What we discovered in working together were two things related to trauma:
K is now feeling energy or heat at the site where the radiation was directed. Although test still now show all clear, I mentioned this may well be residual trauma from her treatments–fear unprocessed and still in her body from that experience. When we did guided meditation, she was able to get to a place where the pain was totally gone. This brought a sense of relief because it made sense when explained as the body’s physiological response to an actual life threat (surgery, anesthesia). I encouraged her to contiue with regular check-ups, and meanwhile to work with visualizations and yoga poses that open the chest.

The second thing is what Katie Asmus said Dan Siegal called Developmental Trauma, which can be from repeated exposure to any situation where over time there is a lingering possibility of threat. In talking about what it is like for K to go to work, it sounds a lot like preparing for battle–every night brings a recurring feeling of low-level trauma. She is working on putting a new manager in place to lessen her load.

So, we have been working with identifying grounding Resources for her; we’ve been doing some breath awareness, guided meditation and body scan exercises each session.
These have been helpful in calming her, and homework always involves daily meditation to begin to carve a new neural pathway toward a more calm and controlled place. She’s been doing meditation now regularly for several months and recently had an encounter where previously she would have blown her top, but took 2 minutes to go out on the sidewalk, came back in and made a proactive plan that rocked the rest of the day. She told me she recognized her newfound ability to stop and make a different choice in the present moment. And that was a very good moment for me!

[Sandy Shea]

Summary Post

It has been good to see how we are all shifting our own brains to re-frame our work with clients using more brain science, awareness of stages of change, etc. I am always inspired by how intuitive and creative everyone of us is–and different too. Each of our coaching styles will use and benefit differently from Brain science awareness. For me, I feel like these ideas will really stick with me and become a stronger part of my education/practice with clients: The Prochaska States of Change, the reality of neuroplasticity, and the power of story/myth in porviding the framework for our entire lives.

[Sandy Shea]

Initial Post

Hi all,
I’ll focus here on:

• How did or could change theory and neuroscience principles fit into your nature-connected coaching session?

My recurring client, K, is a female in her early 40s who in February of this year had just initiated a break-up in an important romantic relationship in her life. She told me that she wanted to explore her feelings around the issue, and move on from a feeling of grief & deep loss, and that is what we have been attempting to do (over Zoom) for the past 7 months. (K is very verbal, in her head, talking non-stop for most sessions)
She was resolved to her decision to break up with the man, D, who she said in numerous sessions “clearly just wasn’t the one for me.” She felt disregarded for her opinions, and a basic incompatibility of lifestyles (ex: she is very health conscious and progressive. He prefers more traditional values, products, etc.). And yet she had deep sadness when again confronted with the prospect of raising her son, and “doing life” alone. When she first came to me, she was in the Contemplation phase, having just completed an abrupt Action phase (she initiated the break-up), and finding it extremely difficult to maintain and support her decision, she was contemplating how to connect with new people, experiences, etc, to lessen her anxiety and sadness.
We went through several sessions outlining actions and goals, yet the homework never really got done—I had this image of her on the fence, never fully committing to actions, exercises, and experiences that would create new neural pathways as she navigated life without D. She did the Action, then was very reluctant to do any Maintenance. After several cancelled sessions, I got a message from K that she was back together with D and life was great! Also, no more need for coaching sessions at this time.

What happened here? My read on it is that K never made the Action I thought she had. Yes they split up and didn’t live together anymore, yet they still talked frequently and remained very close. Yes, she made an Action to break up with D, but it was abrupt and so maybe she didn’t do the work in Contemplation or Planning to feel more grounded in her decision, and more forward-looking in her life attitude. The emotional attachment she felt to D—and all those neurons firing together, continued strongly throughout the 7 months, with little else to take its place. That’s the key. . I should have noticed something when no homework was getting done. Many of her statements in sessions had to do with D and the past and I feel now that she needed these very talkative sessions just to see how she really DID feel, and that her previous Action—rash as it was— was needed as a way to call time-out and sort out her feelings while maintaining some connection with D. That seven month’s time for her seems almost like a pendulation between “Here’s my life on my own” and “Here’s my potential life with D.”

D won, at least for now. I’m curious what you all think about this, and whether my read seems on target–and that I’m identifying the stages of change correctly… 🙂

[Sandy Shea]

Hi Ben,
I heard you say “I posed the question with the reflection of all three…” and that seemed to be key for her to stop and hear your question about focusing the session “what do you want now”) So, it sounds like you listened long enough to make sure you heard the major elements, heard the main actors in her story, and reflected that back in a way that accurately encapsulated where she was in that moment. Then she could go into her PFC with your question about feeling into the current deeper need. 🙂

[Sandy Shea]

Hi Ben,
Thanks for sharing your experience, which sounded so important both for you and the client! It sounds like you did exactly what needed to happen and trusted your gut on the experiment and it worked! thanks for sharing.

[Sandy Shea]

hi Cory,

It sounds like almost a kind of pendulation you did with your client, having them ‘re-live’some of their past feelings, but keeping them in the present moment. They could then presumably get some distance from the habitual feelings and see them as ‘memory.’ Then we can view each situation with new eyes. (Even though the rope still strongly reminds me of a snake, now that I have inspected it (pendulation) I know it cannot be a snake, and so actively look for ways it resembles a rope, to help confirm my new view.)

This reminds me of the meditation concept of “Fresh Start” (similar to ‘no past’), where we begin from where we are (no past influencing or dragging at us) and not merely accept but embrace the fact that we’ll stray from our intended path (be it meditation or a friendly encounter with a past foe, or a rope). One could say the practice is the process of repeatedly returning to the practice. Thus we develop compassion for ourselves–and offer ourselves the option of Fresh Start at every moment, so as not to be discouraged. I’ll be curious to hear if the client was successful in their next encounter with the sister-in-law, and what tools prove useful in sustaining a new view. 🙂

[Sandy Shea]

Hi Adriana,
Cool that you’ll be going out with your friend! Love J-Tree. I wonder if you know the book the Roaring of the Sacred River, by Foster & Little? I great resource about guiding/experiencing Rites of Passage. It’s exciting to hear you’ll be doing that and I hope you will let us know how it went. I’m looking to do similar work and also thinking about how I would structure it, what elements and kinds of interaction and ceremony to have when, etc. It sounds like your client is already well-primed so maybe just holding space and doing the 50-50 plan will be all you need for them to get what they need. Exciting!

[Sandy Shea]

Ben,
Thanks for the reminder of using pendulation and present moment awareness to get at lessening your client’s habitual anxiety pattern. I think I’ll try this with my client K, to give her more resources for realizing her reactive pattern and regaining the present moment. Also I liked your scaling by number whatever the feeling is, in this case anxiety. It reminds me a lot of WFR medical training where we use the number scale to ascertain relative (physical) pain severity, and get a baseline. Then we can get a history and ask, when if ever has it ever been a 10? We start to map changes in client/patient experience, based on environment, triggers, etc. The number scale is so useful to help us track where the client is, has been, and wants to go with whatever the feeling is. Thanks for your post.

[Sandy Shea]

Josh,
Congrats on the collaboration/partnership with the practitioner. I hope it goes well!
Your post reminded me to offer the idea of sit spot to my clients. I have been in a ‘rut’ of thinking in terms of offering only wanders, journaling and meditation, and sit spots aren’t getting thought about enough–one of the most basic things!

I echo Ben’s kudos on meeting the client where they were, and working the whole session on the bench–when maybe you had other ideas. I fall into that one all the time–my expectations being totally trashed. And that is what makes the work exciting, and challenging for me–you never know exactly what each session will contain! It sounds like this was a great session for you also in terms of having success with your client using wide angle vision and other awareness techniques to gain new awareness!

[Sandy Shea]

Hi Lisa!
Your post was really inspiring, and I found I was really interested in how you were able to deeply understand the issues your client was dealing with–to attune with his vibe, and he with yours. Clearly this has had a big impact in building trust so your client kept coming back over many months, and got the benefits that they did. Kudos to you.

I really appreciate your ‘toggling’ exercise, which feels kind of like pendulation, but maybe should be called, ‘modulation’, as you’re asking the client to self-reference across a wide spectrum of feeling, not just between states A and B.

[Sandy Shea]

Hi Taylor,
I really appreciate that you share so much with your clients around brain science and stages of change. I agree this approach of transparency and sharing info with clients can be so empowering and effective. It can really help to point out that re-lapse isn’t ‘failure’. Also, I really like how you are returning again and again to Nature to mirror and be metaphor for all various process stuff that comes up!