Transcript
00:00:05 Joanna Lindenbaum
I’m Joanna Lindenbaum, a coach, ritualist, and all-around transformation nerd who is obsessed with helping clients go deep to create more change and results with their clients.
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I created the Coaching Revolution Podcast to share with you coaching skills, tips, and advice, as well as a deeper understanding of human behavior and of yourself.
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so that you can do even better client work and group work, grow your business organically, and know that you’re making a real difference in the world.
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This is about creating a revolution in the transformational industry so that more practitioners feel amazing about what they do, and so that more of our clients experience life-changing shifts.
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Let’s get started.
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Welcome back to the podcast.
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With it being November already, and also with us just having passed Halloween last week, it felt like a perfect moment to do a podcast episode related to the late autumn season, at least for those of us in the northern hemisphere.
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So this is an episode on the very human experiences of letting go, of being in the mystery versus having full clarity, and of knowing when it’s a moment for less is more.
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We need to talk more and understand more about each of these things that I just mentioned for so, many reasons.
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Because no matter how productive or expansive anyone’s life is, as a human being, they are going to inevitably encounter times of loss.
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or times where they may have to do with less, or times of contraction, or winter-type seasons where slowing down or even stopping things is what’s required.
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So this is a really important conversation, and this conversation is also so, valuable for when it comes to supporting our clients.
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especially because a lot of the coaching industry doesn’t speak to these topics and issues.
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The coaching industry tends to speak about growth and about expansion and about more and more.
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And it kind of just pushes off to the side the conversation about sometimes there is less
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Sometimes there is letting go.
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Sometimes there is loss.
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But of course, as Sacred Depths coaches and practitioners, we know we must also have loss and less as part of our understanding of human behavior.
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because these are key parts of the human experience.
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We need this in order to support our clients.
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So we’re going to be looking at some of this in today’s episode.
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There’s so much to learn, so much wisdom and also skill on these topics.
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And I’ve picked a couple of intro pieces on all of it from
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what I teach inside of Sacred Depths.
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And what we’re going to be looking at on today’s episode mostly are some very important key pieces of human behavior when it comes to the topic of loss and when it comes to the topic of less.
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Because as always,
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The mastery of human behavior is one of the keys to being an extraordinary practitioner and entrepreneur.
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For those of you that have…
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been our graduates of Sacred Depths or really any of my trainings, that there are four main pillars that we look at over and over again in order to become a masterful, extraordinary coach and practitioner and leader who can really support clients to create change.
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One of those pillars is mastery of human behavior.
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Because you can have the best techniques in the world, but if you don’t understand the spectrum of human behavior around those techniques, you’re not going to know how to apply.
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those techniques.
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So mastery of human behavior is one of the four main pillars of sacred depths and everything that we do here and apply depth.
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Mastery of transformational skills is of course another one of those pillars.
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We need to master the skills and the techniques for sure.
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Personal mastery is another one of those pillars.
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It’s
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we have to move through the work ourselves, right?
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And we have to really be doing our own inner work so that we can bring the right energetics to our clients so that we can respond versus react, et cetera, et cetera.
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And then the 4th pillar that we always look at in sacred depths is mastery of ethical business practices, business and marketing practices.
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Okay, so let’s get into all of this by first by understanding the late autumn season a little bit more.
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This time that we’re in right now in the northern hemisphere, it’s not early season, early autumn season, but we’re in the second-half of autumn now, firmly.
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So
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At this time, the time around Halloween, the end of October into November, the natural world that surrounds us appears to be dying.
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And maybe you’ve been feeling it yourself as you’ve been moving through this season.
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Leaves are falling from trees, leaving them bare and naked.
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There’s often during this time of year a little bit of a wet dreariness in the air.
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Since autumn equinox, six weeks ago, the darkness has overtaken the sunlight.
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The nights are getting longer and longer, and the days are getting shorter and shorter.
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The time from Halloween until winter solstice at the end of December, another six weeks away, is the darkest season of the year in the northern hemisphere.
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The sun is quickly disappearing, the days are at their shortest, and it’s getting colder and colder.
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We are right now in the season of death.
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And traditionally for millennia, Halloween in one form or another was a holy day that marked the moment of death, the moment of release.
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This is the part of the wheel of the year, the part of the cycle of the year where the earth metaphorically dies, where it releases and lets go, right?
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And the trees releasing their leaves are an expression of this.
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is the part of the wheel of the year
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where we start to turn towards the long, silent nights of winter.
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This is the moment of death when the cycle of one year ends and the cycle of another year begins.
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And
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In that death, in that metaphoric death of the earth each year at this time, Halloween also traditionally marks the magical moment when the veils between the worlds are the thinnest.
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It is often said that during this time of year,
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if we listen close enough, if we open ourselves up, if we embrace the mystery, if we’re willing to walk in the darkness, that we’re able to hear the spirits that are there to support us, that we’re able to hear the wisdom of the ancestors, and that we’re able to hear
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the deep, sacred, and meaningful wisdom of the other side.
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And it’s in this recognition of death that some of the modern traditions of Halloween derive from, right, the dressing up as ghosts and goblins and zombies and skeletons,
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It all comes originally from an understanding that at this time during the year is a moment where we need to honor and acknowledge that death is part of the cycle of life.
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Now, this acknowledgement that death is part of the cycle of life
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This is something that modern culture and advanced capitalism has tried to distance us from.
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And it’s something that modern culture and advanced capitalism has succeeded a lot in distancing us from.
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So let me explain what I mean by this, because this is really important because these cultural messages seep into us
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and into our clients and they do harm.
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And part of our work as coaches, as practitioners, as transformational leaders is to undo some of this cultural messaging.
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So for example,
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Culture generally tells us that constant extreme production is good, that more is always more, that we always want to create more, that we shouldn’t ever have to do with less.
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I’m a big fan of production, for sure.
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There are places and moments in time for it, but if we start to look at the world and the Earth’s resources and ourselves and our lives as produce, produce, produce, we end up depleting.
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the earth and we end up depleting ourselves.
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We’re not machines.
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We can’t just produce, produce, produce.
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There are moments where less is more, but that doesn’t benefit capitalism, right?
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So we’re told otherwise.
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Or here’s another example of how modern culture
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and advanced capitalism has tried to distance us from the lessons and the wisdom of the late autumn.
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Very rarely in culture do we have permission to have an intimate connection to death.
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Yes, we see a lot of death in movies, in media, in the news, et cetera.
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But that’s either, you know, it’s done in slick ways or it’s done in catastrophic ways.
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And of course it can be catastrophic when it’s in the news.
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But what I mean is for millennia, people were connected to death.
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loved ones died in the family home.
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They were buried by family members and loved ones, oftentimes in the backyard.
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People didn’t go all the time to hospitals to die.
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a lot in our culture, we’re separated from it or like death is cleaned up in a way.
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And it does us a disservice.
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It does us a disservice to be so disconnected from the process of death and decay.
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Of course, experience kind of, COVID opened up some of that, but a lot these days we’re separated from it.
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We’re also separated a lot or kind of told in one way or another to avoid grief.
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We’re also taught
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and the coaching industry is part of this, unfortunately, part of a lot of these things.
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Unfortunately, we’re also taught that we always need clarity.
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That clarity is the only way, the best way.
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And
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that there’s no real space for lack of clarity, for being in the dark, for knowing that there are times that the answers are in the mystery.
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So I hold space for my private clients, for all of my students in sacred depths and advanced depth and into the depth and all of my trainings.
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to understand all of this in a different way, to not just walk the way of dominant culture on this.
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As coaches and practitioners, as I said earlier, we need
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to be able to call out these cultural messages, not as truth.
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Because so many of our clients fall into…
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the space of believing, right?
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I need to just produce, I need to be more and more and more and more.
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I need to have clarity on all the things and all of the ideas and all of the visions all the time.
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So many of our clients don’t know how to navigate through loss, don’t know how to navigate through grief.
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And I really believe it’s our job to support them with all of that and that actually
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we are not doing our full job to just only focus on production, to only focus on clarity, to only focus on the light.
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We end up bypassing our clients when we do this.
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And quite frankly, and you might know this for yourself, that’s sometimes when the problems start to arise, when the resistance starts to arise for clients, because we’re not helping them
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hold all of these pieces and navigate these pieces and create this meaning.
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So one of the things that I love about being a student of the seasons and the cycles is that whatever is happening in any given season in the earth, you know, during any time of year,
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it’s an opportunity to harness the energy.
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And especially right now in November or Halloween time into November, it is a beautiful time to leverage the energy of everything that we’ve been talking about so far in this episode.
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And in honor and respect towards nature at this time of year, it’s a great opportunity to simulate it, to draw inwards, to spend more time sitting in the shadows, to remember those that have passed before us, the ancestors.
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It’s also a great
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time of year to pay more attention to what is ready to be released.
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What is it time to let die and fall away?
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What is it that we no longer need or that’s not going to serve us right now?
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And of course, traditions all over the world
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have keyed in to the magic of this part of the Wheel of the Year.
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There are so many traditions around the world that this time of year honor death.
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And so many of these holy days in so many cultures, in so many religions,
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Focus on gathering wisdom from the ancestors, so…
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So in ancient Egypt, this time of year, the death of the corn god Osiris was celebrated.
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And during this time of year in India, there’s Pitra Visarana, the festival of death.
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In Japan, it’s called Obon.
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Vietnam celebrates Wandering Souls Day this time of year.
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China celebrates Hungry Ghost Festival this time of year.
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The Christian Church on Halloween celebrates All Hallows Day, and then right after that, honoring the dead saints, right?
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All Saints Day.
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Around this time of year, Jews celebrate Yom Kippur, where they remember their ancestors.
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I
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just a few weeks ago, Yom Kippur passed.
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And it’s, I was celebrating is a weird way to call Yom Kippur because it’s a somber day for sure.
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It’s a day where we say special prayers of remembrance of those that have passed.
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And it’s also a day where we’re meant to simulate death.
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We wear all white, like the shroud that bodies are put into in Jewish tradition.
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We don’t eat or drink for 24 hours.
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And we do so much of this to, because this is the time of year, to honor that death is a part of life.
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It’s part of all of it.
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Also, this time of year in Sicily is Imurti.
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People go out to graveyards and have picnics with the ancestors and the past generations.
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In Mexico, there’s Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead.
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That’s a time to identify with death and to feed the ancestors, the ones that have passed.
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And then of course, as I mentioned earlier, modern times in a lot of places on Halloween, we dress up as the spirits and the goblins and the ghosts, and we trick or treat, right?
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We treat or feed the dead lest they trick us.
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Now, here’s the part about all of this that I love the most.
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On many of these world traditions and the indigenous traditions around this time of year, this moment of death is, it’s either a time for celebration or a time that is just so meaningful.
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So why is this time of death a time of such meaning and even in some traditions, a time of celebration?
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Because it’s kind of counterintuitive.
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Well, because contemplating death allows us to put our lives into perspective.
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How could we ever possibly understand the fullness of life, the robustness, and the possibility of life if we didn’t also try to understand death?
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And I can attest to this truth that walking with death helps
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highlight and make the fullness, the robustness of life even bigger.
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I can attest to this 110%, even more deeply than ever before.
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Because as so many of you know, I’ve been walking these last six months with the reality of my mother’s death since last April.
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And
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I’ve always been one who’s been a little obsessed with death since a little girl.
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I used to kind of lay awake at night.
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I think I may have mentioned this on the episode in some, on the podcast in some episodes back.
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I used to, as a little girl at night, just lay in bed and try to pretend so that I could, what it would be like to be dead, you know, as a way of trying to grasp it more.
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And death has always been on my
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mind and my heart, I think because my mother was sick so much of my life and because of other experiences, for as devastating as this holding, this being with my mother’s death has been these last six months, I also more and more and more have moments than I ever did before of just this feeling of, oh my gosh,
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Life is beautiful.
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It is so magical to have the privilege of being alive.
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The more we embrace death, the more we embrace life.
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And again, not to knock, culture, but I am a lot on this episode.
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in our culture, we’re just only used to celebrating the light.
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We ignore half the story and then we lose out on part of the meaning of life.
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I also want to make a case for embracing and celebrating the dark because
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it allows us to let go, to honor and release what no longer serves us, or what’s ready to be transformed into something else.
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So this time of year, between Halloween and winter solstice, this is the glorious transition
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between the death of the old cycle and the birth of something new.
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And this transition time between the death of the old and the birth of the new.
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This, my friends, this process is called transformation.
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It’s the darkest of days, and it’s in the darkest of days, the shortest of days, where we prepare for what’s next, where the foundation for the next cycle is laid.
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In today’s world, we’re taught to fear the dark, to fear
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the mystery, to fear that which we can’t pin down.
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But in actuality, the dark is the time when we dream, right?
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In the nighttime, that’s when dreams happen.
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That’s the time when our creative juices are flowing.
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We dream up new projects, new beginnings.
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We dream the future.
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We prepare life to be born.
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This season that we’re in right now is such a fertile moment.
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Because out of the mystery is where the new beginnings evolve.
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Death feeds life, feeds death.
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feeds life.
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We can’t have one without the other.
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And to live life fully, to access all of our resources, we need to revel in the magic of the entire sacred cycle.
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And I can give so many personal examples
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and stories of times where when I was willing to let go of something, even though I didn’t know what was coming next, it brought so much more into my life.
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It created incredible new beginnings and new cycles.
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And so I’ll give just one personal example.
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when COVID hit back in 2020, I had a number of programs that were only in-person, in-person retreats where people would fly here to be with me in Charlotte.
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And of course, when that, when COVID first hit,
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We couldn’t do anything in person.
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It just wasn’t a thing.
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People were not willing to fly and be in the room together.
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There was a lot of fear, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
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And real precautions had to be taken.
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And so even though it was so painful, I had to let go of that in-person programming.
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I didn’t have a choice.
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So this was letting go that I didn’t have a choice for.
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So I let it go, kind of like we let go this time of year.
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And I moved into the dark.
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I moved into the mystery.
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I didn’t know what was gonna come next.
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It was big chunk of my
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of my income and also my passion, because I love what I teach, right?
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And the space that I hold and the ways I was with people in those programs.
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But I allowed myself to be in the mystery and what rose from that void from the mystery is
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advanced depth, my advanced depth training that’s all about shadow.
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And I had been teaching all about shadow in various ways and other programs, but not in this really focused way for a full year like we do in advanced with all of the techniques we learn there.
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That program would not have been able
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to come forward or it would have taken years before it came forward if I hadn’t been willing to be in the mystery, right, to be with less.
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Okay, so
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hopefully everything that I’ve shared so far has resonated.
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I want to hear how it’s resonated.
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Let me know.
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I’m, you know, hopefully it’s landing.
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And so the next question is, okay, so how do we practically
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apply all of this wisdom and this understanding to our client work, to our group work?
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How do we apply this to our work as coaches and transformational practitioners?
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Well, in many, many, many ways, there are so many practical applications.
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And I’m going to just briefly kind of bird’s eye view, mention just a few.
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to you right now.
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Okay, so first thing to think about is the following.
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Coaching work, transformational work isn’t only for seasons of outward growth.
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So here’s what I mean by that.
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When our clients come to us, as coaches, they come to us because there is something they want to accomplish.
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There is a goal that they want to achieve.
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And
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Sometimes when clients first come to us about achieving those goals, they’re not ready to take outer action.
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They’re not in their spring or summer season.
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They might be in their autumn or winter season.
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I have clients who start with me
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in moments of first, they have to let go of something.
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First, they have to work a fear.
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First, they have to hold some space for grief before we can take outer action, right?
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So it’s really important for you to have all of your transformational skills in place and your listening skills in place, your understanding of all of this to know when a client comes to you, what season are they starting in?
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Another thing to keep in mind, another way to apply this practically to your client work is to remember that sometimes the work with clients is about sitting in the shadows with them.
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So as we’ve been talking about in this episode, grief is part of human nature.
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Loss, whether it’s loss of a loved one or loss of a job or loss of a home,
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or a child going away to college or whatever it is, both grief and loss are a part of life, loss of a team member, et cetera, et cetera.
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We need to be able to sit with our clients in that.
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We need to be able to support our clients, to acknowledge the loss, to honor the loss.
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There are times just because of what’s happening in the world where we need to do this.
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I’ve been doing that a little bit more these days with everything happening in the world.
00:36:23 Joanna Lindenbaum
So you want to have your skills in place with this.
00:36:27 Joanna Lindenbaum
You want to be able to really hold space for your clients.
00:36:33 Joanna Lindenbaum
You don’t want to bypass if they need to sit in the shadows a little bit.
00:36:38 Joanna Lindenbaum
And you want to be able to do this in a way
00:36:41 Joanna Lindenbaum
where you’re honoring, acknowledging the thing, the loss, the things that aren’t going so well, really having your client feel seen and heard in it while also not being disempowering, right?
00:37:00 Joanna Lindenbaum
So finding that balance, and it is a skill, and it’s one we learn in sacred depths,
00:37:06 Joanna Lindenbaum
where you can honor what is while also being empowering.
00:37:14 Joanna Lindenbaum
As part of that, another thing to remember, and I think it’s hard a lot for coaches to do this, but we must, that sometimes less is more.
00:37:27 Joanna Lindenbaum
And also that rest is needed and necessary for growth.
00:37:35 Joanna Lindenbaum
So, just as one example, I have a client who has an incredible business.
00:37:44 Joanna Lindenbaum
She’s just really, in it to be big, et cetera, et cetera.
00:37:51 Joanna Lindenbaum
She’s created just an amazing business and an amazing team.
00:37:58 Joanna Lindenbaum
And she recently went through a period, I won’t get into all of the details, but because of some things that were going on in her personal life, even though it seemed really scary and it seemed counterproductive to growth, what was actually right for my client was to downsize her team.
00:38:26 Joanna Lindenbaum
I don’t think it’s going to be forever, but it needs to be for temporary.
00:38:31 Joanna Lindenbaum
And we worked through that.
00:38:33 Joanna Lindenbaum
I wasn’t just holding this space of more, and more, bigger, bigger, bigger, expand, expand, expand.
00:38:40 Joanna Lindenbaum
Instead, I was holding a space of what is right for you right now.
00:38:45 Joanna Lindenbaum
Sometimes more is more, sometimes less is more.
00:38:48 Joanna Lindenbaum
Anyway,
00:38:49 Joanna Lindenbaum
This client did downsize some of her team.
00:38:53 Joanna Lindenbaum
We work through the fears, the beliefs, and she has had this experience of being able to enjoy her life so much more.
00:39:08 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I do think it’s going to lead to more growth.
00:39:12 Joanna Lindenbaum
Okay, I’m going to
00:39:15 Joanna Lindenbaum
pause on that.
00:39:17 Joanna Lindenbaum
Those are some things to just start to think about when it comes to practical application.
00:39:27 Joanna Lindenbaum
I hope that this episode has sparked ideas for you, has touched important places for you.
00:39:36 Joanna Lindenbaum
if you are like me, a student of the seasons or want to be a student of the seasons, and also if you are like me, not only a lifelong learner, but someone who is kind of obsessed and a nerd when it comes to learning how to
00:39:59 Joanna Lindenbaum
support clients through the seasons, support clients through ritual and ceremony, and also go deeper with your facilitation skills.
00:40:10 Joanna Lindenbaum
Please know that we still have a couple spots left open for our December retreat, training retreat in Charlotte, North Carolina, where I live.
00:40:20 Joanna Lindenbaum
It’s called Into the Depths.
00:40:23 Joanna Lindenbaum
It is
00:40:27 Joanna Lindenbaum
It’s really a life-changing 4 days.
00:40:31 Joanna Lindenbaum
You will be happily surprised at what comes through for you and all of it, and you will emerge also
00:40:45 Joanna Lindenbaum
a much, much stronger facilitator and group leader.
00:40:51 Joanna Lindenbaum
In addition to teaching the facilitation skills, I walk you through a journey, an experiential journey of the four seasons, through the archetypes of the maiden, the mother, the queen, and the crone.
00:41:05 Joanna Lindenbaum
And it is something you will remember for the rest of your life.
00:41:11 Joanna Lindenbaum
So if that calls to you,
00:41:15 Joanna Lindenbaum
get in touch, let us know.
00:41:17 Joanna Lindenbaum
I’d love to meet you in person in December and give you a big hug.
00:41:22 Joanna Lindenbaum
For now, if you enjoyed this episode, please give it a five-star rating and an excellent review.
00:41:31 Joanna Lindenbaum
If you know anyone who would really benefit from this episode, please send it along, share it with them.
00:41:41 Joanna Lindenbaum
I will appreciate it and they will appreciate it as well.
00:41:44 Joanna Lindenbaum
I’ll see you next time.
