SPIRITUAL COACHES. WHY THE WORLD NEEDS YOU NOW!

Written by Elizabeth on July 31, 2016. Posted in Spiritual Coaching, Coaching, Spiritual Emergence

The need for trained coaches to work with people who have had spiritual emergence and emergency issues is increasing.  Increased mainstream awareness of this psycho-spiritual development process is evidenced by one social media site on Facebook, The Shades of Awakening private group.  In it’s first 8 months on Facebook, it attracted over 1800 members.  In the last several years, new organizations dedicated to the treatment and support of the process of integration of these experiences have been developed all over the world.

Even though there are many wise and courageous professionals who have learned to utilize these experiences as life lessons and opportunities for deep healing and transformation, many spiritual experiencers are still afraid of going to mental health professionals for assistance.  Experiencers are concerned about “getting medicated out of their experiences”, or being hospitalized when no other pathology other than the experience exists.  Many experiencers seek help through spiritually oriented life coaches, when they can find them, because coaches do not diagnose conditions or prescribe medications.

Coaches who work with this vulnerable population must be specially trained to provide the support and education experiencers need to ensure the coach does no harm to the client.  The transpersonal-transformational coaching model provides an effective way for the coach to get to the essence of an experience and empower the experiencer to develop understanding and meaning.  Instead of invalidating a client’s experience and taking the risk of catapulting experiencers into a longer and darker process of integration than necessary, the method modeled in my blogs, and in the ITTC Spiritual Emergence coaching curriculum beginning in April 2017, can create powerful transformation for experiencers.

What is Spiritual Emergence and Emergency?
Let’s begin with the basics. First we must define what these experiences are and how they manifest.  It is an event or a series of events, perhaps stirrings in the mind, which can potentially lead to the breakdown of a person’s current understanding and meaning of life. These paradigm shifts lead to transformative growth and greater psycho-spiritual health on the part of the individual. It is, “the movement of an individual to a more expanded way of being that involves enhanced emotional and psychosomatic health, greater freedom of personal choices, and a sense of deeper connection with other people, nature, and the cosmos” (Grof & Grof, 1990: 34)
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Spiritual Emergence can occur when people start seeking or experiencing themselves beyond their own personal, societal, or familial identity. Many things can precipitate a spiritual emergence experience. A few possibilities are a major life change, illness, near death experiences, a devotional religious or spiritual practice, drug induced experiences, or an out-of-body experience, just to name a few. However, there are cases in which there was no apparent precipitating cause. This has been discovered to be true in many other studies of the topic.  Clearly, it can happen to anyone at any time for unknown reasons. SE is no respecter of religion, culture, race, age, gender, education, or socio-economic status.

How Does Spiritual Emergence/Emergency Present?
While it is possible to diagnose up to 50 types of emergence experiences for the coaching process, we will look at the work of Dr. Stansilov Grof and his wife Christina, who have identified 10 states of spiritual emergency (Grof, S., & Grof, C. (1989).  From these basic 10 types we can develop an understanding of the essence of most experiences:

• Ego-Death/Dark Night of the Soul
  • There is a dissolution of the self and a consequent loss of reference points.  Symptoms may involve feelings of pressure, claustrophobia, oppression, tightness, restlessness, or struggle, or an unbearable endless repetition of “dying” experiences.
• The Awakening of the Kundalini Energy
  • Some symptoms are tremors of energy rising up the spine, sensations of extreme hot and cold, the experience of flashing lights, and experiencing powerful waves of emotions.  The body can move into strange yogic postures or become contorted and twisted if the energy becomes blocked.

• Shamanic Crisis
  • This typically involves a quest or journey to the underworld where demons or animal spirits are often encountered, culminating usually in experiences of death, dismemberment, and annihilation.

• Episodes of Unitive Consciousness
  • An experience of transcending the ordinary distinction between object and subject and experiencing ecstatic union with humanity, nature, the cosmos and God.

• Crisis of Psychic Opening
  • This may involve channeling, telepathy, clairvoyance, out-of-body experiences and meaningful coincidences.
• Past Life Experiences
  • People can behave irrationally because they are experiencing something from the past as part of their current life, or else a person can be haunted by physical feelings and emotions that are not seemingly connected to anything.

• Near Death Experiences
  • These experiences often involve an unusual and profound shift in the experience of reality.  This usually includes an out-of-body experience can involve profound lessons about life and universal laws.
• Possession States
  • This is characterized by an uncanny sense that one’s body and psyche have been invaded and are being controlled by an alien energy or entity that has personal characteristics. It can be another type of Crisis of Psychic Opening.
• Psychological Renewal through the Central Archetype
  • Some distinguishing features are themes of death and rebirth, battles of opposing cosmic forces (e.g. good and evil) and conviction that the outcomes are critical to the future of the world.
• Alien Contact/UFO Abduction
  • Experiences of personally communicating with an alien life form or being abducted by an alien. 

As we observe the conditions of most spiritual experiencers, we may see that most people in a full-blown spiritual emergency may not be functional. However, functionality may be possible to accomplish when people are strongly motivated to serve others. This, coupled with the fact that so many experiencers will not divulge the full extent of their experiences to mental health professionals for fear of having their experience pathologized and being medicated, it is very feasible a spiritually or holistically oriented life coach may be approached by someone in spiritual emergency.

We need more caring, courageous, and educated coaches to work with this population.  According to several research sources, over 30% of the population have spiritual experiences!  That is a very large under served population!   Think about it, you could be empowering so many people to integrate the wisdom gained from these experiences, engage in new passions and professions, and manifest their divine work in the world, now THAT is why I love coaching!
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In my next blog in this series, I will talk about the what, how, and why of integration.
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Stay tuned in and stay happy!

Elizabeth Sabet

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