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End of Life Coaching
June 5, 2018In addition to my Integral Life Coaching, I also work in the area of End of Life Coaching. This posting explains and introduces my work in this area as well. It was the result of a decision I made in 2016 to receive training and credentialing as an End of Life Coach.
End of Life Coaching is a generic description for the coaching I do with people who are:
- Living with a Diagnosis of a Life Threatening Illness;
- Living with a Diagnosis of a Terminal Illness (and/or a family member of someone who’s been so diagnosed);
- Grieving the death of another person;
- Grieving the death of a beloved pet; or
- Grieving a substantial loss in their life (marriage, job, relationship, financial, or physical).
My decision to expand my practice was in response to a growing desire on my part to work in the field of End of Life. Volunteering for several years at a hospice had confirmed this desire. What I wanted to be able to do was directly work with people dealing with the profound pain and turmoil that comes with any End of Life Issue – all of the ones listed above, one of which you may be dealing with right now.
End of Life Coaching is very different from the coaching I do as an Integral Coach, which is almost entirely focused on growth and development.
In End of Life Coaching, the entire focus, at least initially, is on being a compassionate and empathetic presence in the midst of the pain and confusion that an End of Life issue inevitably brings.
As your coach, my job is to listen and encourage you to say all that you need to say and process, for it is only in articulating the experiences and the pain, as many times as it takes, that we can begin to come to terms with it and the new reality it brings.
In future blog postings I’ll go into a little more details about each of the two primary aspects of my End of Life Coaching: Coaching for Grief and Loss, and Coaching for Life Threatening or Terminal Illness. They are similar in some respects but also very different. And no, you don’t need a professional counselor or grief counselor when you encounter such issues. A ‘coach approach’ is often more effective. More on this later.
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The imagination retains a passion for freedom. There are no rules for the imagination. It never wants to stay trapped in the expected territories. The old maps never satisfy it. It wants to press ahead beyond the accepted frontiers and bring back reports of regions no mapmaker has yet visited.
John O’Donohue
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
….myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.
Gerald Manley Hopkins, When Kingfishers Catch Fire
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James R. Sherman, Rejection (1982).
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Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth
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Richard Rohr, Daily Meditation, December 31, 2017
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John O’Donohue, Interview with Krista Tippet, OnBeing, 8-31-17
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Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
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Charles Du Box
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Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching
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David Viscott, Finding Your Strength in Difficult Times: A Book of Meditations.
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Mahatma Gandhi