The Importance of Learning from a Coach
We recently caught up with Richard Strozzi-Heckler during our One-Day Summit. Here’s what he had to say about the power of coaching and the mind-body connection.
Having a competent teacher, guide, mentor, or coach is indispensable. Having that access to someone who has traveled the path ahead of us and can say, you're going too fast, slow down; you're going too slow, speed up; too far to the right, come back to the middle, and so forth, is immeasurably valuable.
I've had exemplary teachers to whom I am forever grateful. When I do programs, I mentally bring them into the room because each coach or mentor has been integral to who I have become.
The Value of Collective Training
There is great joy in being with a group of people who are training together. When we train together, we raise everyone’s vote. When we learn in community and collective, we’re in resonance with how we've always done it as human beings. These days, we tend to be more practice-focused on a one-to-one level. You see a coach or a therapist inside a room; it's one-on-one and somewhat solitary. There’s nothing wrong with that, but what's deep inside us is that we are all in this life with a greater village. We're in it with others, and we’re in it with our coaches.
Seeking Deeper Meaning through the Mind-Body Connection
In college, I split my time between studying for my undergraduate degree and practicing the bodily art of Judo. In between, I would go to these houses where people talked about fantastic ideas: poetry, the meaning of life, and the history of human beings - how we've evolved, etc., which compelled me. However, everyone was hunched over as they spoke. Everyone was smoking and having an espresso and not really doing anything. These were beautiful images, it was a beautiful language, and they were having beautiful conversations about important things, but they didn't show up as what I imagined to be strong characters in the world. This was when I began integrating academia with the bodily arts, taking all that knowledge and experience into the field with me.
Misinterpreting the Body
There's a practice called Polarity Therapy by Dr. Randolph Stone. I apprenticed with him and Dr. Moshi Feldenkrais, who created the Feldenkrais method. What they did for me was make me realize that what we call body is misunderstood in society.
If we say the word body, what immediately comes to mind? Ultimately, we think of how we look. I would like to invite you to question that interpretation of the body.
Changing Our Actions through Community and Guidance
I started as a body-oriented psychotherapist. I worked in locked wards, prisons, and with individuals. I began to see that the study of psychology and psychotherapy brought awareness to people through immediate insights, but it didn't move people through that gate of insight and awareness into new actions.
I knew this because I witnessed what moves people into new actions. After working with tens of thousands of people, I noticed that people make a declaration about where they're going, and then they adopt practices to get them there. They begin to build a community that supports them and find individuals that can guide them. That was a big, big piece of information for me. I started to think people are generally just collecting awareness badges. Somebody says, oh, you're just acting this out right now. And you go, yeah, I know because that's what happened with my father, mother, or big brother. So I know that, but I still act in the same old reactive, conditioned ways.
Somatics requires us to move our attention from the thinking self to the feeling and sensing self. By contacting that part of our spirit, if you will, or reaching that part of our nervous system, it opens up huge vistas in ways to hold a wide range of choices of being less reactive. That’s what we're doing in the field of embodiment. We're bringing the body to the foreground.
Embodiment as a Path to Conflict Resolution
One of the reasons most conflict turns to violence so quickly is that we're out of touch with our bodies in America. When we're out of touch with our bodies, we begin to heat up, or “go red,” and suddenly, violence is in the space. This is one of the reasons that we can so easily soil the earth, poison the air, and pollute our water: we’re out of touch with our bodies.
A medicine for these imbalances might be to allow ourselves to come back into our bodies. To allow our children to get grounded within their bodies while they're learning the things they want to learn. We must, ultimately, bring our attention back to the life of our bodies in order to heal ourselves and the planet.
Learn more about how you can become a certified Mind-Body Coach and harness the power of somatics to help others transform their lives, actualize their goals, and live a life of authenticity, freedom and wellbeing with our 120-hr Mind-Body Coaching Certificate.
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