Leadership Embodiment by Wendy Palmer and Janet Crawford. This book has given me an insight and tools to practice being centered, recognizing when one is off center and shifting back to center quickly in various circumstances. It offers useful distinctions like “personality and center” to illustrate the energetically different ways of relating to the world. The way it was brought across using examples of body postures made it more comprehendible and enabled me to start paying more attention to the way I hold my own body throughout my day. It also was really helpful in the work with clients as I could notice when the clients were shifting off center. There were centering exercises in the book which I found complemented well my “arsenal” of practices at hand. During coaching encounters I could use them in situations when I noticed myself or the client shifting off the center. What I found was that this tends to happen as experiential avoidance kicks in when entering areas that are not too pleasant.
How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett. This has been an incredibly rich source and I could list this book as one of my all-time favorites. It offers a complex journey starting with the existing “classical views” on the way people have thought about emotions in the past and the ways they got to their conclusions. Then she goes on and introduces a different way of thinking about what happens in our brains as we experience emotions that she has found more compelling than the previously existing ones. She builds a strong case that we are constructing our emotions and the reality and that they are unique experiences based on our individual background, culture and other circumstances rather than universally pre-programmed set of experiences similar to all humans.
No Boundary by Ken Wilber. This book was a little special for me. As soon as I saw it on the coaches’ bookshelf, I knew I wanted to read it. And I was not disappointed. I remember the time I was reading it – I was doing it slowly over a month or two. At that time, I was really immersed in it. I was looking at the world through the lens of the book and everything that happened in my experience could be related to it. I find it amazing, how now, reopening the book and flipping over the first pages, I find it resonating on such high frequencies. The main theme of the book is unity consciousness. The way Eckhart Tolle put it across in a recent email was “(..) Ultimately you are not a person, but a focal point where the universe is becoming conscious of itself.” This essential idea seems to be central for all major religions. As I was reading through the first pages of the book where people were sharing their experiences of this, I clearly remembered my own, however, there is a certain resistance to it. Caution as in the mainstream culture such sensitivity to experiences are seemingly not acknowledged (here I am demonstrating a split between myself and the mainstream culture). I find affirmation in those sharings. The experience of an individual feeling without any doubt that he or she is fundamentally one with the entire universe. According to what Wilber is writing here, the unity consciousness is the nature of all sentient beings, however in our mainstream society we progressively limit our world to embrace boundaries. That creates various levels and identities – each with different boundaries – each of those having a version of an answer to the question “who am I?”.
Shambhala The Sacred Path of the Warrior by Chogyam Trungpa. This book was the first one I read from coaches’ bookshelf and now, when I open it to flip through the pages I feel drawn to read it again as it appears in a different way than I can remember. It is a really rich source that originates from an ancient path of the warriors that is not bound by any single tradition. What is meant by warriorship is the tradition of human bravery. To be brave essentially means not to be afraid of one-self. Examples of traditions that have embodied such bravery can be found in north and south American Indians, Japanese samurais, king Arthur, king David and others. The Shambhala vision is opposite to selfishness and aims to establish an enlightened society. Something that I feel goes hand in hand with what coaching is doing and what is my personal intentions. The premise is that in order to develop such society each of us need to discover what inherently we have to offer the world bringing what is of value to help ourselves and others to uplift their experience.
Focusing in Clinical Practice: The Essence of Change by Ann Weiser Cornell. This book was a great deeper dive in focusing after having read the Gene Gendlin’s book “Focusing”. This was illustrative and provided much detail to the process and the application. The central concept of focusing and as described in the book “the essence of change” is the felt sense. It is a fresh, immediate here and now experience that is characterized by the organism forming the next step. The felt sense is the experience of that formation process. It is something bodily experienced in the present moment that will appear hard to describe as words might seem insufficient. It will often require metaphorical language for expression. In the research by Gendlin and Hendricks it was found that the clients that attended directly to this process of experiencing were to be significantly more successful in therapy than those that did not.