Often the question arises: what does becoming look like in coaching? In life?
What follows is part of a client session. Intentionally left out are any identifying details for two reasons: 1) the obvious protection of identity, and 2) the thread of becoming is attending to just that - what is emergently becoming. The client’s uniqueness is manifest through sensation, thought, feeling — this aspect of the client is what to attend to.
On to the session:
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She spoke about wanting to live open to more possibility. It sounded nice. It made logical sense. Only she experienced constriction in the chest, a nauseous feeling – a new way felt out of reach. Possibility dismissed on arrival.
(client) “this way of being, of enduring life. It's blocking me… from being able to be open. There is a closed-offness to how I'm moving through.”
As we spoke about what she was experiencing, her breathing began to change. She touched into more spaciousness — and felt suffocated at the same time. The opening and the overwhelm arriving together. She had been working with a physical therapist — her body, it turned out, had literally been learning the same thing we were asking of it here: how to breathe into places long held closed.
(me) “Allow yourself to be breathed.”