We’ve all heard of emotional intelligence, but what is spiritual intelligence? Actually, spiritual intelligence is implicit in the art and science of coaching, so if you are a life coach or had some life coaching, you are probably already using it. Visualising goals, using positive language and releasing limiting beliefs, for example, all have their roots in ancient spiritual wisdom as well as being part of our latest coaching know-how.
Spiritual intelligence is the knowledge and utilisation of the universal spiritual laws and principles at work in our cosmos. Just as physics charts the behaviour of material things, metaphysics (i.e. the science of spirit) charts the behaviour of ‘unseen’ energy. We may not be able to test metaphysical principles in a test tube, but we can observe them at work in our psyches. And, of course, what happens in our psyches expresses itself in every other aspect of our lives.
In recent years, spiritual intelligence has hit the mainstream via the publication of books such as ‘The Power of Now’ and the release of films like ‘The Secret’ and ‘What the Bleep’. The Law of Attraction, once an esoteric spiritual principle understood only by the initiated, now features in self development forums, popular magazines and chat shows worldwide. Like most spiritual principles, the law itself is very simple (what you pay attention to attracts more of the same), yet properly understood and applied, has profound implications.
As coaches, we can employ spiritual intelligence to enhance sessions with our clients, boost the running of our business and resource ourselves. Using our intuition, practising meditation and accessing our inner guidance all serve to give our coaching practice an energetic ‘X-factor’ that is hard to beat.
Seven ways to use spiritual intelligence in your coaching practice
1. Prepare yourself for your client
Meditate for 10 minutes before every coaching session. Sit quietly, follow your breath and relax. Mentally ask for whatever emotional resource or state of mind you require. Then think of your client and ask that you connect well with your client and are able to give them exactly what they need. You can then make a few notes on any ideas that came up that when you were meditating on your client.
2. Prepare your client for their session
Meditate for a further 10 minutes with your client at the beginning of your session. Encourage them and yourself to follow the breath and relax. You can also feed in a relevant question to contemplate whilst meditating. (If you are not confident leading meditation, play a short guided meditation CD.) This will help your client get centred and feel more authentic. It will also help you tune in to your client more deeply.
3. Develop Your Intuition
The word intuition means inner tutor or inner guide. Practise being aware of your intuition by calming your thinking mind (with exercise, meditation or music) and letting yourself drop into a embodied wisdom that speaks from a deeper place inside you. Test out your intuition with small questions first. Ask yourself ‘should I do this?’ and see if you get a ‘yes’ (nice, expansive feeling) or ‘no’ (unpleasant, tense feeling) in your body. It’s often felt in the tummy – the reason why we talk about gut instinct. Follow the answer, then, check later to see if your intuition proved right.
4. Trust your intuition
Rather than cram your coaching session full of pre-planned ideas, allow some space for spontaneous ideas to bubble up. Don’t be afraid to sit in silence for a few moments just to listen to your inner guidance. Check if your intuition is telling you that something would be good for your client, or to change tack if a new direction is emerging. Likewise, encourage your client to do the same. A few moments quiet at any point can be very fruitful. Meditation prepares you to be able to do this.
5. Practice telepathic marketing
We are all much more telepathic than we realise. Once we are 100% clear and intentional within ourselves, a large chunk of our marketing is done! Write down what kind of coach you are, what kind of ideal clients you like to work with, and what benefits you are bringing to them (in precise, positive present tense language, of course!). You will be amazed at what interest starts to come your way even before you’ve placed your adverts.
6. Learn and practice the Ah meditation
This powerful manifestation meditation (popularised by Wayne Dyer in the 80’s) can be done in 10 minutes. It is one of the most effective ways to create and attract what’s best for you into your life, relationships and business. Teach it to your clients too. You can download guidance notes to the Ah meditation from the www.thrivecraft.co.uk website resource page.
7. Connect with your own inner guidance
The most effective way of employing spiritual intelligence is to connect with your own! Every single one of us has a source of wisdom and guidance within us. Learn how to quieten your thinking mind and listen to the amazing answers, promptings and directions we have dormant within us. A special guided meditation to help you do this – Answers: Finding Wisdom from Within – can be found at the on the shop page.
Before you start meditating, be clear how long you will sit for and what kind of meditation practice you will do. Have a silent watch or clock within sight so you can open your eyes and peek at the time if you need to. You may notice that you soon don’t need a clock. Before long you will instinctively ‘feel’ that the time you’ve allocated is up and it’s time to come out of meditation.
2. Choose your time
It makes a big difference if you can stick to the same time to meditate every day (or every other day or every week – whatever routine you establish). If you pick your time and stick to it you don’t have to keep re-making the decision to meditate and figuring out when. It just becomes part of your day or week.
First thing in the morning is great. It’s well worth getting up half an hour earlier to give yourself this start to the day. Some people prefer last thing at night when everything is over. Or perhaps your best time is when you get home from taking the kids to school. Or maybe after getting home from work and just before dinner.
Whatever time you pick, have a satisfied tummy – neither hungry nor overfull. Choose your time and make it part of your daily or weekly routine.
3. Find your quiet spot
Find a place where you can be quiet and undisturbed. Be in a room on your own (unless others are meditating with you). Unplug your phone and switch off your mobile. Be out of earshot of TV or radio. Let others know to leave you in peace.
It’s nice to set the scene for your self. Perhaps face a garden window or a vase of flowers or an inspiring picture. Burn some incense or essential oils. Make this your special meditation spot. You will find that this place will start to have a peaceful atmosphere, a meditation ‘vibe’.
4. Be comfortable
Find a chair where you can sit comfortably in an alert, upright position. A dining room chair is good, or an easy chair. You can also prop yourself up at the head of a bed. Undo any tight clothing, buttons or zips.
Wherever you are sitting, support your back with cushions so that your spine is reasonably straight and your head and neck is free. If you are on a dining room chair you can put a cushion under your feet. If you are in an easy chair you can see if you prefer having your legs folded up cross-legged. If so, make sure your knees are supported with cushions if needed.
Some people like to sit on a pile of cushions on the floor, or a meditation stool. If so, put a blanket down first as a mat, then your cushions or stool on top. Two or three firm cushions are about right. At the right height your back is not bowing or arching but relatively straight.
You can straddle the cushions like a horse, or sit with your legs folded in front of you cross-legged. Support your knees by tucking extra cushions under them if they don’t reach the ground so you can relax at the hips.
However you sit, you should have a strong base – a tripod of your backside and your two knees. Have your hands resting in your lap. Tying a shawl or scarf at your tummy gives a little shelf to rest your hands on if you like.
There’s always the option to lie down on a bed or the floor if you think you’d be most comfortable like this. The only draw back is that you may find yourself feeling sleepier than if you were sitting upright. None the less, the number one priority is that you are comfortable. So if lying down is right for you, that’s fine.
If you get stiff or pins and needles while you are meditating, gently and slowly move and re-position yourself and carry on. However, the idea is to find out how to sit completely comfortably for an extended period of time without having to move, so keep playing with your posture until you get it just right.
When you are settled, close your eyes lightly, or have them slightly open if you are very sleepy or disoriented.
5. Let the weight drop down
Take several big, long, deep, deliberate, audible breaths. As you breathe out, let your weight drop down through the sitting bones – down, down, down through your seat and the floor into the ground.
Even as we let our weight drop down, we are also aware of an invisible force supporting us upright. It’s as though we have a taut string attached the crown of our head, reminding us of our natural poise and alertness. The more we relax and drop down, the more we feel effortlessly supple and upright.
6. Relax and soften
Relaxing further, roll your shoulders a few times each way. Then move your head gently from side to side. Make some wild faces to release your face muscles (nobody’s looking!). Let your jaw hang slightly slack and your tongue be free.
You can use your hands to gently massage your jaw, cheeks and forehead. Carry on over the scalp and down the back of your neck. Give your shoulders a bit of a squeeze then stroke down your arms to your fingers.
Continue down the body with your hands, squeezing or stroking all the way down to your toes. You can hang over your toes for a while. Keep breathing easily and slowly uncurl. Finally, shake out your hands and finish with a nice stretch. Come back to a relaxed, upright sitting posture again.
Take a few more strong breaths. Let your tummy be soft. Check your jaw is still slack and that the tongue is free.
7. Drop into the breath.
Notice how you are breathing now, however it wants to come and go. Feel how it is to be breathing, how you feel inside yourself, the rhythm of the breath as it comes and goes. Let yourself be filled with breath. It’s as though your whole body is breathing, expanding and contracting with every in and out breath. Feel your breath right down to your toes, to the tips of your fingers, to the roots of your hair.
8. Give your head a rest
As you’re breathing, you may be aware of questions and preoccupations rippling around in your mind. It probably feels like its going on in your head. However, invite your thinking mind to rest for a little while. It’s not needed for few minutes.
Soften your eyes, let your eyes go soft and dewy (even though your eyes are closed you can do that) and let the brain itself feel slack in your head. Just feel the breath going in and out the body. Breathe in and out and let all those thought particles fall through the breath like dust particles falling through the air in a sunny room. Let them all fall to the ground.
9. Feel into your heart
Breathing into the body, notice how you are physically feeling around your heart area in your chest. Can you feel if it is tight or relaxed? Can you feel if your heart feels nice, or if it feels pain, or somewhere in between? Can you feel if your heart feels far away or if it feels very vivid and acute and present?
And whatever it is or isn’t, just noticing it as you breathe. Feeling the texture and the tone of our heart. You might be aware that there is a kind of atmosphere – an emotional atmosphere around your heart. You might not have a name for it, but you can feel its ambience, its flavour. Perhaps you can even sense its colour – the colour of your emotional heart right now.
Breathe this emotional atmosphere, this ‘heartness’ into the whole of yourself. Let it circulate with the breath.
10. Being with all that you are
Continue to breathe with all that you are – all that you think, all that you feel, all that you sense and all that you know. Gather yourself into the breath and let yourself drop into the vastness of your total being. Getting into this zone is a meditation in itself and you need do nothing more. However you are now ready for a further focussed meditation if that is what you have chosen. Enjoy.
In this video clip I’m describing one of the benefits of meditation – how it creates the freedom to choose how we respond and react to things in our life. You can tell I’m passionate about it!
The Easy Way to Create Your Personal Help Hotline.
Wouldn’t it be amazing to feel that you could have help whenever you need it? The astonishing fact is that superb help is right there inside you, waiting to be tapped, every single day. Whether you are in the supermarket wondering what to buy for dinner, or finalising a major life decision on a deadline, inner answers and deep personal guidance are only a few breaths away.
The wisdom of the universe is ever present – a great sky full of answers to your everyday questions and a vast ocean of understanding that makes sense of your deepest problems. In days gone by we knew how to commune with this cosmic guidance system, but our modern lifestyle is such that we’ve by and large forgotten all about it. We scurry about getting more and more confused, taking wrong turns and running in circles. No wonder we don’t feel so good these days, that something is missing in our lives.
Fortunately, not everyone has forgotten how to tune into the excellent natural sources of guidance at our disposal. Thousands of spiritual practices keep these arts alive, and countless sages, mystics and healers throughout time are adept at them. Nowadays, more and more of us are picking up the threads of these ancient ways and weaving them together with new spiritual intelligence to make a modern tapestry – a complete map – that works meaningfully and practically for us today….
…. And so my latest project has been to produce a book and guided meditation CD to pass on the knack of finding inner answers. I’m calling it ‘Find Your Answers’. The CD will be available very soon and the book will follow. I’m also running a new ‘Find Your Answers’ weekend course on October 24/25 and a weekly meditation class here in Devon.
I would love to think that lots of people will come to soak in the tips and stories and meditations from the course, class, book and CD and feel able to take on life with renewed confidence. Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could all re-capture our natural entitlement to be totally guided and supported in all that we do? I also hope my new ‘Find Your Answers’ offerings serve to encourage and inspire us to reclaim the most precious resource of all – our own deep lasting connection with the source of all knowledge. In doing this, we remake the greatest of discoveries – the revelation of our true self and our purpose on this earth.
Thrivecraft with Maggie Kay 