My Life Coach Training with Martha Beck
Martha Beck is unlike anyone I have met before in my fifty-six years of travels. She has integrated two disparate experiences - her Mormon upbringing and her Harvard education - and blended them with lessons learned on her spiritual journey of carrying and mothering a special child named Adam. Martha has transformed and transmuted all of this into a radical philosophy that is her guidepost through life.
Through the combined efforts of herself and her team, a group of Harvard and Columbia-trained adult educators, Martha has translated this philosophy into teachings that are life changing for others. The team has collectively spent years studying, researching and designing a very unusual form of adult education. All are talented professionals who are clearly living an empowered life.
At the core of the work is Martha and her unique self. The long journey she has taken to heal from her trauma and pain shows. It is there in her casual yet confident and grounded bearing, in her clarity and purposefulness, in her deep respect for everyone in the room, and in her lightness and joy. As someone who has been working on herself in emotional & spiritual ways for many years, it is clear to me that Martha has let go of ego, as she tells us in her writing.
Martha Beck’s Life Coach Training is not for the faint of heart. One must be ready to be challenged, to be confronted in deep places. It changes your life…if you let it. The work is all about getting in touch with & challenging lifetime beliefs, the beliefs we learned from influential early caregivers. As the power of these beliefs fades, we come closer to our ’true self’ or “essential self” as Martha calls it.
Students who are learning Martha’s coaching method must always be moving forward themselves, and breaking down their own rigid belief systems. For how can they help others if they’re not living the work?
It has been three weeks now since I returned from my training, and I just keep on processing the experience. As the days pass and I continue to question myself and my traditional ways of being in the world, and to do the exercises that are part of the life coaching experience, my resolve to live the life I desire grows. The joyful part of me becomes more dominant, and the fearful part diminishes in strength. As I was doing a practice coaching session recently, I told my client that we are meant to be happy, and to live in a joyful state. I looked out my balcony door, and saw my little pine tree, my personal symbol of life and vitality, and felt moved almost to tears as I remembered and became aware, yet again, of that feeling of opening my heart more fully to life, to its joy, and its vulnerability.
I am very grateful for having had the experience of working with Martha. I have changed as an individual and as a counsellor. Martha’s search for meaning and spirituality has led her closer and closer to her essential or true self and now she leads others. Although not old in human years, she is a seasoned teacher who willingly and caringly shares what she has learned with her students. She is aged like a fine fine wine.
Visit Martha Beck's website.
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