Freedom and Choice.
"Coaching was born to address a major ontological and epistemological breakdown of modernity: for centuries we left 'soul' out of the realm of learning."
- Julio Olalla, Founder of Newfield Network
"We made a radical separation between object and subject, creating a profound division between the human self and the world.
We asserted that the only source of meaning in the universe is human consciousness and that the main purpose of knowledge is to generate the ability to predict and control the natural world. On the other side, the natural world has been seen as impersonal, mechanistic and indifferent to human concerns, nothing but a resource to be used for our benefit.
Our emotions were understood as being in the way of reason as our passions were in the way of living virtuously, our spiritual longings were considered superstitions, and our guessing of the soulfulness of nature was considered a simple projection of ourselves. We denied the "anima mundi" and, by doing so, we disenchanted the world. We were left alone in the immensity of cosmos. We stopped seeing ourselves as part of each other and as part of the world. The task at hand was to know the outer world through rational mastery. The inner world was fundamentally abandoned and distrusted; it was seen as “the unreliable realm of subjectivity.”
Many "schisms" resulted from this world-view: spirit and matter, self and world, mind and body, conscious and unconscious, and today, facing the immensity of our crisis (ecological, energetic, financial, health, political, etc.), we begin to realize that it is time to reunite what we have divided, to bring back soul to our learning. A new epistemology is needed and coaching is the practice we have developed to explore this reunion between the inner and outer, to bring back wholeness to learning. Hundreds of years of believing that gathering information and learning were almost the same thing, radically separating matter from spirit and excluding the power of revelatory experiences, the cognitive role of emotions and somatic and sensuous modes of learning have produced this deep sense of loneliness and disconnection that is beginning to seep into our bones. No wonder the epidemic of depression we have in the US and much of the Western world. Depression has become a major health problem. The World Health Organization (WHO) predicts that by 2020 depression will be the second largest cause of the global health burden. Antidepressant drug sales in 2004 reach $14 billion worldwide, out of which 9.9 billion were sold just in the US. And their consumption keeps growing.
“Thus the Western neglect of the realm of subjective experience,” writes Willis Harman, “has had serious consequences in our confusion about values. For it is ultimately in the realm of the subjective, the transcendent, and the spiritual that all societies have found the basis for their deepest value commitments and sense of meaning.” The modern human being has been left without a lasting ground to build and sustain his or her values. It is in that emptiness that the pseudo-values of the market, mass media and the entertainment industry have become dominant, impoverishing our lives, depriving us of the elements of power dreams. Coaching brings to our learning the fullness of human experience by reuniting the inner and outer realms of reality. It provides access to a rationalism that does not deny the cognitive power of emotions while enabling us to play with a plurality of perspectives to approach the infinite complexity of reality. That requires on the side of the coach a deep caring, a tender listening, and an authentic desire to be of service.
Coaching is not to serve growth for the sake of growth. Coaching teaches us to recognize the sacredness of nature and fill us with gratitude for the infinite mystery and beauty that surround us."
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