AYAHUSACA! - Life Coach becomes Death Coach
Ooooh....This is a good oneIf you have been following my journey over the past 10 years you might have noticed that the way I identify myself professionally has morphed and evolved. How I work with clients has largely stayed the same, but my title has not. Depending on how people find me, they think of me as being one type of coach or another.
I am a Life Coach. This always seemed like the catch-all. I started out as a Holistic Health Coach, but only worked that before my sabbatical. If you search on Yelp I rank in the top 3 for both Life and Career Coaches in NYC. So many think of me primarily as a Career Coach. Over the past couple of years the growing majority of my clients became CEO's and other executives. When they refer me to a colleague running their own company they hire me as an Executive Coach (first new page on my website in a while!). All of this was actually expected and is basically par for the course. It's a kooky unregulated industry. My most recent titles I did not anticipate. Things are getting weirder.
Because I insist that my clients be open to discussing and working with all areas of their life it is hard to predict where things will lead, but I always assumed it would all fit within the "life" realm....until recently. Witness the birth of Death Coaching!
My client D.S. Moss created a podcast called The Adventures of Memento Mori. Memento Mori translates as Remember to Die. The idea is that, through contemplating impermanence one might really start living. This journey has led us through some truly strange and beautiful explorations, and now, in the last two episodes, to Peru, where he offers his ego up to the plant medicine of the local shaman. Believe it or not, this is not the first time I have been an Ayahuasca Coach, but it is the first time I can take you along!
This is work that gets my juices flowing. Who AM I? What lurks in the depths of my shadows? How do I kill my ego? All of the big philosophical questions smash head on into heroic doses of psychedelics in the final episodes of this absolutely brilliant podcast. Every week he explores death and our relationship to it through a new lens. I believe I am in the first episode, the last two, and maybe one more. The whole podcast is worth the journey. The last episode of the first season (episode #14) where the ayahuasca ceremonies actually happen, is particularly bewitching. Listen with headphones if you can. He really captures the sounds of the ceremony space. It brought me right back to my first ceremonies in Brazil.