The party was intimate and engaging. The guest speaker was Harriet Simon Salinger, one of the founders of SF Coaches. The first meetings were held in Harriet’s home over ten years ago.

This was my first opportunity to meet Harriet, and I found her intelligent, witty and completely accessible. Her talk was centered around holding two questions, a very ‘coach-like’ thing to do. The questions were, “Where do old coaches go?”, which brought quite a round of laughter around the room, and “What is the Soul of Coaching?”. The second question we entertained with our table mates before bringing the discussion back to the room at large.

I found this discussion fascinating. What is the Soul of Coaching? We had numerous ideas and thoughts, just sitting with them all and not trying to actually answer the question. I found this question still intriguing me last night while I worked out. Some fresh insights then entered my realization.

I could feel, at a deep and profound level, that the Soul of Coaching is the immense capacity for human beings to consciously experience the depth and breadth of who and what we are, and in this experiencing and conscious reflection of our experiences, we awaken the parts of ourselves that have been repressed, hurt, or believed to be not good enough. In this awakening through conscious action, we not only create our lives from choices based on that inner compelling pull, but return to the wholeness that always has been present within.

I see this as the Soul of coaching, because it lies at the very foundation of our practice. We hold our clients as whole, and we hold that they have their own answers, and we hold that their awakening to wholeness is a natural and ‘given’ expression of the very nature that they are, that humans are deep at our core. As I coach, I know that every client has their own seed of wisdom that when watered and fed, and loved unconditionally, will express their unique nature.

While coaching started out with an accomplishment and success mindset, I see that goal is still valid. What has changed is what accomplishment and success mean. For me, over the past five plus years I have been coaching, my own notion of what coaching really is has changed and morphed. My work with clients has honed my skills and my vision for what coaching is and can be, and for what I know I am uniquely skilled to offer those clients that are meant to work with me.

What does this have to do with being Unabashedly Female? Everything. I see the wholeness that you are. I see the unique beauty and power that is inherent in women and men. I see the critically important need for all of us, both men and women, to live our unique gifts and to express them in the world. Life is intelligent by design, and each of us has a role to play in this design. If any one of us is living from beliefs that what and who we are is not enough or is bad somewhere deep within, then we are hiding our gifts away, gifts that must be shared for our world to be balanced and in harmony.

Women have been conditioned to believe that we are bad simply by design. That somewhere our design as women is sinful and dirty. I can’t tell you how many women I have spoken with that feel this deep within, but don’t have the consciousness to express it until we work together or at least talk about it. And, many men have spoken of the unconscious beliefs they hold about women, too. These beliefs hurt us all. They hurt both men and women. They are part of the shadow of our culture and world, and are played out every day in violent and degrading scenarios. And it all stems from conditioning. None of it is really true.

The Soul of Coaching is about holding us all as the vibrant, creative deeply loving beings we are by nature. When a coach holds you this way, you begin to hold yourself this way. When a coach calls you forth to be this nature in the world, you begin to express this nature. When you learn effective tools and practices that help you to live this nature, then you begin to live the life you were created to live.

If you are intrigued at all by what this post shares, please contact me at juliedaley at gmail.com. I would love to begin a conversation with you about how to step into this magnificence that you are.

By design, you are creative.

By design, you are, and always have been, whole.

By design, you are unique, yet One with everything in existence.

By design, you are Essence experiencing and expressing through a human body that has a gender.

By design, you are part of the Great Intelligence that creates and destroys, that moves through all of existence that is the creatrix and the created.

As concepts you know this, but do you know this as experience?

Do you trust the uniqueness and intelligence of your design as a creative being?

Do you have faith in your own raw, unmediated experience and expression?

When you trust in your creativity, and unbind your heart and body, a faith in your full expression emerges. Faith in this expression opens up a whole new world to you, a world in which you trust yourself to meet life as it comes to you. Give it a whirl!

Just yesterday, this best friend sent me a picture. She has been scanning old pictures and came across this one. I am on the left. Just seeing this image brought back a flood of feelings and memories of a time in my life when I felt so connected to the world around me, especially nature through all the time I spent outdoors. As I thought back to this time, I realized how important these years are. It’s during these times that we have a glimpse into our deeper nature and a sense of our place in the world. Once we grow up and move out into the world, and into making a living, most of us lose contact with our own internal knowing, because we believe we have to conform to our culture and society to make it. And, we believe that conformity requires letting go of who we really are and what we truly want to do with our lives. It’s not that we consciously choose to go against our authenticity, but rather we are conditioned to do so.

Seeing this picture and remembering that time in my life, with all the friends and experiences it held, re-affirmed who I am and what compels me to action today in my life. I know that my work with women to awaken our connection to the Earth and our connection to each other is exactly what I knew somewhere deep within me when this picture was taken.

Think back to your youth, those years when you wondered what your life would hold. What did you envision. Who did you see yourself to be? Are you honoring that deepest place within you, that place that speaks to you quietly, but insistently?

For decades, women have been trying to be more like men in order to succeed and be a powerful force in the world. What we are now seeing in so many circles is a shift in realization that our power lies in being authentically ourselves, authentically female. It is important to live into our differences in gender, for when we do we are living into the natural intelligence that underlies all of Life.

One organization celebrating differences and working towards bringing out the change that can come from supporting girls and women is the Nike Foundation. And, rooted in the work of the Nike Foundation is girleffect.org. Girleffect.org has a great video to watch that explains their work, as well as a fact sheet that beautifully speaks to why we should pay attention to girls.

Think about girls and women in your life that could use your love, support and encouragement. Check out the Nike Foundation and girleffect.org. See how you can make a difference in a girl’s life.

An image that is burned in my mind is my daughter standing beside my mother’s casket. Her beautiful full belly was so close, a great-granddaughter and great-grandmother so close, but never to meet. To be a witness to this passing of generations has been as enlightening as anything I have ever experienced. To think the beauty of this reality is available to us everywhere at any time leaves me breathless.

Blue Tara ~ Goddess of Liberation

“Blue Tara, or Ekajati, is associated with the transmutation of anger. A Protector expressing ferocious, wrathful, female energy who destroys all learning obstacles producing good luck and swift spiritual awakening. She removes fear of enemies, spreading joy and good fortune.” (source: Seasonal Salon)

If I am going to be unabashedly female, I must be present to what is here. Anger is here…again. To be honest, I don’t know what to do with this anger. Anger wasn’t something I learned to feel or express, but it certainly is here.

Anger for the way women and children are treated. I sense rage underneath a pretty veneer of good and appropriate behavior, not only on my part, but in the world at large. I sense many women feel this rage at something we can’t quite name, or perhaps don’t know how to name. I am sure many men feel this, too. I know some of it is my own anger, while I know much of it is the collective rage, a rage carried over from centuries of oppression of the Feminine.

My mind can’t understand how this anger and rage can be expressed without hurting another. I don’t want to simply spew more negativity into the world…there is enough already. But, I know I must feel this anger. It is here. And, I feel compelled to do something about what is happening all over our planet. While I feel small compared to the problems, when I feel this anger arise, there is at least something moving, something stirring rather than the complacency that comes when I feel overwhelmed by the problems I see.

In my writing, I have been stymied by the anger that comes up. I am clear that I don’t want to blame or rant or rave. I want to move from the love I know lies deep within my heart. Yet, I don’t yet know the fullness of how love can show up, the ways in which it can move and stand in its fullness as the truth.

I do know that love can cut like a knife of truth. I have seen it. When I stayed at Amma’s ashram in India, I witnessed Her love over and over. Even in moments of Darshan, when she was hugging someone with infinite tenderness of the Mother, she would occasionally express this knife of truth (what I might call anger or something like it) towards someone when it arose. But, here the expression was clean. It cut through the haze of ego like a knife, cleanly without a lingering trace of guilt or blame. Her love flowed through the entire experience. Witnessing its expression took my breath away. I had never seen the beauty in truth of expression like this before.

From my own experience, I know that pure love follows the true expression of anger. When anger is experience fully, without identifying with it, and without allowing one’s conditioning to feed off of it, it transforms into love.

I now know this transmutation of anger to love is what Blue Tara represents. For thousands of years, Blue Tara, and the other goddess forms, have represented this transmutation because anger blocks the way to expression of truth and love. There have been deities to express this because this is part of our path to awakening, to discovering the truth and wholeness of what it is to be female.

There is so much fear amongst women about being angry. No woman wants to be the angry bitch. Yet, we must feel the entirety of what is here, without identifying with it. We are not our feelings or thoughts, yet they move through us. When we block the negative ones, we block all of them. Our hearts are big enough to hold the entire universe…I know we can hold the feeling and expression of this anger, too. Perhaps then it will be like letting the air out of a balloon, slowly, little by little, rather than letting it get so full that it pops.

Just one day is not enough to truly appreciate what mothers do and give.

Just one day is not enough to really stop and consider what your mother offered up to you.

Just one day is not enough to imagine what it would be like if we all looked inside to see what we expect of mothers and motherhood, what kind of ideals we hold mothers to, and how we might soften our expectations of our own mothers, ourselves as mothers, and all the mothers in the world who continually live under the stress of such expectations.

I had a wonderful day yesterday. I was able to see both my daughters, their husbands, and my grandson, as well as my mother and sisters.

I was particularly aware of the smiles on mothers’ faces and wondered what it would be like if we let mothers off-the-hook from expectations of having to be super human, and ultimately what it would be like if we let ourselves off-the-hook of the same expectations.

“Today, the reason we haven’t found our grail, the key to who we are as women, is because we look for it in worlds of false power, the very worlds that took it away from us in the first place. Neither men nor work can restore our lost scepter. Nothing in this world can take us home. Only the radar in our hearts can do that, and when it does, … ‘We will light up like lamps, and the world will never be the same again.’ “

–Marianne Williamson

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”  

- Albert Einstein

“The key to who we are as women.” What is this key that Marianne Williamson speaks of? Who are we? What key might unlock this door? Answer this question? Awaken our own knowing?

These two quotes point to the same thing: that we can’t look to the current cultural paradigm to answer the questions we face in this moment. The conditioned world we swim in today is the world that took our knowing away from us. It is a illusory world devoid of a woman’s grail, that by which we know our own wholeness. What we see in this world is void of a deeply feminine reflection.

So if we can’t look to the outer conditioned world for our knowing, the only place we can look is within. Within our own being lies the key. When we enter into the inward gaze, we enter the unknown. If we truly want to know, we must be willing to step into not knowing. This means leaving behind all false powers and the answers they so readily give. We turn our faces to this inner gaze so that we might know something wholly new.

It is a heroine’s journey. It is a truly creative act. It is the place for disruption. And, it is ripe with the fragrance of grace for it is in our willingness to turn away from the conditioned world and toward that which is without false words of comfort and safety that we will discover the truth in the question that asks, “What is it to be female?”

 The only place we will find this truth of our being is within our hearts. That is the only place where the illusions we have been taught cannot exist. Trust your heart to bring you home.