You are invited to 5 days & 5 nights of Mutual Evolution.

This retreat happens July 29-Aug.3, at Johnson’s Landing Retreat Centre, on beautiful Kootenay Lake, BC

The Free Introductory Telecall for Mutual Evolution is on July 12, at 5:30pm pacific, 8:30pm eastern.

To register, or find about more about Mutual Evolution, click here: Mutual Evolution Free Intro Call

What is Mutual Evolution?

I see it happening everywhere, and here is an example, taken from my coaching work with people all over the world:

A client will ask me to write down something that has emerged or clarified during a session. For the last while, I have been sending out some of these notes to all of the clients who are currently engaged in coaching with me. Many of them have shared with me how much they have benefited from these writings. And what they have expressed to me has inspired me to look again, and go more deeply into each inquiry or contemplation. And then to write and speak about it.

So the field we create together keeps expanding, deepening and becoming more and more alive.

This is how it happens in the field of Mutual Evolution.

Here is a writing, requested by one of my clients, following a coaching session.

Breaking through our habitual barriers in conversation

What is the source of our first suffering? It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak. It was born in the moment when we accumulated silent things within us.( Gaston Bachelard)

Sometimes we find ourselves trying to express something very important to a partner, a parent, a child, a colleague or a friend. Something that we care deeply about, something that really matters to us, that inspires us, that is not going away, that continues to call us, to beckon us, to invite us.

We may have reached this point before with this person, and received what one of my clients described as a ‘blank stare.’

It’s so easy to give up here, to withdraw, to shut down, to collapse. And then all I am left with are my own conclusions, my own beliefs, my own assumptions. I have locked myself up in the narrow world of my conditioned mind. There has been no connection because I didn’t take enough responsibility.

In an ‘evolutionary conversation,’ I can take this kind of responsibility with great joy, because it opens up so many possibilities for intimacy, connection and discovery.

It begins with being very clear about one thing:

It is my responsibility to become totally visible and accessible to you, if I want to have an authentic connection with you.

If I receive a blank stare from you, I can stand my ground, stay present, open and tender. From this space of presence, I can ask you these questions, allowing them to emerge from my heart, without demand, without expectations, and without pressure:

“What’s going on here? I would really like to express this to you right now, because it’s really important to me. Are you interested in hearing about this? Is it the right time now, or would another time be better? Is there something about the way I’m expressing this that is difficult for you to hear? Are there questions you need to ask me about this that I have not been open to until now?

So I need to know it you are interested in hearing about this. Whether it is a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’, if it is true, this will be very valuable information for me.”

When this client gave herself permission to move through this barrier, she was immediately able to access a different sense of herself. She described her identity as expanding into a much bigger space, and becoming, at the same time, less fixed, more flowing and fluid.

So these evolutionary ways of being with each other support a loosening, a dissolving of fixed ways of being, and an increasing capacity to rest in the space of effortless presence, our unconditioned being.