When the Divine Offers You an Appointment
When the ground falls away, we reach for what does not fall.
Last time this happened, I booked my first ayahuasca retreat in Peru.
When the ground falls away, we reach for what does not fall. Whether it’s a prayer or a drink, our heart is intuitively looking for a connection to a deeper dimension of existence that our mind will never see, understand or maybe even acknowledge.
When my then wife and I decided to divorce back in 2019, I asked for an appointment with the divine in a way that made sense to me back then. It’s handy that ayahuasca is both a prayer and a drink.
This time… Wait, what do you mean ‘this time’?
Well, Egle and I decided to separate after six years together, having been engaged for the last two. Her note on instagram is so perfect that I wouldn’t have written a better one myself. The relationship transformed us both spiritually, but it wasn’t meant for romance, family or home, although we tried indeed.
Why am I writing about this to a thousand people on Substack, some of whom are close friends, some clients, and the rest strangers I haven’t ever met?
That’s a story of the inevitably messy but necessary task of navigating personal and professional boundaries.
As a coach, I work with a whole person. We may talk about CEO transitions but if the conversation takes us to heartbreak, we’ll go there together.
I also do my best to show up as a whole person. The skill here is to have my shit together and not dump my emotional stuff on the client. Not that I can hide it anyway, the client will feel it if I try.
And so I found myself picking up a phone and calling one client to tell them about my own breakup because otherwise it would have seeped into our coaching work.
Anyway, this time round, I booked a pilgrimage.
I would have never described myself as a person who goes on a pilgrimage. What is that anyway? Well, don’t ask me — I’ve never been.
What I do know is that one morning I woke up with perfect clarity on two points. First, I am going to India. Second, I am going there soon.
When the divine offers you an appointment, the only right answer is ‘thank you’.
(Once a CEO told me he stopped working with his coach — not me — because “he went to Peru and became too spiritual”. Advice to coaches: going to Peru is going to cost you clients.)
The appointment came earlier this year in the form of a direct connection to more love and gratitude than I had known possible — and this time without ayahuasca.
“Salmon swimming upstream,” I thought. No idea where exactly I’m swimming to, but I know in my bones it’s very important to get there.
I’ve been reflecting on all of this sitting Zen in the mornings. On the face of it, Zen looks the opposite of love: it’s got a strict and rigid form, it stresses discipline and effort. And bhakti yoga, the path of devotion, feels like total opposite: love is the path, even meditation is optional. Go chant instead!
And yet, these two paths lead to the same mountaintop. Through love and devotion we come to the direct realisation of oneness of all things. Through rigorous Zen practice, we directly see the empty nature of reality and find out that emptiness is not cold and indifferent, but deeply loving.
Love leading to wisdom. Wisdom leading to love. Love and wisdom becoming one.
So I’ve two intentions for my pilgrimage. First, chant Hanuman Chalisa with Krishna Das. And then, say the deepest ‘thank you’ I’m capable of at an ashram of Neem Karoli Baba.
Love and wisdom aren’t found in remote Indian ashrams alone, though. I received both from my psychoanalyst. He knows more about my personal life than all my friends combined. I found a part of me that wished he took care of me, eased my pain, told me what to do. This week, I named it:
— In our 1.5 years of working together, not once have I felt you nudging me to end my relationship.
— Would it have helped?
— No, it wouldn’t… And now I understand why.
I indeed understand now. Not fixing or advising was the most helpful thing he did for me.
You see, us coaches — even more than therapists — are trained not to fix, help or save our clients. We’re taught to be very, very careful with giving advice or even wishing, secretly, that our clients do this or that.
If we give advice, we must believe that the client needs it. That is, they are not capable of finding a way forward themselves. The clients will feel it; they will feel helpless thanks to their coach.
Intellectually, I knew all that from my coaching training, but actually feeling it in my psychoanalytic relationship gave me a far deeper appreciation of what love and attention without an agenda feel like. And how powerful it can be.
Feeling seen, accepted, understood and supported by my psychoanalyst without being ‘nudged’ or ‘fixed’ even when I was in pain, made all the difference.
You don’t pull a butterfly out of a caterpillar. You watch it emerge itself.
The only wisdom that’s genuinely ours is the one we earned ourselves. We can read all the books and be none the wiser if we haven’t earned the stripes.
We earn the wisdom of loving, caring and not fixing by bringing this attitude to our own heart, whatever heartache we might be experiencing.
Sometimes, we need to learn that some things don’t have a solution. They need to be witnessed and experienced on their own schedule. Grief and heartbreak are like this. The answer is ‘yes, thank you’, no matter how hard it is. And maybe one day the heartache stays but it stops being such a problem.
Deep in peruvian jungle, back in 2019, at the start of our first ayahuasca ceremony out of many, I anxiously wanted our shaman Spring Washam to tell me what to do if things felt “too much”.
“No matter what happens after you drink ayahuasca, never resist,” Spring said. “The only answer to every experience is ‘yes’.”