This incomprehensible touching or emotional punch might relate to Jung’s synchronicity. The Gods have provided us with wise insight or advice. We should pay attention to and make use of this insight or advice. It might lead us to new feelings of happiness, harmony, or being in tune.
When providing coaching, we often encounter moments when our clients are confronting a failure in their own work, a disappointment regarding their aspirations, or a mistake in a decision that they made. A bit of micro-coaching might be engaged by inviting one’s client to take a step backward and “pretend” for a moment that the failure, disappointment, or mistake was actually purposeful. The “gods on Olympus” actually planned for this outcome, hoping that you (the client) would learn something from this event that could be of great benefit in the future.” A few moments of reflection in an Interlude of Safety not only helps one’s client gain a bit of emotional reprocessing of the event but also helps them extract some important lessons. As many wise counsellors have suggested, there is only success and learning in life. There is neither failure nor disappointment.
There are also times when we find ourselves quite anxious. We are not quite sure what the source of this anxiety might be. Many years ago, Sigmund Freud (1936/2000) suggested that anxiety often signals the potential appearance of some unacceptable thought or action. What might this ‘unacceptable” be? If we become aware, in an Interlude of Safety, of what is being signaled, then we can either ignore it or continue to block it out from our consciousness; however, we can also test to see if this is actually based on an old childhood fear that we can now set aside: “I need no longer fear being abandoned if I let them know of my disagreement.” “It is OK to let this person know that I care deeply about them.” Even if we choose not to act upon the anxiety we experience, this anxiety can provide us with a teaching moment. With the support of a coach, we can find Freud and Marcus Aurelius joining together in pointing the way to our distancing from and reflecting on the signal anxiety that appears in our life.
Fortune-Telling-Based Reflection
One does not have to “believe” in fortune tellers and their many devices to find these devices of value in setting up an Interlude of Magic and generating a bit of micro-coaching. For instance, as a coach, I often bring out Tarot Cards. My client pulls out a card, and we begin a discussion about what this card might mean in my client’s life: “You pulled the card containing the image of a chariot. What does this tell you about travel or change in your life right now?” I often recount a bit of the history of Tarot Cards (or at least one version of the story). During the Middle Ages, these cards were used to guide discussion in the high chambers of Royalty. Since many topics would have been met with suspicion by Royalty (“Are members of my council trying to tell me something I don’t want to hear?”), it becomes much safer to arbitrarily pick out one card from the Tarot deck and commence with conversations regarding the theme in this card: “We have pulled the chariot card. Should we consider what changes we might make or the land to which we must travel to improve international commerce?”
Similar use can be made of devices such as the I Ching and Runes. I recently coached a young adult who had just experienced a major failure in her life. We spent several hours throwing coins to reveal I Ching hexagrams that speak to important themes, and overturning Rune stones that contain symbols that speak to specific themes. My young client was able to reflect on what she might “learn” from her failure, making use of the themes revealed in the hexagram and Rune symbol. Once again, the reflections based on random events (tossing coins, turning over a stone) generated the content for this reflection, while also providing a way in which to distance oneself a bit from the emotion associated with the event on which one is reflecting.
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