The Unspeakable Magics

This past weekend I was apparently possessed by some sort of house cleaning demon and I tore through literal years of piled up mail, files, and random junk that has been accumulating in the corners of my home for much longer than I’d like to admit. It started because I had the wild hare to find an old harddrive, and I could not for the life of me remember where I put it. And if you don’t know where you put something, you have to look, everywhere, and I mean EVERYWHERE.

About an hour and half into the process I found the harddrive I was looking for, but I was already so deep into this cleaning possession I couldn’t stop, and I’m glad I didn’t. Because what I found shortly after the harddrive tapped me into something I didn’t even know I had been missing.

A few years back, I transitioned from keeping all my client notes on standard white paper over to my ipad. It’s incredibly handy and helps to keep me organized and not tear down the Amazon every quarter. But I had used paper notes for literal years before I made the switch—and I’ve kept every single sheet of paper related to any client I’ve seen in that time. Since making the electronic switch I kept telling myself I would eventually deal with all the paperwork that had piled up in my file cabinet that I shoved in the back of a closet, and of course I never did—until this weekend.

So I started dealing with the paperwork. I put stray notes in the correct files and arranged the files that had been out of place. And through this process I came to realize just how much I’ve done in the last eight years of being a yoga therapist and enneagram coach. I have one client who has been with me for nearly that entire time, starting with me only a few months after my internship started in the summer of 2017. I have a handful of clients who’ve been with me for six plus years. And while I have a deep appreciation for these clients and prefer this long-form style of coaching, I also saw stacked before me the names and files of 70+ clients I’ve seen in the last eight years.

There’s something so much more impactful about seeing the files stacked up in one place instead of scrolling through my ipad menus. Here is physical evidence of all the lives I’ve touched and have changed me in return. It filled me with so much gratitude for what I’m able to do for my career.

I deeply love the work I do. And more in more over the last few years, I’ve left sessions feeling a profound sense of alignment. I, many times, have come into our kitchen after a session and told Danielle, “Damn, I am good at my job.”

And this doesn’t come from a sense of inflated ego or a misapplied sense of self-importance, it comes from an almost mystified feeling of “how in God’s name is this happening?” It comes from knowing deeply that there is something more happening than me just showing up to do my work. There is some magic coming into play that is wholly apart from me, but has, for some unknown reason, chosen me to move through. And I’ll be honest and say it’s not always there, but it has been showing up more and more over these last few years and it is truly humbling to experience it the way I’ve been able to.

What I’ve found so frustrating about this phenomenon, though, is that the more I have this feeling, the more the magic is moving through me and my clients and the relationship we’ve built, the more I want to do this work—and the less I know how to talk about it.

And this is a problem from the traditional marketing sense because if you can’t talk about what you do, how on earth could you ever convince anyone to let you do it? This has been one of deepest and most challenging struggles I’ve had in my career. I want to see more clients. I want to coach more people. I want to do more typing interviews, teach more workshops, and do more corporate and team work, but traditional marketing and capitalistic wisdom says I have to be able to talk about what I do if I want to do more of it.

When I was first starting out, I could confidently deliver an elevator pitch for yoga therapy and the enneagram that would knock your socks off. I could clearly articulate what we would do together and what benefit each and every one of my clients would experience (whether or not that actually happened is a different story). As I’ve grown as a coach, yoga therapist, teacher, and guide, my confidence in session has far outshadowed the confidence I have talking about my sessions. Yes, I can still tell you in a general sense what we will do and what yoga therapy is and how the enneagram works, but those things never seem to get at the real magic that’s happening in these sessions.

And I think that’s part of what makes it magic.

Magic is all the things we don’t understand. All the things that we can’t wrap our minds around. Some magic we come to understand, like how the magician cuts the woman in half or pulls the quarter from behind your ear, but some magic continually eludes us. Just when we think we understand it, it jumps three miles ahead of us and dances into a completely new world, asking us to follow.

I don’t understand the magic that happens in my coaching sessions. I just feel honored I get to see it, and in some small way be a part of it. And if not knowing how to market myself or talk about these things is the price I pay to get to continue being a part of this magic, than I will gladly pay it. I guess what I’m also getting at here is if you want to take a leap of faith and see what this magic is for yourself, reach out and let’s do a consultation and see what magic has in store for the both of us. And, if you’re a current or past client of mine who’s felt this magic, and you feel like you could articulate more about this magic, I would love to hear it because I’m at a loss.

And if you’re not a current, past, or future client of mine, I encourage you to look for those nameless moments of magic in your own life. Where are you finding those places that bring you into something bigger than yourself? Where do you find yourself at a loss for words? Let yourself love those spaces a little more and enjoy the magic dancing out in front of you.