This article is a continuation of The Four Styles of Transformation in Aletheia Meta-psychology Part 1. If you haven’t read that yet, I recommend doing so.
Transmutation
In Part 2 of this series, I want to explore the first style of transformation called transmutation. In Aletheia Coaching, we practice transmutation through Integral Unfoldment. These two terms can be used synonymously. Briefly, through practicing Integral Unfoldment, Parts are transmuted into Process, Process is transmuted into Presence, and Presence is transmuted into Nondual Awareness. Let’s unpack this in more detail.
In the Advanced Coaching Program (ACP) curriculum, transmutation or Integral Unfoldment is the first style of transformation you learn. It forms the core of Aletheia Coaching. In Level 1, you learn how to practice transmutation by working with the client’s current experience in an ever-deepening way. In Level 2, you learn how to amplify and accelerate transmutation through integrating somatic practices like breathwork, movement, and bodywork into your coaching conversations.
“Transmutation” is not a widely used term. Transmutation most often refers to the legendary alchemical process of transforming base metals into gold. According to modern physics, a physical transformation like this requires so much energy that it can only happen in the center of stars.
Many interpreters of alchemical texts say that the processes they describe are metaphors for psycho-spiritual transformation not physical transformation. This was Carl Jung’s view. I’ve spoken to present-day alchemists who stand by the claim that transmutation is a physical transformation. It may be, but I can’t confirm this. I side with Jung on this point. In Aletheia, transmutation is a process of psycho-spiritual transformation that is relevant to us as coaches. Transmutation is the most important form of ego transformation for the journey of individuation.
In Part 1, I defined transmutation as the unfolding of innate wholeness into further expressions of wholeness. This is the most common form of transformation and it is found everywhere in nature. This is the transformation of an acorn into an oak tree. It is the transformation of a child into teenager, a teenager into an adult, and an adult into an elder. It is the transformation of a person who is disempowered and stuck into someone who is creative and capable. Transmutation is the transformation of anyone into a leader. Through transmutation, potential becomes actual. For this reason, learning how to skillfully facilitate transmutation is a core coaching competency.
Self-improvement vs. Self-unfoldment
If you follow my work, you know that I often make the distinction between self-improvement and self-unfoldment. The drive toward self-improvement is a dominant thread in mainstream culture. The coaching industry owes a huge debt of gratitude to the self-improvement movement. This movement has produced the ever-growing self-help industry and the proliferations of books and YouTube videos showing yet more ways you can optimize your life and and improve yourself. In fact, the narrative of self-improvement is so dominant that most people don’t even know about self-unfoldment, which utilizes transmutation. Furthermore, most people don’t realize that true effectiveness and fulfillment are rarely the outcome of self-improvement and self-optimization. Instead, the drive toward self-improvement and self-optimization is, more often than not, a source of suffering. I sometimes call this the tyranny of self-improvement, but that’s another soap box.
The premise of self-unfoldment differs significantly from the premise of self-improvement. Self-improvement is usually initiated in response to self-deficiency. You don’t like the shape of your body. You are dissatisfied with your job performance. You are unhappy in your relationships. You feel overwhelmed and stressed out. It feels like you just don’t have what it takes, whatever that is. Experiences like this are what often bring clients to coaching. But self-improvement isn’t self-transformation. Through self-improvement can upgrade your skillfulness but that doesn’t necessarily transform your way of being. Such a profound shift requires self-transformation.
The most powerful outcomes of coaching tend to come from self-transformations that fundamentally shift the client’s sense of themselves. In fact, that such a shift is even possible is often a surprise to clients. It is rare that clients seek such fundamental transformations because they don’t know they are possible. However, when clients experience the profound power of self-transformation they usually become an almost endless source of referrals. Self-transformation always over-delivers. One of the best ways to build your coaching business is to provide more value to your clients than they expected or paid for. Transmutation or self-unfoldment is the first of four styles of self-transformation that we practice in Aletheia Coaching.
In contrast to self-improvement, self-unfoldment starts with self-sufficiency. That is, self-unfoldment takes the view that who and what you are is whole and complete from the beginning. To be clear, I’m not using the term “self-sufficiency” in is usual connotation as being ‘capable of doing something on your own without support.’ Instead, I’m using the term self-sufficiency to indicate the opposite of self-deficiency. Another way to stay this is that innate wholeness as latent potential is unconcealed, embodied, and expressed through self-unfoldment.
By definition, unfoldment is always the unfoldment of wholeness from wholeness. Let’s return to my earlier example of an acorn. Rather than holding it as a deficient wannabe oak tree, lacking roots, a trunk, branches, and leaves we can hold is as whole and complete in itself. An acorn is a miracle in itself. It has the potential to be an oak tree if the conditions necessary for its unfoldment are met. What are those conditions? The acorn needs nourishing soil, water, sunlight, and air in the right mixture. As the acorn swells with water, splits open, sends its first roots into the soil and its first leaves upward into the sky, the acorn-becoming-an-oak-tree is whole and complete in every moment. The acorn is transmuting into an oak tree. This is the miraculous process that the alchemists so celebrated and studied. This is transmutation, the core process of life itself.
Like the acorn, you are already whole and complete in every moment and so are your clients. And, like the acorn, you can unfold your potential if the conditions needed are present. When you practice Integral Unfoldment, you foster the exact conditions required for unfoldment within the coaching relationship. And as a result, the client unfolds more and more of their depth, more and more of who they are as a self-in-relation (and you do as well).
Meeting Normal Psychological Needs Creates the Necessary Conditions for Unfolding
What are the conditions required for spontaneous unfoldment? According to Self-psychology, founded by Heinz Kohut, we all have normal psychological needs that must be met for us to naturally unfold and develop. In no particular order, they are:
The need for mirroring – the need to feel seen, understood, loved, and valued exactly as we are, especially when showing something important to another valued person
The need for idealization – the need to experience being cared for and protected by a sensitive, capable, powerful, wise, and respected other who is perceived as possessing the qualities, resources, and capacities that we lack
The need for belonging – the need to experience an essential likeness or kinship with other human beings (Kohut’s word for belonging was “twinship”)
The need for efficacy – the need to experience that you have a positive impact on others and can evoke responses from them that satisfy your own psychological needs
The need for supportive adversaries – the need to be challenged by others in ways that help us be our best self
The need for self-delineation – the need to experience support from others for articulating what one is perceiving, feeling, and thinking
The need for validation – the need to experience validation of one’s subjective reality, especially of how one feels
Whew! That’s a lot of needs! Yet each of these needs are spontaneously met in multiple ways through practicing Integral Unfoldment with your coaching clients. There is no need to track and satisfy each need individually. All of these needs are met in natural ways within a well-organized coaching relationship centered on exploring the client’s direct experience and integrating what unfolds into their life.
I frequently hear from students in our classes that they are surprised how coaching in this way feels effortless. Some will even say, “It feelings like I’m not doing anything.” How could this be an effective way to coach? Because meeting these needs requires that you stop trying to change the client. Even well-intended efforts to change the client will thwart this natural process from unfolding. Instead, you meet the client exactly where they are. You meet the client exactly as they are. You hold an open, accepting, loving, and appreciative space for them to meet themselves exactly as they are with no change agenda. In fact, the majority of the work is in helping the client relax their own self-improvement and self-optimization agendas, which themselves need to be seen, understood, loved, and valued exactly as they are. Paradoxically, as these conditions are met, the client spontaneously unfolds in profoundly transformative ways. That’s the power of transmutation!
When these normal psychological needs are unfulfilled, your clients will struggle with self-trust, self-acceptance, self-nurturance, self-worth, self-esteem, self-understanding, self-confidence, self-enjoyment, self-engagement, and self-satisfaction. All coaching clients struggle in one or more of these ways. As their normal psychological needs are met within the coaching relationship, they will naturally deepen and develop in all of these capacities.
Coaching with Depth
The method of Aletheia Coaching is organized around a model of depth called The Four Depths of Cosmos, Psyche, and Soma. Listed from shallowest to deepest, the depths are as follows:
The Depth of Parts where you experience a reactive and fragmented self (usually felt as ‘not enoughnes’) and a world of separation
The Depth of Process where you experience a fluid flow of felt relatedness and experience
The Depth of Presence & Absence where you experience the innate wholeness of yourself, others, and the world
The Depth of Nonduality where you realize the profound non-separateness, unity, and oneness of reality
The mindfulness movement and the popularity of books like The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle are thankfully introducing the concept of “being present” into mainstream culture. However, the notion that most people have of presence is binary - being either present or not present. However, Presence is more textured and multi-faceted that this simple binary distinction reveals.
In general, our culture is blind to depth. The four depths distinguishes four progressively deeper ways of being present. That is, when you shift from being not present to being present, you can then deepen your presence in four distinguishable ways. And, as your presence deepens, your experience of yourself, others, and the world is transformed in profound ways.
When you coach it is crucial to meet your clients where they are within these depths. Without realizing it, the vast majority of people are living at the Depth of Parts. They experience a world of separate and identifiable people, places, and things. And, they experience various reactions to them that can be mental, emotional, and/or physical. In fact this reactivity is one of the key indicators that someone is living at the Depth of Parts as this reactivity diminishes with deepening presence.
Reactivity reveals that a Part feels threatened or perhaps it feels hurt. In turn, Parts react defensively. Fear, hurt, other reactive emotions, and defensiveness are common ways to notice the client at the Depth of Parts. Another way is to notice the activity of The Three Poisons named in Yogic and Buddhist philosophy.
Avoidance
Attachment
Delusion
Delusion tends to show up as a sense of self-deficiency (which is sometimes masked as grandiosity). You might say, delusion is a case of mistaken identity. Delusion produces the belief that you can’t tolerate certain feelings (perhaps feeling anxious, anger, sadness, depression, loss, failure, aloneness, abandonment, worthlessness, helplessness, etc.). In this delusion, you are afraid of being overwhelmed by these intolerable feelings and they must be avoided at all costs.
Avoidance goes hand-in-hand with attachment. Just as you avoid certain feelings you become attached to other feelings (perhaps feeling happy, comfortable, peaceful, righteous, victorious, etc.). In this delusion, you believe you need to feel these ways and they must be sought at all costs.
Naturally, what is an intolerable feeling to one person is not so to another person. And feelings that are desirable to one person are undesirable to others. Nevertheless, we all engage in avoidance and attachment when our identifications are shaped by delusion. Patterns of avoidance and attachment can be unraveled at the root by exploring and unconcealing your innate nature as wholeness, as Presence itself. Presence has the innate capacity to be-with any experience without being overwhelmed. Realizing and embodying Presence liberates you from the hamster wheel of avoidance and attachment.
Self-improvement efforts driven from self-deficiency are usually a form of both avoidance and attachment. And, very often, regardless of the short-term outcome, in the longer term, they tend to reinforce the underlying delusion that drives them. Paradoxically, self-improvement tends to reinforce self-deficiency even as it attempt to address it. This is how incessant self-improvement and self-optimization can be a source of suffering. The alternative is self-unfoldment.
Let’s now explore how self-unfoldment occurs at each of the four depths.
Parts Work
You can meet the normal psychological needs of your clients and create the necessary conditions for unfoldment at the Depth of Parts by practicing Parts Work. Parts Work has three gestures: 1) Identifying, 2) Disidentifying-Accepting, and 3) Loving/Valuing. In the first gesture, you help the client identify the Part that is triggered. In the second gesture, you help the client disidentify from that Part and relate to it exactly as it is in an accepting way from Presence. Then, in the last gesture, the client-as-Presence offers this Part love and appreciation for its good intentions. In turn, the Part relaxes, softens, and melts. Of course, I am describing this practice at a high level and there are many nuances involved. However, the process of these gestures can unfold in a few minutes to a few seconds.
To get a sense of how this feels bring to mind a memory of a time when you felt truly seen, understood, loved, and valued exactly as you are by someone. You might have felt this way with a lover, a friend, a family member, a therapist, or even a coach. How did you feel? I always ask this question when I teach. I’ve probably heard close to a thousand responses to this question in the last 15 years. Most people share that something in them softened, melted, relaxed, or released the very moment they felt truly loved and valued for being who they are. Some people will even notice that this sense of release is the sign that they feel truly loved and valued exactly as they are.
When you feel truly loved and valued exactly as you are, something melts. What is it that melts? This melting dissolves the boundaries of separation at the Depth of Parts and spontaneously drops you deeper into contact with yourself, others, and the world in the Depth of Process. Love melts boundaries. This is the process through which fragmented Parts become re-integrated.
Process Work
In the Depth of Process you experience a fluid flow of felt relatedness. You primarily feel process experience through two channels of perception: 1) bodily felt sense and 2) imaginal felt image. Felt senses and felt images often arise together and amplify each other. Some people are more sensitive to felt senses whereas others are more sensitive to felt images.
Felt senses and felt images are a persistent background in all experiences. Parts may or may not be triggered, but process is always present. These felt experiences are literally the feeling of relatedness (technically, this is prior relatedness). As you bring these feelings into the foreground you become conscious of what’s unfolding in your current relationships.
Have you ever been walking down a street late at night at suddenly felt unsafe? That’s a felt experience of relatedness. Have you ever been at a work meeting and become uneasy with how the meeting is going? That’s a felt experience of relatedness. Have you ever been on a date and felt that special romantic spark with another person? That’s a felt experience of relatedness. Felt senses and felt images reveal what’s unfolding in the field of relatedness in which you live.
To meet the necessary conditions for deepening unfoldment at the Depth of Process you practice Process Work. The gestures of Process Work are: 1) Contacting, 2) Being-with, and 3) Feeling-Saying. In the first gesture, you help your client make contact with their current felt sense and any accompanying felt images. Felt sense and felt images often initially arise in a vague or indistinct way. For example, the client might say, “I feel something in my chest that’s stirring.” In the second gesture, you help the client be with their felt experience exactly as it is from Presence. And in the last gesture, you support them in exploring this felt sense through feeling and languaging it as it unfolds. Through this practice what was initially vague and indistinct unfolds in a way that becomes precise and exact. The client may say, “Now I’m sensing something in my in the center of my chest that feels like champagne bubbles.” In fact, as you the the client explore this felt experience you keep finding that it is more than can ever be put into words. Language just isn’t precise enough yet this felt experience functions more like the source of languaging because whenever you return to the feeling more can be said about how it’s unfolding.
Eugene Gendlin, creator of Focusing, taught that the body’s felt sense 1) reflects the whole field of current relatedness, including aspects of these relations that you are not yet conscious of, and 2) it always “implies a next step” that unfolds in a life-affirming direction toward the realization of innate wholeness. By themselves, these are remarkable resources for navigating the complex relationships that you live and work in. Any client that struggles to navigate relationships skillfully will benefit from learning to drop into the Depth of Process to sense and feel what is happening in their relationships.
Portals to Even Deeper Depths
There are two kinds of felt experiences that show up as portals to even deeper truths and depths of presence: 1) felt fullnesses and 2) felt emptinesses. I call them portals of Presence and Absence respectively.
A felt fullness arises as the feeling of some supportive capacity or resource that enables you to meet the moment exactly as it is. In a romantic moment, you might feel soft and sweet or yummy and juicy inside. In a moment of violation where boundaries need to be re-established, you might feel emboldened, energized, strong, expansive, and definitive. In a moment of irritation and suffering, your heart might become tender and cool in a way that soothes your irritation and brings a sense of freshness. These are examples of felt fullnesses, portals of Presence. If you feel such a fullness when it arises as the feeling of yourself in this moment (and thus collapse the subject-object dualism), you will spontaneously drop into the Depth of Presence & Absence.
By contrast, a felt emptiness arises as the direct feeling of deficiency and lack. Instead of feeling the presence of capacity, you feel the lack of it. This is what A. H. Almaas, founder of the Diamond Approach, calls a “hole” in his Theory of Holes. This word fits as often you feel this deficient emptiness as a hole in your body. You might feel like something essential is missing in your chest or solar plexus or belly or anywhere.
Feeling this lack seems to ground and reinforce the sense of self-deficiency. One response is to side with this belief and reinforce the delusion, which of course now seems proven. However, doing this pops you back up into the Depth of Parts as you crystalize this feeling and identify with it. But you can take another approach. You can get curious about this felt emptiness and start to explore it through Process Work. In fact, ultimately you will want to feel and explore it as directly and intimately as possible. The closest way to explore it is to feel this lack as the feeling of yourself in this moment (once again collapsing the subject-object dualism). When you do this, you spontaneously drop into the Depth of Presence & Absence where your inquiry can deepen and unfold in a profound way.
Presence Work
As I have just described, you drop into the Depth of Presence & Absence by deeply exploring a felt fullness or a felt emptiness. To meet the conditions necessary for deepening unfoldment at this depth, you practice Presence Work. The three gestures of Presence Work are: 1) Beholding, 2) Being-Wholeness, and 3) Unfolding-Completeness. In the first gesture, you open your awareness to behold the entire field of awareness, including awareness itself. Next, you practice Being-Wholeness through being this field of aware awareness exactly as it is as a quality of Presence or Absence. In the last gesture, you experience a spontaneous gestalt shift, a transformative shift in your sense of self.
If you entered this depth through a felt emptiness, this gestalt shift will generate a sense of fullness and Presence. Likewise, if you entered this depth through a felt fullness, this shift generates a sense of emptiness or Absence. Absence and Presence are like yin and yang. They are mutually defining, co-arising, and co-creating. There is no Presence without Absence, and naturally no Absence without Presence.
The experience of this gestalt shift is very similar to the change of perspective that you experience when looking at this famous line drawing.
Initially, you might see an old woman. Yet if you continue stay open to the picture-as-a-whole, you will experience a shift of the entire image. Now instead of an old woman, you see a young woman. Of course, you might have seen the young woman first and the old woman second.
The hallmark of this gestalt shift is that in a blink everything changed yet nothing changed. That is the exact experience of the gestalt shift at the Depth of Presence & Absence. With this shift, the felt sense of emptiness becomes full. Likewise, the felt fullness starts to empty out.
Another analogy is walking into a completely dark room. At first, it feels empty but as your eyes adjust you start to notice that the room is full of stuff. Once again, everything change but nothing changed.
What is actually occurring here is the dance of various qualities of Presence as they flow from the background into the foreground and from the foreground into the background. When you see the young woman, the old woman is unseen in the background. When the old woman pops into the foreground, the young woman withdraws into the background.
Experience at the Depth of Presence & Absence is a dance of foregrounding and backgrounding. Qualities of Presence that recede into the background are not gone. As they recede they make way for other qualities of Presence to emerge into the foreground as needed.
As you realize this, you stop connoting Presence as good and Absence as bad. Instead, you flow through various qualities of Presence in a dynamic moment-by-moment (nondual) responsiveness to life. Each quality being an expression of your innate wholeness and completeness. Each quality being an innate resource for navigating the complexity of life.
This is a remarkable discovery! Consider how much time, expense, and effort is spent in self-improvement and self-optimization projects to address self-deficiency. Characteristically, when Parts feel an inner deficiency, they try to solve it by taking action in the external world. They motivate you to buy more self-help books, follow more social influencers, take more course, get to the gym more often, buy the latest life optimizing app, and maybe even hire a coach. Of course there are many great benefits from doing these things that transmutation doesn’t replace. However, transmutation is an alternative response to self-deficiency that addresses it at the root. Instead of acting externally, you turn your attention internally by exploring your current experience in a progressively deepening way. As a result you unconceal your own innate wholeness and embody your innate resourcefulness in a profoundly transformative way.
Once you have realized a particular quality of Presence, and there are many, and it’s complementary quality of Absence, you can be and feel them both at the same time. This will spontaneously drop you into the Depth of Nonduality. This is one of four kinds of Nondual Work that we practice in Aletheia Coaching. I’m not going to say more about Nondual Work in this article. I will share more about Nondual Work in another article.
Transmuting in the Metacrisis
Transmutation spontaneously occurs as the necessary conditions for unfoldment are met in the coaching relationship at each depth. These conditions are met through exploring the client’s current experiences exactly as they are at their current depth. Integral Unfoldment gives you skillful ways to consciously practice this at each depth. Unfoldment proceeds through transmuting current experience into deeper experience and realization. Through this natural process of self-unfoldment you help your clients to unconceal and embody their innate resourcefulness, creativity, resiliency, and genius.
The metacrisis we now face is a clarion call for change and transformation. Yet the prevailing ways of responding to this call are through self-improvement and self-optimization efforts. Improvement and optimization are a capitalists dream. To sell your products, sell people on the deficiency of their lives and the deficiencies in themselves. Despite short-term gains, in the longer term self-improvement projects generally don’t deliver as promised. Plus, they consume vital resources. In short, self-improvement is not regenerative.
On the other hand, self-unfoldment, the unconcealment and unfoldment of wholeness into wholeness is regenerative. It is the very process of all living systems. This is a process that produces resourcefulness instead of only consuming resources. This is a process that generates more than it consumes. For this reason, I believe that self-unfoldment must become a more dominant response to the deficiencies that we experience. The work that we do as coaches who adopt this approach can make a significant contribution to this social transformation.
There are many nuances and details about this practice that are beyond the scope of this article. If you want to learn more about how to facilitate transmutation through Integral Unfoldment with your coaching clients, consider joining a Level 1 cohort.
I look forward to reading your comments and answering your questions.
In Part 3 of this series I will explore how we practice translucence in Aletheia Coaching. This is a style of transformation that enables you to see self-constructions as constructions and then learn how to see through them to the unconstructed nature of reality. Translucence can be used as a powerful sensemaking practice to reframe and recontextualize experience. And, in its fullest expression, translucence is a powerful way to awaken to Nondual awareness or Emptiness as it is called in Buddhist philosophy.
With love,
-Steve