Personal Statement

Several years ago a friend and colleague challenged me to articulate what coaching is in my own voice. One winter, deep in the heart of a silent retreat, an answer arose: Coaching is Bodhisattva work. It is the work of helping to alleviate suffering and to open the potential for freedom and peace, one person at a time.

This insight came after many years of struggling to heal the fragmentation I saw and felt around and inside of me. As a diabetic since age ten, I wanted to make peace with my physical limitations, and to erase the battle lines between my mind and body. Encountering the teachings of Zen Buddhism in my twenties taught me that the sense of separation and struggle I felt inernally mirrors the separateness we all feel—between self and other, and between us and the world.

During the  1980's, I lived and trained as a monk at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center. During the first Gulf war, as the cries of the world filtered into the serene beauty of Tassajara, I wondered how the power and profundity of Buddhist teachings could help heal the pain and violence of our time. At that time, I made a vow to carry the warmth, wisdom and potential for humane action and interaction embodied in monastic life back into the world.

An Appropriate Response is the vehicle and venue for ongoing exploration and expression of this vow.

Over the years, my vow has grown through ongoing study in Buddhism, the Ridhwan (Diamond Approach) School, and Integral Coaching. It has been enacted and verified through mindfulness-based leadership programs offered in corporate and non-profit organizations nationwide, through dozens of individual coaching programs for executives, managers, small business owners, therapists, clergy, and others, and thorugh classes and retreats offering the practices and principles of Buddhist teaching to leaders, consultants and people from all walks of life.

 

Through two decades of practice, I have discovered that this place of brokenness and yearning is also a doorway, opening the possibility of compassion and intimacy with others; that our sense of separation is precisely the location where we can connect, revealing our shared humanity and one great heart.

I created An Appropriate Response to integrate the richness and insight of spiritual teachings into accessible, down-to-earth offerings for individuals and groups committed to living meaningful and passionate lives. This unique articulation is an expression of gratitude to the teachers who have guided me - with remarkable patience, wisdom and love - along the path of awakening, leading me toward a way-of-being I yearned for but could barely imagine becoming. Passing along what I have been given is the only way I know how to return their generosity and kindness.