Finding Favour

Last night's group coaching was nothing short of excellent. 

Each Wednesday and Each Friday, I run group coaching sessions where women come together to discuss and learn some of the strategies I've spent many years developing and working through. The ideas and practices they are introduced to often have one marked effect... 

They bring joy and they make my clients smile. The stuff we coach and teach somehow finds favour with these clients and they smile. They are brought to a place of love. And a space of love. Of Love.

That's important.

And in all honesty it's no mean feat considering the stark reality of the human condition and the complexities many clients navigate on a daily basis in order to move through life. 

Ultimately, the task at hand is for me to show them how to find favour with themselves.

Real favour. with both self and the world.

***

Here on Arapito Farm where we live (check out the link as it's where we live our words,) I've been called into another process in relation to finding favour.

Always processes. And space. And rests. And work. And life. And joy. And self-creation.

And yes, yet again, it involves the beautiful sediment of trauma. Residual trauma.

How do we find favour with that?

Trauma - an particularly residual trauma - is a bit like sediment.

It is like the sandy loam soil here on our 6 hectare farm. This soil, volcanic and fast draining, that grows the glorious regenerative pasture mix that shoots into feed for the cow friends/family we live with. (We run the Miniature Belted Galloway Society of New Zealand as a bit of a side hustle. Check it out on FB. It's another gorgeous thing.) 

So what has this all got to do with finding favour and the farm, you might ask?

How does this gorgeous stuff all fit together?

Well, it all comes back to the way I approach life as a coach and woman as I walk the planet.

And that entails trauma, because it is one of the languages that I speak and one of the most profound, that informs me.

So What Of Trauma and Finding Favour?

In my case the trauma within  was once an all-encompassing and consuming difficulty. It was also loathed as one might loathe a pariah. It was resistant. even obtuse. Somewhat objectionable.

These days however, I love it. Absolutely LOVE LOVE LOVE IT.

And these days, it it exists as sediment. 

Just sediment.

Coaching Clients and Trauma

Many clients come to me with the entrenched notion that the trauma imprinted within them will continue in this way until the day they die. They are stuck in this way of thinking and being. Stuck in this labyrinthine framework that webs them. They are stuck like rock.

Atrophied? Petrified? Frozen?

Dissolution of The Sisyphean Rock of Trauma

I actually know this to not be the case, and explain this to them. for those who come to work with me all the way through they also come to know this through embodied praxis and through the processses and tasks they are given on the journey.

It is a process of unravelling and unbecoming. A process of Doing and Undoing, Being and Unbeing. A process of dissolution as the aquifer rock of trauma, embedded within you in Sisyphean proportions (- a boulder rock that obscures your day and your nights, that very rok and image that formed the basis of my visual arts work in Australia for years in the same way trees has done ) is gradually dissolved away by miraculous processes and strategies used within the coaching realm.

And just as it is dissolved, it is also transmuted. This atrophied aquifer, this rock of ages that is embedded within you. It is laden. And we invite you to shapeshift and to call upon its possibilities within you. In this way the Sisyphean rock can be repurposed and reshaped into magnificent cairns - little Stone Johnnies (as they're so often called in Brett's ancestral Scotland) or ometto (as they're known in Italy), so prominent and prevalent here in the Kiwi and Australian and even the European and Gaelic countryside. 

Yes...You have a very real opportunity to become unburdened.

To make cairns.

The Language Of Trauma

So how do you become unburdened in this way? How do you learn the steps and stages of repurposing your trauma so it no longer rules you?

How?

We take you through a careful and creative process that even requires sacred knowledge.

My experience is it also absolutely requires a lived experience practitioner and coach who fully understands this language inside and out, as well as the language BEYOND trauma.

This is because the aim is always, always, to wrap an arm around you, love you beyond the way you love yourself and help you to ease your beautiful load, all at once or bit by bit by bit over time. 

And there's only one way to get that.

You can't fake it. You cannot emulate it successfully, and you cannot copy it. ...(well you can, but eventually the ruse will be exposed in the coaching dynamic. It will always be exposed...absolutely exposed.) So many clients have in fact come to me after years of therapy or after experiencing other coaching strategies with this very experience.

It took them so far...but it couldn't take them over the stone bridge. The stone bridge collapsed...because the therapeutic and/or coaching foundation was weak due to a lack of lived experience. In short, the strategies were rudimentary, beautiful yes, and ignorant of the poetry and language of trauma. Chaos ensued and the practitioner was unable to bridge that gap and work with the unwieldy chaos of trauma as the new raw material.

Interestingly, the gorgeous language of trauma and change exists way beyond words.

Words are not the defining attribute.

These attributes are discussed and explained and coached in detail in your elite coaching or your group programme, where you begin to understand the poetics and music of trauma in a whole new way. 

It's very true that current pop psychology and neurophysiology posit truma language very clearly within SOMA and the body, and while that is great in terms of intellectualism and embodied praxis™ and Doing Being™ and coaching, it also means nought.

It can take you part ways over the stone bridge which is great. But not the whole way. And what of beyond?

HOW TO WORK WITH YOUR TRAUMA

You see, the real HOW of trauma transformation - the unburdening - extends WAY beyond language and Broca's Area, right into new territory, that can expand out the human being in unimagined ways if the full journey is undertaken ANd completed. It is a gorgeous and sacred and precious language of new territory that exists beyond the usual conscious and unconscious perimeters that comprise the human being.

This language is rare. In fact, it is an obscure dialect, with its own subtle pronunciations and its own particular subtleties and inflections. 

It is a language known most fully and beautifully by those who speak it silently, and the full learning of this language cannot be emulated or mimicked. It cannot be earned by a piece of paper, or by the tiresome appropriation of someone else's writings...by the use of a ghostwriter, or by cash cow paid entry.

No.

Entry to this particular language school is rarefied and the fee is steep.

The fee is by way of the experience of considerable trauma. Real trauma. Hard and difficult and terrifying trauma. 

That is the entry-fee. 

But once the curriculum is fully learned and mastered and unlearned and then understood?

Once you are educated on this, you discover a regal and glorious school of unbridled hope, true gorgeousness and magnificence, and incredible LOVE - a very beautiful love fit for the never-princes and never-princesses, for the ne'er-be-royals who finally own their queendom and kingdom with full silent power.

This silent and wise and shonky crew wear their crowns a little crookedly at times, and have a radar for fakery and the clumsy verbal language of inexperienced trickster. The silly young tricksters, the old tricksters, the bully tricksters and the unethical tricksters, still scooting about with jester bells, prove prove proving worth by way of artifice that poses as the real deal.  And we love them, just extend love to them, love them for who they are...just love them and their transparent braggadocio, all the same.

Through these observations and experiences, with a mix of frustration and love, there is always something to learn and experience and change. 

The Sacredness of Trauma

Your trauma may be your potential. It may just herald something quite rare. 

How then, can you mine it like you might mine an ethical diamond? How can you repurpose it for your benefit and the benefit of others.

That is some of what we do here with you at Camilla Slater Coaching.

We show you HOW to ReStory, and Self-Create. We show you HOW to Re-Create, applying the same principles - those 2 and 3 dimensional principles and visual arts strategies - the ones we live and breathe, that earned me as your coach, an award winning art career.

We take you from the rock to tree and beyond, in a cycle of regenerative and degenerative processes that are loving and compassionate and real.

We show you HOW to grow and HOW to manifest the intricacies of life with the same finesse as an award-winning drawing. We show you HOW to draw and paint and sculpt and make not necessarily an artwork (oh we can do that too) BUT A NEW LIFE.

Image: Trees with Epiphyte, 2010, by Camilla Slater. Graphite on Hahnemuhle paper

This is HOW you can really find favour with yourself. This is how you can do it. This is here, for you. 

The Next Phase

This year in 2022, we rolled out our programmes for the first time. It's been beautiful to see women embracing my strategies into their lives so they move beyond the silent language of their inner pain to flourish forth into new possibilities and ventures. The changemaking has been extraordinary and honourable. 

In 2023, the programmes will continue and there'll be ample opportunity to find more freedom and self-creation in ways that were otherwise unknown to you. 

I'm looking forward to this extraordinarily poetic next phase where becoming and unbecoming meld and fuse, and where clients and myself and you, have an opportunity to share, learn, dialogue and work with Doing Being™ and Embodied Praxis™and all its secret subtleties and incredible nuances and simplicities and complexities.

It is exciting. 

And lastly, if you are reading this, you are hopefully finding favour with yourself. WIth all of you. That is the true gift. To simply find favour and live from that place as a given. Finding Favour. 

All of you...find favour for the muck, the inauthenticity, the parts you loathe, the fallen princess, the fitful prince, the desperate part that needs... the part that may even be curious enough to want to reach out to us here, the beautiful rage, the part that resents the wisdom, the grief of the wounded daughter and that very wounded son, and the miraculous flip of these. 

Much love as always.

Look forward to seeing you in the programmes and the elite one-to-ones.

Camilla xx

If you'd like to know more about true freedom from trauma and love and developing a more grounded approach to self-creating that encompasses more than pastiche and appropriation reach out for a Discovery Call on Zoom. 

Book in for a Free Discovery Call here

Your Discovery Session is a private and free 30 min discovery so you can REALLY map a path. What path? YOUR path. Compassionate, clear, real and helpful. Begin to ReStory™️ your life here. We open up a couple of slots each week for these. Best to book in as soon as you can...

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^{Copyright Camilla Slater, 2022.}