7 Ways Spiritual Coaching Could Transform Your Life

If you're lacking fulfilment or direction in life, spiritual coaching can help you align your beliefs and values with purpose. Sonia Vadlamani explores how spiritual coaching can change your life’s course for the better, and what sets it apart from life coaching.

 

In today’s competitive, success-obsessed world, many of us reach a point where we feel something is missing from our lives – a deeper sense of connectedness, a purpose beyond worldly pursuits, or a spiritual hunger that no amount of goal setting and accomplishments can seem to fulfil. This is where spiritual coaching can become incredibly helpful. 

 

What is Spiritual Life Coaching? 

Spiritual coaching aims to help individuals connect with their spiritual goals by aligning their values and beliefs to a purpose greater than themselves. While researchers agree that spirituality and wellbeing are interlinked, emerging studies suggest that spirituality also helps mediate the fear arising from uncertainty or challenging times, thus safeguarding one’s mental health and fostering emotional resilience. 

 

A spiritual coach acts as a guide or companion on your journey toward spiritual growth. Freud’s renowned Iceberg Theory is useful here: it uses an iceberg as the metaphor for the human mind, where the vast submerged part of the iceberg signifies the human unconscious mind, which has the largest impact on one’s personality and behavior, even though it’s more inaccessible than the visible ‘tip’ of the iceberg which represents the conscious mind.

 

The role of a spiritual coach is to work with both – the visible or external aspects of your life, like your goals, setbacks, and daily activities, as well as underlying, deeper aspects that influence everything you do. 

 

7 Ways a Spiritual Coach Can Help You

Simply put, the role of a spiritual advisor is to provide the support and guidance you need to access your inner gifts to create a meaningful, authentic life that reflects who you truly are. Here are some ways spiritual life coaching can help you:

 

1. Navigate life transitions with ease

Handling major transitions in life – whether a career change, moving to a new area, relationship shift, losing a parent and working through the stages of grief, or a health challenge – isn’t easy alone. Whether by choice or unexpected, such life changes can trigger existential questions and a need for expert guidance.

 

This is where a spiritual coach can offer perspective and wisdom, helping you realize that life changes can also serve as stepping stones to personal growth. A spiritual coach will help you tap into your inner resources and overcome challenges and move forward in life.

 

2. Overcome fear and mental blocks

Sometimes we subconsciously carry self-limiting thoughts and patterns that may hold back our growth. These may include ingrained beliefs about self-worth, fears about our capabilities, or doubts about success in career and relationships. 

 

Spiritual life coaching can help identify and address these blocks using techniques like energy cleansing, inner child work, and developing a growth or abundance mindset, thus enabling you to realize your fullest potential and live a fulfilled life.

Spiritual coaches act as a guide to align your passions with purpose

 

3. Trust your intuition 

Each of us has, at some point, experienced a “hunch”, an inner voice, or a “gut feeling” about a decision or circumstance. This “ability to understand something instinctively, without any need for conscious reasoning or an explanation” is what we know as intuition, according to Dr Thomas R. Verny, clinical psychiatrist and author of the blog Explorations of the Mind. 

While this intuition is often accurate, we tend not to trust the feeling, given our majorly analytical, logic-driven minds. We fail to realize that intuitive thinking isn’t about unlocking psychic powers but about learning to recognize and trust the subtle signs from your body, your environment, and the knowledge accumulated from your past experience. 

 

Dismissing intuition sometimes makes us lose out on valuable guidance from our subconscious learning and prior experience. A spiritual coach can help you tap into your intuition and reinforce your connection with inner guidance, so that you can make better, more informed decisions.

 

4. Strengthen relationships and build community

The power of community in creating a happy life can’t be ignored - research agrees that growth thrives when we’re surrounded by like-minded people who uplift us. In fact, studies show that relationships and spirituality are intertwined, suggesting that spirituality boosts the health of relationships, while healthy relationships aid one’s wellbeing and spiritual growth in turn. 

 

“Spiritual coaching aims to help individuals connect with their spiritual goals by aligning their values and beliefs to a purpose greater than themselves.” 

Indeed, a spiritual advisor can help you attract and develop relationships that aid your personal and spiritual development, helping you overcome loneliness, feel valued, and lead a meaningful life.

 

5. Find your life’s purpose

At some point, all of us find ourselves questioning what we’re here to do, what’s the point of life, and where it’s taking us. While pondering about life’s purpose can help us to review their goals and improvise our next moves, it can also lead to confusion, feeling lost, and loneliness, sometimes resulting in depression and anxiety. 

 

Spiritual coaching can help you explore the answer to “Who am I?” by encouraging introspection and helping you uncover your unique gifts and strengths. Often this guided exploration goes beyond traditional career choices, enabling you to focus on showing up as the best version of yourself in every area of life.

 

6. Work through past trauma

There’s a growing body of research highlighting the role of spirituality when it comes to healing from past trauma and developing a healthy outlook and building emotional resilience for the future. 

 

In her book Traumatic Stress and Long-Term Recovery, author Anna R Harper discusses how spirituality and religion influence how one perceives trauma, as well as the post-traumatic recovery process. Indeed, a spiritual coach can help you process your trauma better, in addition to helping you understand that while your trauma is painful, it’s also your gateway to growth and greater strength.

Spiritual coaching helps you to overcome fears and addictions

 

Interestingly, a study of 529 care leavers – or young individuals separated from parental care and placed in alternative care settings – from 11 nations revealed a strong connection between spirituality, well-being, and resilience, even when accounting for challenging life circumstances. Thus, building inner strength and emotional resilience to face life’s storms and uncertainties is another area a spiritual advisor can help with.

 

7. Overcome addiction

One of the most practical ways spiritual coaching can benefit someone is addressing compulsive behaviors and addiction – not only by identifying the addiction itself but also the underlying triggers. In fact, research shows that religious faith and spirituality can play an active role in recovery from substance abuse. 

 

“A spiritual coach can offer perspective and wisdom, helping you realize that life changes can also serve as stepping stones to personal growth.”

 

A spiritual coach can help clients realize that their addiction is often an unconscious effort to numb emotional pain or escape reality. Through this awareness, and by incorporating helpful techniques like conscious breathwork, meditation, and journaling, they can help connect individuals to a greater purpose, putting them on the path to a purpose-driven life.

 

Spiritual Coach Vs Life Coach 

At first glance, spiritual coaching and life coaching can seem similar, as both serve to bring a positive change in individuals. However, they different in the aspects they focus on and their approach. 

Life coaching typically focus on:

• Setting, tracking, reviewing definite goals.
• Devising client-specific productivity hacks
• Performance and accountability reviews
• External behaviors and conscious thoughts

Spiritual coaching explores deeper with:

• Exploring and examining your belief systems, thought patterns and values without judgment.
• Incorporating new perspectives and spiritual practices like meditation, energy work and journaling.
• Aligning your inner values and beliefs with your life purpose.
• Addressing your soul’s needs, not just your extrinsic goals.

 

How Do You Become a Spiritual Coach? 

While the spiritual coaching training space is largely unregulated, some respected certification programs accredited by organizations like the International Coach Federation (ICF) offer training in necessary skills like the tutoring methodology, spiritual advancement techniques, and fair practices.

Becoming a spiritual coach involves lifelong learning

 

Most reputed spiritual coaches also study various spiritual practices like meditation and dream interpretation extensively on their own and with the help of their spiritual mentors. Developing core spiritual competencies in aspects like mindful compassion, active listening, radical acceptance, and cultivating safe spaces is helpful as well.

 

Above all, effective spiritual coaching training involves lifelong learning – the best spiritual coaches continue to expand their study and skills through workshops, events, mentorships, and in their personal spiritual practices.

 

Takeaway: Spiritual Coaching

In a world driven by achievements and competition, spiritual coaching can guide you toward finding what matters most – living with purpose as your most authentic self, in alignment with your deepest values and goals. 

 

In essence, spiritual coaching shows us that there’s more to us than our to-do lists, professional achievements and materialistic pursuits – it’s about finding a purpose greater than ourselves and leading a meaningful life. ●
Images: insta_photo, KieferPix, Lopolo

Written by Sonia Vadlamani

Fitness and healthy food blogger, food photographer and stylist, travel-addict and future-self journaler. Sonia loves to write and has resolved to dedicate her life to revealing how easy and important it is to be happier, stronger and fitter each day. Follow her daily pursuits at FitFoodieDiary or on Instagram.