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The Experience of Coaching
How We Work. What we do
A Buddhist Approach to Coaching
User's Manual for the Mind
A Short History of Change
Full potential living. Embody your Power
Values Alignment for Individuals, Couples, and Families
Breakthrough Package
Coaching by Phone
Caitríona Reed
Michele Benzamin-Miki
Free Seminars
What People Say
Mushim Ikeda-Nash
Alessandra Gherardi
Michele Benazamin-Miki
and Caitriona Reed
Spectacular achievement is always preceded by spectacular preparation
Coaching is partnership, mentoring, collaboration, clarifying your core values.
Coaching with 5 Changes will transform habits and practices of a lifetime.
We understand that with a few key changes in behavior and attitude you can be happier,
more effective, and live with greater integrity.
The best time for you to achieve excellence is NOW. Because of who YOU are, and because of who WE are,
coaching with us is intrinsically a spiritual practice;
AND because we are skilled at helping you change limiting behaviors and attitudes,
coaching with us will bring you tangible, guaranteed Results.
Coaching for Excellence and Success
It is rash to imagine that we can attain our peak without the aid of wise counsel. Professional athletes have coaches, great spiritual teachers have mentors,
organizations have consultants. Why would you imagine that you deserve less, or could achieve your best with less?
Caitríona Reed and Michele Benzamin-Miki have more than twenty-five years experience as facilitators of deep personal change. They have extensive training in Buddhism, Clinic Hypnotherapy, Coaching and Consulting, Deep Ecology, and the Martial Arts. As artists they also value creativity, authenticity, and personal integrity as essential elements which they bring to their work with clients.
They always work with the understanding that there is no essential difference between what we imagine to be 'spiritual' or 'personal', and how we perform in the world. They are committed to helping you define your priorities, clarify you goals, be truly accountable, and fulfill your vision. They are also committed to honoring your phenomenal human creative capacity—in the unique form that it takes within YOU. They will help you align yourself with your highest positive values—intrinsic to your well being and the well being of those around you; and now—more clearly than ever before, to the collective well-being of the planet.
If a thing is humanly possible, consider it within your reach---- Marcus Aurelius
M.C. Esher
Usually we will work with you for a minimum of eight hours, by phone or in person, or with a combination of both. Usually the eight hours are spread out over a three month period, to give you time to practice and assimilate the tools and lessons we give you. We also provide what we call a Breathrough Session, in which we concentrate between 8 and 14 hours of work into a two or three day period. We will design the frequency and number of sessions to give you maximum benefit, and can decide together what will work best for you. This work is to designed to provide you tools that will change the way you approach you career, your relationships, and your life.
Please contact us us to schedule a meeting by phone to discuss what will work best.
manzanita@fivechanges.org
760-782-9223
We are excited to work with you. There are few pleasure greater than that of watching clients opening to richer possibilities and transforming their life through new ideas, new strategies, new attitudes, and above all, by learning to work with their own strengths to permanently cut through the old habits that have held them back—sometimes for years. The capacity each of us has to change and to renew ourselves is truly amazing.
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Our priority is to help you bring your natural abilities, your values, and goals into alignment. When they are in harmony you are in harmony. Huge resources of energy then become available to you. You are then free to utilize your natural skills, and to truly claim your life as your own.
With the right skills, it is actually relatively easy to learn to free yourself from limiting attitudes and negative emotional states. Our work together begins by teaching you the specific skills you can use to do just this—so that you have tools to sustain ongoing and genuine renewal.
As coaches for excellence, we will then help you transform your career or profession, your finances and the attitudes that drive your relationship to money, as well as your personal and professional relationships. Most of all, we will help you refine and deepen the understanding you have of your own life-path, transforming perceived limitations into strengths, and allowing you to perform to your own epitome of excellence. Coaching with us is an investment for your long-term success and happiness; and will help you move rapidly and skillfully towards greater balance, well-being, confidence, and effectiveness.
We offer: short term interventions, utilizing hypnotherapy, neurolinguistics, and counseling. We also offer a Breakthrough Package (usually lasting a total of between eight and twelve hours and ideally concentrated within three or four days). In addition we offer ongoing coaching to help you maintain your peak effectiveness in all areas of your life.
We offer Coaching for Career, Relationships, and Life. We also work with couples, families, organizations, and corporations—often using similar tools that we use with individuals and applying them in appropriate ways in the bigger context. We are also available for coaching by phone. We use skills drawn from the new synthesis/discipline of Neurological Reprogramming (NLP with a kick), Hypnotherapy and Gestalt; and also from our practice of non-violent intervention, mediation, and council. We also offer training in Buddhist Mindfulness Practice. And if you wish to pursue your work with us we offer residential retreats and trainings at our retreat center in Southern California.
If you work with us, you will also be able to contact us in the future, whenever you need, for a complimentary sessions by phone on any of the issues we have dealt with in our work together. Usually, this requires little more than a reminder for you to use some of the tools you have already learned—though it is always a pleasure to re-connect with old friends!
Coaching for excellence is also coaching for balance,
for happiness, authenticity, and integrity
We are fortunate to have a detailed account of the life of Shakyamuni Buddha. It is the record of a life dedicated to eliciting the very best from others—men and women, lay people and monastics alike, without regard to their rank or social status. He was a master of creativity, varying his approach so that it was always accessible, and always eliciting from his listeners ever deeper understanding, and respect and love for others. Radically innovative for his time, he taught that personal and collective well being are mutually interdependent, and that we cannot truly work to improve ourselves without benefiting others.
Underlying his approach was the recognition that all things are subject to change, that everything arises out of a multitude of circumstances, including how you construct your own core identity. He taught that when you transform the limiting conditions of your own thinking ultimate happiness, effectiveness, and freedom are available for yourself, and through you, for others.
Everything is interconnected, and so everything you do matters
It has been said that the human mind, brilliant as it is, is not always user friendly. We will provide you with the tools you need to create your own user's guide, and the means to maintain the full potential of your imagination, your intelligence, your heart; as well as refining your ability to develop your professional skills, maximize your physical health and well-being, and deepen your communication skills and ability to sustain genuine and lasting relationships.
M.C. Esher
THE QUESTION: Gregory Bateson gives the example of a blind person walking with a cane, learning by sound and touch the shape of the streets along which they walk .
He asks the question, "Where is mind for this person?"
"Is it in the brain? Is it in the ear, or the hand that holds the cane, or the arm that moves it? Is it in foot that is placed on the ground with each step? The body as a whole? Or does it extend to the tip of the cane that taps the pavement, to the walls that echo the sound of the tapping cane? To the passer-by who hears and sees and offers a word or a helping hand?"
How do we define, how do we imagine, the boundary of the mind?
Any generalization we make about the mind is inadequate and incomplete. There is no one single model that encompasses the entirety of our experience and capability. Most models of the mind—psychological, biological, behavioral, political, religious—are intrinsically limited. Theorists are likely to have a vested interest in their own point of view, their own interpretations, and their own methodologies.
While the traditional model of psychiatry and psychoanalysis is strictly personalistic and biographical, modern consciousness research . . shows the human psyche as being essentially commensurate with the whole universe and all of creation. --- Stan Grof
While working as your coach, we begin by assuming an intrinsically limitless potential. We treat the mind and the imagination as a microcosm of a much larger whole. When we work together, it is not important HOW we understand 'the mind'. What is important is that you use the tools we provide to effect change that will empower you towards your full potential. Our approach is above all PRACTICAL. We will teach you unique skills for your own particular use. As you refine them, they will become part of your own user's manual—for your mind and for your life.
A Short History of Change
Over the past hundred and fifty years Western culture has completely transformed how it thinks about learning and change. This transformation has been so profound and all-pervasive that it is hard to imagine a time when these things did not form the backdrop to our collective thinking and culture, even though the changes are actually relatively new. Among the many changes, there are three important currents:
The First is the introduction of non-Western, especially Asian, religious practice to the west, in successive and continuing waves—Theosophists and Swamis, Zen Masters and returning western neophytes, Lamas and Tibetan healers. In addition is an interest in indigenous, shamanic and earth-based practices from all parts of the world. Modern Western culture hungered, and still hungers, for renewal from outside.
The Second is the development of psychoanalysis, social studies, anthropology, depth psychology, a recognition of the power of myth and dreams, and the discovery/invention/reinvention of the unconscious.
The Third is General Semantics, emerging out of the work of Alfred Korzybski in the 1930s, and paving the way for transformational work of all kinds, from Gestalt therapy to EST, as well as the discipline of Ecology, Neurolinguistic Programming and a multitude of ways by which we continue to reframe and understanding our place in the world, and methodologies for realizing it.
We acknowledge all three of these strands as essential elements of our work, they are ancestor roots to the tree of our understanding and practice. We recognize that life and culture in the west, from the late nineteenth century until now, is inconceivable without these elements. All the more reason then, to acknowledge them as having a particular chronology and development pertinent to any change work you do with us.
Alfred Korzybski
One day, Alfred Korzybski was giving a lecture to a group of students. He suddenly interrupted the lesson in order to retrieve a packet of biscuits, wrapped in white paper, from his briefcase. He muttered that he just had to eat something, and he asked the students on the seats in the front row, if they would also like a biscuit. A few students took a biscuit.
"Nice biscuit, don't you think", said Korzybski, while he took a second one. The students were chewing vigorously.
Then he tore the white paper from the biscuits, in order to reveal the original packaging. On it was a big picture of a dog's head and the words "Dog Cookies". The students looked at the package, and were shocked. Two of them wanted to throw up, put their hands in front of their mouths, and ran out of the lecture hall to the toilet.
"You see, ladies and gentlemen", Korzybski remarked, "I have just demonstrated that people don't just eat food, but also words, and that the taste of the former is often outdone by the taste of the latter."
Apparently his prank aimed to illustrate how some human suffering originates from the confusion or conflation of linguistic representations of reality and reality itself.
Alfred Korzybski
THE MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY—A STORY
"The map is not the territory" does not mean that there are no useful maps. There is a story of a platoon of Gurkhas, elite Nepalese troop, fighting with the Indian Army in the Second World War. They were trapped in a remote part of uncharted mountainous forest behind enemy lines. Months went by and they were given up for lost. When they eventually showed up, hundreds of miles away, at their base, their commanding officers asked them how they had escaped.
"We had a map, sir."
"But there are no maps."
Oh yes, we had a map."
They showed the officers a map of the London Underground. By using it, they had found a way to cross the dangerous mountains and endless forests, and to return home to safety.
In his book The Man Who Planted Trees, John Giono tells the story of Elzéard Bouffier, who devoted his entire life to reforesting a desolate portion of south-western France. He single-handedly planted 100 acorns each day before, during, and after two World Wars, and transformed a sorrowful place into one full of life and joy. Jean Giono's words offer a tribute to how much good one person can accomplish in a lifetime and advise on how to live life with deep meaning.
Everything you want is on the other side of fear
We owe it not only to ourselves—but to everyone in our life, and ultimately to the world, to the universe—to come to the fullness of our well-being, and to the realization of our full potential,
If you keep doing what you have always done
You will keep getting what you've always got
Values can be understood as a set of internal filters that determine our model of the world, and thus our experience. We accumulate them over a lifetime of learning and modeling. We may have different sets of values for different areas of our life, and our values also naturally change with time.
M.C. Esher
Sometimes our values may be in conflict with each other. For example we may value our personal freedom, while also valuing the intimacy of a long-term relationship; or we may value job security while also valuing the autonomy of being an independent contractor. We may also experience conflicts within a single value, for example we may imagine we value money and prosperity, when our motivation is really coming from our fear of poverty.
When our values are out of alignment we experience internal conflict, stress, and failure. But when our values are in alignment huge resources of energy become available to us, allowing us to sustain awareness, maintain consistency in what we do through continuity of focus, and ultimately to fulfill our goals. More importantly when our internal values are in alignment we experience a pervasive sense of well-being, clarity, and joy.
Understanding values systems is also essential in helping us to communicate with family, friends, and co-workers. Just learning to communicate within others' values system can improve our effectiveness many times over. Values alignment for individuals, couples, organizations, and teams, are a central element of our work, and a key ingredient of any work for personal and organizational transformation.
Our Breakthrough Package is an intensive coaching and training session which lasts from between eight and thirteen hours, ideally concentrated into between three and six days. The Breakthrough Package is available at our Westwood office in Los Angeles, or at Manzanita Village.
• Your Breakthrough Package is your investment in YOU. It is designed to totally restructure your behaviors, attitudes, and habits.
• It will help you bring your values into alignment, and give you the means to permanently eliminate internal values-conflicts in the future, thus freeing up huge resources of energy, focus, and clarity—reflective of your true potential.
• It will remove limiting emotional patterns and replace them with a new emotional palette. It also will help you resolve and eliminate decisions that you may have made unconsciously years before.
• Decisions that have held you back will no longer be able to do so. It will give you the means to set appropriate goals for your life, using precise cutting-edge mind-skills technologies.
• What you learn in your Breakthrough Package will be something that will give you value for the rest of your life.
• We will, of course, provide you with the tools to maintain your new learnings.
Call 800-619-8416 to speak to
Caitríona Reed or Michele Benzamin-Miki
about your Breakthrough Package
We are available for coaching by phone. Please contact us for details. If you live in, or visit, Southern California it is also possible to mix in-person and phone sessions.
Phone session are in many ways similar to in-person sessions. Please call us for information, cost, or to discuss if this will work for you.
Typically we would have phone sessions between one and three times a month. Sessions last from between thirty minutes to an hour, depending on your needs and your budget.
. . . the best way out is always through . . . Robert Frost
Caitríona Reed is trained in Hypnotherapy, Neurological Repatterning and NLP. She is a Performance Consultant and Master Results Coach, and was certified as an NLP Trainer by Christopher Howard. She has been in practice as a clinical hypnotherapist since 1985. She trained with Gil Boyne in Hypnotherapy, Gestalt, and Dream Work, and subsequently studied with such luminaries as Ormond McGill, Don Motin and David Quigley.
She was first exposed to Buddhist practice in 1970. She began teaching in the Theravada/Vipassana tradition in 1982, and later in the Tien/Zen tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh who formally empowered her as a Zen Teacher in 1992. She has led retreats and workshops in Buddhism, Meditation and Zen, Deep-Ecology, Socially Engaged Spiritual Practice, and Hypnosis in the U.S. and Europe.
Caitríona integrates her work as a coach with perspectives derived from Buddhist Practice, Transpersonal Psychology, Hypnosis,and Dream Work along with her own infectious sense of humor and her natural sensibilities as a poet.
For examples of her writingIn addition, Caitríona is a 'woman of transsexual experience', who lived the first part of her life as a man. Thus she has a unique perspective on identity, relationships, life-transitions, and the issues that emerge from our basic instinct towards integrity, honesty, and living life at one hundred percent. For more biographical information
Michele Benzamin-Miki trained in Clinical Hypnotherapy, Gestalt and Dream Work with Gil Boyne. She has practiced as a Hypnotherapist, Counselor and Personal Coach since 1987. More recently she has added Neurological Repatterning and NLP to her repertoire of skills.
She has three Fifth Degree black belts in Aikido and Iaido in the style of Shoji Nishio Sensei. She has taught Iaido and Aikido since 1984. As a Martial Artist with a deep sensibility towards proactive non-violence she has worked extensively with at-risk youth, and young people in the juvenile Justice System. She has also consulted with the Dalai Lama on issues of prison Dharma.
Michele has trained as a Buddhist teacher and began teaching Vipassana in 1985, and subsequently Zen in the tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh in 1989. She has let Aikido and Meditation retreats and workshops in the US and Europe since 1985.
She is also an Artist who has exhibited widely. Work from her most recent show can be seen at:"Much of the focus of my work with clients is related releasing limiting patterns and fears. Old traumas, frozen in the psyche, emerge as inappropriate behavior and inexplicable anxiety, stress, a sense of powerlessness, and feeling overwhelmed. To understand the cause of our fear may be comforting, but to transform it at its roots transforms our entire life. I feel that this is at the heart of all healing".
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