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Style & Approach

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Seeking Within

 

Connecting to your life purpose requires thoughtful examination of many aspects of self. As your coach, it is my job to help you navigate your way through many areas of inner exploration, including:

  • Meaningful childhood influences

  • Conditioning from past experiences

  • Cultivating interests, purpose, and passions

  • Nurturing talents and skills

  • Examining personality

  • Understanding synchronicities and accessing higher wisdom

  • Eliminating limiting beliefs

  • Choosing fulfilling self-narratives

  • Spiritual alignment & purpose

  • Internal relationships to privilege and power

Earth-Based Spirituality

 

My approach to coaching is grounded in love and reverence for the Earth as our teacher, mother, and holder of our ancestral stories. By extension, our relationship with our bodies, with the stars and planets, with the seasons and plants, with animals and people, are all critical elements of our wholeness as embodied spirits. I believe that our life purpose, deepest needs and desires, and highest potential exist in relationship to the sacred Earth. In our work together, we can explore these themes by engaging with spiritual systems and philosophies, communion with nature, ancestral work, ritual and meditation, dreams, divination, and our relationship with the stars and planets.

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Cultural Humility & Social Justice

 

To identify our authentic self and align with our deepest sense of purpose, we must first disentangle ourselves from harmful and oppressive narratives about race, culture, gender, sexuality, economic status, ability, and spirituality to which we have been exposed. As a coach who is passionate about cultural respect and social justice, I am committed to helping you see the self beyond the stories of systemic oppression. Appropriately honoring our identities and heritage is a pathway to balance, wholeness, self-empowerment, and true agency.  

My Cultural Principles

 

As a Filipina-American dedicated to the lifelong work of decolonization, I hold cultural values particular to both my pre-colonial Filipino ancestors and those of us in the diaspora who are committed to reclaiming our unique voice and heritage.

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Here are some of the native Filipino social, spiritual, and cultural perspectives I am arriving with in my coaching work:

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KAPWA ("KAHP-wah")

Kapwa is the principle of an intersubjective self, the communal self, the self which resides in the other. Filipino people channel the experiences of others with a unique depth of feeling. What is felt by you and held by you is also experienced in me, through empathic imagination and emotional attunement. 

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As a collectivist and inward-facing people, Filipinos understand that only a very small space separates self and other. We are quick to extend grace, assistance, inclusion, and compassion to others, especially those we feel kinship or responsibility toward. Though we often discuss kapwa in the context of people, I personally believe that the natural world and all its creatures are also an important part of kapwa, of our spiritual community.

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UTANG NA LOOB ("OO-tahg nah loo-OHB")

Utang na loob, which literally means "debt from within," is a Filipino principle of social indebtedness or reciprocity arising from a deeply held sense of gratitude. When others do us a kindness, there is an instinctive desire to return this favor and help those who help us. We exist in a world of constant and eternal reciprocity which we must always honor through generosity of spirit and kindness.​​​​

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This value can be, of course, a tricky double-edged principle. Sometimes we feel a kind of crushing indebtedness that we can never truly repay, which can quickly turn into guilt. How can we ever repay our parents, elders, and ancestors who sacrificed so much to give us better lives than they had? What act could ever equal the care we receive from a loved one who supported us through a vulnerable time? 

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However, at its core, utang na loob as I understand it is not about guilt or payment. It is about an omnipresent feeling of gratitude for the gifts we are given in this life and a sacred responsibility toward other. We have an indebtedness to our parents who gave us life, to this bountiful earth which sustains us daily, to our friends and loved ones who form our community. Always we approach these debts with humility and a giving spirit, even if they can never be repaid. 

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PAKIKISAMA ("pah-KIH-kih-sah-mah")

Pakikisama is the Filipino principle of togetherness and cooperation. Filipinos tend to prioritize the experience of the group over the individual. We are thoughtful about the experience of the whole and prefer to demonstrate relatability, friendliness, and agreeability. Pakikisama is one of the primary ways Filipinos bring harmony and solidarity to social interactions. It is our way of letting others feel belonging by matching energy through attunement and deferring to the needs of the group. 

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Of course like some of the other values discussed here, there are dark sides to pakikisama. Sometimes the pressure to be deferential and agreeable causes us to lose our connection to individual feelings and perspectives. We can slip easily into focusing on sameness rather than honoring what makes us different. This is why it's so important to remain mindful about our thoughts, emotions, bodily experience, and spiritual wellness. As we give to others, so we must also replenish and nurture ourselves. We must open ourselves to receiving love and understanding from loved ones, from the natural world, and from ancestral spirits. To live in balance, we must recognize when we need this medicine.

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BAHALA NA ("bah-HAH-lah nah")

Bahala na is a common Filipino expression which loosely translates to something like "whatever happens, happens." This sentiment is sometimes taken to be an optimistically fatalistic saying that means there is nothing we can do about a difficult situation and we accept our powerlessness about it. Some people take it to mean that there is no point in thinking about things we cannot change. But I believe the concept of bahala na comes from a deeper and more spiritual root than the passive acceptance with which we survived the trauma of colonization.

 

I believe that bahala na is reflective of what is called the "benevolent fatalism" of indigenous islander psychology. When we live on an island and the monsoon comes to sweep everything away, we must accept that nature is greater than ourselves; if we survive, we must work with whatever remains to rebuild and to continue forward supportively and compassionately. This attitude is not about non-engagement or powerlessness; it is about accepting the wisdom of Mother Earth and our divine destiny. This is an active, courageous, and wise approach to the cycle of life and death, love and loss. Behind the doors of grief is the sacred love that is the root of that pain. When we accept our smallness in the grand matrix of the universe, we come to learn and respect when it is time to act and when it is time to yield. Sometimes the tree that bends best survives the harshest storm, and to understand bahala na is to know when we must defer to the sacred Earth and to our cosmic destiny.

 

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