Poets as Coaches

This coaching business is nothing new. Helping people shift their perspectives, question their assumptions, follow their hearts—poets have been doing this for millennia.

In fact, metaphor, one of the tools that coaches find most useful in moving clients forward, is borrowed straight from the poet’s pen. There is magic in the way that metaphorical imagery can draw us out of our heads into a full body awareness of our challenges and dreams.

So, on those rare occasions when your coach isn’t available, you might consider consulting a poet who can guide you to new ways of sensing and thinking. And of course, continuing with the celebration of National Poetry Month, I have a recommendation for you.

The poets represented in Eating Her Wedding Dress, A Collection of Clothing Poems, from Ragged Sky Press, deliver joyful and poignant insights about what it means to be human as revealed through what we wear and what wears on us: How do we present ourselves? How do we connect with each other? How do we change?

How, for example, do we inhabit the experience of being laid off? You might read a thousand news reports and human interest stories about the effect of the recession on individual lives, and still something surprising clicks when a poet reflects on it:

My First Pink Slip
by Mary Langer Thompson

Not a lacy half or whole
silk of lingerie, but
a sheer missive
delivered today, needing
my unfashionable signature
saying I received it, not
that I agree not to cling
to a position gone.

The smooth Board decided
in private session,
secret even to Victoria,
taking action pursuant
to code section 44951
to unclasp me.

Four a.m. I awake
under a rusty moon
in a cold-hot sweat,
neglected in my negligee
drenched in worry.
I’ve finally been noticed.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Poets, like coaches, help you do the noticing. What are you noticing now?

Shadow Boxing

Can you escape your shadow?

Probably not. It might be nice to think all those doubts and fears that we confound ourselves with could someday be retired for good. But most evidence and opinion suggests that those self-defeating voices are inseparable from our essential selves. We are no more likely to escape them completely than we are to wake up one morning as someone else.

Carl Jung formulated that our negative impulses are rooted in a universal, archetypal aspect of the human psyche: “Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions.”

What does it mean to embody our shadows in our conscious lives? I think one answer is simply to get to know them; to bring them into the light of day, name them, and hold them where they belong—subordinate to our aspirations.

Since April is National Poetry Month, I thought it would be fun to share Robert Louis Stevenson’s playful consideration of the shadow, published in 1885. You might wonder, “How can a poem written for children illuminate my adult tendency to sabotage myself?” The poem gains dimension when you remember that the author was also the creator of one of the most iconic representations of inner struggle with the shadow in English literature: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

My Shadow
by Robert Louis Stevenson

I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me,
And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.
He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head;
And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.

The funniest thing about him is the way he likes to grow—
Not at all like proper children, which is always very slow;
For he sometimes shoots up taller like an india-rubber ball,
And he sometimes gets so little that there’s none of him at all.

He hasn’t got a notion of how children ought to play,
And can only make a fool of me in every sort of way.
He stays so close beside me, he’s a coward you can see;
I’d think shame to stick to nursie as that shadow sticks to me!

One morning, very early, before the sun was up,
I rose and found the shining dew on every buttercup;
But my lazy little shadow, like an errant sleepy-head,
Had stayed at home behind me and was fast asleep in bed.

How well do you know your shadow? When do you find opportunities to leave it home in bed?