Therapeutic mentoring
A whole-of-mind paradigm and action-based approach for support, guidance and change.
To live an engaged and reverent life is the means AND the ends. People too often believe they need to change in order to be better, when they really need to be better in order to change. I help them be better.
Features:
- A concierge offering. The most comprehensive, efficient and effective “program” that targets your obstacles and helps you clear them, with frequent access to Chuck to help along the way.
- A change process that befits your developmental stage and deepest values
- A personalized, integrative curriculum crafted for your needs, natural gifts and strengths (“natural utilization”).
- The Engage and Revere Model: An overarching philosophy and accountability guide.
The internal compass: The Engage with Reverence Model.
Part psychospiritual approach, part assessment and part action-based framework, it helps you move towards joy, peace and wisdom. Developed by Chuck Genre. Click below for more information.
Engagement
Movement and action defines engagement. It may be slow and mysterious and quite often, unconscious, or it may be quite obvious and clear, but engagement is defined by a moving towards something. Often, choosing to be open to experience is a form of moving towards. The goal may be clear, like spending more quality time with family or finding a job that is more aligned with your values. Or, engagement may be more uncertain, like beginning your day with an early morning meditation and letting its benefits ripple into your day, or recording your dreams for a period of time and wondering what they might reveal to you. Sometimes, sitting still–doing nothing–can be a powerful, if not uncertain, practice of engaging life.
So, engagement is always a process that can have a clear or unclear purpose. Simplified, engagement includes assertiveness, creative action and expansion. When you are engaging life, you’ll notice these three qualities.
And yes, sometimes LIFE will engage you! Will you engage it back?
Still, the question remains…engaging what? After all, there have been cruel dictators in the world who have been very active and engaging with their lives, their actions filled with creativity, assertion and expansion, but most of us know that their willfulness came from a selfish, violent place within. Engagement, alone, doesn’t enrich life. It needs reverence for joy and wisdom to blossom. We’ll get to that soon.
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The action of engagement is contrasted with the inaction of avoidance. Though one can see avoidance behaviors as a form of action, we’re not going to get tangled in that confusion. Avoidance opposes engagement in that it consists of resistance, distraction, passivity and, ultimately, contraction. Whereas engagement enlarges your world, avoidance shrinks it. Experientially, avoidance often appears when risk is involved. The risk of vulnerability…or of failing…or, most generally, the risk of encountering an undesired or feared feeling. For instance, someone might avoid going to a social gathering because they only know one person there, so they avoid it even though they know it could be good for them to lean into the risk. Perhaps they fear awkwardness, judgment, boredom, conflict or something else. Fear is usually the salient factor, however large and grizzly or light and breezy it might be.
Supercharging your life with the action of engagement is not enough. Your attitude and disposition are crucial for determining the quality of your life. A reverent disposition deepens appreciation for life. With a wink to the serenity prayer, reverence is further characterized by an acceptance of life on its terms, not yours. Reverence doesn’t free us from the inevitable pains of living, but it does enlarge our perspective. Our container for holding the pain expands, making it much easier for us to dis-identify with pain. The energy or spirit of reverence is abundant in giving and connecting. In states of reverence, the chattering, needy and self-focused ego quiets itself, allowing room for feelings of wonder and awe and humility. Reverence cannot be spoken of without speaking of love, for reverence is nothing if not a practice of love. For many, if not all of us, the way to be bothered less is to love at larger and grander scales. Lastly, reverence is as much a spontaneous experience as it is a practice.
Appetite is the flip side of reverence. Independent of your level of engagement with your life, appetite is characterized by craving/control, self-focus and dissatisfaction. Where reverence gives, appetite takes. Our chattering egos have big appetites! One can crave a desired emotional state like pleasure just as much as one craves narcotics. Picture graspy, needy fingers clutching in neediness or desire. So much of American consumer culture is (sadly) steeped in building massive appetites in us–then selling us remedies for our relentless appetites that only deepen our appetites for more, more, more.
So often, underneath the appetite drive is the hunger for treasure–some thing, some experience, some person that temporary relieves the discomfort of deeper pain. It feels good for a while: that achievement, that new toy, that approval, that belief. Then the luster fades and then what? Our treasures beckon us to chase after them-keeping us dependent upon them, distorting our internal compasses even if we know we are choosing to remain lost. The good news? I can help you find freedom from the pull of appetites.