Is this coaching?

That’s a great question and one that is often asked. The short answer is no, even though the question has been near the creative process of making Metamorphosis Medicine. Let me explain why.

The best coaching can help us listen more deeply into ourselves to clarify our goals and strengths, analyze our current situation, and help us pick a path through our work and life that is a better fit with available options. Often, however, coaching sets its sights on goals that seem more achievable and theoretically more practical so it falls short of addressing inner and outer transformation. It focuses instead on ego competence and satisfaction. The problem is that, as physicians, we’re ultimately still adapting to (or working around if we choose to leave) a system of practice that has a fundamentally different operating system and core value from the deeply held, richly archetypal character of medicine and healers. We find ourselves acceding to a corporate healthcare agenda rather than helping define the practice of Medicine. That deep rumbling—the call—appeals to our intellectual appetite and the promise of financial security, is also, eventually, about spirit, connection, and finding and creating meaning. The work of doctoring is both a cultural phenomenon and a personal calling that founders when this quintessential, numinous dimension is eclipsed. It takes particular, ongoing preparations and practices to work at this level, and to build strength, confidence, and the capacity for it. We exist professionally in the moral equivalent of a food desert with regard to these things even though we summon them daily to help us care for others. We also learn to malign them as irrational and unscientific.

I came to understand that there is a Missing Curriculum in Medicine and to see the so-called Hidden Curriculum as what develops in the vacuum left by the missing education and wisdom transmission. In this desert, we too often interpret our difficulties as personal failures, which becomes a paralyzing act of self-betrayal. Of course, we have failings, but our ability to work with them, metabolize them, and even to use them to advance and inform our work of doctoring is constricted in the current practice milieu. Metamorphosis Medicine is about just that: Metamorphosis. Engagement. Change. Evolution. Courage. Heart. The soul of doctoring. Healing Presence.