(to be published soon in The Health Journal)
I openly yet nervously booked my first session with Cory Haas, a San Francisco based intuitive life coach. Between the day that I booked and our first session together, I had already experienced an internal shift in self-worth that gave me the courage to walk away from a toxic workplace. At our first session, I told Cory that I had already experienced a career shift in that interval. She replied, “the work begins once you set up an appointment and stick to it. Then you just have to show up.”
After mentioning to a friend that therapy wasn’t working for me anymore, she suggested that I see an intuitive. She was working with an incredible healer and gave me a referral. I immediately imagined us sitting around crystals with tarot cards and fluffy language. Don’t get me wrong, I love energy healing. It makes me feel amazing in the moment but I hadn’t had any lasting effects from energy healing before.
How An Intuitive Session Works
I went to my first session with the intuitive and there were indeed crystals (into it) and tarot cards (also into it). Her approach was anything but fluffy. It was courageous and hit me right in my core. I was in the best kind of awe possible during my entire first session with Cory. This work was unlike any other sort of healing work I had done. I grew more in my first intuitive coaching session than I had in seven years of therapy and several visits to various energy healers.
Unlike a therapist, an intuitive coach helps you clear your energy so you can reorganize who you are. Then, they help you reactivate so you can create meaningfully in the world. Cory mentioned, “Most coaches would agree that they are doing exactly that (clearing, reorganizing, and guiding others into creating). My work is about offering others time to witness themselves in present moments. I am able to heal more quickly and at a deeper level because I tap into the energy of my clients. I also want to get my clients to a place where they can rely on their own knowing.”
Before our first session, Cory had me answer a series of written questions like “what are your strengths” and “what do you hope coaching will bring to your life?” Cory began the session diving right in to describe a visual image of where my energetic blockage was within my body. It was an incredibly detailed and specific image. It resonated very deeply for me. I immediately trusted her.
I asked Cory about how she describes these visuals to clients and she said, “I use the chakra system as a bridge or a diagram. It’s my first go-to to describe energy. It invites clients to see themselves as light and as energy. It’s a way of opening them up to this level of awareness about themselves.”
Cory didn’t try to explain to me the reason I had this blockage and didn’t want me to either. I started to try to go into therapy talk about past patterns. She wasn’t having it. She’d say, “what do you want to happen? Let’s hold space for that.” It was obvious to me that our work together wasn’t going to be about processing the past, but reclaiming myself now.
I’ve been working with Cory once a month for one year. Everything in my life has changed. I reinvested in my relationship with my family in a major way, got married, moved across the country to New York, changed my career, began living with healthy, balanced habits, and am overall feeling much more aligned with my purpose. And let me assure you – she did not outright tell me to do any of this. What happened was I began to see myself differently. I began to see myself unstuck. I had cleared out the rocks holding me down. I began to operate from a deeper part of myself.
An Intuitive Coach is A Hybrid Between Energy Healer and Life Coach
An intuitive life coach is a niche within the life coach industry. Cory describes the field as a new hybrid between energy healers and traditional life coaches. “In a sense, the intuitive coach isn’t ‘out there.’ The intuitive coach is actually helping people access these deeper ranges of their soul.” She mentioned that seeing an energy healer is great for people at certain times because it opens them up. “At different times in our lives, we are drawn to different types of healing and to different people.”
According to an International Coach Federation report, there were about 17,500 life coach practitioners in North America in 2015. IBISWorld projects a 3.6% annual growth rate in the Life Coaches industry over the next 10 years. There’s no report yet on how many of those coaches are intuitive life coaches.
Cory started her business as a life coach. She then began incorporating intuitive processes into her coaching after a few profound experiences of going out on a limb for clients to describe these images that she saw to them. She describes her intuition as a conscious channel. “It really has to do with listening very deeply. This listening allows me to tap into an energetic world for people.”
I asked Cory if she identifies primarily as an intuitive coach. She said, “one of the most profoundly amazing qualities of the work I do is that it is steeped in mystery. That is why I love it! It can’t be explained entirely and even when it can be, the work goes above and beyond anything I’ve ever known. The idea of magic, mystery, and all those things that keep us wanting more are why I gave up trying to explain what I do.”
Needless to say, the process of working with Cory has been incredibly transformative. I’ve referred 4 friends to her and was curious if she had said similar things to them. She had not. They’ve all had equally profound and personal experiences. Unlike traditional therapy, her work is anything but scripted.
The Buffet of Healing Modalities For You To Choose From
When I started to dabble in healing, I sought out traditional methods like therapy, prescription drugs, and if I was feeling adventurous, massage. But, especially if they're not working, if they're not transformative to the degree you’d like, why be limited to going about your personal healing via traditional approaches?
Mastin Kipp, who mark my words is the next Tony Robbins, is putting out a new approach to dealing with trauma called "trauma hacking." Mastin describes trauma hacking as “a system based approach to realize there’s no one way for someone to get better.”
Essentially, there is a buffet of modalities for your healing and you are in charge of deciding how you want to go about it. He says, “you are the CEO of your own health. There’s no one way to get better. A diagnosis is not necessarily life-long. You can change your physiology, you can change your emotional state. The mindset is: I am in charge of that and I’m gonna be the one who’s running that.”
Healing is so much more than a process. It’s a daily, dare I say every moment of your life, practice. And like all other practices, it ebbs and flows with your development, your current interests, and your needs. So why not break the rules with it? Why not try something out of your wheelhouse? It just may be your new thing.
