Life Coach – Therapy – ICT

What are the differences and how to know which one to use

What if there is an interesting technique that could be a shortcut to spiritual awakening?  What if healing were easier than you’ve been led to believe?

In over 30 years of spiritual counseling and healing, I’ve found that there are differences in the way that practitioners will approach their work and of course much of that is due to their own inner guidance and life path as well. Please recognize that if you are drawn to any form of healing work that it’s also being driven and guided by your own spiritual nature to find the person who may be the best fit for your particular karma and mission in this lifetime.

I’ve created this article to describe the similarities and the differences between life coaching, therapy, and ICT or Integrative Chakra Therapy®.  Although there are many similarities that are devoted to optimizing a person’s life path there can be qualitative differences in the depth by which a person is affected by the power of the particular form of the work and the level of spiritual advancement of the practitioner themselves.

In any of these three forms of counseling and healing work the spiritual advancement of the practitioner is absolutely paramount because it helps to define the level at which the work can be most powerful.  That is, has the practitioner qualitatively shifted to a higher consciousness through their own spiritual journey.  A qualitative shift in consciousness due to spiritual practices is difficult to describe yet is very real.  A higher spiritually awakened practitioner sees things more as they are, not as they appear to be and thus allows them to see deeply into their client’s true needs.  This gives them much more insight to the depth and breadth of the person they are working with.  And when seeking such healing it’s important for you to use your intuition to tune in to the type of healing and counseling that resonates with you most.

What matters is your goal for engaging a practitioner. Does what the practitioner offers match what you are seeking, and on what level (monetary, intellectual, insightful, spiritual)?

Life Coach

Here we’re looking at life coaching; what it is, what it represents and what can you gain from it. As you can well imagine there are a multitude of people who offer their services as a life coach and their acumen can range from simply helping you to organize your life physically or to a more holistic approach (mind-body-spirit). 

A life coach is someone who can help you identify strengths and weaknesses and overcome obstacles holding you back. According to certified coach Jane Scudder, “Life coaching focuses on what’s happening right now what a person wants next and how that gap can be bridged.”  Life coaching is about helping you to identify the obstacles that keep getting in your way helping to find motivation and pinpointing resistance to change.  Life coaches do help you to connect to your inner wisdom and make choices and actions from that inner wisdom.

Typically, you would offer what you feel you were looking for in terms of your life goals whether that be helping to guide you to maximize you were given skill sets and desires or to set out a plan to optimize your life path. Some life coaches endeavor to use their intuitive faculties to tune in to you to help guide you towards the realization of these life goals. I suppose that to some extent that includes self-empowerment but I’m not quite sure that it’s means spiritual empowerment.

In life coaching there typically is no spiritual healing work but more a type of a guidance that helps you pull together the several aspects of your life into a more cohesive, more coherent form which would also help you to let go of some of the habits that may be holding you back in a negative way.  Even to the extent of creating and executing step by step plan in order to help you achieve your stated goals.

Most people are only vaguely aware of the spiritual aspects of their own lives and that is not a bad thing, but it also means that a true spiritual awareness is something that everyone is seeking at the deepest level of their being, whether they are physically aware of it or not.  In other words, most people are inured in the five-sense perception physical world (dualistic, separationist), but everyone is a spiritual being first and thus always seeking, on some level, a higher order of understanding of the non-separation (non-dual) reality where we are all connected in a continuous process.  I believe a person is led by their higher self to the circumstances, events and people who will help them to unfold like a beautiful flower, their true spiritual nature.

A life coach will help you to establish a method and a plan to help you to reach your goals and that may even include some forms of exercises or tally sheets that help you to fully understand where you are spending your time and energy.  I would add that a life coach helps you too maintain your focus on your stated goals and to avoid unnecessary distractions.

A life coach will not give you a diagnosis; a licensed therapist can and is a trained professional who has been vetted by a board and can diagnose disorders, can work with traumas and work with short term behavioral modifications.

Life coaches typically do not do any kind of healing work. A life coach won’t address clinical issues; they would know boundaries of their coaching and would refer you to a therapist or ICT.

Possible outcomes or results are a better-ordered life and lifestyle and focus and achievement of important goals.

Therapy 

Generally, the point of therapy is to improve your mental health.  Most therapies aim to give the client insight into their thoughts, feelings, motivations and desires, thus creating improvement in functioning in the world.

The idea of seeing a therapist is of course once again related to your stated goals; the therapist would be working to give you insights into your belief systems, patterns of early trauma, and limiting habits that prevents you from letting go of what is causing you suffering or preventing you from reaching your goals.

A life coach looks at your present to help you create the future you desire while the therapist looks at your past to help you manage your present and in doing so helps you to achieve deep insights. According to Tess Brigham, a licensed psychotherapist, “While coaching is action-oriented, therapy is insight oriented.”

Life coaching sessions are very directive; goals are established homework is assigned it is very action oriented.

In therapy sessions the clients can decide which direction they would like to go in and it’s more open-ended in the session it’s usually determined by how the person is feeling in that moment and insights gained.

Again, I don’t know that therapy in and of itself would necessarily include psychic intuition to draw forth deeper insights into your life and it could be that it does access deeper spiritual parts of you that can have a positive effect on the mind-body-spirit.

Possible outcomes are much better mental state is improved, less reactive and more oriented towards reality, emotional stability and resolution of early traumas.

ICT (Integrative Chakra Therapy®)

I created ICT, or Integrative Chakra Therapy®, well over 20 years ago as a means of accessing the four archetypes of the whole human being-mental, physical, spiritual, and emotional-through the chakra system.  ICT is a form of energy medicine, based on the chakra system and the biofield.  I developed an entire theory on dominant chakras-that one chakra has more impact on one’s psychic perspectives on life than the non-dominant chakras, although all chakras are open and functioning seamlessly.

In ICT the practitioner does not necessarily require the person to make any stated goals, rather the practitioner makes an assessment of the condition of the chakra system that controls those four archetypes. Once the assessment is made intuitively the practitioner then becomes a conduit of healing that flows through them as an instrument in order to help that person heal any or all of the four archetypes that are ready to be addressed. And this includes limiting belief systems, traumas, physical ailments, spiritual growth and especially self-empowerment spiritually.

ICT is a bit of a different animal because it focuses mostly on the chakra system at the level of the soul (the level of the soul is also the astral dimension, the next higher dimension from the physical dimension). Like life coaching and therapy, ICT seeks to help self-empower the individual, but also to awaken their inner power.

Life coaches and therapists can be trained in a holistic manner to use their intuitive faculties to help assess the needs of their client more clearly. Whereas with a life coach you may state your goals, with the therapist you may discuss behavioral problems and traumas, it is similar with ICT, but the premise of ICT is at working at the level of the soul there is a certain state of spiritual awareness that becomes center stage. Thus, the ICT practitioner is trained to intuitively assess the chakra system not just as it relates to the physical body but also as it relates to the mental, emotional, and spiritual archetypes (the whole human being).

ICT is a two-step process: in the first part the practitioner makes an intuitive assessment of the client based on chakra disposition whether they are strong weak excess deficient and so on. Within that assessment are the four archetypes: metaphysical spiritual and emotional. After the assessment the ICT practitioner then allows Source energy to flow through them so that it works at the level of the chakras which are not limited to time or space but also on the physical aspect of the client.  Assessments can include information from past lives and karmic relationships, even future events.

The second step is when the healing work is finished the practitioner then relates to the client what the healing was that passed through them and what the client can do to help strengthen themselves whether it be physically mentally spiritually emotionally and so on.

The ICT practitioner then becomes a conduit of healing work flowing through them but not from them so in this case you can call it spiritual healing and I like to use the word God for the nondual, nonpersonal healing energy that is flowing through the ICT practitioner. As well, the spiritual development of the ICT practitioner is paramount, and this is why they must study for at least 2 1/2 years because the manner in which the practitioner assesses the person, and their chakra dispositions means there is also a flow on a much higher level that is happening. Doctor Hiroshi Motoyama, one of my main mentors, calls it “Being as ‘topos’”, or when you achieve a certain state of awareness, you now represent that awareness.  The more awakened you are, the more you see the true soul level of every person you work with.

The ICT practitioner, by the very nature of making assessments of the client’s chakras (employs their own chakras), helps to awaken the healer themselves at the astral dimension (or higher) to see the true character of the client as they are in this lifetime, not as they appear to be. The phenomenon is called representation through relationship where the client takes a psychic relationship to the ICT practitioner and benefits from the level of spiritual awareness that the practitioner has attained.  This is very powerful because when working at the soul (astral level) the client can make major shifts in their own spiritual awareness as well as addressing healing that is ready to occur in any or all of those four archetypes. That is what makes ICT so very powerful.

Interestingly, giving the person a verbal assessment then moves that healing work into a daily practice that the client can use whether they are being given some form of breathing exercises or meditation exercises or some counseling to apply the benefit of the healing work that flowed through the practitioner as a facilitator of healing. In this case ICT practitioners don’t do any healing they only facilitate a perfect divine blueprint within the client, so basically the client is healing themselves.  What makes this so powerful is that 95% of all communication is not verbal or physical it’s energy. So even when the practitioner is offering their verbal assessment the client is still taking the psychic relationship to what the practitioner represents, working on the level of the chakras and the biofield.

A major difference between the three is that ICT always involves healing work on the four archetypes through this facilitation as a conduit of healing at the soul level, and helping the person become more spiritually aware. Again, it’s important to remember that the basis of ICT is to help the client spiritually awaken without any regard to their religious background or belief system it’s simply to help them 2 awakened to higher levels of conscious awareness.  ICT is very powerful, as integration of the healing effects can go on for months and years.

Case History:  There are many examples of the efficacy of ICT from healing of physical issues to a much deeper understanding of how a person relates to their environment and to others. To that effect there are many testimonials for people who have achieved great shifts in their lives. One such shift was the person I was working with who had been diagnosed with stage four throat cancer, and in two months they had completely given up their cancer.  This included an assessment of which chakras were causing their perception of reality to create the conditions for the cancer could occur. Meaning in ICT not only does the practitioner facilitate source energy flowing through them, but they must also offer a verbal assessment even though they cannot prescribe or diagnose, of what tools that person can use to reinforce and reconstitute all of the healing energies of their session with the practitioner.  Because the practitioner works on the level of the chakras and the biofield, the verbal assessment will include an understanding of chakras as conduits of consciousness, thus enabling the person to become more aware of non-duality and the power they already have within them.

Possible outcomes are dramatic shifts in physical health and healing of infirmities, deeper insights into their own soul and mission in this lifetime, spiritual awakening to higher orders of consciousness, and divesting or dissolving of karmic patterns.

All three modalities have their benefits. And you should choose carefully and intuitively before you engage in any form of self-help.  All three modalities can also be done in person or at a distance, depending on the practitioner.

Richard Jelusich, Ph.D.