MY RELATIONSHIP IS DEAD OR DYING, MY CAREER SUCKS AND MY BEAUTY IS FADING

Deep down you are miserable and you don’t know how to turn your life around. Your relationship is dead or dying because she or he does not understand you anymore; your career sucks because, let’s face it, you never really liked working in corporations; and you believe your body and your beauty is deteriorating. You are lonely, lost, tired and depressed; and you are worried that your life has no meaning. If this sounds like you then you are at the beginning of your SOUL’S JOURNEY, the beginning of the rest of your life with soul.

I CLIMBED THE LADDER, BUT I HATE IT

You have the accoutrements of success yet deep down you don’t feel successful. In fact, you feel down right unsuccessful. You can’t modulate your moods. You’re up, you’re down; and you don’t know why. You feel overwhelmed by global warming, right-wing politics and the religious fundamentalists. Deep down you long for peace and community. But most of all you want to be of service, to make a difference with your life.

DRUGS AND THERAPY ARE NOT HEALING

Your soul beckons through the cracks of your life. She knocks on the cage door of your body hoping to get your attention by sending psychosomatic symptoms, like anxiety and/or depression. Unfortunately, western medicine which includes conventional psychology treats these symptoms by blaming your biology and treating it with drugs. Your soul calls through these psychosomatic symptoms asking you to liberate her so she can participate in your life.

ANIMA COACHING™ teaches you to hear the voice of soul and see the symbols of healing she sends. Is your soul calling you? Will you Answer the call of soul?

When soul calls you have two choices: Answer the Call or Refuse the Call.

To Refuse the Call of soul is to stay caged in boredom settling for a wasteland of meaninglessness. Although seemingly safe from the unknown, you live out your life in an illusion of control all the while your unconscious plays self-destructive patterns until death comes. In the language of depth psychology to refuse the call of soul is to be bound in by the cage of childhood defensive patterns where images of father and mother stand as threshold gargoyles threatening some punishment if you separate and pass through the door onto the soul’s journey.

To Answer the Call means to cross the threshold and take The Soul’s Journey. It means learning to be guided by your soul via dreams, visions, artistic expressions and synchronicities to know yourself deeply and intimately.

ANIMA COACHING™ liberates people from their self-destructive patterns and teaches them to interpret the healing messages from their soul.

Are you ready to take THE JOURNEY to animate your soul for the rest of your life?

Everyone’s soul and journey is unique. Bren Hudson, founder of ANIMA COACHING™, has developed a unique approach to helping people reconnect with their souls and to dare to live their lives fully and meaningfully.

LISTEN TO YOUR SOUL

When soul learns you are interested in coaching from Anima Coaching™ for the journey of life, she will begin to send dreams and fantasies hoping you will be curious enough to take the step towards learning her language. Soul speaks symbolically and she sends the symbolic clues to healing your split between her and your ego. If you love mysteries you will never be bored with learning the mysteries of your own soul’s life.

ANIMA COACHING™ helps you understand and respond to the symbolic mysteries of your soul.

TURN YOUR CHILDHOOD DEFENSES INTO GIFTS

Most likely you are living your life in the past. Your life has been scripted by what has happened to you thus far. Your ego learned long ago in childhood what was safe and what was unsafe, developing strategies all along the way to avoid danger and maximize safety.

ANIMA COACHING™ helps you to identify the childhood strategies that are not serving you anymore, choosing strategies that are more appropriate for the demands of your adult life.

INTEGRATE YOUR SHADOW

Growing up in American society many parts of our selves have been denied expression and repressed into the unconscious. In depth psychology we call this the shadow. The shadow needs you as much as much as you need the shadow to live a full and meaningful life.

ANIMA COACHING™ helps you reconnect and integrate the lost parts of yourself.

BALANCE YOUR FEMININE AND MASCULINE ENGERGIES

Anima, the Latin word for our feminine soul, has been pushed into the depths of the unconscious while the masculine spirit (also known as ego) soars to unsustainable heights. Identification with the masculine (spirited ego) and denigration and denial of the feminine (soul) deeply embedded in religious doctrines perpetuates this unnatural split forging a dangerous one-sided obsession with perfectionism, rationality and good as godly and everything else as evil. These out of balance forces (good/evil, spirit/soul, masculine/feminine, rational/irrational etc.) not only threaten our survival but every living species on this Earth.

ANIMA COACHING™ helps you to excavate and integrate the feminine and masculine energies into a fully integrated being.

A FATHER’S DAUGHTER

My father was my hero. He exemplified all the qualities of the perfect man. He was handsome and nurturing, yet stern. He had an eye for beauty and order. He was an artist and an athlete; he was a musician and a sophisticated businessman. He was the ideal model for a child. There was one catch though; he was a 50’s man. Woman had their roles in the home serving their man; and men had their roles as heroes and providers for the family. I like so many women my age, choose to follow dad and reject mom. I didn’t really reject my mother I rejected her role and associated activities – cooking, cleaning, sewing and shopping, etc.

I was my father’s daughter, smart, nurturing and stern, athletic, musical, artistic and a sophisticated businesswoman. Again there was one catch, I identified with the masculine and rejected the feminine. In other words, I was confident and competent but I was separated from my body and my emotions. Maureen Murdock in Fathers’ Daughters: Breaking the Ties That Bind says, “Her identification with her father gives her a sense of self-confidence and competence in the world, but in her separation from her mother, she also receives a deep wound to the very core of her femaleness. Her relationship to her body, her creativity, her spirituality, and her ability to engage in intimate relationships are all impaired. Most women avoid dealing with issues about their fathers until they are confronted by their own relationship or career problems…”.

For the first fifteen years of my career I was doubling my income every three or four years, rising through the ranks and enjoying an epicurean lifestyle just like my father. In 1995 I joined Ernst & Young Consulting to pursue a career in business management consulting and to pursue a Master of Science in Information and Telecommunication Systems from Johns Hopkins University. At Ernst & Young Consulting I became an expert in business process improvement, information system design & implementation, organizational development & training, and leadership development & coaching services. It was here I realized my love and gift for coaching.

LEARNING TO BE A COACH

In 1996 I hired Teri-E Belf, founder of Success Unlimited Network, as a personal life coach. Although I was very successful I felt something was missing. Teri-E helped put my life in perspective. She opened me up to spirituality as something distinct and different from my childhood religion. In fact, Teri-E Belf featured my story in her latest book, Coaching with Spirit. She taught me how to be a personal life coach with a focus on life planning. In addition, she taught me the ethics of coaching which she helped design for the International Coaching Federation, the coaching credentialing board. I used these skills during my career at Ernst & Young Consulting.

As Senior Manager (one rank below partner) at Ernst & Young Consulting where I was responsible for career development for over two dozen individuals I realized I had a real knack for finding the potentials in people and providing opportunities for them to shine. Where most of my Senior Manager peers were stealing the limelight for themselves hoping to make partner, I was in the back room with my consultants coaching them towards excellence. I loved watching these young consultants rise to their highest potentials giving them opportunities well above their level while my male peers often squashed their potentials with meaningless tasks. As a result most of my consultants reached the level of manager often a year or more before their peers.

HITTING THE GLASS CEILING

But in 1999 this approach would cost me dearly. I hit the glass ceiling. Coming back from Australia and New Zealand from a long needed month vacation I found myself pushed aside so a male new hire from Boston could make partner. They gave my account and the consultants I worked hard to train and nurture to this male partner-to-be. I was devastated. For the first time in my career I was treated like a woman. I was not partner material because I focused on nurturing clients and consultants, rather than on wheeling and dealing in the old boys club. Although Ernst & Young and all the men involved in this silent takeover would be quick to deny there was a glass ceiling in this firm who made the Working Mother’s Top 100 Best Places to work for working mothers in 1998, I like every other woman in this firm knew otherwise.

For the sake of my people, I chose not to fight and left gracefully. I was not about to confuse or take advantage of their loyalty or make them chose between leaders. When my father was laid off in an effort to reduce costs by eliminating all the Executive Vice Presidents, he managed to negotiate a different position maintaining the same income but with a lower status in a different location. I managed the same maneuver, leaving Washington, DC moving to San Diego essentially surviving as a lame duck for almost two years after the ‘glass ceiling’ event.

In 2001 I left Ernst & Young Consulting and joined Wind River Systems, a high tech firm as the Director of Business Excellence. I was hired to transform the fledgling engineering services company in San Diego into a high functioning engineering services team. I’d like to say I was as successful with this venture as I had been through out my career, but that would be untrue. For the first time in my life, the client was near death and there was nothing I could do to save them. In fact I got sick. I caught their dis-ease. This experience knocked me to the floor and in three counts I found myself battling clinical depression. This midlife depression stripped me of everything, my job, my career, my house, my life partner and my identity.

DESCENT TOWARDS THE GODDESS

For four long years I took the Heroine’s Journey as described by Maureen Murdock, Marion Woodman, Sylvia Brinton Perera and many others. In fact it became my full time job going to analysis twice a week and spending the rest of the week in deep contemplation. I wrote in my journal several hours a day. I spent hours analyzing my dreams, complexes, emotions, defenses and projections learning how to turn my childhood defenses into gifts, integrate my shadow and my masculine and feminine energies into a new dynamic self.

Believe me I did not start on this journey saying – I going to take the soul’s journey! At first I thought my analyst was just plain crazy, interpreting dreams and talking of familial patterns. I had no idea I was fighting my father, my mother and brother at every turn of my life. It was downright maddening when I began to recognize the childhood patterns and defenses I used in relationships. At one point I thought I was enclosed in a repetitive theatre of my life with no way out.

Soon I came face-to-face with the little girl I abandoned in pursuit of success in a patriarchical capitalistic world. At first, I wanted her to go away. But I quickly realized I could abandon her no longer, I had to mother her. In the process of nurturing my little girl, both of us were transformed.

SOULFUL VOCATION

During this time on the Soul’s Journey, I completed New Ventures West’s Professional Coaching Program. James Flaherty the founder and author of Coaching to Excellence took business coaching from being primarily focused on performance improvement to developmental coaching based loosely on Ken Wilber’s All Quadrant All Levels (AQAL) model of bio-social-psycho-spiritual development. Where other professional coaching programs were focused on performance and skill building, New Ventures West focused on what it means to be a human being in this world. They believe working at the level of being leads to deep structural changes in psyche. Rather than change the behavior, they focus on the person who is behaving. This leads to transformations rather than adaptations. Yet I found this program lacking something. It did not work for me or any of my peers who were going through the depression of midlife.

In 2003 at a Spiral Dynamics Integral conference in Santa Barbara, I met a student from Pacifica Graduate Institute. Knowing how much I loved books she tempted me with Pacifica’s fabulous bookstore. The moment I set foot on the campus and entered the library of Joseph Campbell, I knew I was home. It was a mystical experience like none other. Within weeks I found myself pursuing a PhD in Depth Psychology. I had found the missing link in Ken Wilber and Don Beck’s Spiral Dynamic Integral programs and in New Ventures West’s Integral Coaching program – SOUL.

In 2005 I completed the course work to achieve a Master of Arts in Depth Psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute and launched ANIMA COACHING™.

In 2006 I completed the course work for a PhD and began my dissertation on the 12th Century mystic, Hildegard von Bingen, an integrated role model for women in the 21st Century.