Find the Soul of Your Research
Each research project begins as a calling before it becomes a career move. However, during the research journey, the daimon that first drew you to your research question often goes quiet. You can no longer feel the animating force underneath the research. It is often stifled by the complexities and demands of the research project.
This coaching is for researchers, doctoral candidates, and academics who want to restore or strengthen their connections to the soul of their research—the question that chose you before you chose it.
Coaching explores the following:
Recovering the original image: Before your project became a proposal, what image, inquiry, or wonder was it trying to give shape to?
Working with the shadow of the topic: Are there aspects of your research that you have suppressed because they seem too personal, too irrational, or too far from your topic? Often this is where the real work lives.
Holding the tension of opposites: Is there tension between what your discipline demands and what your psyche is working through; between the persona of "scholar" and the interior life driving the inquiry?
Staying in relationship with the unconscious material: What are your dreams, intuition, and somatic responses telling you about your research topic and process?
Individuating the work: How can your research become distinctly yours rather than a well-executed version of what your advisor, field, or funding body expected?
How it works
The sessions can be done individually or in a small group. Some people come for a single session at a moment of crisis or impasse; others stay in the work through an entire dissertation, book, or research arc.
Sessions explore what’s happening beneath the surface of the work—a dream that seems to be commenting on a chapter, a striking coincidence, a flicker of resistance that turns out to be the project pushing back, not you. We make room for image and intuition alongside argument, on the premise that a research project has a life of its own, and the parts that resist tidy language are usually where that life is trying to speak.
This is not therapy, and it is not developmental editing. It is a space to encounter your research as a psychic activity — with its own shadow, its own calling, and its own soul.