What Is Creative Depth Coaching?

Creative Depth Coaching is a hybrid form of coaching that combines traditional and narrative coaching with healing modalities, transformative art and depth process to engage wisdom, self-discovery and healing. Deep thinkers, healers and seekers often yearn for this type of inner exploration to fuel their purpose and passion.

The process has been defined and developed over many years by Cat Caracelo, founder of JOURNEYpath Institute and Creative Depth Coach Certification.

For the Creative Depth Coach, the integration of Jungian-based depth work, psychosynthesis, expressive arts, narrative process and strengths based personal growth, offers a non-pathologizing approach to deep healing and aligned wholeness. This fresh and dynamic perspective invites the client to explore their own material of life, engaging discovery, building on restorative healing and developmental practice.

The four primary elements of Creative Depth Coaching are relational coaching, expressive arts, narrative process, and understanding the the spectrum of healing and wholeness.

Relational Coaching

Coaching is the process of partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative way that inspires them to experience significant transformation and change toward identified areas of focus that include healing, visioning, expression and activation.

Expressive Arts

Art as a healing practice, creates a space for expressive action and engaged transformative process. Integrating expressive arts as a depth coaching tool offers a threshold experience that often becomes a transitional image or object, which can be relevant to ones healing and personal growth for years.

Many creative forms, materials and approaches can be used to explore emotion, memories, intuitive knowing, experience and embodied sensing. Simple collage, painting or mixed media, using JourneyCircles™, Soul Collage™, storytelling, visual narrative, sand tray or art as ritual are some of the modalities that I and my students use with clients.

Narrative Process

Narrative Process is a valuable and powerful tool for understanding root stories and unconscious beliefs, while accessing new information to support restorative healing.

Narrative Coaching offers a specific approach to guiding process and tracking awareness and experience. This client led approach offers a client space to unfold their experience, as the coach assists a client in creating a living language.

By combining elements of visual narrative, a story told primarily through art-based medium, experiential process becomes lived experience. Using narrative coaching techniques, the coach invites the client to deepen their own field of experience in order to access the power of personal myth and story as a catalyst.

Using tools of narrative process one will explore and re-story their stories, finding expanded perspective for self and other. Engaging narrative creates a specific way and mode of communication and expression. One will create and voice new meaning, exposing possibility that can clarify what has been previously perceived as shadow, shame, absolute or impossible.

There are parts of self, personal narratives and secret stories that are waiting to tell their tales. Many narratives need a safe space to begin to surface and unfurl.

Healing and Wholeness

Healing literally means to bring into, or return to wholeness.

Healing is the active, moving energy that slowly turns us toward a new wholeness. It is the activation of transformative change that is often initiated by circumstance. Healing is a journey that moves one through the threshold of initiatory challenge to seek, find and bridge a renewed or reconciled experience. It is a journey that offers integration.

Healing seeks the pathway of relief, release and movement. Healing does not hold the same charge, or motivation, as the intention of curing. It does not serve to repair, but to mend. Instead of returning one to “how it was” healing moves one beyond the edge of “how it has been” to a new place of understanding and possibility. The Creative Depth Coach as Healer guides themselves and others, navigating the journey of pain, challenge, loss or fragmentation.

The power of depth coaching is supported by these four elements. From years of coaching, teaching and facilitation I know this approach is highly effective and that many are powerfully moved by this work.

The body of work developed through Mythos Journey programs and Depth Coaching is incorporated into all JourneyPath Institute offerings. If you are called to expand your work in the world and bring the power of your experience, original voice and new layers of learning, explore the program.