cultivate your authentic path
In a world full of overwhelming complexity, endless distractions, and existential uncertainty, Wild Iris Coaching helps you to find deeper meaning and purpose, supporting you to discover and cultivate a depth of presence, openness, and trust in the core of your being. Through a powerful combination of philosophical inquiry, spiritual practice, and shadow work, you can uncover the beliefs and habits that block your ability to feel connected to your authentic self and to the world and people around you. My role as a coach is to offer a supportive yet challenging container to help you to uncover your deepest truth and true potential, cultivate your passions and gifts, discover meaning in your daily life, and take confident steps on your authentic, unique path in the world.
Hi, I’m Alex gilman.
My greatest passion is to explore life’s deepest questions, discover what makes up a truly meaningful and fulfilling life, and help others live their deepest truth.
I have always been drawn to big questions. What is the meaning of this strange and beautiful thing we call life? What is my deeper purpose? How can we live in harmony within ourselves, with one another, and with the natural world? How can we truly help others and improve the world, which is in such peril and suffering? Are there enduring truths and values I can orient my life around? My aim is to discover and embody a way of life that is in dialogue with these perennial questions, which seeks a greater good, that embodies a depth of presence and curiosity and love for the world and all its endless wonders. With a unique synthesis of spiritual and philosophical inquiry, cultivation of mindfulness and embodied presence, and shadow work, my purpose with Wild Iris Coaching is to hold space for others to discover and embody the way of life that calls to them deep in their heart, a life that expresses their deepest purpose, that brings them meaning and fulfillment.
Will you take the next step on your journey
toward your authentic life?
The Coaching Experience
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Clarifying Your Vision
The first step in the coaching process is uncovering your purpose and vision for our work together. What parts of your life feel unfulfilling, unclear, or challenging? What do you want to pursue or manifest in your life? Do you want more peace, harmony, and joy in your life? Are you looking for more meaning, purpose, or direction? Do you want to enhance your relationships, work, or creative endeavors? We begin our work by exploring what you most want out of your life and designing a path to getting there. As we move forward into the coaching process, this will also include clarifying the core values and principles that orient your life, along with nourishing your sense of purpose and meaning. Develop a North Star that guides you through your days.
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Harmonizing Body & Mind
Much of the coaching process involves uncovering all the ways that we are at odds with ourselves, out of integrity with what we know is best for us. This includes investigating the habits and choices we make with regard to our time and energy, as well as how we feed our bodies and minds, and then cultivating new habits that nourish us and bring balance to our lives. At a deeper level, this means uncovering and working with our “subpersonalities,” the semi-autonomous constellations of our unmet needs, limiting beliefs, and psychological patterns that hijack our minds, drain our energy, and throw us off-center. By developing sovereignty over your inner self and creating harmony within, you unlock new clarity and energy for manifesting your highest potential.
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Embodiment & Practice
One of the core principles of my coaching is that to manifest our best life, we must embody that potential in our day-to-day lives through regular, intentional practice, thus integrating insights and frameworks into how we spontaneously move through the world. One of the pillars of our work together is developing a personalized set of practices that support your thriving, manifest your vision, and cultivate an ever-deepening embodied presence in your everyday life. This toolkit can include: contemplative practices to center your mind, harmonizing practices that optimize your health and well-being, active practices that engage your aliveness, and creative practices that express your passions.
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Expressing Your Authentic Self
Our life can be seen as an ever-unfolding improvisation, an expression of our own unique creative vision. One of the key outcomes of the coaching experience is to build your capacity to express your authenticity in your thoughts, words, and actions, to live from a place of confidence, creativity, and flexibility. This process includes discovering and growing your passions and gifts; building outlets and avenues for your creativity; developing your ability to be true to yourself while being open and connected to others; learning how to communicate your feelings, desires, and needs honestly; and becoming comfortable with the unknown, the unresolved, the imperfect, with the mystery that is life.
Components of a coaching Session
Learn more about what a typical coaching session looks and feels like.
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Each session begins with a contemplative practice to center the mind and body, grounding the session in embodied presence and allowing for the focus and aim of session to arise organically. These guided meditations can be tailored to suit your needs and goals and can be incorporated into your own regular practice.
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In each session, we spend a few minutes engaging with a text or quote from the wisdom traditions of the world, ancient and contemporary, to bring inspiration, seeds for contemplation, or material for further inquiry. The reading list can be co-created and there is an option to have this textual component be one of the main focuses on our work together, in the form of a one-on-one Socratic seminar on topics of your choice.
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Since embodiment and integration is such a key component of the coaching process, we always spend some time reviewing the takeaways from the last session and how your practice unfolded in the time between sessions. This discussion might organically lead to the focus of the current session or be a quick check-in.
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In order to bring clarity and intention to the session, we articulate a focus and aim for our time together. This focus could come from a previous session’s work, be planned in advance by the client, or arise spontaneously from the Opening Meditation or review.
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This constitutes the heart of the coaching session: a deep dive into the issues, questions, and parts of yourself that are called forth by the Focus and Aim. Each Deep Dive will look different but will in essence be working toward one of the Coaching Pillars. We may be exploring your visions and core values, uncovering and working with the shadow parts of you that are sabotaging your goals or causing distress, processing whatever came up in your life between sessions, transforming and healing your core wounds, developing your set of regular practices, or whatever else has arisen in the session.
As the core material of the session unfolds, we may land upon a moment that invites a pause, and an opening for deepening our exploration with a specific exercise that shifts the energy. This may include a brief interlude in nature for contemplation, a guided meditation, or other specific exercises that open up new ways of being. -
As we approach the end of the session, we pause our Deep Dive to land upon the key insight, lesson, new mindset, or somatic experience, crystallizing it into a pithy takeaway that weaves the threads of the session into something to bring forth and integrate into your life.
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To wrap up our session, we take the key takeaways and uncover ways to embody and integrate it into your life through a practice you will engage with between sessions. This practice may be a refinement of one of your Core Practices, adding more depth and intentions to your existing toolkit, or something new and provisional. Your commitment to this practice is perhaps the most important part of the coaching process, making your insights real, impacting how you live your day-to-day life.
We end our sessions with a brief meditation to recenter, letting the magic that transpired to sink into your whole being and inform the rest of your day and week.
Other Offerings
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Holistic Academic Mentoring
Personalized academic mentoring for high school and college students; optimize your learning strategies and reach your academic goals; overcome persistent challenges; college choice and applications; discover and develop your passions and gifts; mindfulness and stress reduction; social and emotional literacy.
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Personalized Socratic Seminar Sessions
Socratic Seminar is an exploration of life’s deepest questions through philosophical inquiry, dialogue, and personal reflection. Individual and small-group Socratic seminars on a co-created curriculum to fit your learning goals. Great for homeschoolers, autodidacts, or passionate life-long learners.
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Musical Improv Performance and Lessons
Incorporate improvised soundscapes into your event, performance, or other activity; experienced Contact Improv musician for jams and workshops; music lessons for intermediate guitar players looking to expand their approach to improvisation.