Rumi as a Life Coach

Duration of the Workshop: 180 minutes

About the workshop

In this workshop, we review and learn that Masnavi is a call to set foot on a journey; a journey from within oneself. The audience of the Masnavi is each and every individual, present at the moment. Masnavi also addresses those, who are stuck in the swamp of greed, self-centeredness and selfishness; and those, who have become accustomed to this situation and are aware of it. Masnavi talks to us all and to each and every one of us, it teaches that the way out of this swamp is through removing the veil from people’s eyes.
If we take into consideration the scientific definition of coaching as freeing people’s potential abilities to optimize and improve their performance or, based on the definition of the International Coaching Federation, regard life coaching as helping a person identify real values and create basic learning to improve one’s performance in personal, family, professional and social life, we could, in a general overview, consider Rumi’s Masnavi a book of coaching and Rumi himself a life coach. With the magical use of metaphors, Rumi puts the capabilities of the right hemisphere in the service of accurate evaluations of the left hemisphere and by posing indirect questions to the readers, he helps them become aware of their capabilities and fundamental values as he deeply believes:

A wretched man does not know himself
he has come from a high state and fallen into lowlihood