Photo: Contributed
“Have you ever seen a waterfall you didn’t like?”
This question has been swirling around in my mind since I heard Donna Fairhurst pose it in a recent BWB video. It’s an apt metaphor for this “endless student of life on planet Earth” who has been gathering and mastering a vast array of skills and gifts for decades. Like a river, Fairhurst draws from many sources and can go deep to help her clients find their true selves and “know, grow, flow, and glow.”
Fairhurst is a unique life and soul coach, Reiki master, psychic medium, empath, and aura and chakra intuitive who isn’t afraid of to face truths and to surrender to personal change. However, her path to wisdom has been a long and circuitous one. Her diverse history includes banking, tourism, theatre, volunteering and coaching swimming; travelling the world and studying with many teachers, including an Egyptian Coptic priest, a Jesuit priest, an imam, and a Buddhist nun, all while networking with two oil companies and three airlines to create and teach an ocean awareness and crash survival preparedness course—to name just a few experiences.
To Fairhurst, who describes herself as chief evolving officer, these seemingly eclectic experiences all flow into one journey of her “sacred soul self,” an inner sense of being she felt intuitively from a very young age but avoided for most of her life.
Having survived near blindness and polio as a child, three near-death experiences, resistance from those close to her and from within, and many harrowing personal challenges throughout her life, Fairhurst understands that whatever we go through, whoever our egos would have us think we are, we are all souls in motion from the same universal source. We are love. She also knows that each of us is on our own path to find our own expression of what this means.
Today Fairhurst helps professional women “and a few brave men” embrace their unique essence of being human by cultivating the clarity, coherence and calmness to let life flow through them freely. Harnessing the full range of her modalities, abilities and insights, she guides her clients through their most difficult transitions and empowers them to reach their highest levels of self-awareness, purpose, joy and potential.
The power of experience and wisdom is that you can cut through confusion. What are some of the questions you ask a client when they first approach you for a consultation?
Have they ever worked with a coach, Reiki master or intuitive before?
What drew them to me? Where are they stuck?
Do they have a spiritual practice? If so, what is it?
How do they define energy, or source, as it relates to them? How is that working for them?
What ideal outcomes are they hoping to achieve?
What are their dreams and goals?
What troubles them and keeps them awake at night?
What’s their reality? What’s stopping them?
How much self are they prepared to invest in themselves?
These are some of my key questions. I am not a psychologist, psychiatrist, medical or clinical counsellor. I am an intuitive holistic practitioner with practical, doable tools for realizing optimum results. I guide my clients to understand, use and integrate those tools, mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually. This is a complimentary discipline that enhances life, not a replacement for medical science.
What happens next? What do the next steps look like?
I require a detailed intake form, which we use after the initial consultation to enter into a coaching contract. We are a team, and along the way we connect deeply with their guides and angels. We show up together, and we create the space for success and self-actualization. This is not smoke and mirrors. It is living in the present, here, now.
During the first call, we noodle at least one sticking point or a difficult transition they are currently working on. We find at least one way to move forward positively right then and there. My one-on-one coaching programs run for six or 12 months for a specific number of hours per month. Each program contains many of the same teaching elements; however, each program is individually created for each client. I meet them where they are. No two are exactly the same because no two souls are the same.
It takes time to identify and work through layers and years of this and past lives. I have been described as a tough love coach in a velvet glove. I feel that is pretty accurate. I am always humbled and inspired by how deep my clients are prepared to dive, and by the privilege of working with their spirit guides and angels, as a medium and empath. I incorporate healing Reiki, sound, meditation, and EFT among other things. My coaching is grounded, practical, spiritual, balanced, intuitive and fun.
You certainly have a wonderful variety of tools and modalities. It must be rewarding to find the right mix for an individual. What does the ideal outcome look like as you move through your work together?
The ideal outcome is to create balance, clarity and optimal coherence in their lives. Together we identify and learn how to deal with self-sabotage, negative self-talk and disempowering practices, and then replace them with tools for living and making solid, empowering choices from a place of self-awareness.
It is very gratifying that many of my clients elect to keep working with me in a coaching capacity beyond their contract terms. My practice is very full and fulfilling. I only take on clients who are passionate and prepared to the work on themselves, to create their best reality. A few times I have had to gently fire a client who did not need me anymore, as they were more than ready to step into their own power.
How does the process differ when you work with a group?
Until now, the only groups I have led have been part of holistic expos and wellness events, where I was speaking and presenting workshop sessions on a single topic: aura and chakra balancing, or the power of intention, et cetera. While that has been a wonderful part of my life and business that I will continue to do on a limited basis, it is about to change rapidly. I cannot keep up with the growing demand for one-on-one coaching. So embracing a group online platform is the next logical step forward to continue my work.
I am very excited to be rebranding and launching a new website, Facebook page and group. And, time allowing, I will offer three monthly online master classes, as well as participate in an extraordinary (soon to be announced) Women’s Spiritual Summit online. The icing on that cake will be launching two six-month, or one 12-month, online Zero 2 Clarity group programs in late fall this year or early 2021. I am still deciding the timeline on that.
Yes, like your clients, you continue to evolve and shift. Let’s talk more about your rebranding and new website. Tell us about your new focus and what differences, and similarities, visitors can expect.
It’s another positive step forward for me in my own evolution as a coach and teacher. Same Donna, same modalities and principles, just more of me, for more of you, in more places. We are launching DonnaFairhurst.com in the next few weeks—a brand new name, look, and some exciting new and expanded programs.
I am not divorcing myself of Soul Full Solutions. I am incorporating it as a direct result of using the methods, principles, programs and tools I have developed in my powerful Zero 2 Clarity coaching programs. Soul Full Solutions will be the measurable results achieved from working with me and the tools I provide as I guide my clients and groups through the programs. So DonnaFairhurst.com will be a melding of both. There will be period of overlapping sites as we integrate to ensure no one gets left out in the cold.
Given our water theme, I would be remiss if I didn’t ask the same question about your time as a swim coach.
Water of any kind is restorative and sacred, whether it is a glass of water, a bath, a shower, a swimming pool, river, lake, pond, puddle, great ocean—yes, a waterfall—or in our bodies. Water sustains us and all life on the planet. It heals us, floats us, teaches us. We travel on it, clean with it, drink it, and play with and in it. Water is the juice of life. Teaching children from the cradle to adulthood to see, feel, respect, honour and love water has been one of the greatest joys of my life. I have always said and taught, “Where water goes energy flows.”
Tell us some fun stuff about yourself.
I am absolutely nuts, pardon the pun, about crunchy peanut butter on Manchester loaf with thinly sliced Gala apples, Earl Grey tea and nice bit of fine dark chocolate to finish. I trekked nearly 10,000 kilometres exploring and studying the ancient Mayan, Aztec, Inca, and Toltec sites of Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Belize over a period of four months, and I have an extensive bucket list which includes skydiving and hot air ballooning.
Donna Fairhurst is the owner of Soul Full Solutions in Penticton.
This column was submitted as part of BWB Wednesdays.
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