Lynne Twist
FOUNDING EXECUTIVE, THE HUNGER PROJECT
CO-FOUNDER, PACHAMAMA ALLIANCE

Please tell us about the organizations you work with and your role in them.
The mission of the Hunger Project is to end chronic, persistent hunger on earth. I’ve been very deeply committed to the Hunger Project and an executive with them for 22 years. I am also the co-founder of the Pachamama Alliance whose mission is two-fold. One is to preserve the tropical rainforests of the world and the indigenous people who inhabit them and their cultures. And the second is to contribute to the creation of the new global vision of equity and sustainability for all life.

What are your primary responsibilities?
I worked for the Hunger Project from its inception in 1977 until the year 2000. I was one of the founding executives and the director of global funding. About five years ago, my husband and I co-founded the Pachamama Alliance. We run it ourselves with a small staff here, in San Francisco, and a small staff in Ecuador.

What are the activities of the Pachamama Alliance?
It began as an alliance between a very remote indigenous tribe in the Amazon called the Achuar people and a group of conscious committed people from the modern world. Now it includes several other tribes from that same region. It’s an alliance between two cultures to form a global vision of equity and sustainability for all of life. Our work is to assist them in preserving their culture and their rainforest lands while they educate us on sustainability and ways of being more connected with the natural world. So it’s a beautiful alliance of two cultures with the purpose of all life becoming sustainable.

It sounds really interesting and really difficult.
It is very challenging and it’s a big responsibility. They are the leaders and we are their partners. They listen to the forest and they work with their ceremonies and psychotropic teaching plants so that the wisdom comes from somewhere beyond any of us. We trust it and it’s a beautiful, very, very powerful experience..

How did life coaching affect that work?
When I began Life Coaching, I was sort of ready to make a transition from my work with ending world hunger into the environmental movement and this work with the rainforest. But it was latent and I didn’t fully know it. Talking with my Life Coach and reaching into the deepest part of myself, I looked out way further than my own lifetime. This is one of the things that Life Coaching helps you do. I began to see that I could leave more than one legacy. When the end of hunger is accomplished, I’ll know that it was one of the things I participated in and contributed to. I also realized that I could take the skills that I’d learned in the Hunger Project and apply them to this other arena, and it would be totally internally consistent and a fuller expression of my life. So Life Coaching was very important for me during those years of that transition period.

How did Life Coaching help you make sense of all that?
Well, Life Coaching was a place I could go outside of my job and my family to explore my deepest longings. When you’re with your family, you’re really a mother and a wife and a daughter and a sister. Often, the role of a woman is to serve and support and nurture everyone else. In my job, ending world hunger was a very intense, powerful, and profound kind of mission that had life and death consequences. So you don’t really put yourself in the forefront of your thinking. You’re really focused on resource-poor people, the people who are engaged in the real battle to survive and to have enough to feed and nurture their own children. So thinking about your own needs is just not a part of that picture.

Having a Life Coach gave me a time each week or every few days when I could look at a deep longing that was latent within me. I never really overtly tapped into it the way I did with my Life Coach. It was an absolute service to me that helped me develop the next part of my path and my future. It allowed me to be open to this destiny because the indigenous people contacted us. We were not looking for them. We did not design this project. We were too busy to even think about the environment and, frankly, we were glad other people were working on it. But when the call came from the rainforest, I had the ears to hear. My heart was open and my mind was exploring so I could hear the call and respond to it.

Are you claiming that Life Coaching helped you be open to this possibility?
Yes. It was a wonderful opening and I don’t know what would have happened had I not been involved with my Life Coach. I suppose I would have heard this call, but in a different way and not with the kind of ready response that was available to me.

It was a rare privilege to be contacted by a culture that had never made contact with any outside people. They’d been completely isolated by design for thousands and thousands of years. White people had never really gotten into their territory. They had never sought out a relationship with modern world people. They completely escaped the Conquistadors. They’re just an amazing, very intact cultural tribe. And their spirit gods told them that they could stay isolated no longer and that contact with the outside world was inevitable. So they initiated the thing they most feared, and they initiated it with me and John Perkins and Daniel Cooperman. We are a fortunate group of people. I wasn’t looking for this and I wasn’t trying to find the next part of my path — it found me.

Life Coaching helps you look at your life in a context much larger than next month, next week, next year, and even the next decade and the next 25 years. It helps you look at the legacy you’ll leave and how your life will impact people 500 years from now. It’s a very remarkable process. This is not the kind of thing you talk about at a cocktail party or almost in any other setting. Rather than minimizing your life experience, Life Coaching maximizes it and you see how you can be useful to the generations that came before us and the generations that will follow. You can have your life be a work of art.

How comfortable are you with talking about this confidential and really personal stuff with your Life Coach?
I’m very comfortable. I know him very well. We’ve worked on ending world hunger together, which created an intimate and profound bond between us. I know his wife, I know his children, I’ve been to his home, and he’s been to mine. So we’re friends. But even if we weren’t, what Life Coaching is all about is creating a safe space for full self-expression . . . and it does.

Is their something about Life Coaching that helps people be comfortable about getting very personal?
Well, yes. Life Coaching is a real opportunity to engage in the most private and personal parts of your life with someone who’s committed to you and with someone who has no stake in the matter other than yours. A Life Coach is not someone whose feelings you’re going to hurt or someone who you have to stay friendly with. You’re actually in a professional relationship but it’s designed in a way that creates safety and openness for the most private things that you have to say. And we don’t give ourselves those opportunities very often except maybe with a family priest or a guru. A Life Coach actually assists you to become a better human being. I mean, what could be more remarkable than that. And I really really recommend it to people. Not everyone has the opportunity to work with someone on the path they’ve chosen in their life. I would say that if you really look at the treasure that life is, the vital kind of unique opportunity you have to make your life a work of mastery, then you don’t just want to go through the motions or get through the next day or try to look good. Instead, I think you want to give yourself a set of circumstances and even a professional relationship that provides a kind of very deep feedback. And I think it’s fantastic.

Did Life Coaching have an impact on your personal life?
Yes, it did. If you look at your life with any kind of full and complete lens, it’s a microcosm of itself in every area. So what I did in Life Coaching impacted my way of working and my authenticity in relationships with my husband, my children, my friends, as well as with my professional colleagues. It released more of my love into the world which I think is the best thing you can possibly do for yourself. And it affirmed my instincts and my intuition so that I could follow my heart with more freedom in every area of my life.

Did other people in your family participate in life coaching?
Yes. My youngest son was in college struggling with a lot of things. And, my life coach offered to do some work with him. He had a lot of experience working with college students and high school students in helping them find what they wanted and who they are. So, he did some work with my son, which was very important for him as well.

What would your husband say if I asked him how Life Coaching affected you?
If you asked him if I’ve changed over the last 4, 5, or 6 years, he would probably have something to say about that, and it would be pretty positive. But I don’t know that he’d attribute it to Life Coaching because one of the gifts of Life Coaching is that it becomes part of the fabric of who you are and so there’s no credit that goes in that direction. I think this is a very high tribute to what Life Coaching is.

You’ve done other kinds of self-actualization training. How is Life Coaching different or better?
Well, I wouldn’t say it’s better or worse. It’s different because it’s one-to-one all the time. It’s private and it’s frequent, and rather than being a course, it is a way of living while you’re in the coaching relationship. And it supports and serves and amplifies. I think it enhances the kind of insight and clarity that people get out of courses they take.

How is it different than having a really good, sensitive therapist?
Life Coaching is different than therapy. I’m not a psychologist and I won’t say something technically accurate here, but I have some sense of therapy. When I was ill 3 years ago, I engaged every possible kind of healer, and I had a therapist for a few months. I had an experience of therapy that was completely wonderful. Life Coaching is quite different from therapy. It’s not psychological.

The Life Coaching I experienced was ontological, which addresses ways of being. I think Life Coaching is very different than therapy because you’re not healing anything. What you’re doing is working with distinctions of effectiveness and distinctions of integrity and distinctions of expression. And that’s a very healthy and powerful way to approach living a fuller and more authentic life.

Can you describe one significant positive experience that involved Life Coaching?
One was completing my professional work with the Hunger Project. The end of hunger was, and still is, a deep life commitment. I was almost like a folk hero in that organization for many years. Letting that work go to the younger people that I’ve trained was difficult. I developed a really deep and beautiful partnership with people all over the world. Then it was time for them to step forward and fill my shoes. Letting all that go was very difficult for me and Life Coaching enabled me to do that with some grace and some certainty and some confidence. In fact, it’s very moving to me to think about it.

Life Coaching was a powerful asset to me during that very difficult time. I had no idea what was next, but I was able to let go of a professional career that had so much meaning for me. It was almost unthinkable to leave and I released it with grace and integrity and love. And I’m very, very grateful for that because it opened up my life to the Pachamama Alliance and my work with the environment. It also gave me the space to accept a very significant life transition regarding my relationship with myself. I moved from being very expressed in my outer life, traveling to 55 different countries and working with many, many different people and cultures, to a deeper focus on my inner life. In the last few years, I’ve really been exploring my inner life and it’s been magic.

What prompted you to begin Life Coaching?
My coach offered his partnership and service to me and I didn’t really know if or why I needed it. But we began and it became very clear that it was a wonderful opportunity and I knew it was a great decision.

If I were a close friend, what would you say to me to entice me to start Life Coaching?
I would say go for it, do it, don’t hesitate. It works. It will serve you. It’s one of the best things I ever did.

I’d also like to say that ever since I first started Life Coaching, I’ve had it in my life one way or another. There have been times when I went a couple of months, or maybe even 6 months, without a Life Coach and then I would recover and realize “My God, this is missing for me.” I’ve had the great honor of being coached by several wonderful, wonderful people. And so now it’s just something that I know is part of my life. I wouldn’t go without it.

What do people being coached need to bring to the Life Coaching process?
They need to bring a commitment to get as much out of it as they can. It’s just like anything — you get out of it what you put in, and if you’re serious about living a committed life, you need a partner like that. Living a committed life is tough, and it’s exhilarating, and it’s beautiful and it’s a great honor, and it’s challenging. You’re always up against it. You’re always breaking through, not just for yourself, but for the human condition. I think that’s what a committed life is — someone who has taken a stand. I am moved to think about the gift that it is to live a committed life. Not everybody chooses that, but if one does, having a coach is a vital and essential part of having that committed life deliver on the promise that it can be. It’s a great thing.

What’s making you cry?
Well, I always cry when I get in touch with the gifts I’ve been given to serve people. Whenever I give talks, I eventually always cry, even when I’m speaking to the United Nations or the U.S. Congress. I have cried in front of the most prestigious bodies where nobody cries, but I can’t help it. I must drink too much water or something. I’m also in touch with something now about how we don’t do anything alone, anything great. We think we should, but it’s not necessary. And I think its not even possible, especially now at this time in history when so much is in the balance. We live at a time when the very habitat in which we’re living is in danger. And so we’re like someone with a terminal illness during which time they usually find a new whole way of seeing who they are and where they fit. I’m very much in touch with that now in my work.

So I don’t think we should try to do anything alone. Even though the source of the word alone is “all one,” I know that we’re never alone. I think that to manifest this by partnering with someone who’s standing for your stand — not just standing for you, but standing for the stand you’ve taken — is immensely powerful. I’m moved by the fact that this exists and that there are people out there who are willing to do it. I’m one of the people who does it, too. I have many people that I mentor. And I’m just touched that the kind of partnership Life Coaching offers is now available to human beings and I support it.