Month: February 2022

Your Spiritual Direction

What has your experience been like in spiritual direction…either with me or other spiritual companions? If you feel drawn to writing about your experience in an essay or poetry, please contact me to get the guidelines if you would like your experience to be considered in my next book proposal. The book will feature the experiences of spiritual directees (not directors) to provide background for liberal or unchurched folx to explore the concept to see if it is right for them.

Please contact me if you would like the full guidelines. The proposal and a few essays will be sent in March, but if accepted, many more will be needed. For a similar companion book, check out Everyday Spiritual Practices: Simple Pathways to Enrich Your Life edited by Scott Alexander or Faithful Practices: Everyday Ways to Feed Your Spirit edited by Erik Walker Wikstrom. Both of these books are on spiritual practices rather than spiritual direction, but they will give you a sense of how a personal essay might provide guidance and insights for seekers.

My Current Learning

As we begin 2022, we will continue to explore how the Divine is showing up in your life. Delving into yourself–beyond persona and ego– creates sacred space for the spirit of the unknown. Another part of creating sacred space is the intention you bring  to your spiritual practices, whether looking for beauty on  your daily walk, giving gratitude for the vegetables you chop, or opening  yourself to the love that is surely around you. So I encourage you to continue, expand or (re)start your spiritual practices as a companion to our work together.

I am committed to continuing to build my skills to provide you with a sacred space by continually engaging in professional development. I’m beginning 2022 with a course on Wonder and one on the Supervision of Spiritual Directors. I will continue to engage in a monthly spiritual direction of my own, a spiritual directors’ supervision group and an ongoing group with spiritual directors that I trained with at the Haden Institute.

I’m also taking a Spiritual Memoir Writing Class that offers opportunities to look into the past with an eye for understanding what is deeply embedded in our souls. I will be using this work as I companion you as well.

As background for some of you who don’t know me yet, in 2021, I completed the certificate for Spiritual Direction to work with children and youth as well as courses on Active Imagination, Lucid Dreaming, and Shadow Work. I  attended the multi day online conferences from Spiritual Directors International, Liberal Religious Educators Association and the General Assembly of the UUA.

I share my professional development work with you as a commitment to providing relevant and supportive spiritual direction and to help you understand why I am raising my 2022 rates for all new directees to 5 Sessions for $375 or $80 for one-off sessions. I want to be able to continue to provide you meaningful spritual direction. I so appreciate all of you that I currently work with and I look forward to meeting those of you who are new to spiritual direction with me.

It’s in Paperback and Online

I’m excited to share a book that I edited that captures the need for all of us to stay aware and make changes in order to create an inclusive world. You can get it at the Inspirit Bookshop in paperback or as an ebook at Amazon. The essayists in this book speak from the heart.

A Review from the Rev. Penny Hackett-Evans

I think of myself as pretty informed and aware of issues around inclusion in the UU church. And, as I made my way through this book, I kept finding surprises and new information to consider. I would sit down and say I’m going to read one chapter – and then I would see the subject of the next chapter or the author and decide I HAD to read that. I finished the book in two sittings!

I especially liked the range of expertise that the various contributors brought to the overall topic of inclusion. From an interview with a 10 year old about what does community mean, to chapters written by well-known UU ministers and lay people about subjects ranging from sensitivity and inclusion in the area of gender identity, anti-racism, including youth in the community, Islamophobia, family worship, sacred cyberspace and more.

As mentioned in the introduction to the book, I think it would be an excellent resource for UU church committees who are wrestling with doing more than just giving a newcomer a special name tag and a warm welcome the first two weeks they show up. This book has specifics about how to delve deeper into the questions that bedevil us all about how to be truly inclusive in a meaningful way. Each chapter has one thought-provoking question to consider relevant to your own individual congregation.

I look forward to seeing how my own congregation might embrace the questions asked in this book!