“Focusing is an elegant way to finding your way into the body” notes the teacher in my latest class: “Focusing and Dream Work: with Dr. Leslie Ellis. Focusing is an approach to both our inner worlds and our dreamwork that helps us connect with images that may be more connected to our souls than the intellectual work of the head. Focusing asks us to create images and connect them with feelings to understand ourselves and our spiritual lives more deeply.
A flower opening to the world on the campus of the Chautauqua Institution in New York.
If we are processing trauma, or recognize that part of our journey will be to face and process trauma, it will be helpful to strengthen our inner selves so that we have both images and feelings that we know well and can connect to our spirit. These images and feelings can bolster us for the challenging images and memories that will arise in trauma work.
Dreams can be a fascinating and deeply meaningful way to focus. Using the images in a dream, we can draw our attention to our inner world, finding the conduit to our inner wisdom that is hidden in waking life. We can also use active imagination to find our way to this conduit to our souls, Self and inner wisdom. Sitting with images and being guided to explore them with a companion can be heart opening and provide the spiritual “aha” moments that deepening our living experiences.
Anyone who has taken UU Wellspring, Spiritual Direction Training, the UUA Renaissance Module UU Identity, or a host of other programs that encourage you to look at your own spiritual journey, you have either created a drawing or a written account of your spiritual journey.
Garden in Acadia National Park where we wondered through the beautiful paths.
For me, my Lutheran upbringing and my exposure to Islam, interdenominational worship, Buddhism, Methodism, Native American Spirituality, Catholicism, and Paganism all led me to becoming a Unitarian Universalist. I didn’t practice all of these religions but was deeply influenced by experiences and writings from people of these faiths. Perhaps the time I knew I was a Unitarian Universalist (before I ever knew there was such a thing, was when I attended a funeral for a Native American man that was led by both the tribes elders and the Catholic priest. They melded the beliefs and when we sang “Amazing Grace” in the Ojibwe language, something stirred in me. A sense that the spirit moves in us and our religions and cultures shape how we ritualize and worship, but not the pure spirit we are connected to.
Writing about our spiritual lives can be an important window into our souls. I encourage you to try it and see what comes up for you.
Not only does the Spiritual Directors Network offer a way for you to find a spiritual director by location, religious background, spiritual philosophies and other identities by searching for your preferred categories, it also provides excellent ongoing training for Spiritual Directors. Recently I attended the Engage 2022 conference remotely and I am currently working through the multitude of workshops and keynote speakers they provided.
The workshops have included practices to support campanions in spiritual trauma, dreams and divine creativity, decolonizing spiritual direction, honoring silence, challenging inner shadow work, end of life work, embodied and receptive listening, forgiveness, chronic stress, spiritual heritage and a host of other embodied and informative workshops.
Keynote speakers included Valerie Kaur, Fr. Greg Boyle, Dr. Cornel West, Yavilah McCoy, Pat McCabe, Beverly Lanzetta, Pamela Aya Yetunde, and Marabai Starr.
I also attended the 2021 Renaissance SDI Conference.
Lucy Abbott Tucker is a renowned spiritual director and supervisor of spiritual directors. I was fortunate enough to take her supervision course in the spring of 2022, to join a group of wise UU Spiritual Directors who also participated in the course to meet to explore these new skills, and to create a practicum group who were trusting enough to go on this journey with me as they complete their own spiritual direction training programs.
This work calls to me as a way to support spiritual directors, both through consultations and spiritual direction supervision. What is the difference? Spiritual Direction Supervision is bringing forward a session, with no names or identifying information about the directee, and to work through the images, emotions, joys, and blocks that occurred within the spiritual director. The supervising spiritual director helps the spiritual director explore their own responses to the session to deepen their own spiritual lives and their openness to what their directees bring to them.
Statue in Chautauqua calling out..I see it as opening ourselves to the divine.
I see consultation as more of the “what is a way to handle a specific situation that comes up in a session?” What are some additional pathways I might pursue to help my directee?
So supervision is for the spiritual directors own spiritual life and consultation is to improve the skills of the spiritual direction. Although supervision provides opportunities for the spiritual director to improve skills, it comes from within. Supervision is based on outside information.
