I’ve agreed to do an interview for the new Spiritual Director program at Meadville Lombard Theological Seminary and to speak to the spiritual direction cohort at Cherry Hill Seminary.
It’s an honor to share my philosophy and experiences as a spiritual director with spiritual directors in formation. So many wonderful mentors have crossed my path and supported me, it feels great to create similar space for others!
“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.
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.
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.
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.
I attended the Liberal Religious Educators Association (LREDA) in October of 2022. This transformational conference brought us to the Legacy Museum and Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. We then returned to the historic city of Birmingham to process and be guided in deepening our understanding of the trauma that indentured people, dragged from their homes and families, somehow endured (and many did not). How that ancestral trauma has continued to plague their descendents. Yet, our Black worship leaders at the LREDA conference held us in love, reminding us that ‘justice is love in action.”
From segregation to lynching to mass incarceration, anytime Black Americans have made progress in the United States in education, politics, or economic and social status, the opposite of love in action occurs: “violence is hate in action.”
Just as a person descended from slaves holds that trauma in their DNA, as a white person I hold the DNA of heinous acts of European violence to both indigenous and Black people., This conference helped me see hope in how the denomination to which I proudly belong (Unitarian Universalism) can collectively move forward by working for LOVE and Justice. We left the conference with a personal plan for our work back home to bring justice forward.
We must recognize changes in our country that are based on the reactions to Black progress, from the backlash to Black Lives Matter, to politics swinging wildly after an African-American president. Whether you are White, Black, Indigenous, or a Person of Color (BIPOC), processing the racism in our land damages our souls. As we take the spiritual journey together, naming our role in racism and processing it can do our souls good and help us all actively move forward with spiritual power. It is important to name what is happening and find ways to process it so that we can move forward in love.
I welcome your concerns and challenges with racism in our sessions. We are all experiencing liberation together and may we find ways to free all so
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.
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.
