Mystics

Recently, the poet Mark Nepo did an online poetry reading to support Spirituality and Practice. He quoted that a mystic is anyone who believes there is something beyond themselves.

Another quote on mysticism: “A mystic is a person who has a direct experience of the sacred, unmediated by conventional religious rituals or intermediaries,” Mirabai Starr, author of Wild Mercy: Living the Fierce and Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics, tells OprahMag.com.

I have so appreciated Nepo’s Book of Awakenings, which is a day-by-day meditation and action book. For me, each day encourages me to look beyond myself and be in connection with the world, which I term mysticism. One of the quotes I particularly like for spiritual direction:

“Sometimes the simplest and best use of our will is to drop it all and just walk out from under everything that is covering us, even if only for an hour or so—just walk out from under the webs we’ve spun, the tasks we’ve assumed, the problems we have to solve. They’ll be there when we get back, and maybe some of them will fall apart without our worry to hold them up.”

Perspective Changing Dreams

One of the classes I am taking with a colleague has focused on looking at the darker characters in our dreams, or perhaps when doing a guided meditation, poke around to see if there are any dark bits. These more negative characters and insights may just have something to tell us. As an example from one of my guided meditations, I saw a flower blooming in response to asking “what do I need to know.” Of course, this gave me great pleasure and hope as focused on what new growth or learning was unfolding in me. However, when I look at the entire seen and look for the darker bits, I saw that the background in my image was blurred and although my blooming flower appeared to be in a forest near the ground, the blurriness of the background was now interesting to me. Why would the background be so blurry? What does a background of blurred dirt and trees suggest to me? How am I like a blurry background? Dirt? Trees?

Looking for the dark bits to see the whole.

I appreciated this model of moving more deeply into our images and recognizing, like ourselves, that a whole image includes what we see at first (our ego, persona) and that when we look at the context (the collective) we might see parts of ourselves that were otherwise hidden. Our perspective of the darkness can bring deeper understanding of ourselves and our connection to the mystery of life.

Supporting Spiritual Direction Programs

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!

Books that Influence my Spiritual Direction Practice

1. Anam Cara by John O’Donohue
2. Everyday Spiritual Practices by Scott Taylor
3. Faithful Practices: Everyday Ways to Feed Your Spirit edited by Erik Walker Wikstrom ( I have an essay in this one)
4. Holy Listening: The Art of Spiritual Direction by Margaret Guenther 
5. Mystic Heart: Discovering a Universal Spirituality in the World’s Religions     by Teasdale
6. Natural Spirituality: A Handbook for Jungian Inner Work in 
7. Noticing the Divine by John Mabry
8. Sadhana by Anthony De Mello
9. Spiritual Conversations with Children, Lacy Finn Bargo
10. Spiritual Community by Joyce Rockwood Hudson
11. The Secret Spiritual World of Children by Tobin Hart
12. The Seeker’s Guide by Elizabeth Lesser
13. Wisdom of the Enneagram by Riso and Hudson
14. The Wisdom of Your Dreams by Jeremy Taylor

Deepening Dreams through Focusing

“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.

Mystic Mag Interview

I was honored to be interviewed by Mystic Mag. Here is the full article.

Spiritual Memoirs

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.

Spiritual Directors Institute

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.

Supervision

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.

Living Into Liberation with Spiritual Direction

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