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.
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.
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 paperbackoras 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!
You have convictions. You have passions. It may be time to dig deep and amplify your voice. It can be a little overwhelming to put your deep desires out in print, but I encourage all of you to make your voice heard to speak for what is most meaningful to you.
My own passions include supporting children and families. Last year I put together a book on spiritual practices for families called the Spiritual Practice Playbook for Families. I felt it was the right time for families to move beyond Zoom and to find ways to connect deeply with one another and to create an opportunity to create spiritual practices as a family.
I recently had this book reviewed by Writer’s Digest and I was so affirmed by their comments:
Review of Spiritual Practice Playbook for Families by Linnea Nelson:
“The book is visually stunning, featuring undersea images that immediately drop the reader’s shoulders, elicit a deep exhale and dial the mind to easier, calmer, tropical breeze times. We are primed to experience this book, a smart idea to provide to parents who are likely looking for ways right now for the family to gather together (and get away from their screens) to make some art and learn some new things as a group. If everyone is learning how to meditate, it’s likely easier for the family members who really need it to start a practice, rather than just the reader telling everyone that they really should start meditating. This book is the right, beautiful book at the right time, layered with use in enough repetition for a practice to be established. Well done. I like the fill-in spaces for everyone to use, since this activity book can be kept so that you’ll look back on those precious notes and drawings years from now.
The structure is one of its greatest strengths, as it’s precisely the ease of use and ease of access to the different topics that makes this a family-accessible activity. This book is exemplary in production quality and cover design. The physical materials, printing, and binding are of professional quality and traditional industry standards. The typesetting and page layout (including illustrations, images, or figures) are easy to follow, thoughtfully designed, and error free. The cover appears to be professionally designed and is compellingly related to the content/genre of the book.
This book is beautiful to look at, from the calming cover image of the sea vista and brightly-colored fish to the smart layouts of the art page, the note-taking space, and other experiences. Author leaves room for the reader and family to make this their own book via their writings. Author also has featured gorgeous images within the book, such as the art on the spiritual pages, the altar, the candles the orange. This breadth of design calls in plenty of variety for the family’s use and benefit. It’s a beautiful guide and becomes an important keepsake later.
Bringing families together for calming, centering, and meditation exercises, plus moments of learning and being inspired has lots of appeal, especially during these challenging times of the pandemic and families handling a lot of stress. The author creates a calming pattern of repeated features like the art pages and the journal space, and it’s that repeated return that feels like gently lapping waves, always returning anew. This book just feels good, for its open-space full of potential to how each family member is honored with making their own choices and finding freedom to participate to his or her own chosen degree. The same goes for everyone else in the family. Freedom of expression, a helping hand to learning how meditation might best work for you. Very well done. Many layers of benefit.
Author writes with a steady, calming, guiding voice, using excellent phrasing and word choice. I noticed where the author mentions The Artist’s Way and its morning pages that the author provides sturdy advice, such as that adults write three longhand pages, ‘no more, no less.’ I initially thought that the ‘no more, no less’ veered away from the light energy and personal freedom guidance of the book, but then I remembered that the Artist’s Way’s morning pages are specifically designed to be the three pages. Author is actually being gentle in the instructions by not over-describing! That’s great instinct, again keeping all of the family members in mind. Author succeeds at the challenge of being relatable to all age groups, since everyone from little ones to grandparents and beyond can participate here. Author invites them in, with her unfailingly positive, guiding voice, to work together as a group to learn new calming skills.
I have no notes for improvement on this book, but rather use this space to encourage the author to keep writing. I see that she has an additional book on transforming community coming out, and it makes me happy that the author brings this structure and learning methods to the world. It’s a fresh idea, compiled so beautifully, and author remains at the center of it as our encourager.” –Reviewer from Writer’s Digest, December 2022
Will you be asked to offer a prayer or blessing for your Thanksgiving Dinner? Please feel free to use this one, or adapt it for your own.
A Blessing for Thanksgiving
May our gathering today allow for hearts to open, For memories to meld, Children to engage the eyes of adults, And adults to hold them clearly and with love.
For all of the joys and all of the sorrows Of this lonely year, May we gather in love, forgiveness, and fortitude As we give thanks all around.
[Here you might invite each person to share a gratitude, even in this year of challenge. If you are alone or with those you already see on a daily basis, perhaps sharing a loving memory of an ancestor, known or simply remembered through stories.]
I’m excited about a new book, the first I have edited for Skinner House Books. It’s called Beyond Welcome: Building Communities of Love. Seventeen essayists have written about their own, very personal experiences in Unitarian Universalist settings. Questions are posed to the reader to uncover our own biases as well as questions for groups to discuss, making this a great books for boards, staff teams, book groups, and small group ministry.
Watch for it! It will be available early January 2022 from Inspirit, the UUA Bookstore and via ebook in 2021. (also available for pre-order now:)
