spiritual counselling: definition and disambiguation

What are we up to here?

Who is Spiritual Counselling For?

Spiritual Counselling is for those who can't help but yearn for something deeper in their lives. It's for those who are unsatisfied with solutions designed to "fix" them to be better adapted to a society that that's dissociated from Soul and Spirit.

It may be that you feel it’s not enough to make small adjustments to the trajectory set out for you in early life. Your soul…the awakening force of Life…all the deep currents of the world may be present with you in a way that requires a response. It may be that the only way forward is to open in a way that re-shapes your self and your life as an ongoing response to embodiment of this inner call. If this is the case, I may be able to offer support along the way.

Of course, we have so many gateways available now: ways that leads out from limiting beliefs into an ever-widening and deepening sense of self. Eastern forms of meditation and yoga. Plant Spirit Medicine. Breath work and ritual, ketamine and ecstatic dance. Formal religious structures with ancient pedigrees and new approaches hatched yesterday that remix and breathe new life into old ways. All these gates leading into the larger inner wilderness and mystery of Self.

No matter what gates we may move through, feeling lost and heartbroken at times is likely. Death stalks us through this territory. So much of the richness we discover on the journey may come at a price. We may have to let go of old pieces of self that we once relied on for self-assurance and stability. We may at times wobble with Bambi legs and new skin. And yet somehow, the more fully you discover and reveal yourself, the more life takes on a kind of grace in which you get to give who are in a way that benefits the world. This is what we are in service of here.

The endless initiation of Stepping outside the Known

How Spiritual Counselling differs from Clinical Counselling

Spiritual Counselling is for exploring past the ego and its limitations, into a larger, wilder territory of being .

Clinical counselling - the kind of counselling that's standard and conventional - is perfectly suited for most people. What we're offering here is for those who want and need something different.

The structure underlying clinical counselling is evidence-based practices - techniques and modalities that have been proven to have a benefical effect for people. To a great extent, these are interventions to manage and control people's experience towards something more comfortable and painless. This is of course a wonderful offering. Spiritual counselling takes a different approach. It involves opening to something that can't be managed or controlled. When we stay locked into the trajectory established by our conditioning and ego-tendencies, opening to something beyond the ego holds the potential for radical change. Spiritual counselling is a space designed to support that opening.

The poet Gary Snyder observed that "the conscious agenda-planning ego occupies a very tiny territory a little cubicle somewhere near the gate." We may find that so much of ourselves - a sense of rich soulfulness, a sense of meaning and purpose, is found outside that cubicle. When we are quiet and still, we may notice an intelligence and grace persistently nudging us to step out of that stale space into the larger territory of consciousness and world. Out under the stars. Visions, dreams, the surprising world glimpsed in deep meditation...they all reveal a world operating outside human control - a world that somehow mysteriously tends to support and reflect our deepest healing and Wholeness.

If we venture out of ego-cubicle, we may experience a reunion with parts of ourselves. We may shake loose from identification with the hurts we've experienced through the years and rediscover a kind of sacred, primordial dignity. We may discover our deepest gifts and shape our lives with the offering of those gifts at center. But all of this requires a willingness to leave the cubicle of the familiar and known. This kind of unfolding - of letting the ego become porous so that the magic and soul of the world can seep in and embody themselves in your heart and gesture - is what we're about. And this process of unfolding, breaking, initiating, expanding...it would all be a bit difficult to support within a structure that required science to validate all that was happening.