Whatever challenges or opportunities life brings, we'll meet them through the perspective of what's most important to you.
We'll sit with what comes up in a way that reflects and meets your own lived experience and reality and sense of what's sacred - however unique and outside the norm that might be.
There may be a case to be made that "ordinary" counselling strives to help people fix what's broken in their lives so that they can return to "normal". Our aim is a little different.
Spiritual Counselling - as we're defining it - sees every challenge you may face as a chance to drop down a rabbit hole into your own depths. If your ordinary thinking mind can't find a solution to some difficulty, maybe what's called for is more wisdom - or vulnerability, open-heartedness, truth, intuition. So we offer a space of openness and safety that supports you in surfacing all aspects of your self...all the parts that might usually get left out. In this way, the hard knots and obstacles of daily life help you become more and more who you are...and help you align to what is most important to you.
We'll sit beside you as old ways of operating that don't serve you anymore fall apart. And as you find new ones. You may find yourself letting go of beliefs which offered you a sense of security. You might find yourself facing unsavoury truths about yourself that undermine your sense of identity. You may find yourself sitting intimately with emotions you'd prefer to never face or feel. Not always comfy experiences, especially compared to numbing out with distractions. The good news is you don't need to do it alone.
It may be that the certainties handed down to you by family or community or spiritual tradition don't feel so unquestionably reliable anymore. Maybe the beliefs that have organised your reality until now are starting to wobble. Our role is to sit with you in the insecurity and confusion that comes inevitably with discovering your own truth. To support you in stabilising in the unknown.
We'll sit beside you as old ways of operating that don't serve you anymore fall apart. And as you find new ones. You may find yourself letting go of stories which motivated you in almost every waking moment (stories like "I'm not worthy"). You might find yourself facing unsavory truths about yourself. You may find yourself sitting intimately with emotions you'd prefer to never face or feel. It can all unfold more smoothly when you don't have to do it alone.
“Shawn has such a beautiful, deep profound presence that I just so appreciate and adore. He’s like a big Bear - gentle and gifted and powerful. He holds a beautiful space where your inner child and soul can feel so at home and safe to open up. You feel so frickin safe in his presence.”
Inquiry is fuelled by spiritual courage: the willingness to meet the truth, even if it conflicts with comfortable notions that help give you a sense of self and stability in the world.
The process drops you out of the known and conceptual - to involve the intelligence of the heart and bones and guts. You might even found the note of missing wisdom you needed in the Silence between thoughts...
Spiritual Counselling offers a space in which to hold open questions over time. The point being less to find quick and easy answers, and more to keep exploring past the quick and easy...to let the questions serve as excavation tools that reveal more and more truth. Landing on an answer, and then looking beneath for something deeper. Becoming open and permeable to deeper and deeper truths. In this way, the questions we ask ripen and mature us...and establish us firmly in the authenticity and wisdom of our own direct knowing.
And so on...
Nope. We’re still operating in the territory of professional counselling, which prohibits the therapist from pressing religious or spiritual beliefs on the client. Spiritual Counselling is more of a mindset - of exploring experience in a way that focuses more on soul, depth, and meaning. While still staying within the official rules of counselling.
The tendency of spiritual groups can often be to present collectively agreed upon truths and celebrate collectively agreed upon values. If you love these truths and values - great. Our focus is supporting you in an inner listening that deepens your relationship with your own truth. That might involve taking a spiritual teaching you’ve encountered and bringing it home - into your bones - through reflecting and embodying it over time. Or it might mean realising some of the spiritual teachings you’ve been presented with are not ultimate a good fit for you. We don’t have skin in the game to convince you either way: we just hold an open space for you to notice what’s true for you.
Likely! Spiritual Counselling is covered as “counselling” under many insurance plans. As a registered clinical therapist, my sessions are often eligible for reimbursement from insurance providers. However, coverage varies from plan to plan. Get in touch with any questions, and we can work together to see how we might get your sessions covered.
“Much of beauty, both in art and in life, is a balancing of the lines of forward-flowing desire with those of resistance - a gnarled tree, the flow of a statue’s draped cloth. Through such tensions, physical or mental, the world in which we exist becomes itself.”
