What is spiritual direction anyway?

Post by Frank Placone-Willey

Spiritual direction, generally speaking, refers to the professional practice of providing support and guidance to those who are seeking personal strength, healing, and/or transformation via a conscious exploration and application of those traditions and rituals with which they identify.

The work of spiritual direction explores and draws upon life experiences, values, practices, ultimate questions, and beliefs in order to ennoble, elevate, heal, liberate and expand human consciousness in its particular embodied and relational contexts. As Kenneth Leech, author of Soul Friend, suggests, it is rightly concerned with:

• Living more consciously
  
• The needs and dynamics of the searching soul
  
• The development of whole persons vis-à-vis their current realities
  

Spiritual direction links contemplation and action as one of its essential aims. It helps people engage themselves and others in a more loving, just, meaningful, mutual and creative way.

It is not about persuading someone to conform to a particular theological orientation or soteriological formula. It is not about saving people for some doctrinally established afterlife. It is not so much about the “director” giving advice; rather it is about a “soul friend” who—using spiritual resources at her or her disposal—wisely companions others in order to help them salvage and find a truer, and truly more fulfilling, direction for their lives upon this earth.

The work of spiritual direction is a journey through which the one journeying may actually have an immediate experience of the transcendent ground of being from which we have all emerged, and to which we may yet all return.