What Exactly is Spiritual Direction?

Spiritual direction is an exploration of your spiritual path with a person trained in listening, deep reflection and discernment. Those are all carefully chosen, important words so let’s break it down. We explore with you. We don’t tell you what you need to know, do or have in order to be spiritual. It is essential that you feel the freedom that comes with exploration in spiritual direction. It is your path we are exploring. No one else’s. The time you spend with a spiritual director is supposed to be about you taking the next step along your spiritual path. Not taking a step your director thinks you ought to take. We’ll talk a lot more about this as we progress. The path is spiritual. We are not therapists poking around your psyche. All of life is spiritual—God is found in all our experiences. With that understanding we will explore with you many aspects of your life. But we keep the emphasis on spirituality. We are trained in listening. Yes, training is necessary in order to listen well. In our culture today, listening is a lost art. We are trained in deep reflection. Spiritual directors learn how to interact with you so that as you talk about your life, we can help you spiral deeper into areas where you find the most meaning. We are trained in discernment. Within the Christian tradition lies a lot of wisdom about making faithful choices. A good director is trained in the principles of discernment.

Comments

Risks in Loving Men Who Can’t Commit

Commitment phobic men are not wounded birds waiting to be nursed to health. Should women spend time, energy, and emotion on a man who may never be a part of their future? All too often women say to themselves or their friends: “Well, he wouldn’t commit in the past, but I’m different. I have more patience than the other women he dated, and I am more understanding than most women. I can help him.” If you have heard yourself saying the words “I can help him,” think of yourself as being trapped in the “wounded bird syndrome” in which your desire to nurse someone back to health is so strong that it clouds your logical thinking. Before getting too involved with a commitment phobic man consider asking yourself these 20 Questions to Finding New Love and Marriage. And then make a conscious effort to understand what is most important to you. 2 Virtues Enhance Falling in Love Forever. Also watc...

Emotional eating is when people use food as a way to deal with feelings instead of to satisfy hunger.

Emotional eating is when people use food as a way to deal with feelings instead of to satisfy hunger. We've all been there, finishing a whole bag of chips out of boredom or downing cookie after cookie while cramming for a big test. But when done a lot — especially without realizing it — emotional eating can affect weight, health, and overall well-being. Not many of us make the connection between eating and our feelings. But understanding what drives emotional eating can help people take steps to change it. One of the biggest myths about emotional eating is that it's prompted by negative feelings. Yes, people often turn to food when they're stressed out, lonely, sad, anxious, or bored. But emotional eating can be linked to positive feelings too, like the romance of sharing dessert on Valentine's Day or the celebration of a holiday feast. Sometimes emotional eating is tied to major life events, like a death or a divorce. More often, though, it's the countless ...

Statin side effects: How common are memory loss, diabetes, and muscle aches?

When the US Food and Drug Administration told the makers of cholesterol-lowering statins to add new side effect warnings to their labels last week, many of the 40 million statin users may have been unaware of the extent of the risks associated with these drugs that have been touted by some cardiologists to be safer than aspirin. No question, statins -- which include Lipitor (atorvastatin), Zocor (simvastatin), and Crestor (rosuvastatin) -- are relatively safe drugs, and they’ve saved thousands of lives over the past 20 years, particularly in men with established heart disease. But like any drug they can cause problems in some, including muscle aches, an increased risk of diabetes, and, gaining recent attention, memory loss. University of California-San Diego researcher Beatrice Golomb published a paper two years ago describing 171 statin users who reported that they had developed memory problems and dementia-like symptoms that the statin users attributed to their use of t...

Search This Blog