FAQ

We see spiritual care as a place to process the BIGNESS of spirituality. We aren’t searching for certainty or theological absolutes. In a nutshell: we work with you to re-create a spiritual life as you want it to be (in or outside of a formal religion).

We help you: move through any pain associated with religious experiences, hold your story, and unpack big questions. We’ve been there too. We’re here as a guide while you heal from past experiences and create a new way forward that most resonates for you.

• Anyone who has felt abandoned by God, religion, religious families, or religious communities. 

• Anyone whose community has said they don’t belong.

• Anyone looking to process harmful or confusing theology or experiences with high-control religion with someone who understands the religious landscape and its particularities.

• Specifically for the LGBTQ+ community, for whom there are very few true places of refuge and safety in our current religious climate. We recognize the gaping wound that often exists being queer in religious spaces and families.

• Anyone searching for a new way to be a spiritual person in the world. We are decidedly not attached to outcomes, meaning we don’t have an agenda for your spiritual life. We want YOU to discover what feels authentic for you, without formula or prescription.

• Anyone looking to honor their inner knowing and learning to let that inner wisdom lead, responding to it in actionable ways.

• Anyone stuck in a funky situation within organized religion and looking for movement out of a holding pattern, or needing mirroring from someone with perspective and experience.

Definitely not. We don’t have an agenda for where your journey of spirituality takes you and — though many of our clients come from some sort of Christian background — many choose to create a totally new and different way of being themselves in the world. Others may choose to return to organized religion. Our work isn’t to make you Christian or not Christian, it’s to help you to be authentic to yourself in your spiritual expression and spiritual life.

We think of spirituality as the energetic flow that is the undercurrent for one’s entire life -- that flow that embodies what it is to be alive. These are matters of existence - things like meaning, connection, justice, and beauty. We’d like to see spirituality rebranded as an art, not a science, and we’d like to bring back play, experimentation, and fun into this search!

We believe that spirituality, much like sexuality, cannot be compartmentalized. Spirituality is just a part of who we all are, regardless of religious affiliation. To be a healthy, whole person, it’s important to work toward a holistic integration of our spiritual selves.

Though there are some areas of overlap between these two professions, we are not therapists.

Therapy is done by licensed clinicians who are psychologically trained, rather than theologically or pastorally trained. Many of our clients have been referred to us by their therapists, who find that a spiritual care practitioner can apply much more accurate and niche guidance in these areas of a person’s life. We are in full support of our clients using therapy and spiritual care in tandem for wholeness and healing.

We see spiritual care as existentially- oriented and as issue-specific, an intervention for a period of time when you are ready to find movement in your spiritual or religious life. 

Spiritual care is action-oriented and rooted in the nitty-gritty of specifics — we deal with anything from harmful theology to being stuck in an unhealthy religious system. Our practitioners are not licensed therapists but each does hold a masters degree in theology and has completed decades of service in pastoral care.

Each of our practitioners have a Masters Degree in theology, have completed supervision requirements for pastoral care, and have ten or more years of experience in spiritual leadership, both within churches and outside of organized spaces.

We see spiritual care as issue-specific, as an intervention for a short period of time when you are ready to find movement in an area of your spiritual or religious life. Spiritual care is action-oriented and rooted in the nitty-gritty of specifics. For those from religious backgrounds, you could compare spiritual care to how you might occasionally meet with a pastor, rabbi, or imam to work through a question or situation. Spiritual care, however, does not assume belief in God or a relationship with the divine.

“Spiritual direction” is designed to be long-term, ongoing accompaniment with a trained guide who is most concerned with the relationship between you and the divine.  It assumes that you have a connection to God and are seeking to deepen and strengthen that bond.  The most important focus of a spiritual direction session is “Where is God and what message does God have for me?”

Religion provides a way for us to channel our spirituality; it gives us a set of ethical stances, a central mission, a group of people to work things out with, and practices to stabilize and sustain us. Because of the strong bonds of love, unity, and familiarity that grow in this kind of environment, we become attached to the people and the way of life we create together.  

When fractures in trust, abuses of power, manipulation, controlling ideologies, or breech of boundaries occurs in religious communities, we work hard to protect leaders, peers, and the religious dogma itself.  We start to question and abandon ourselves and often mask to fit in.

The communities we are a part of tend to get conflated with God or divine love, which ultimately creates a sense of separation from God - a loss that is crushing, especially when combined with the loss of belonging, safety, peace, and purpose.