| Rev. Ricky is a member of the Unitarian Universalist Spiritual Director's Network and Spiritual Directors International. He offers personal spiritual direction to private clients in the Los Angeles area. Spiritual Direction sessions are private meetings, usually one hour, once a month. Cost is $50 per one hour session. |
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What is Spiritual Direction?
Spiritual Direction begins with the assumption that all persons are connected to a divine source of wisdom. That wisdom constantly speaks to us, offering us help and guidance, and urging us toward the life choices that will make the divine goals of peace, love, and justice manifest in our lives and in the world. Most of us need help from time to time hearing and understanding the Divine voice. Spiritual Direction allows us to sit with another person, professionally trained, with whom we can talk about our spiritual journey and explore how the divine may be speaking to us. |
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| People often enter spiritual direction because they are facing a difficult life choice, because they have specific spiritual questions, or because they are sensing a call to go deeper on their spiritual journey. |
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What if I don't believe in God and prayer?
Spiritual Direction requires that the directee recognize some source of wisdom larger than their own person, and that the source of wisdom, however defined or named, has the ability to help and guide the directee. |
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| A sense of connection to something larger than ourselves is the basis of all spiritual work, however, there is no requirement that the "thing larger than ourselves" be named "God" or defined in the way that God is traditional defined. For some people the larger thing may be the human community or it may be the community of all living things, or the Earth, or the entire universe. |
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| How the source of wisdom speaks to us may be through prayer and meditation, as in traditional forms of spiritual direction, or the wisdom may come to us in other ways. Spiritual insight can come through talking with friends, reading and study, exercise, travel, creating art, dancing, journaling. Depending on how you define the source of wisdom some avenues of communication will be appropriate and others may not. Any life experience if lived with awareness can provide a window to the divine wisdom. |
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How is this different from therapy or counseling?
Mental Health therapy and Spiritual Direction both involve two people talking in private, one person a trained professional, the other person paying a fee and seeking help. But there are other aspects that make spiritual direction very different from therapy. |
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| Therapy begins with a model of illness, similar to a person going to see a doctor when they feel physically ill. The therapist's job, like the doctor's, is to find the cause of illness and restore the patient to wholeness. A Spiritual Director does not assume that there is anything broken about a directee. Although the directee may be troubled by a spiritual question, or anxious about a life choice, spiritual direction does not regard these as problems to be fixed but as opportunities to go deeper into spiritual exploration. Spiritual Direction isn't about restoring health, it's about taking a journey and following where it leads. |
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| The second difference between the two disciplines is that therapy involves only the two persons. The patient and the therapist face each other and the therapist is the source of wisdom. Spiritual Direction requires that there be a third entity involved. The directee is assumed to have a relationship with a wisdom source. During direction the directee talks about that relationship with the wisdom source and what he or she is learning. The Director helps translate and explore the messages the directee is hearing, and may offer suggestions of ways to hear more clearly. The Director is not themselves the source of wisdom. Rather, the Director agrees to be a companion on the directee's journey. The Director and the directee turn to face the same direction and they walk forward together. |
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