spiritual companionship

as you seek your place in the whole of things, tend your interior life, and nurture collective flourishing

What is spiritual direction?

Simply, supportive companionship on one’s spiritual journey.

In sessions with me, this can look like slowing down together in a practice of deep listening, intentional attention, and curiosity about how sacredness is present in your life. In this lingering together, there is room for grief and mourning, questions and conviction, joy and courage, and simply being.

I understand spirituality to be present through all aspects our lives – within, around, between, and beyond us. All realms of your life are welcome in this space.

I often turn to grounding resources that center the individual life in relationship to all the earth, more-than-human kin, and the human collective as sites of the sacred as we listen for divine guidance for the sake of your own flourishing and your generative contributions to the world in which we live.

What is your experience?

While I have been active in ministry for over ten years, I have eagerly anticipated shifting my focus to holding space with others in the work of spiritual companionship. I am currently enrolled in the Spiritual Direction Certification program with Cherry Hill Seminary. During the second year of the course we work with three people, for free, as a practicum. If you are interested in doing Spiritual Direction work with me, please contact me. We will meet monthly over zoom for 50 minutes.

What might spiritual direction offer?

I understand the spiritual realm to weave in and through all aspects of life. Spiritual direction can be a space for attuning differently or intentionally to divine wisdom in your own inner life/bodily reality, relationships to other people, land, and more-than-human kin, systems and lineages, religion, work, family, social justice, and our collective realities. A few things things this can look like:

a space for discernment – that is, making decisions or coming to clarity by way of intentionally sought wisdom and divine guidance
a steady relational space for your life to be witnessed with care and commitment
a carved-out time for being curious, exploring, unpacking, feeling through the spiritual aspects of your life
an opportunity to try on different spiritual practices
a trustworthy place to be entirely real, entirely human, entirely open to sacred power, possibility, and guidance in your life

What spiritual direction is not:

It’s not particularly directive! As a spiritual companion, my role is to join you in the depths of feeling, seeking, wondering, practicing. I will be with you. For you. Alongside you. Supporting you. Honoring your journey. But not directing you. The space is cultivated with an intention to connect with your understanding of sacredness as the force of direction in your life. Whether that’s gods, god, ancestors, lineages of wisdom, philosophical frameworks of ethics, church, the more-than-human world, or something else!

It’s not teaching. It’s us working together as you explore your own inner wisdom.

Spiritual direction is also not counseling or therapy. I love therapy! But I am not trained in that skillset or framework and will make referrals regarding treatment for mental health.

Some of the areas I specialize in

LGBTQIA

My queer and trans identities have been inseparable from my spiritual life and relationship to the sacred. Whether you’re longing to integrate your spirituality into your sexuality and/or gender, wish to have a companioning space to explore the sacred as queer, or love as queer-embracing, I’ve got over a decade of experience in supporting others in these processes and would be privileged to hold these realities with you.

eco-spirituality

Including but not limited to: encountering the more-than-human elements, creatures, aliveness of the earth as a dwelling place of sacredness. Reckoning with the griefs and realities of climate catastrophe. Practices that heal one’s relationship to the land, relationship to the animal of your own body, and relationship to shared resources. Opening to indigenous wisdom and exploring collective paths that return land to its original tenders.

spirituality & activism

Fighting for collective flourishing requires spiritual nourishment, spiritual tending, spiritual transformation. As one part of that, I can hold these truths with you: burnout is real, tending your own needs is a part of the work, your pain deserves a witness, you’re not alone, something divine holds you, us, everything.

spiritual direction for unlearning dominance

Unlearning whiteness, patriarchy, ableism, dominance over the land, the need to produce…the list of examples of dominance is lengthy and together we can walk or stroll our way through exploring the spiritual roots of each in your life, how they manifest in your body, and what might emerge differently for the sake of your own flourishing and all of ours.

complicated, changing, or multifaceted religious/spiritual identities

Whether you’re re-negotiating your relationship to a religion you’ve long identified with, have no idea what you think, feel, believe, are trying on something new, or holding multiple truths – perhaps seemingly contradictory truths – in a world that often defines spiritual identity in all too simple of terms, it’s all welcome here.

my approach to spirituality is political, poetic, creaturely, integrated, creative, bodily, collective.

About M (they/them)

Welcome, beloved! Please feel free to call me by my first name, M. In my other work, I am the co-founder and director of enfleshed where we create and facilitate spiritual nourishment for collective liberation. I live in the city currently known as Iowa City, home to the Ioway, Otoe, Omaha, Pawnee, Sioux, Sauk, and Meskwaki peoples. I was born and raised in the deep south and have occupied fundamentalist spiritual and political terrains that I spent many years of my younger life focused on unlearning. The process is forever ongoing, but has evolved into a radical politic and spirituality that knows how much theology can implicitly and explicitly shape a person and a world. I am absolutely enlivened by the opportunity to explore with others spiritual alternatives to dominance in all its forms, in every religious and spiritual space of life, making space for life to flourish. Though most of my work has been focused on engaging Christianities as a means of social transformation, my own spiritual belief system and practice is one of multiplicities – within and outside of Christianities.

A few things that I…

love:

poetry, creaturely kin, doing stained glass, hiking, laughing, organizing around things that matter with passionate people.

believe in:

the wisdom of the earth, queer people, the power of solidarity, transformative justice, the value of rest, friendship, slowing down, disrupting and divesting from whiteness, our need for each other, our great possibilities and potentials, individually and together.

identify with being:

queer (bisexual), nonbinary trans, white, dynamically disabled/chronically ill, southern born & raised (now in the midwest), contemplative, outdoorsy.

am religiously/spiritually:

Into using the language and frameworks of Christianity for disrupting supremacies and social dominance within and outside of it.

Into both non-theism and panentheism depending on the context of shared language. That is to say, sometimes I like using god-language to describe my belief systems and in other ways/places, I find it most authentic to speak of sacredness that is not at all personified.

Living in spiritual places of liminiality, of both/and, of contradictions and paradoxes, of friction and movement. My spiritual identity is queer – strange and difficult to put borders around.

hope to be:

a warm presence, a trustworthy companion, a champion of everything that moves us closer to collective flourishing, accountable, willing to grow, enamored with the world, faithful to seekers.

What’s the process?

1.

contact me

Feeling some interest and wish to explore further? Send me a message via the contact form below.

2.

we chat

If spots are still availabe, I’ll reach out for a brief introductory call.

3.

we discern

We’ll both discern whether it feels like I’m the best match for your spiritual journey in this time of your life.

4.

we meet!

If all the stars align, we’ll begin to meet once a month over zoom for 50 minute sessions. These sessions will be free through March 2023.