Entering her small, cozy office each month, I would gratefully sink down into an easy chair and prepare to explore my relationship to the Holy One of Being with the help of my mentor. She would light a candle to symbolize the presence of the Divine, and then she led us in a meditation, played a tape of chants, or read a verse of scripture that we reflected upon together. The session continued for about an hour, and during that time, the sister and I discussed my recent meditation and prayer experiences, my dreams, and any other aspect of life that affected my devotional practices. I left each meeting with a strengthened commitment to my daily meditation practice and a host of insights to mull over for the coming month.

Previous to meeting my director, I had already had a long history as a spiritual quester. As a teenager, I joined a devotionally-oriented religious community, and lived there for twelve years. During that time, I received valuable mentoring and advice from more senior members about the struggles, joys and hard-won realizations of spiritual practice, and eventually I was in a position to mentor some of my peers as well as the younger members. Although it wasn't termed as such in my community, this kind of specific guidance is generally known as "spiritual direction" within the Western tradition.

After leaving that community about ten years ago, my longtime devotional practices eventually became lackluster and irregular, and I felt the need to once again enjoy the nurturance and help of a teacher of the interior life. I was fortunate to locate a compatible and trusted spiritual director; although I now live in Asheville, North Carolina, I still receive guidance from my director in Boston, although now we communicate over the phone rather than in person.

The practice of spiritual direction has been around as long as there have been spiritual seekers. The Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches have a centuries-old heritage of this sort of companioning, and this practice exists in other traditions as well. Rabbi Kerry M. Olitzky, co-author of Jewish Spiritual Guidance, suggests that in the 18th and 19th centuries spiritual direction began to gain ground in the Protestant church. Olitzky's recent book seeks to invigorate the long-neglected tradition of spiritual mentoring within Judaism.

The ancient Celtic tradition of anamchara, or "soul friend," and the Orthodox Christian elder or staretz both reflect the same custom — an ongoing, one-to-one relationship with a person who walks the spiritual path with the quester, providing comfort, suggestions, instruction, and above all wisdom. The term "spiritual direction" is a misnomer in the sense that we can only be "companioned" by another human; the Holy Spirit is the ultimate spiritual director.

Directors typically meet with clients for an hour once a month. Some provide this service for a donation, while others charge a fee (usually in the $20-50 range, and often on a sliding scale). The majority are comfortable working with people from a variety of backgrounds and faiths. Although most directors are Christian, one does not generally have to be a Christian oneself to work with a director.

Although spiritual direction does overlap with pastoral counseling, there are differences. Spiritual mentoring has as its primary focus the client's relationship with the Divine, while a pastoral counseling session usually addresses a specific crisis or problem in the client's life. Rev. Jeffrey Gaines, a Presbyterian minister and executive director of Spiritual Directors International (a professional organization with over 3,000 members worldwide), discussed the differences between the two modalities in an interview in Hungryhearts News.

In spiritual direction, according to Gaines, "discernment is based upon the intimate engagement of two people walking into the sanctuary of God." A spiritual director "companions another person, listening to that person's life story with an ear for the movement of the Holy, of the Divine." When I spoke with Sister Jane Zimmerman of the Institute for Spiritual Leadership in Chicago, she noted that while "counseling guides a client through a particular problem and then comes to closure," companioning is an open-ended process; "it seeks to call forth one's own inner wisdom in order to be attentive to the spiritual journey."

While it may seem that a director's connection with a client mirrors the guru-disciple relationship, this is a misleading assumption. The contemporary Western model of a spiritual instructor is peer-based, recognizing that the director is also human and fallible. The ideal is to have two people working cooperatively to enhance the client's daily meditative and prayer life, rather than an "enlightened being" instructing a benighted, eternally devoted disciple.

Modern spiritual directors use a variety of techniques to facilitate awareness in their clients. For instance, as a spiritual director now myself, I work with directees using active imagination, dreamwork, the Christian prayer practice known as Centering Prayer, or other contemplative meditation methods. I also use mantra meditation, folk tales, poetry, and scriptures from various traditions.

With some directors, the enneagram, a nine-pointed figure illustrating personality types, is a popular tool these days, along with the more traditional exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola and the spirituality of St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross.

On a practical level, how does one go about locating a compatible teacher? Carl McColman, an Episcopalian spiritual director who administers a Web site dedicated to contemplative prayer (www.anamchara.com), advises those in search of a soul-friend to first pray and seek divine guidance. He also suggests that one could ask friends and clergy for referrals, or inquire at a local monastery or convent for someone trained in direction. Another good resource in this search is the Spiritual Directors International Web site at www.sdiworld.org. But one should only begin this search when one is sincerely committed to a deepening of the interior life within the context of daily practice.

For those who are so dedicated, though, working with a spiritual director can be immeasurably rewarding. As Sister Jane Zimmerman says of modern spiritual guides, "We come to our companioning role today as people who ourselves have our own woundedness, our own hungers and thirsts for wholeness and for the God we seek. The role is ever ancient, yet ever new and evolving."

Siobhán Houston, MTS, is a graduate of Harvard Divinity School, a member of Spiritual Directors International and a writer whose work has appeared in numerous publications, including GNOSIS: A Journal of the Western Inner Traditions and Intuition Magazine. She provides spiritual direction for people of all traditions and paths. She may be contacted at alexandria@post.harvard.edu.




An earlier version of this article appeared in Gnosis: A Journal of the Western Inner Traditions, No. 51 (Spring 1999). Used by arrangement with the author.
2000 by Siobhán Houston