My understanding of spiritual counselling is constantly changing and unfolding, as is life itself. For me, the invitation of spiritual counselling, from the client’s perspective, is whatever you most need or long for in the moment of consciously meeting another.

 

It is not about fixing something, or making something better, or getting it right, or getting it wrong. There need be no destination. We might make that destination healing and wholeness… and yet, healing and wholeness are already the case; they are already the eternal constant, the eternal now. Healing and wholeness are already the truth of who you are, in your essential beingness. The spiritual counsellor holds this possibility – this truth – for the client.

 

Spiritual counselling creates space for two souls to come into conscious communion, to rest with one another, to rest in Source, to rest in the invitation to truth – the truth of who we really are. If we drop the stories and the problems, the rights and wrongs, the identities and desires – then what is left? Or rather, who is left?

 

And so spiritual counselling is also an exploration; an expedition; a journey; a pilgrimage. It is an adventure into the unknown. It is an invitation to surrender – if only for a moment – our sense of separation and disconnection: to recognise the boundless awareness or Source from which all life, all experience – every sensation, feeling, emotion, thought, action – arises.

 

The spiritual counsellor is a companion, a guide, an ally, an advocate for the client’s journey – loving that person into healing and wholeness. The counsellor holds the space open for new possibilities, for enquiry, for not-knowing. The counsellor does not have the answers – they celebrate the questions: honouring their client’s ongoing enquiry into the truth of each moment. What is it like to be alive now… and now?

 

What are you running from?

What are you longing for… waiting for?

Who would you be if you stopped running? If you stopped waiting?

If you could be longing?

Belonging.

Spiritual counselling is an invitation to come home to yourself, again and again. An invitation to remember, to awaken, to witness all that holds you back from recognising the truth of who you are – for the client and the counsellor. For spiritual counselling is also a mirror: the client becomes the reflection of the counsellor’s deepest truth, too. We can only be seen when we open up to receiving another – to receiving and seeing another as witness – and so both souls are seen and held within the light, within the Source.