Healing With Spiritual Direction with Vanessa Sadler

by on August 30, 2024

In this episode, Rachael Clinton Chen is joined by Vanessa Sadler, a trauma-informed spiritual director and contemplative creative, who brings heartfelt wisdom to the conversation about healing from personal and collective trauma and abuse. Vanessa draws on her unique training in the Enneagram, spiritual direction, and Narrative Focused Trauma Care to explore what spiritual direction truly is (and what it is not). 

Vanessa highlights the transformative power of spiritual direction as a vital part of the healing journey, helping to renew our spiritual imagination and attachment to God, ourselves, and others. She also shares some contemplative practices and resources that can support this process, which are linked in the show notes below.

Listener Resources:

About Our Guest:

Vanessa Sadler is a trauma-informed Spiritual Director, Enneagram practitioner, and Facilitator with the Allender Center. Vanessa approaches client sessions with the understanding that our styles of relating with God, self and others were not formed in a vacuum. Our formative years and stories deeply shape who we are today and are worth exploring with curiosity and compassion. 

In addition to facilitating story groups and meeting with clients 1:1 at Abide, Vanessa is also a regular contributor at Red Tent Living where she shares essays, spiritual practices, and spoken word poetry. She recently became the co-host of Peace Talks, a podcast at the intersection of contemplative spiritual formation and racial justice. Peace Talks is a production of The Center for Formation, Justice, and Peace.

Vanessa considers it a sacred honor to come alongside people as they reclaim parts of themselves that have been buried or lost to the effects of trauma. 

Additional information can be found at her website: abidinginstory.com. 

Episode Transcript:

Rachael: Good people with good bodies. As you know, we take healing from trauma and abuse very seriously here at the Allender Center. It’s a core part of our mission and really central to a lot of the work that we’re doing. And we do our best, especially on the podcast, to engage the multidimensional nature of healing. Meaning there isn’t just one way to pursue healing. And quite often, especially throughout our lifetime, because we know healing takes a lifetime, we need to engage multiple modalities in our healing journey that tend to the wounds of our bodies, our minds, our relationships and capacity for love. And that includes our spirituality and our imagination. And one modality of care and healing that we haven’t engaged as much on the Allender Center Podcast is the work of spiritual direction. I think it can be a vital part of healing our spiritual imagination and attachment with God and self and others. But we’ll get to that. And as someone who has benefited greatly from spiritual direction in my own healing journey, I’m thrilled to welcome my friend and colleague, Vanessa Sadler, to join us today. Welcome, Vanessa.

Vanessa: Thank you so much for having me. Rachael. Let’s get to be with you.

Rachael: Vanessa Sadler is a trauma-informed spiritual director, a contemplative creative, retreat facilitator and Peace Talks podcast host. She brings an embodied wisdom, a rooted spirituality, a gracious truth telling, and a gritty hope. In her work with others, she utilizes her training and spiritual direction with an emphasis in Ignatian spirituality, her training with the Allender Center and Narrative Focused Trauma Care and her training as a certified Enneagram practitioner to help others understand that our formative years and stories profoundly shape who we’re today and our worth exploring with curiosity patience and kindness. If you want to learn a little bit more about the work that Vanessa’s doing, you can find her at abidinginstory.com . So I just want to say that a lot of what happens, a lot of the impact of trauma and abuse is that our imaginations get disordered and our capacity to perceive who God is, who we are, our identity, our style of relating, these very core parts of us get malformed, get disordered and distorted. And sometimes that can be engaged, certainly through the therapeutic work, through medical care, through all the different somatic care that we talk about and healing from trauma. But I think spiritual direction has a very particular place in that work. I mean, as someone who is a pastor by orientation, I should also say certainly if you’re in a good faith community with trauma-informed pastors who take healing seriously, that can be a very transformative and healing place as well. But like I said, spiritual direction is a very particular type of healing work. And Vanessa, you and I have, obviously you have your experience with it. I’ve had a lot of healing come in my work with spiritual direction, but not everyone is familiar with what that means or maybe they have really preconceived notions as to what spiritual direction is. So how would you explain spiritual direction to someone who’s unfamiliar with it?

Vanessa: Yeah, I like to think about what spiritual direction is in terms of why a person may find themselves seeking spiritual direction. Usually someone who’s exploring it or looking into it kind of uses this language of more. There’s a knowing that there have been ways of doing things and ways of relating with God or scripture community that are just no longer working either because they’ve uncovered parts of their story and they’re unpacking trauma or there’s just a desire or a longing for more, even if they can articulate what that more is. And so a spiritual director is someone who comes alongside and accompanies companions, those who are on the journey of discovering what the nature of the more is or untangling or uncoupling to use a trauma word, their spiritual spirituality and spiritual trauma from the body and the institution and the person or the perpetrator. And that’s generally discovering more of that is through a contemplative route, which usually has less to do with doing and more to do with being. So it’s this art of sacred listening together. I really like the imagery that Margaret Gunther uses of spiritual direction where the client or the directee is in a birthing process and the spiritual director’s role is that of a midwife of attending and just sort of attuning to whatever’s gestating in someone, whether that’s over a long period of time with that uncoupling or untangling process or it’s just discernment about a decision or just during the length of a particular session. Yeah, so I don’t remember who said this, it might’ve been David Benner who’s an author, but that spiritual direction is a prayerful conversation to facilitate greater awareness of the movement of God in your life. And so if we even kind of break that down, not as linear steps, but maybe as movements in a piece of music, there’s this prayerful conversation of attunement and attentiveness to the directee from the director as to what’s at play in their spiritual life. And also the spiritual director is listening for spirit and where spirit is showing up and at play or at work in the client. And there’s this movement of facilitating greater awareness. And I like to use the metaphor of going on a hike with someone. It’s like we’re going on a hike together and we’re walking and you’re determining the path that we’re taking, but we might pass a particular tree or a rock or a stream. And my role is to just be curious like, Hey, we’ve passed this several times. Is there anything that you want to tell me about? Is there significance about this tree or this stream or this rock for you? So that practice of greater awareness and then the listening and attentiveness can move out of the session and start to become a greater awareness of the movements of divine love in the stuff of everyday life and how we move and have our being.

Rachael: I love that. And I love this sense of sacred listening and the more, because I know for many of us, maybe we’ve been in context where our spirituality has actually been really dictated by others, or we question our own knowing what could we possibly know and is what we’re experiencing God or our sin or the demonic, whatever our worldviews are or whatever our framework is. And I think there’s something so beautiful about the possibility of someone being a midwife with you that has a posture of a lot of humility and listening. It can be such a corrective experience of a more dictating type of spiritual mentorship that tells you what to think or feel or what’s true and what’s not true, and can be a really kind way of restoring a sense of your own intuition and your own knowing. And for some of us, that is harder work than for others. And it makes me think about in a lot of the work I’ve done pastorally thinking about the impact of trauma on our spiritual imagination. When you read a lot of people who talk about contemplation, often they talk about contemplation in isolation. But if you have a really disordered imagination, sometimes contemplating in isolation, whether you have mental illness or just very debilitating trauma doesn’t feel great or doesn’t, feel like you can actually trust what you’re perceiving. So to have a really kind wise presence of another, to be listening alongside who’s also holding things with a lot of curiosity, I’ve just experienced that as leading to some really profound moments of healing and some very restorative moments with God and spirit and Jesus that have been, yeah, just so life-giving to me, so I love some of the language and imagination you’re helping us have for what is possible with spiritual direction.

Vanessa: I think it’s a good place to answer this question of why spiritual direction only meets monthly. But I mean it does get into that this is the place you heal from spiritual abuse. So spiritual direction meets monthly for a reason. It’s because it’s really about becoming aware of the active presence of the sacred in our particular midst as opposed to depending so heavily on the spiritual director as the primary means of facilitating that connection or like you said, telling us what to do, how to do it, what’s acceptable, what’s not, which is so characteristic of people who’ve experienced any form of dogmatism or spiritual abuse within a really rigid frame and in spiritual direction we actually want to interrogate some of those form aspects or malformation or misalignments in order to be able to reach a more conscious connection with a divine without the background noises or those explicit or implicit messages that we’ve come to learn or were taught about God, about our bodies, about our minds, about our hearts. Yeah.

Rachael: Yeah. I’m going to jump to one question and come back to another one, but in some ways where you’re going is maybe not a frame or a lens that every spiritual director has. Just like we talk about finding a therapist, really you have to be discerning around what’s their framework and modality is that going to fit with what you’re looking for? It’s similar with spiritual direction and you’re self described and also trained trauma-informed spiritual director. And so how did that come to be something that’s true about your work in spiritual direction? Both what does it mean to be a trauma-informed spiritual director, and how did you get there?

Vanessa: Yeah, so I would say most things, there were multiple parallel paths that were happening simultaneously throughout my life. So full disclosure, I was stressing about all that this question in particular could or would entail as you and I were playing with it as a topic of conversation. And I was venting to my spouse and I was like, this is hard. And he was like, he’s just so wisely said, I’ve heard you say before that all you’ve done is go after your own healing. I was like, that’s alright. That’s so sweet. And just really dropped me down into, yeah, that really is how all of this happened. So we’ll hop around just a little bit, but my hope is that it sort of incorporates itself as I go. So I would say that I’ve always had a contemplative heart, contemplative meaning like you said, that kind of spirituality that’s about slowing down. It’s about being more than adding to. And a lot of the audience, I grew up in an evangelical context where that didn’t always blend well, but I was in college when in one of my theology classes, we were given this book, we were working through this really teeny tiny book that was like 180 something pages called Jesus Asked. And the premise, as you can imagine, was what is Jesus up to in the gospels when he responds to these questions and confrontations with questions, more questions? And this idea being that there is more emphasis and curiosity put around the heart than on what the answer to the question is. And even that in Jesus modeling asking questions, he’s actually giving us permission to wonder and to ask. That’s right. All the questions in the world. And so fast forward several years after a series of events in my life found me in therapy and for years, and I started looking at my own trauma. And here’s where I really love what Melody Li of Inclusive Therapy puts it. She says, society asks what’s wrong with you? A trauma informed approach asks what happened to you. And if you take it even farther, a racial-trauma informed approach asks what happened to you and to your people or your community and what is still happening to you. So once we start to look at it, and once I started to look at my own story, it really isn’t difficult. It’s really difficult not to see the connections between personal and collective trauma and the lasting generational society and societal impact. So I was knee deep in that when I started meeting with a spiritual director because I realized that the implications of trauma and racial trauma in particular in my own life and my faith at the time, the sort of distorted ways that I had come to view myself as a result of internalized racism and the distorted ways that I’d come to view God because of what I was taught. And it was at that same time that I was starting an Enneagram coaching business, is seeing how much of the Enneagram really is a wisdom teaching that sits under this umbrella of spiritual direction. And my integrity compels me. I’m like, I must become trained in this if I’m going to offer any amount of credible care love. So I started…

Rachael: I love that. That’s good. We can all use a little more of that in our lives. I think especially with the internet and all the access we have to information, so.

Vanessa: I’m just a fan of guardrails. They can be a river bed that sort of puts me on a track. So I started to become trained as a spiritual director in order to keep having these rich and deep conversations with people. And I was also going after my own healing too. So I landed in the NFTC training program at the Allender Center, and so I was simultaneously being trained in narrative focused trauma care and becoming a certified spiritual director, both programs that were entirely immersive and practice based.

Rachael: Oh, wow. You were in it.

Vanessa: I was getting it from all sides here. And so it landed me in my own story and how that had unfolded. So my spouse was just really spot on. I was going after my own healing. But that question of what happened to you and your people, the collective groups to which were connected, whether that’s by gender, class, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, I think that’s a central element to the ways that sacred attachment with God becomes misaligned or where that rupture of relationship with God happens.

Rachael: Absolutely. And in some ways you put some words to this even in sharing about your different training, but some people could think about spiritual direction. Well, first of all, often we have to just deconstruct what we mean by spiritual anyway, right? Because it could be perceived as this kind of ethereal place that’s outside of us and it’s not embodied and it’s not connected to our mind and our reasoning and our emotions, but we know it’s deeply embodied, but it has connection to story work and pastoral care and therapeutic care and somatic work. And it also has difference. So in thinking about your own story and your own healing path, the work you do as people, how do you differentiate between these different types of care in your work, both where they need to collide and then where they differentiate?

Vanessa: Yeah, that’s so good. There can be degrees of similarities. So it’s important that spiritual direction is not problem solving. It’s not therapy or pastoral care. It’s also not a context for faith sharing or any kind of Bible study or catechesis. But I like to think of, we have doctors and chiropractors, functional medicine for our physical health and maintenance. We have therapists, somatic practitioners for our mental and emotional wellbeing. Spiritual direction is for that spiritual health. It’s our interior life. It’s how we relate with holy mystery, and it sort of rounds out our care team in a holistic and a w-h-o-l wholistic way. So I’m really clear on my website and in the consultation process that about what each of my offerings entails, and some people know between spiritual direction, story work or Enneagram, which type of care they’re interested in when they reach out to me. And some are interested in all three. So we have to discern that in the consultation process. But once we establish, okay, let’s say you’re wanting to do story work. There’s a structure that I hold to, you’re bringing a story or a series of stories and we’re engaging them, and it isn’t new to you, Rachel, that these are thematic elements that start to pop up and show up in our stories because they’re not just personal. They exist in context and time and place, and they exist within larger systems and structures. And so I’m engaging a story with a person or a client and we’re uncovering these themes. I’m mindful of these contexts that they’re bringing, and I’m kind of bookmarking as a spiritual director, let’s say, if there’s something that I want to bring up or multiple stories that point to a broader spiritual rupture that you’re talking about between the relationship with God and self. And so I’m listening for where at some point there might be a willingness to step into those realms further down the line, but the same is also true in spiritual direction. So typically you might meet with a therapist weekly or biweekly, but with spiritual direction you’re meeting monthly. And we’re purposefully aiming our focus on the context and the content of what someone’s coming in with. And those questions and curiosities and even the silence are more around those relational aspects of what a person’s encountering with God and how it’s playing out maybe in light of old religious tapes or teachings about love or compassion or mercy or grace and where there’s room for reordering. And so I would just say that it happens a lot where somebody maybe starts with Enneagram work and through that becomes interested in deeper understanding of their story and spending time in their stories starts to disrupt those paradigms and they become interested in a different type of healing care or modality. And so there’s a natural transition there, but I always have my hats on. I’m working in the context of Enneagram. I’m listening for story same in spiritual direction. I’m doing story work. I’m listening for spiritual elements and the persona or personality that a person’s to take on in order to mitigate harm. If I’m doing spiritual direction, I’m listening for how they’ve metabolized their trauma maybe through a religious filter. So yeah, it’s just a matter of which hat sits top my head the most at the time.

Rachael: Yeah. Oh man. I’m just thinking about, well, I’m thinking about the long journey I’ve been in with healing that I will be in for the rest of my life and just my seasons of pursuing spiritual direction often in partnership with some therapeutic work. Or there was a particular season a few years ago where I was doing spiritual direction and EMDR at the same time with different practitioners, and that honestly was some of the most wild healing work I’ve done because they were just informing each other in such stunning ways because so much of e EMDR is also listening to the interior world with an emphasis on your body and what’s coming up and not trying to overthink it, but this work of contemplation, again, let’s come back to it a little bit because you were putting some really beautiful words to this and that there’s work of contemplation that is deeply personal, but any healing work is not just our interior world is not the end. It’s a really core part of our capacity to connect to God and to others. And if I’ll just say from a Christian framework to then also be a part of the kin-dom or kingdom of God and bringing flourishing and healing to others or contending with the systems that perpetuate harm so that we don’t have to be only doing healing work. I mean, sometimes as a healer it’s hard because we are the people who are in the trenches trying to provide healing care, and we don’t always get to be the people on the front lines of advocacy or justice work, but we know ultimately that justice and contemplation are not like polar opposites and neither is mercy, neither is humility. Are these really core parts of really what make us a flourishing human being. So could you speak a little bit more to this intersection of love, justice, mercy, humility, a capacity to care about others and the work of contemplation?

Vanessa: Yeah, absolutely. I’m thinking about the Desert fathers and mothers of the early third and fourth century who were like, we’re going to cloister ourselves off from society. We’re going to live this minimalistic life in solitude because they were taking the teaching of Jesus seriously about selling all the possess in order to inherit eternal life. And we can argue, I like to argue, that they didn’t even get to end up spending their time naval gazing and looking inward all the time with God because people eventually came to them and sought their wisdom and insight and clarity. And so the Ammas and Abbas are, they didn’t turn ’em away. They converse with people. They listened. They gave up their time and their energies, and we would even say they gave up their service. They were of service to others. So there’s a book called Into the Silent Land by Martin Laird, and he talks about this image of a bicycle wheel where the center is our inner life in the places that we practice faith and spirituality that’s focused on that conscious contact like divine love. And then there’s the spokes that go out from the center and that the spokes are people. And so when we move out and away from the center, the farther away we become from one another, but the picture of the wheel, the near we’re to the center, the near to the ground of our being, we’re near to one another. We can see the needs of others around us. We can be in communities that don’t look like ours and recognize through the lens of love the Imago Dei in people of different ethnicities and cultures and socioeconomic statuses. So if we’re being transformed on the inside and viewing ourselves as part of a community in light of who God is, then our contemplation really can’t help but transform our action. Like you said, there are some who might really see contemplative Christian practices and rhythms as sort of the solitary and disconnected thing from what’s going on to the greater world at large. But the more that I rightly see myself in view of the maker and creator of all that is I can’t help but be confronted with the belovedness of the person who cuts me off in traffic or the person who lives down the street and flies a politically inflammatory flag. For me, it’s sometimes is the parent at the soccer field who is coaching from the sidelines and mercilessly laying into their child, and I’m in my mind going, beloved, beloved, beloved, if it’s true about me, then it’s true about you. I think that’s a really good starting place.

Rachael: I feel very convicted right now in a good way. I think I need to do more contemplation because I’m really struggling to do that good work that I know we’re called to. And sometimes making space, especially when we are traumatized, space is such a luxury because our limbic system is just working and there’s something about the kind of rhythm and work of spiritual direction that can help us practice what it is to make space. And I love how you say in the mundane, even the examples you’re bringing, it’s like it’s really playing out in these very mundane, everyday interactions. And we could even take it smaller in our home with our children and our spouses and our close friends and relatives where we just need a breath and a pause. In some ways, any healing work is a practice is practicing, and I would imagine as a spiritual director, it’s not outside of the realm possibly that you’re giving people practices to utilize. Are there practices when it comes to contemplation and justice and this work of doing that connection work of the internal and the external that come to mind?

Vanessa: I like to think of practices as letting go. So rather than a list of like, I’ve got to read this or I’ve got to sit with this, or I love Lectio Divinia and things like this, and those are important practices, but letting go of something in order to make room for something else. So letting go of the parts that no longer serve the person I want be so I can make room for the transformative work of who I’m becoming. Kaitlin Curtice talks about we’re always arriving. So I think about the spiritual practice of letting go of judgment to make room for the benefit of the doubt. So you and I, Rachael, our mutual colleague, Linda Royster, came on to Peace Talks and she talked about how racism is a projection and it comes from the places of unhealed wounds. And so another way that we might say that at the Allender Center is self contempt manifest as other centered contempt and vice versa. Okay, so what does it look like or what would it mean to let go of the judgment of another person? It may mean I have to confront my own biases and encoded messages about a person or a demographic in order to make room for the benefit of the doubt. And that doesn’t mean that I necessarily come to agree with where a person stands, but it does mean that I can take an internal and hopefully an external posture of not making a fixed pronouncement about who they’re, because every person has a story and one that began really long before them. So that’s one practice that I think about. I also think about this practice of letting go of scarcity and the anxiety that’s often connected to a sense of scarcity and making room for enough. So we have these beautiful teachings of wisdom from the seasons that show us in cyclical ways and that there’s a time for everything. And we have these teachings in our sacred text in our scripture that tell us about daily manna, daily bread. And so I’m not just talking about finances and money. We can be anxious about the scarcity of our patients with others, that there’s going to be a scarcity of our compassion for ourselves or the way that we deal with others. There’s exhaustion when I just don’t feel like I have enough for today and there’s room for that. But are we also making room to remember that there’s an ever flowing river of abundance that is a source of mercy, love, compassion, humility, empathy, and that it’s not just all on us to think or to act our way into being or becoming, but to let ourselves become upon in the moment. I like to say in my session sometimes for the next 50 minutes, we have all the time in the world because time is a construct. Anyone who’s been around the Allender Center for any length of time knows that linear time is irrelevant. But so for a God who exists outside of time and space, there’s always enough. So what is it in me or in my story that holds a lot of angst around there not being enough emotionally, mentally, spiritually, and yes, even physically in terms of those resources, that there is not enough to go around. I have one more if you want one more.

Rachael: Yeah, go for it. I’ll just say before you share that as an Enneagram 2 who’s child is not sleeping right now because she’s cutting molars. Even just your simple reminder of exhaustion and that feeling of, because as a two, so much of my scarcity comes from if I’m not useful or helpful, if I can’t attune to all the things, if I can’t rise to the occasion, if I need care and I need rest, then I’ll be without love, I’ll be abandoned, I’ll be too much. I can’t deal with the anxiety. And I think it’s just a good reminder, even though it feels hard in our world today, when I think about the genuine, even the way I’m saying that what I feel is the more deserved scarcity that needs to be attuned to the more urgent where people are facing famine and violence and genocide and a lot of these collective complex oppressive realities we talked about, it can almost be like, well, what right do I have the tap into this divine source of love? And I have to constantly remind myself, I’m not God. I do have finite resources, and in many ways I’m projecting onto God a kind of finite resourcing that God is saying, I don’t need you to limit my resourcing, and I’m quite capable of holding, and I actually need you in order to attend to these things and stay in this work of justice for the long haul. We actually do need you to tap into some resourcing and receive, but it’s such hard work. So I’m just grateful for the reminder that it does take practice for me a lot of practice, and I have to come back to it and start over again and again and again and again.

Vanessa: Yeah, I think that’s why I love that they’re called practices. Practice doesn’t make perfect, practice makes progress. So yeah, you mentioned silence, and I think of reframing it like spiritual practice of silence is very familiar, and if you let me, I just want to geek out here for a second, go

Rachael: Go for it.

Vanessa: Because in contemplative language, there are two different buckets when we talk about forms of prayer. So there’s the kataphatic prayer, kataphatic type of prayer which is like prayer that speaks or uses words or images or ideas, imagination to relate to God, and then there’s apophatic prayer, and that’s prayer that occurs without words or concepts or images. There’s more silence, there’s more stillness, there’s more unknowing. And uncertainty is seen as a doorway rather than an obstacle to communion with the sacred or with God. And so that there’s actually a gift in our discomfort. There’s gift in the letting go. And so something like centering prayer, which is an apophatic prayer practice of silence, letting go of thoughts as they come by returning to a sacred word or phrase like Jesus, love, God, father, mother. What inevitably happens when you’re letting go of those thoughts and centering prayer, coming back to that word is that spills over again into the stuff of everyday life where I’m letting go of the resentment or the hopelessness that I feel about the world and what’s unfolding in front of me, and I’m making room for creative solutions of love or the ability to see something that’s not yet as though it were.

Rachael: I just love that. I’m like, this gave us more practices. This is great. I think, yeah, where my mind is going is just that you and I have talked and worked and kind of been in some of the trenches of spiritual abuse and the impact of spiritual abuse and are deeply compelled to offer healing work for others to not have to give up their sense of attachment to a God of love and abundance in order to stay safe. Spiritual abuse often sets us up to have an imagination of God that becomes abusive because of the nature of the abuse. And so it cuts off this source of connection and invites, understandably so, a kind of splitting that just makes being human a lot harder makes feeling a lot harder, and certainly being in relationship and in community a lot harder just thinking about the work of spiritual direction and mostly just wanting to ask some of your wisdom. If someone’s listening today, and I would say, Vanessa, even if you have a practice that comes to mind that you actually want to take us through on the podcast, that’s good as well. No pressure there, but just if you were making space for someone who’s coming in saying, I know there’s more for me, but it almost feels impossible, what is some of the beginning work so that someone could have an imagination as to what’s possible for them even in that next step where we just think I’ll never get to recover some of these things that have actually been precious to me. And I’m a huge advocate that our innocence and our desire to belong to God, to a community that has meaning and purpose and to actually feel beloved is still worth fighting for. And that bad shepherds and abusive people and systems don’t get to have the final say, and that is so much easier said than done when you are in that really fragmented kind of tormented place of needing help to have a different imagination, not to ask you to tend to all of that, but just knowing this is so much a core part of your work, if someone were to come to you and say, I know there’s more for me, I can’t imagine it right now.

Vanessa: Yeah, I think you mentioned my training is in Ignatian spirituality, and I think this is where that frame really is helpful because Ignatian spirituality, in reference to say Ignatius of Loyola who founded the society of Jesus or the Order of Jesuits, Ignatian spirituality really is this embrace of God in all things that are emotional, and our thought life really aren’t from our spiritual life or from our faith, and therefore we aren’t shutting off this part of ourselves, this emotional thought beings that we are in order to engage with God, but that our desires and our pain are actually the entry points to really wrestling well with those big and those little, the personal and the cosmic aspects of life. So yeah, what I would say is I find my way in my notes… Is that we all come with the filters, we all come with the embedded and encoded messages of how we come to see God as removed or critical, and that makes it really difficult to have any kind of spiritual imagination for something different. And that’s actually a place that I love to work within because when something is shattered and it feels like it’s not even there anymore, then you can almost, not entirely, but you can almost start to build it from the ground up and you can start with a different foundation. And so spiritual direction is where we bring in those spheres about, I don’t even know how to do this right, I’m making a wrong decision about a teaching because we’ve been told that the human heart is deceitful above all things, then we can hold it up against the places where we’re invited to delight ourselves in the company of God and they’ll give us the desires of our heart. So the question really, it changes the prayerful conversation. Do I believe at my core and profoundly deceitful and beyond cure? or do I believe that there’s actually no height or depth that I could go that divine love wouldn’t be with me and not because they followed me there or came unbiddingly, but because I actually can’t be separated from the love of God that’s in Christ. And yes, we’ve mitigated the pain and the suffering and the trauma, and that keeps us bound to patterns of behavior, including being really fearful about trying something new without various rungs of authority, saying what’s okay and what’s not. But that doesn’t alter the bedrock of the nature of the One who’s put just and holy and good desires in my heart and the infinite desires of eternity into the hearts of finite human beings. So it becomes this interplay and this sort of loop of how do I experience divine love in ways that reshape and reform what I believe about the nature of the infinite? And then I can shift my perspective about how I see myself in relation with the source of everything that is life giving. And I just think that’s a really fun place to dance in the mystery and learn the steps as we go.

Rachael: Well, I feel like we’ve covered a lot of ground, and I hope that it’s been life giving to people and help to create more imagination about some of the work that’s possible in spiritual direction as a healing modality that can be a companion to your healing journey as we bring things to a close. Well, first I want to just say thank you for your generosity and vulnerability. I just deeply appreciate your wisdom, but also your hope and your kindness. Are there resources that you’d recommend for folks interested in learning more about spiritual direction and/or having access to some practices that could get their journey started?

Vanessa: Yeah, absolutely. So three books that I usually recommend for people. One is Starting Spiritual Direction by John Mabry. It’s a great book. If you’re new to spiritual direction, you’re thinking about exploring it, just sort of unpacks what you need to know before stepping into a session for the first time, what you can expect to make the most of your time. And then for just meditation, I love Meditations of the Heart by Howard Thurman, spiritual advisor to Martin Luther King and many others in the Civil Rights movement. And really, I mean a true Christian mystic, I think. And then in terms of that inward journey that we were talking about, I really like The Gift of Being Yourself by David Benner. He’s a psychologist and he’s also a spiritual director and just plays a lot with what Kierkegard meant when he said, with God’s help, I shall become myself. This paradox that when we authentically become more of ourselves, we’re actually becoming more Christlike as well. And then in terms of practices and resources and practices, the other organization that I spend a lot of time playing in and with is the Center for Formation Justice and Peace. And three times a year we have what’s called an online retreat called Nourish, and you can just enter your email address and for 30 days you’ll get various practices of contemplation and spiritual groundedness. There’s some Lectio in there with audio recorded of my voice coming into play that can just be in your ears. And there’s some Visio Divina in there as well. So images. Images, yeah, that’s what I’d mentioned. So that’s centerfjp.org

Rachael: Awesome. That sounds incredible. And I would love to have your voice speaking scripture to me or inviting me to certain meditation. So thank you for all the work that you do in various forms. And thank you so much again for joining me on the Allender Center Podcast. As I mentioned, if you want to find out more about the work Vanessa is doing, you can find her at abidinginstory.com and also, she’s doing a lot of work with the Allender Center as well. So hopefully you’ll be hearing more from her out on these Allender Center streets too. So, again, thank you Vanessa.

Vanessa: Thank you Rachael, thank you so much for having me.