What are spiritual care and spiritual counselling?
Life is always changing and challenging. Life always puts (too) many demands on us. We have relationships, we study, have careers, we give or receive care, run a household and/or a business. We are successful, other times we fail. We aim for 'more', 'better', 'faster' or 'bigger'. At some point something makes us change the way we look upon life, others and ourselves. We hit a wall. Where once we drove on automatic pilot we are now forced to find a new route. The only sign we see is No Through Road. Due to technological problems, our Sat Nav is also out of function. The only thing left is our inner compass - our soul.
The soul is an oldfashioned word but it covers our most inner and personal voice. in plain English: our gut feeling, a knówing, a truth, a direction we can trust. It is the life of the mind (which is not the same as rational thinking) and the life of the spirit (which is also very much the life of the body). In spiritual care, we focus on overcoming the dualisms body-mind and rational-emotional. We aim to (re)connecting to our whole being: body, mind, spirit and heart.
We are talking about the spiritual realm. Nothing in the clouds but a reality on earth. Spirituality is something that is part of our human being, every human being. A group of international wise women and men have sat together and came up with a definition of spirituality:
'Spirituality is a dynamic and intrinsic aspect of humanity through which persons seek ultimate meaning, purpose and transcendence, and experience relationship to self, family, other, community, society, nature, and the significance or sacred. Spirituality is expressed through beliefs, values, traditions, and practices.'
Society paints a picture of how we should be: in control, planning, targetting, powerful, dominant, on top of things, well-prepared and ready for the future, our pension, insured until the grave. In reality, we are always fundamentally the opposite of all this. Everyone is vulnerable and not in control of those things that touch us deepest and matters most to us: our health, the future, love and friendships.
In our contemporary western society, the balance between human beings and the system is very upset. This dichotomy causes a lot of suffering. Instead of living in a controlled and predictable space we are always living in a liminal space. We are living 'in between'. The word liminal derives from the Latin 'limen', meaning threshold. The liminal space is a threshold, a doorway in between what we know and don't know, what we can control and we can't control, what is tangible and what is intangible, between earth and the spiritual. The art of life asks us to get comfortable with standing firmly grounded on this threshold. The threshold offers us a doorway to become truly balanced and to become fully human.
practical
My charge is $125 per session for private clients.
Corporate rates are depending on the assignment.
Please ask me to give a quote using the contact form.