If so inclined, you could spend years of your life reading books written about spirituality, discernment, prayer, religious and spiritual traditions and spiritual direction. Here’s a suggested reading list which contains a list of books and authors we recommend at the Hesychia School of Spiritual Direction. You could consider these books a starting point for learning more about the subjects near and dear to the heart of the practice of spiritual direction. The books are grouped according to general... Read more

  Spiritual directors need to make a living like everyone else. So, like all freelancers, we have to figure out what we are going to charge for our service. There is no standard fee or even agreed-upon scale for spiritual directors. There are lots of ways spiritual directors approach this. Ask around in your region and find out what the “going rate” is. Your rate should be comparable. You can try pricing yourself higher and see if the market can... Read more

Spiritual directors must pay special attention to the space they use for direction.  It needs to be quiet, comfortable, private and uncluttered. The space needs to mirror the contemplative work that will be done in it. The best spaces are artistically beautiful yet not overtly “religious.” You may be wondering, “What’s wrong with putting my religious knick knacks around the room?” Well, what is religiously significant to you may be a huge distraction to your directee. I don’t think directors... Read more

Once you have received training in the art of spiritual direction and want to get started as a spiritual director, you then have a lot of smaller decisions to make. Chief among them is what kind of spiritual director am I called to be? There are a lot of ways to be a spiritual director. Some of us set up private practices and basically “hang a shingle” in order to meet with people one-on-one. We hope to see quite a... Read more

  The psychological term transference is a concept that spiritual directors need to know and understand in order to not be derailed by it. It’s the natural, to-be-expected process by which a person seeking help in a direction relationship (or any helping relationship) transfers his or her own feelings, thoughts, impulses and fantasies about a person from one’s past (feelings not fully resolved) to the spiritual director.  The directee in the midst of transference is not aware that he or... Read more

Spiritual directors must be clear about limits. Boundaries are important for everyone, but for those of us in the helping professions, they are crucial. It is most important that the spiritual director know within himself or herself where those boundaries are set. A boundary is an external limit placed on a person, object, space or area. It determines how distant or close we become to another person. All human beings get to decide where we set our limits, our boundaries.... Read more

Because good spiritual directors do a lot of listening and very little personal sharing in a session, we sometimes become a target for other people’s projections of anxious thoughts and feelings.  Projection is a psychology term for a defense mechanism people use against their anxiety.  A common example of projection is when I am internally angry at the actions of another person but instead of “owning” my anger, I accuse the other person of acting out in anger. It’s a... Read more