Understory:
Individual Spiritual Coaching
Spiritually-grounded coaching and mentoring for creative, complex, and curious souls.
In our work together, we will engage in deep listening to help you give voice to your innate wisdom and align with your authentic spiritual expression.
Our time together is a co-creative process, responsive to your unique needs and interests. In our sessions, I support you in exploring what is most alive in your inner landscape through a variety of modalities, including guided meditation and visualization, creative exercises, and embodied practice. I reflect back to you your vibrancy through the prism of Jewish and other wisdom traditions.
I work with people of diverse backgrounds in their personal and spiritual self-discovery and development. People who are drawn to work with me include:
- People with a deep desire to explore their spirituality with compassionate and non-judgmental support
- those navigating a period of existential or spiritual questioning, transition, or discernment
- People of Jewish ancestry or background who wish to deepen their connection to Judaism
- Gifted, neurodiverse, and multi-exceptional people seeking to explore and integrate their unique minds and spirits
In this 30-minute session, we will spend time getting to know each other, and I will lead us in a brief spiritual practice exploration that supports you on your path of discovery.
How it Works
Before our first session, I will send you a form to complete so that I can get to know more about you and what you are seeking from coaching.
In our first session together, we will explore what you shared in the intake questions more deeply and discern a starting point for our journey together.
The shape of our time together emerges from your needs and desires, and what is most alive or present in a given session.
A typical coaching session may include:
- A guided meditation to arrive and begin our time together
- Reflections on what has emerged since our last session
- Open discussion and reflections on questions or other areas of focus
- Additional guided meditations, visualizations, or other spiritual practices to support your exploration
- I may offer suggestions for next steps – things to practice, explore, or reflect on between now and our next meeting.
Is this for me?
What is spiritual coaching?
Coaching generally refers to intentional work in which a professional supports someone in working toward a goal. I actually don’t love this term to describe spiritual support, but I have adopted it because of its growing familiarity over the past several years.
Another way to describe what happens in a session is guiding or accompaniment. When you’re visiting new terrain, it can be helpful to have someone who walked that path before to come along for support. As a guide, I can share what I have learned from my experience of previous journeys as we navigate together.
This work also shares much in common with chaplaincy and spiritual direction. There is a rich history in many spiritual traditions of people seeking one-on-one support from spiritual leaders and teachers. I see my work as continuous with and a reclamation of the roles that spiritual leaders have historically played as resources and guides to individual seekers. While spiritual leadership in contemporary Western cultures is most visible in the public personas of leaders of prominent communities, I believe that there is a deeply-felt need for the kind of spiritual care and support that happens in personalized settings.
How is this different from therapy?
I do not diagnose and treat mental illnesses, as licensed psychotherapists do. However, there is an area of overlap between the kind of work that takes place in spiritual coaching or guidance sessions and in therapeutic settings.
In my own experience and that of many friends and loved ones, I have noticed that many people go to therapy for reasons that extend significantly beyond the treatment of mental illness. For many people, therapy has become a part of how we care for our emotional and spiritual wellbeing in an ongoing way. I believe that there is power in witnessing and being witnessed – sharing our stories, being seen and heard by a compassionate other, and receiving mirroring and support. I see my role as a spiritual guide primarily as that of witness and mirror, drawing on my knowledge and experience to offer support and help you find clarity.
For matters beyond the scope of my spiritual guiding practice, I will refer to appropriate professionals.
I’m not religious. Is this for me?
I believe that we all have a spiritual dimension, which is an essential part of our whole, integrated selves. Our inner worlds are rich and complex. It is difficult to distinguish between aspects of ourselves and experience that we may name thoughts, emotions, intuition, conscience, the unconscious, or the voice of divine wisdom. Indeed, depending on one’s culture, similar experiences may go by any one of those names. In the post-Enlightenment, Western materialist paradigm, we are taught to place greater value on that which can be physically observed or quantified. Psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience and other disciplines are the domains that have been deemed acceptable sites of exploration of the inner world in our rationalist context.
But the realm of the psyche and the emotions is not so easy to separate and distill. In fact, the Greek word psyche means “soul.” In matters of the unseen, we are touching on matters of the soul, of spirit. Spirituality does not belong to any one religious tradition or institution. We can think of spirit as the lifeforce energy that resides within each of us. When we are connected and attuned to our lifeforce energy, we can rely on it as a source of guidance in everything from our day-to-day lives to big life decisions. As earthly, embodied beings, our spirits express themselves within and through our bodies. In my spiritual coaching work, I support you as a whole self in connecting with your spirit, your inner wisdom.
