Depth Spiritual Direction

Welcome to Reflections on the Spiritual Life

Here you will find articles on spiritual direction, psychology and spirituality, contemplative practice, and the deeper movements of the spiritual life. Drawing on decades of experience in psychospiritual work and spiritual accompaniment, these reflections explore common themes such as shadow material, prayer struggles, images of God, dreamwork, and the emotional dynamics that shape our spiritual journey.

Whether you are seeking support in your own inner life or resources for spiritual direction practice,

I hope these writings offer clarity, depth, and encouragement.

A still pool of clear water surrounded by trees and rocks, with soft light filtering down into the depth of the water.

Depth as a Place of Listening

Spiritual direction has always been concerned with attentiveness — to God, to the movements of the heart, to the unfolding of a person’s life, and to the presence of the Divine or Holy within these. Yet not all listening is the same.

Shame and the Spiritual Journey: Healing the Inner World with Compassion

Shame longs not to be fixed, but to be met. Many people come to the spiritual life carrying a quiet but persistent burden of shame — a quiet, corrosive sense that something is wrong with who they are. It may not always be named as such, yet it often shapes how a person prays, how they imagine God, and how safe or unsafe it feels to be truly known. Shame whispers: “I am not enough.” “I am fundamentally flawed.” “If I were truly known, I would be rejected.” Shame is not simply

A contemplative image of gentle hands tending a small inner garden or luminous vessel, with roots extending downward into shadow and light rising softly above, symbolising depth spiritual direction, inner transformation, and attentive care of soul and spirit.

Depth Spiritual Direction: Tending Soul and Spirit

A contemplative space where soul and spirit are held together, and deeper truth is allowed to emerge. Spiritual direction has always been concerned with the interior life — listening where soul and spirit meet — with how a person responds, over time, to the presence and movement of God. At its best, this ancient practice has never been limited to prayer techniques or spiritual discernment alone, but has attended to the whole terrain of human experience through which the spir

Silhouette of a reflective woman with an inner landscape of trees, a path, sun, and cross appear in soft green and yellow tones, creating a serene mood of someone engaging their inner world through guided imagery.

Guided Imagery in Spiritual Direction: Recovering a Creative, Ancient Practice

Across religious and psychological traditions, images have long been recognized as carriers of truth, insight, and transformation. Yet in much contemporary spiritual accompaniment the imaginal dimension—once central to Christian prayer and discernment—has often been sidelined or treated with caution. A rediscovery of guided imagery opens a creative and deeply rooted way of engaging the soul, a way that resonates with the ancient Christian imagination as well as with modern de

Jungian Psychology and Spiritual Direction

Jungian spiritual direction aims to help individuals deepen their connection with their inner selves and the divine by exploring the unconscious and embracing the wholeness of their psyche (soul).

A dancer moves gracefully in a flowing dress against a textured background of blue and gold patterns, creating a sense of fluid motion and elegance as in the dance between our psychology and spirituality.

Psychologising our Spirituality: Depth, Soul, and the Loss of Mystery

I have had cause to reflect recently on looking the other way down the lens of this dialogue between our psychology and spirituality, to reflect on a relatively new 20th - 21st century phenomenon of how we can also unhelpfully reduce our spirituality to our psychology. We now live in a very 'psychologised' world where this paradigm can too dominate our perspective.

Silhouette of bamboo leaves against a white sky, creating a dramatic and black-and-white contrast depicting the darkness and uncomfortable parts we can encounter on our spiritual journey.

The Spiritual Journey of Descent

The journey of descent often begins being triggered by an event in life - an inner event or process of the outside world such as job loss, the loss of a relationship, grief or trauma; a crisis that shakes the familiar ground of our ego's reality. As this ground of our ego's sense of self and reality is shaken, we find things begin to fall apart, challenging what we thought of as our sense of reality about ourselves.

Colorful word cloud with "symbol" central, surrounded by "love," "peace," and "freedom" on a blue-purple gradient background, conveying calm and wide nature of the symbols we use in life.

Symbolic Life & the Spiritual Path

Much of the spiritual life unfolds through symbol rather than explanation. Images, dreams, metaphors, and stories carry meanings that cannot be reduced to concepts alone, yet they shape how we encounter God, ourselves, and the world. This short reflection explores why symbolic life matters so deeply for spiritual maturity — and why reconnecting with it is essential for inner work on the spiritual path. Modern society may have lost something of the power of symbolic life, but