G.R.A.C.E. can be an active and adaptive process not only in the spiritual accompaniment encounter but in the context of our whole lived experience, and a powerful resource for us, not just a technique. When we live it, it can become a way in which we align ourselves with our integrity, values and deep aspiration to be of service to others in our life with God.

When applied to spiritual direction, the ancient concept of temenos particularly offers a revealing and helpful metaphor for the sacred relational field that takes place between director and directee.

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.

The Celtic tradition offers us the wonderful notion of anam cara . In Gaelic the word anam means soul and cara is a word for friend. So anam cara means soul friend . This is not a simple or superficial friendship, but a special and deep one in which one person really supports and guides another. They are the person to whom you can reveal the hidden intimacies of your life - your innermost self, heart and mind, without mask or pretension. In early Celtic history, the anam c

I have been involved in a UK project developing an ethical framework for spiritual direction work, which also relates to spiritual accompaniment, spiritual mentoring and spiritual guidance. It was put together in consultation with many other publications of guidelines of good practice and ethics from across the world, and across spiritual disciplines, as you can see detailed in the appendix. The project has paused for a while. So, I post here the work I have done on ethics a

At the moment, in England, Wales and Scotland, there is no form of accreditation for spiritual directors. Other countries such as Australia, New Zealand and Ireland do have accrediting bodies that can set standards and offer some form of public accountability. In Canada spiritual directors have a path of certification by a state regulating body. In England, however, anyone can call themselves a spiritual director, whether they have received some form of training or not. Altho

Soul is the most common translation of the Hebrew word nephesh and the Greek word psyche . The biblical meanings of these concepts are richly varied. In the Old Testament, for example, the meanings of nephesh range from life, the inner person (particularly thoughts, feelings and passions), to the whole person, including the body. Similarly, in the New Testament, psyche carries such meaning as the totality of the person, physical life, mind and heart. Here, soul is presente