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

The ways in which human beings imagine God are never static. They shift over centuries, reflecting not only theological debates but also profound transformations in human consciousness, culture, and as I have shown in previous articles, our psychology - each shift revealing something about the inner landscape of the human soul. Carl Jung invites us to read this unfolding not as doctrinal confusion but as psychological evolution. The God-image changes because we change, it evo

Spiritual direction conversations often touch into the area of uncovering and letting go of toxic images of God imbibed during life, often in childhood. In my earlier article on 'The Spiritual Life & Our Images of God' I talk through how these images are crafted in our life and the general influences and factors behind their development within us. I also discuss how our images are not the same as our ideas about God. Rather they are projections onto the Holy which may or may

Here is a copy of the recent article I authored for a special Spiritual Direction themed edition of the Franciscan magazine published by the Society of St Francis, UK, January 2022. It is part of a series of articles I have now written on the S hadow and the spiritual life . Over many years of working as a spiritual director, I have found people come to me, some in Christian leadership, in times of crisis in their lives - relationship issues, anger, hidden addictions, extram

Following my earlier article looking at how to work with our dreams, detailing the initial stages of recording all the detail of the dream and then building up all your associations with the dream symbols, we now move on to the later stages, towards understanding any meaning the dream has to convey to us. 3. Dialogue with your dream There are many creative ways we can prayerfully dialogue with our dreams to help unlock their meaning. The important thing to always bear in mi

Modern society has lost the power of symbolic life, though we have not escaped our need of it. A symbol is a term, a name, or an image that in itself may be familiar to us but which through its connotation and application also points to hidden, vague or unknown meanings. For example, the image of the cross. For Christians a cross means much more than the intersection of two lines. It has wider unconscious aspects, qualities than can never be precisely defined or fully expla

In the Christian tradition, many people are becoming more interested again in working with their dreams, recognising some intuitive value and wisdom in them that needs to be listened to. However, most of us these days don't have a clue where to start to begin to try and work with our own dreams. They contain a language of symbolism that is alien to our modern Western mindset. On top of that, as each dream communicates information that is not consciously known by the dreamer,

'Spiritual directors and gurus have always been listeners, but the language to which they listen is the 'forgotten language' of myths and dreams and symbols, the language of fundamental human experience,' Kenneth Leach in Soul Friend. From ancient times, people of all religions have shown reverence for dreams and sought to understand their meaning. In the Christian tradition there is a particularly long history of respecting and working with dreams. Apart from well-known exa

In my earlier article on The Spiritual Life and our Shadow, I describe the Jungian under-standing of how we learn, from early childhood, to suppress aspects of ourselves deemed unacceptable to our culture and context. They remain in our ​ unconscious and can dramatically influence our daily lives in unseen ways. As we grow up, we receive both subtle and overt messages (from our family, care-givers, peer group, school, religious community, wider society and so on) that cer

God calls us to wholeness, through self-transcendence, to embrace our true selves in God - our deepest Ground of Being. Richard Rohr (a contemporary Franciscan monk and spiritual writer) expresses this as the journey from our False Self to our True Self. Jung understands it as the journey of individuation from the Ego to the Self. What increasingly interests me in my work, as both a spiritual director and psychologist, is the role the unconscious plays in this journey. If, in