Struggling with Prayer : A Psychological Perspective
Many people experience prayer as unexpectedly difficult — especially at moments when they most long for comfort, clarity, or closeness to God. Rather than assuming this difficulty is a failure of faith or discipline, it can be helpful to look more carefully at the inner dynamics that shape our prayer life. This reflection explores some of the psychological patterns that may quietly influence our openness to prayer, often without our awareness. When Prayer Feels Most Difficult
Spiritual Life and Our Shadow
Carl Jung , a 19th century Swiss psychoanalyst whose work bridges the gap between psychology and spirituality, understood our Shadow to be where we hide all the bits of ourselves we think are shameful or primitive . It is that aspect of our nature that is cast into the unconscious and held there in the dark to protect our conscious life from what we feel may be unacceptable, either to ourselves or to others. This reflection draws on many years of working with people in spiri
Spiritual Pathology: How Inner Wounds Can Distort the Spiritual Life
Spirituality is often assumed to be inherently life-giving and benign. Yet, like every dimension of human experience, it is shaped by our inner world — including our unresolved wounds, fears, and unconscious patterns. This article explores how spiritual life itself can become distorted, not because spirituality is false, but because it is taken up into the very places within us that most need healing. Spiritual pathology describes how we can distort and undermine our spiritua
Living With Paradox
In the Christian spiritual tradition, paradox is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be lived. Again and again, the life of faith draws us into tensions that cannot be neatly resolved — between strength and weakness, certainty and unknowing, action and surrender. This article explores why the capacity to live with paradox is not a spiritual failure, but a sign of growing maturity, opening us to a deeper, more spacious way of knowing and being with God. Paradox and the
Spiritual Life and Our Emotions: When Spirituality Avoids Feeling
Spiritual bypassing names a subtle but pervasive tendency within spiritual life: the use of spiritual beliefs or practices to avoid painful feelings, unresolved wounds, and developmental needs. While often unconscious and well-intentioned, it can quietly undermine growth, wholeness, and genuine transformation. What Is Spiritual Bypassing? The term spiritual bypassing, coined by psychologist John Welwood in 1983, describes the use of spiritual beliefs or practices to avoid eng
Spiritual Life and Our Emotions: Toward Wholeness and Integration
Transformation of our emotion life remains one of the greatest challenges confronting us on our spiritual path. Emotions and the Spiritual Struggle Indeed, perhaps in exasperation, many historical strands of Christianity relegated feelings to an inferior and suspect status, often seeing them as manifestations of female weakness far less trustworthy and more 'primitive' than 'male' rational powers. Strong feelings needed to be muted for fear of muddying objectivity, with 'dis
