Wholeness & Our Unconscious
Much of our spiritual life unfolds beyond the reach of conscious intention or effort. Beneath our prayers, beliefs, and spiritual practices lies a deeper inner world that quietly shapes how we experience God, ourselves, and others. In this article, I explore how our unconscious life plays a vital role in the journey toward wholeness, and why spiritual growth so often requires us to attend to what lies hidden as well as what is known. Wholeness, Selfhood, and the Spiritual Jou
Praying with the Labyrinth: Journeying to the Centre and Back
The labyrinth has re-emerged in recent years as a quiet but powerful aid to prayer and reflection. Used across cultures and spiritual traditions, it offers a way of engaging the body, imagination, and inner life together. For many, it becomes not simply a practice, but a living symbol of the spiritual journey itself. The Labyrinth as Symbol A labyrinth is an ancient symbol of wholeness . It combines the imagery of the circle and the spiral into a meandering but purposeful pa
Cultivating Compassion Meditation: A Meditative Practice
Compassion is understood as a divine quality that draws us closer to our true self in God. Wisdom — learning to see ourselves, others, and all of life through God’s eyes — gently guides us into this way of being. As wisdom and compassion deepen, we become a conduit through which divine compassion flows into the world, embodying the mystical truth of the interconnectedness of all being. The meditation that follows arises from this wider understanding of compassion as rooted i
Cultivating Compassion: From Ego to Christ-Centred Love
Compassion lies at the heart of every authentic spiritual path, not as a sentiment but as a way of seeing, being, and acting in the world. Compassion as Walking in God’s Ways Most spiritual paths teach that we come close to God when we 'walk in God's ways' - that is when we embody the divine quality of compassion. In the midrash below, from Jewish mysticism, the attributes of divine mercy revealed to Moses at Mount Sinai form the template for the practice of compassion: ''Wa
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
Barbara Hepworth's Spiritual Vitality
A Garden of Presence: Encountering Barbara Hepworth in St Ives I've been staying a stone's throw from Barbara Hepworth's studio and museum in St Ives. So, before the crowds arrive each morning, I slip alone into her extraordinary garden - a captivating blend of sculpture and exotic planting. Her working spaces lie undisturbed as if she has just popped out for a moment to fetch milk for morning tea, or perhaps in her case a packet of cigarettes. The early morning light in St I
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
The Wisdom of Imperfection
Many of us approach the spiritual life with an unspoken assumption that growth means improvement — becoming better, purer, or more complete versions of ourselves. Yet again and again, both spiritual tradition and lived experience suggest something more paradoxical: that our imperfection itself may be one of the primary places where transformation begins. Wisdom, it seems, does not arise from eliminating what is broken, but from learning how to live more truthfully, compassion
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
