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 spiritual life unfolds.

In recent decades, however, spiritual direction has often come to be described more narrowly: as attentive listening, gentle reflection, and the naming of spiritual movements. While these qualities remain essential, something vital can be lost when spiritual accompaniment becomes hesitant to engage the deeper psychological dimensions of a person’s inner life — the places where fear, desire, memory, and unconscious patterning quietly shape how God is imagined and received.

Depth Spiritual Direction arises from a simple but demanding recognition: soul and spirit have never been separate realities. The spiritual life does not unfold around our psychology, but through it.

A Recovery Rather Than an Innovation

Long before psychology became a distinct discipline, the great spiritual guides of the Christian tradition worked with a profound attentiveness to the inner life. They understood that spiritual growth involves not only illumination and consolation, but also struggle, unravelling, resistance, and descent.

Early monastic teachers, medieval mystics, and later spiritual writers recognised that unconscious forces shape our prayer, our images of God, our sense of self, and our capacity for love. What we now name as psychological dynamics were once understood as part of the soul’s landscape — to be approached with patience, discernment, and compassion.

Depth Spiritual Direction does not import psychology into spiritual accompaniment as an external tool. Rather, it recovers a fuller, older vision of spiritual care, one that honours the complexity of the human interior and the subtle ways grace works within it.

Tending the Whole Person

To tend the soul is to attend to the whole person:

the conscious and the unconscious,

the wounded and the desiring,

the defended and the yearning.

In this sense, depth work is not an “addition” to spiritual direction, but a widening of its lens. It acknowledges that inner resistance, emotional patterning, early relational experience, and symbolic life all play a role in how a person relates to God and to themselves.

This is why certain struggles cannot be addressed through reassurance or discernment alone. Persistent blocks in prayer, recurring inner conflicts, disturbing dreams, painful or punitive images of God, or a sense of being inwardly “stuck” on the spiritual path often point to deeper layers of the psyche asking to be met — not fixed, but listened to within the deeper psychology of the spiritual life.

These experiences are not signs of spiritual failure. They are invitations to listen more deeply.

A Space Between Worlds

A contemplative space where soul and spirit are held together, and deeper truth is allowed to emerge.

Depth Spiritual Direction offers an integrated space in which specific psychospiritual issues can be explored with care and discernment. It often serves those whose struggles fall between the worlds of psychotherapy and traditional spiritual direction — belonging fully to neither, and yet deeply to both.

Some people arrive with a clear spiritual commitment but feel confused, distressed, or destabilised by what is emerging within them. Others have done extensive therapeutic work but sense that something essential remains untouched — a spiritual dimension that has never quite been welcomed into the conversation.

Depth Spiritual Direction does not replace therapy, nor does it reduce spiritual experience to psychological explanation. Instead, it holds spiritual longing and psychological truth together, without collapsing one into the other.

Not Technique, But Posture

What distinguishes Depth Spiritual Direction is not a particular method or set of techniques, but a posture of accompaniment. It is a way of listening that is attentive not only to spoken prayer and conscious reflection, but also to the quieter movements of the soul — images, feelings, resistances, memories, dreams and symbols that arise as part of a person’s spiritual journey.

This listening draws, where appropriate, on ways of working with the inner life such as guided imagination, that have long been present within the Christian tradition and are also recognised within depth psychology. Rather than analysing or interpreting experience, the director helps the directee stay with what is emerging, trusting that the psyche has its own wisdom and that God may be encountered within these inner movements.

Such work is always in service of the issues a person brings and the spiritual questions they are living. Inner material is not pursued for its own sake, nor treated as a problem to be solved, but received as meaningful — part of the soul’s response to God, and part of how transformation unfolds over time.

Depth Spiritual Direction therefore allows unconscious material to surface without haste, welcomes ambiguity and paradox, and resists premature resolution. It trusts that integration is slow, and that spiritual maturation often involves periods of uncertainty, vulnerability, and descent before greater clarity and freedom emerge.

Toward Wholeness and Freedom

At its heart, Depth Spiritual Direction is not concerned with fixing or correcting the person. It does not seek to make someone more spiritual, more faithful, or more acceptable to God.

Rather, it creates the conditions and sacred space in which truth can emerge — truth about oneself, about God, and about the relationship between them. Over time, this truth tends to lead toward greater freedom, deeper compassion, and a more integrated spiritual life.

In this sense, Depth Spiritual Direction serves the long work of wholeness in the spiritual life: the slow aligning of soul and spirit, psyche and prayer, inner truth and outer living. It honours both the mystery of God and the depth of the human heart — trusting that grace is already at work, even in what feels most difficult or hidden.