A simple, art-based spiritual practice for listening to your inner experience and moving from head knowing to heart knowing.

Explore what it means to go slow with this evocative image collage. What does it stir in you?

Helena Bonham Carter reads Rumi’s The Guest House. What does this welcoming poem stir in you?

Dr. Shannon Michael Pater’s trauma-informed perspective is helping me look upon my experiences of dysregulation with greater compassion.

Sometimes an image or phrase can help us gently help us excavate this wisdom (like an archaeologist, not a construction worker!). Here’s a practice to experiment with.

Praying our experiences means being open to seeing ourselves as we are. This requires an awareness and an honesty that will root us in our actual daily life.

Prayer is fundamentally an offering of ourselves to God. It is not a matter of offering the pious thoughts of theologians or spiritual writers. Nor is it a matter of offering God only what we believe to be worthy.

Have you noticed the concept of trauma coming up more in the past few years? You are not alone. What do people mean when they use the word trauma in this rapidly-changing landscape?

Sometimes an image or phrase can help us gently help us excavate this wisdom (like an archaeologist, not a construction worker!). Here’s a practice to experiment with.

What words shimmer for you in this poem by Derek Mahon? What arises in you as you hold those words?

“You’re able to begin to notice that God speaks to us, God comes to us in our experience, that God becomes known; God becomes flesh in our everyday experience.” - Jonathan Merritt

Coming home to our bodies is about recognizing we are complex beings whose present-tense needs are worthy of time and care. These needs are not distractions, but rather, a portal to our deepest wisdom.

A poem about coming home to ourselves, to inner wisdom—not as an end in itself, but as the place we perceive the ways we are interconnected.

In trauma-informed spiritual direction, we seek to recover and deepen a direct connection with wisdom.

“Prayers are tools not for doing or getting, but for being and becoming.” Follow the threads that call you and listen for what is stirred with you.

One day your child may summon the courage to tell you their most tender truth. Here’s what I wish I would have known before mine did.

I was in a minor car accident a couple of weeks ago. Though not badly hurt, I received a prescription for brain rest. My doctor also suggested bundling up and going outside to be among the trees and birds. Nature as medicine.

My spiritual director wouldn’t give in to my pleas for a narrow way. As I look back now, I see that in her wisdom, she resisted the human temptation to “fix” or “save” me.