Spiritual Development for your Life and Career
At any moment, you have a choice,
that either leads you closer to your spirit or further away from it
– Thich Nhat Hanh
What is Spiritual Development?
Spiritual Development is based upon viewing a person from a holistic perspective incorporating both internal and external universal wisdom. The focus of this approach is beyond the limitations of mind and body. Alternate references to Spirit include Source, Soul, a Higher Power, the Divine or God. For the sake of simplicity, I will use Spirit here. Working with Spirit, Spiritual Development includes being open to receiving information from the subconscious, and embraces belief systems, intuition, metaphysical experiences, energy systems, connection to the higher-self and the cosmos. For those with a religious practice, this may also be part of the process, but it is not necessary to be involved in formal religion or religious practices to embark on the journey of Spiritual Development. It is also a process in which you cultivate a conscious awareness of Self and then explore how you are in relation with and connection to others, nature, and the cosmos.
How Can Spiritual Development Help You?
Spiritual Development has broad applications, and enables you to find clarity, direction, meaning and purpose in life. It can assist in balance and integration of all parts of the Self, especially when there is a sense of fragmentation because of grief or loss caused by significant change events in your world. It can restore a sense of well-being in all aspects of your life.
Reasons to embark on Spiritual Development:
- Suffering anxiety or depression.
- Feeling lost, overwhelmed, or stuck.
- Feeling isolated or profoundly misunderstood.
- Experiencing an existential or spiritual crisis or spiritual emergency: Why am I here? What is my Higher Purpose?
- Working through major grief or loss due to death, traumatic or unexpected life events or change.
- A yearning to explore or deepen with your inner world, spirituality, and creativity.
These are some common examples, but each person’s journey is unique.
What is the Difference between Spiritual Development and other forms of Therapy or Coaching?
The key difference is that Spiritual Development will overtly and often deliberately include dialogue and experiences involving Spirit and/or religion which is typically not a focus for more traditional forms of therapy or coaching. It may even be avoided in non-spiritual support settings. Whether you already feel connected to or are struggling in relationship to Spirit, in Spiritual Development, you will be encouraged and supported to communicate from this spiritual perspective during and between sessions.
In addition, the methodologies used in Spiritual Development may encompass more esoteric approaches including Shamanism, energy healing, channelling and mediumship. In comparison, traditional therapy and coaching techniques are usually more tangible and concrete including talk therapy, mindfulness, body-centered or somatic approaches to name a few.
What to Expect Exploring Spiritual Development with Me?
For clients that come to me in spiritual crisis or have the desire or curiosity to ask for my guidance as they venture towards a spiritual path, my approach is informed by these four tenets that I apply in connection with all my clients:
i. Trust in Self: each of my clients arrives with their own unique inner wisdom.
ii. Trust in Potential: we can discover our learning edges to grow and expand in every situation.
iii. Trust in the Process: we are on our own journey to reveal the how our lives have meaning.
iiii. Trust in Spirit: we are born as pure Spiritual Beings and can access that Intelligence.
During Spiritual Development sessions, I call in Spirit to create a sacred space of holistic healing. In addition to my vast toolkit of personal development resources, I draw upon wisdom and knowledge that explicitly includes my intuition, psychic attunement, channelling, mediumship and Chinese Shamanic Medicine. My approach is person-centred tailoring the way I meet client’s needs integrating other modalities such as mindfulness, somatic or body-centred experiential techniques tapping into the mind/body/spirit wisdom to co-create a safe journey towards spirituality for my clients.
My unique approach of deeply connecting with clients at this spiritual level, proactively creates transformation change to achieve inner balance and self-integration.
My Spiritual Development Story.
After graduating from university, I was working towards being a career coach, but decided to travel the world for a year after leaving a psychologically abusive relationship. This inadvertently led me to a period I now describe as wandering the vocational desert for over two decades. The turning point and my salvation from that spiritual desolation and existential crisis was meeting my own Career Coach, Gael McCool who I found out later was also a Spiritual Coach. Gael and I worked together intensely for 6 months and during that transformative process, I began my own Spiritual Journey. I was empowered to pivot from a corporate career where I had been unconsciously suffering at all levels including anxiety and stress-related physiological conditions. I decided to go back to school and return to the field of mental health. I graduated as a Career Counsellor and opened my private practice.
In my evolution to become an Integrative Career Coach, my commitment to and insatiable pursuit of personal and professional development has been heavily influenced by my counselling supervisor and mentor, Mahmud Nestman. Working with Mahmud individually and in groups resulted in my personal Spiritual Awakening in 2015 from the depths of traumatic grief and loss. The blessings within that period of suffering continues to evolve and unfold. The emanation of my healing gifts bestowed upon me from Spirit allows me the honour to steward and witness the courage of my beautiful clients in their own quest for spirituality and meaning as they transmute suffering into self-discovery of their inner wisdom and True Self.
Your Spiritual Development Story.
I want to acknowledge that you have already started your own Spiritual Development Story by having the curiosity and patience to read this page. Whether you choose to reach out and connect with me to determine if we can commence this journey together, or if my words have piqued a deeper interest to seek out other avenues to consider – independently or with the support of someone to guide you, I congratulate you for taking this step. I hope you can offer that to yourself too.
If you would like to know more about how I might support you with your Spiritual Development Story, I invite you to contact me today. There is no obligation to book but I invite you to explore what possibilities can await you.
You have to grow from the inside out.
None can teach you, none can make you spiritual.
There is no other teacher but your own soul.
– Swami Vivekananda