Spiritual Direction & Accompaniment

The Role of Spiritual Directors

Spiritual directors serve as a second set of eyes to accompany you on your journey. They offer encouragement, perspective, and support while maintaining a contemplative stance. Rather than solving problems, fixing life issues, or offering pastoral counsel, directors listen attentively for God's movements and presence in your life.

Strict confidentiality and mutual trust ground this guidance, providing a safe environment to explore intimate spiritual experiences. A three-party dynamic forms the heart of this process: the Holy Spirit acts as the true spiritual director moving in your life, while the human director serves as a holy listener.

Ignatian directors receive specialized training to guide the Spiritual Exercises and apply principles of discernment. They assist you in recognizing interior movements such as consolation and desolation. This approach focuses specifically on your relationship with God and your ongoing life project of faith rather than clinical treatment or administrative advice.

Sessions occur weekly for about an hour at a time and place convenient for both you and your director, offering dedicated opportunity to reflect on your prayer and spiritual progress.

The Contemplative-Evocative Method

The contemplative-evocative method serves as the foundational framework of Ignatian spiritual direction, explicitly designed to ensure your session becomes an encounter with God. As a holy listener, the director helps you hear what the Holy Spirit is already saying to you.

This model operates on the principle that the Holy Spirit acts as the primary director already at work inside you. Directors ask open-ended, evocative questions to draw out your deep interior awareness, inviting you to notice where you feel peace, warmth, or anxiety during prayer.

The contemplative-evocative method relies on a "long, loving look at the real." Sessions move deliberately, allowing ample space for silence, reflection, and noticing internal shifts. When you present a difficulty, the director invites you to pause, examine where God is present in that situation, and consider how you wish to share your experience with God.

This non-hierarchical approach encourages you to look directly to God for answers rather than relying on human counsel. The director actively receives what you share and consistently redirects your focus back to God. Ultimately, this method aims to foster spiritual freedom, helping you build an intimate, direct, and lifelong relationship with the Divine without creating dependency on a director.

Registration

Applicants who wish to make the Exercises and meet with a spiritual director in a private setting can register here. This cohort of retreatants will meet together five times during the retreat to share the graces. The dates listed in this application are applicable for the individually-directed retreatants, only.

The responses to the following questions help us to determine whether this retreat is the right fit for you at this time. All responses are kept confidential. Applications are reviewed only by the core team members of our organization.