Silent
Silent provides the tools for seekers to recognize their path and enables self-reliance for spiritual and magickal growth.
Seekers gain insight from his work and find their inner calm from his ability to listen and help others reflect.
What is Spiritual Direction?
Silent • June 19, 2024
Reflections of a Priest
Being present.
A spiritual director provides a safe space for seekers to express their thoughts and needs about their journey. That point may be when they are in that safe and sacred space or at a particular moment.
Spiritual direction is a sacred practice that guides individuals on their spiritual journey, facilitating deeper understanding and connection with the Divine. However, one might conceive.
This process is akin to a companionable exploration, in which the spiritual director acts as a guide, offering support, insights, and reflections to assist the seeker in discerning their spiritual path.
I liken it to being a torchbearer in a series of caves. The literal translation of the Japanese word “sensei,” often translated as “teacher,” means “one who has been this way before.”
The torchbearer listens deeply to where the seeker wishes to go, shares wisdom, and asks reflective questions, encouraging them to explore their beliefs, experiences, and feelings about life's sacred or divine aspects. When necessary, the torchbearer shines a light on things that are hard to see. Most of the time, the seeker speaks (80%), and the torchbearer provides probing questions that allow the seeker to reflect rather than being told where to go.
For my Pagan path, spiritual direction involves a holistic approach, recognizing the interconnectedness of all aspects of a person’s life. It’s a journey inward and outward, exploring personal beliefs, practices, and experiences and how these shape and are shaped by the individual’s relationship with the world around them.
My role is to provide a safe, sacred space for exploration and reflection, to listen deeply without judgment, and to offer insights and questions that help you navigate your spiritual journey. It’s about walking alongside you, sharing in the discoveries, challenges, and joys of your path, and helping you to cultivate a deeper, more meaningful engagement with the spiritual dimensions of life.
This question leads to the question, “Should SpiDir be present for the community? Should we be sought out?” I will explore this later in the document.
What is the role of the spiritual companion?
Be authentic and articulate needs and wants.
During the ongoing journey, be ready to listen actively, apply critical thinking, and develop new questions as the need arises. This is a discussion between peers and one peer in the role of someone who has been this way. There can and should be an active dialogue about goals and reflection.
I strongly recommend that seekers keep a journal. It is an expressive tool for thoughts and lessons as personal insight through text or images. Reviewing the past week is a good exercise for identifying the natural rhythm in their lives.
Spiritual direction is a reflective journey; the seeker should prepare themselves with as many tools as possible.
What brings folks to Spiritual Direction?
Much depends on the seeker’s spiritual formation. Sometimes, they look for course corrections on their path to the divine. They may have been taught that direction is needed, and this came from their formation. Alternatively, they may have questions from a time and point in their
lives. Hopefully, it is self-directed, but it would not be out of the range of
For the Spiritual Director, a desire to connect and be present. Think of them as a map. A map provides an overview and wayfinding. It may be used in several ways, but a map is agnostic to who uses it or how. There are things a map cannot do, and that becomes apparent after a time; the seeker will move away.
I would like to explore if part of Spiritual Direction is to be there for a community. Writing and public speaking touch many. If a group seeks you, say a Red/Green/Purple (women/men/non-binary + trans + another) tent or an event happens in the community (e.g., I wrote a Pagan response to the events at Christchurch), when and if you get involved?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Walk into any forest in the Cascades and you are standing on the dead. The fir that fell forty years ago is now the nurse log feeding a row of saplings. The salmon carried uphill by an eagle became the nitrogen in the cedar's needles. Nothing in that forest is wasted, and nothing in it is afraid. We have built an entire industry on pretending we are exempt from this. We drain the body of its blood, fill it with preservatives, seal it in lacquered hardwood, and lower it into a concrete vault—as if the earth were a contamination to be defended against rather than the place we came from. Cremation, for all its simplicity, burns fossil fuel and sends the body skyward as carbon. There is another way, and it began here in Washington. Human composting—the law calls it natural organic reduction—was legalized in this state in 2019, the first in the nation. The process is unhurried and honest. The body, unembalmed, is laid into a steel vessel and surrounded by wood chips, alfalfa, and straw. No chemicals are added. The microbes that already live on the plant material, and on us, do the work they have always done. Over eight to twelve weeks, the body becomes soil—about a cubic yard of it, dark and alive. Families may take some home for a garden or a tree, or donate it to forest conservation land. What was a person becomes, quite literally, ground for new growth. I have sat with the dying, and I can tell you that the question underneath most deathbed fear is not what happens to me? It is did I matter, and will anything of me remain? The Hávamál answers plainly: cattle die, kin die, the self dies too—but what one leaves behind endures. We usually read that as reputation. I have come to read it more literally. A body that becomes soil leaves something behind that you can hold in your hands. Something that feeds. For those of us who keep the old ways, this is not innovation. It is restoration. Our ancestors were returned to barrows and bogs and burial mounds, given back to the land that fed them. The vessel and the alfalfa are new; the covenant is ancient. The earth gives, and the earth receives. Every harvest festival we keep is built on that exchange. It would be strange to honor the cycle all our lives and then opt out of it at the end. This choice is now legal in a dozen states and counting. If it speaks to you, say so—out loud, in writing, to the people who will one day carry out your wishes. Death plans left unspoken become burdens; death plans spoken become gifts. A leaf falls. A seed sprouts. The tree does not grieve the leaf, and the soil does not refuse the seed. When my own time comes, I intend to be useful one last time. That, too, is a kind of prayer. —Silent
For the Pagan and Contemplative Community
There is a grief that arrives before the death. It does not announce itself. It does not have a name that anyone uses at the dinner table, or in the waiting room, or in the parking lot of the care facility where you sit in your car for a few minutes before going in, gathering yourself. It lives in small moments. The first time they didn't recognize you. The day you realized you were making decisions for them that they would have hated. The night you caught yourself hoping — just for a second, just once — that it would be over soon, and then spent the next three days punishing yourself for the thought. This is called anticipatory grief. And it is real, and it is heavy, and almost no one will name it for you while you are living inside it, because you are the strong one, and the person you are losing is still here, and grief, we have been told, comes after. It doesn't always come after. Sometimes it comes alongside. Caregiving is one of the most demanding things a human being can do. It asks you to be present to someone else's diminishment, day after day, while managing your own fear and your own exhaustion and your own sadness — and while the world around you continues as though nothing unusual is happening. You go to the grocery store. You answer emails. You show up. You are praised for your strength, which is a kindness people offer because they don't know what else to give you. What you actually need is someone who will let you put the strength down for an hour. Not fix you. Not give you a plan. Not tell you that you're doing a great job, or that they couldn't do what you're doing, or that everything happens for a reason. Just someone who will sit with you in the weight of it. Who will not be frightened by what you are carrying. Who will let you say the unsayable things — the anger, the ambivalence, the love that is so tangled up with loss that you can no longer tell them apart. That is what I offer. I am a death doula and spiritual director. I work with caregivers who are in the middle of it — not at the end, not after, but now, in the long middle stretch where the grief has no official start date and the world has not yet given you permission to feel it. We meet, usually by video, for an hour at a time. I listen in a particular way — not for problems to solve, but for what is actually present beneath the exhaustion and the competence and the careful management of everyone else's emotions. You do not have to have it together when you come into this space. That is the point of it. A few things I will not do: I will not tell you how to grieve correctly. There is no correctly. I will not rush you toward acceptance or silver linings. Some things do not have silver linings, and pretending otherwise is a small violence. I will not give you more to manage. You are already managing too much. What I will do is be present — fully, unhurriedly, without an agenda — for whatever you bring into the room. If you are a caregiver and you are reading this and something in you recognized itself in these words, that recognition is an invitation. I have a small number of spaces available for caregivers who are navigating the approach of death alongside someone they love. The intake questions at tokeepsilent.me are where we begin. Or you can reach me directly. There is no script for this conversation. We simply start. — Silent