What Happens in a Spiritual Direction Session?

If you’ve never experienced spiritual direction, it can be hard to picture. Not because it’s complicated, but because it’s quiet in a way that’s unusual — and quiet is hard to describe.

Jim remembers the first time he sat with a spiritual director, years before he trained to offer it himself. He walked in with something vague and heavy that he’d been carrying for weeks — not a crisis, just a weight he couldn’t name. He left an hour later without a single answer. And yet something had shifted. The weight was still there, but it had a shape now. He could see it, which meant he could begin to understand it.

That’s as close as he can get to describing what happens in a session. Let’s try to go a little deeper.

Before you arrive

Most spiritual directors suggest arriving with a loose sense of what you’d like to bring — not an agenda, exactly, but an openness to whatever feels most alive or most heavy in your life right now. You don’t need to have figured anything out in advance. The session itself will help you locate what’s most important.

Some people journal briefly beforehand. Others arrive mid-conversation with themselves and discover the thread once they sit down. All of this is fine. The preparation, to the extent it’s needed at all, is simply an intention to be present.

How it opens

Sessions typically begin with a moment of centering — a brief silence, a short prayer, a breath. Lynette and Jim both open their sessions this way, and not as formality. It’s a genuine attempt to shift the register of the conversation from the ordinary pace of a day into something slower and more attentive. Even a few seconds of silence at the opening does something. It marks this time as different.

From there, the director will typically offer a simple, open invitation: What would you like to bring today? And the conversation begins.

What the director does — and doesn’t do

This is where spiritual direction tends to surprise people most. Jim often says that his job in a session is to get out of the way — not of the person sitting across from him, but of whatever is already moving in them that hasn’t quite surfaced yet. A director doesn’t lead. Doesn’t teach. Doesn’t offer advice or suggest solutions or move the conversation toward a predetermined destination.

They listen — with a quality of attention that most of us rarely receive in ordinary life. What they’re listening for isn’t only the surface content of what you’re saying. They’re listening beneath it: for what seems to carry energy or weight, for what you keep circling back to without quite landing on, for what might be stirring in you that you haven’t yet given voice to.

Silence is part of the work. Neither Jim nor Lynette is uncomfortable with it. When you trail off, or pause, or lose the thread, they don’t rush in to fill the gap. They let it sit. Because sometimes the most important thing is just underneath the silence, and it surfaces when given room.

What you might talk about

Anything that belongs to your inner life. Grief. A recurring dream. A relationship that’s shifted in ways you can’t name. A decision you can’t make. A joy so unexpectedly large it frightened you a little. A long stretch of spiritual dryness. A sense of call toward something you’re not sure you’re equipped for.

Jim’s pastoral care work — including his accompaniment of individuals and small groups across faith traditions at Linworth United Methodist Church — has taught him that the thing people think they’re bringing into a session is rarely the only thing. Often it’s the doorway. What’s really there tends to show up once the room gets quiet enough.

Toward the close

Sessions typically run 50 to 60 minutes. As the end approaches, a director might gently offer a reflection — not a conclusion, but an observation about what seemed most alive in the conversation. Or they might invite you to name what you’re taking with you.

You won’t always leave with clarity. Sometimes you leave with a question that feels sharper than when you arrived, which is its own kind of progress. And sometimes a session is simply a session — a quiet hour of attentive presence that doesn’t produce a dramatic insight but is nonetheless doing something, slowly, over time.

Between sessions

Spiritual direction and spiritual formation tend to work best as an ongoing practice, meeting roughly monthly. Between sessions, many people find that the conversation continues internally — that the questions raised in a session keep surfacing in ordinary life, in unexpected moments, in the margins of ordinary days. That continuation is part of the work too. The director doesn’t go home when the session ends.

If you’ve been wondering what it would actually feel like, a free 15-minute conversation with Jim or Lynette is an easy way to find out — not a commitment, just a first conversation to see if this is the right kind of companionship for where you are.

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Peace and every good.

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

Jim and Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. They are Master Certified Coaches, certified Narrative Enneagram teachers, and Certified Spiritual Directors. Together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research — and serve individuals, small groups, and organizations across faith traditions. Jim also serves at Linworth United Methodist Church.