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The Difference Between Spiritual Direction and Coaching

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Two empty chairs turned slightly toward each other in a quiet room, warm lamplight between them, a window beyond showing early morning — the shared space of coaching and spiritual direction.

Two chairs, one conversation. What changes is the question you bring to it.

Coaching helps you move toward something. Spiritual direction helps you pay attention to something.

People ask Jim and Lynette this question more than almost any other. It’s a fair one — they offer both, they’ve been trained deeply in both, and from the outside the two practices can look similar. Both involve one-on-one conversation. Both involve careful listening. Both are oriented toward growth and clarity.

So what’s actually different? The honest answer is: quite a lot. And Jim and Lynette have lived that difference from both sides — as practitioners and as people who have needed both at different points in their own lives.

What coaching is for

Coaching is fundamentally future-oriented. It begins with the question: where do you want to go, and what’s getting in the way?

Jim and Lynette spent years as Regional Network Directors for North America at Six Seconds — Josh Freedman’s global emotional intelligence nonprofit — and together co-developed the SEQ (Spiritual Emotional Intelligence) assessment now used across many countries. That work deepened their understanding of what coaching can do at its best: help people understand how their emotions inform their choices, interrupt patterns that are limiting them, and move toward what they most want with more skill and intentionality.

The Six Seconds model takes the inner life seriously. But it does so in service of forward movement. Coaching tends to work well when you have a goal you’re working toward, a decision you want to make more effectively, or a pattern you want to interrupt. It’s good for people who know roughly where they want to go and need help getting there.

What spiritual direction and spiritual formation are for

Spiritual direction and spiritual formation are fundamentally present-oriented — and in some ways, gently suspicious of the rush toward the future that coaching is designed to support.

When Lynette completed her Doctor of Ministry research at the Haden Institute and Graduate Theological Foundation, the work that eventually became the SEQ framework, she was exploring something the coaching world often moves past too quickly: the inner life not as a resource to optimize, but as a landscape to inhabit. Spiritual direction begins not with where do you want to go but with where are you, and what is already stirring in you?

A spiritual director isn’t working toward a goal with you. They’re paying attention alongside you — to what’s alive, to what’s heavy, to what keeps surfacing without resolution, to where the sacred might already be moving in ways you haven’t fully recognized yet.

The overlap — and why it matters

The two practices share more than they might seem to. Both take the inner life seriously. Both involve listening of a particular quality. Both resist the impulse to fix or advise.

Jim often says that the person who comes to him for coaching and the person who comes for spiritual direction are sometimes carrying the same question — they just haven’t recognized it yet. The executive trying to decide whether to take the promotion might actually be trying to understand what his life is for. The woman discerning a major transition might need both the practical clarity of coaching and the contemplative spaciousness of spiritual direction.

These aren’t competing practices. In Jim and Lynette’s experience, they’re part of the same one.

Spiritual Direction or Coaching Reflection Sheet

So how do you choose?

A few questions worth sitting with: Do you have a clear goal, or are you still trying to understand where you are? Are you looking for help with change, or help with understanding? Is there something specific you want to accomplish in the next year, or something you’ve been carrying that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere?

And — do you sense that what’s happening in your life right now has a deeper dimension you haven’t been able to name yet? If so, spiritual direction and the spaciousness of spiritual formation might be exactly what you’ve been looking for.

If you’re still not sure, the best next step is a free 15-minute conversation. Jim and Lynette can talk through where you are and what kind of companionship makes the most sense for this season.

Schedule with Jim: https://calendly.com/jim-792/spiritual-direction-consultation

Schedule with Lynette: https://calendly.com/lynettespiritofeq/15min

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. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

Series

Post 4 of 6 in the Spiritual Direction series.

Ninety Trucks, Ninety Driveways, Ninety People

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The true sentence is usually the worse-sounding one.

There was a stretch of years when I would get to the Varment Guard yard before most of the crews, and what I remember is the sound more than the sight — twenty-odd trucks pulling in already running, warm from the drive, ready for the day and the hiss of a bay door going up. Most of the fleet never saw the yard in the morning. Ninety trucks and the men took them home, so at any hour of any night our trucks were scattered across Ohio in ninety driveways. Only the ones needing parts or a swap came in. But, standing there at six, what you saw was rows of black and gold, same logo, same ladder racks, same lettering on the door, men in the same uniform crossing between them with coffee.

I was proud of that lot. And, because of that pride it complicates everything I’m about to say.

We made them identical on purpose, and it cost money to keep them that way. Not for efficiency — for recognition( and maybe a little efficiency). Sending the trucks home every night was part of it. Ninety black and gold trucks sitting overnight in ninety neighborhoods is ninety people seeing us before they ever need us, so that a woman who noticed one in her neighbor’s driveway on Tuesday knew it on sight when it pulled into hers on Friday. She had already decided something about us before anyone knocked. That is how a stranger comes to trust you enough to let you into her crawlspace at ten at night. The sameness was a promise, of knowing that we had to be good enough, often enough, for the promise to be worth anything. Uniformity without a company behind it is just paint.

Which is why it took me a while to understand what bothers me about the internet now.

Because it looks like my back lot, and it shouldn’t. Scroll for ten minutes and you’ll see it — the same post, the same words, the same three-beat structure, the same gentle authority, the same closing invitation to reflect. Row after row of the same thing, parked, in the back lot. But our trucks were never supposed to be parked together. The whole design was to get them out and scattered, one to a street, each one sitting in front of a particular house belonging to particular people. What is filling the internet is the opposite: the livery piled up in one place where nobody lives, all the recognition with nothing behind it. No company. No crews. Nobody who answers the phone when it goes wrong at ten at night.

Nobody decided this, which is the strange part. At Varment Guard we chose the sameness and paid for it and could defend it in a room. What’s happening now is a lot that filled up by default, truck by truck, with no one ever choosing the colors.

I know how it happens, because I know how it almost happens to me. You sit down to write. Something comes back fluent and competent and nearly right. “Nearly right” has a gravitational pull that “wrong” never had. Wrong you fight. Nearly right you accept, because fixing it feels like fussiness, and because it already sounds like something that would do well. The median is seductive precisely because it is the shape of what has already worked for everyone else. Right?

The contemplative tradition has a name for this, and it is older than any of our tools. Thomas Merton spent his life circling what he called the false self — not a liar, not a villain, but the self we assemble out of what the room is known to approve of. It is competent. It is often admired. It is also, in his reading, not anyone. The desert monastics worried about the same thing in a different space. They were forever warning young monks against copying an elder’s practice instead of finding their own, because a borrowed discipline produces a borrowed man.

Here is the part that matters for anyone who isn’t writing anything. The parking lot is not primarily a content problem. It is an interior one, and it had a head start on the technology by several thousand years.

I sit with people for a living and what I hear, more often than anything else, is pre-owned language. Someone describes their marriage in the vocabulary of a podcast they heard. Someone names a career crisis in terms borrowed whole from an article they read. Someone tells me about their grief in the precise phrasing of the last condolence card they received. None of it is dishonest. All of it is context with nothing behind it yet. My work in that room is almost never to supply a better framework or give answers — it is to keep asking until something comes out that nobody handed them. You can hear it when it happens. The sentence gets worse. It gets halting and specific and a little embarrassing, and it is the first true thing said in forty minutes.

That is the whole discipline, as far as I can tell. The true sentence is usually the worse-sounding one.

I wrote in the last blog about my father in his studio, and how he would set aside a piece that was nearly finished because a quarter inch in the slope of a cheek had gone wrong. He could not paint over wood. He had to go back to the log and start again. It took me fifty years to understand he was describing the same thing I am describing here from the other end — that the fluent, finished, nearly right version is the most dangerous thing on the table, because it is the hardest one to see a fault in.

The Enneagram makes the same case from another direction. Each type is, among other things, a strategy for being acceptable — a reliable way of getting approval, safety, or distance that worked so well, so early, that it stopped feeling like a strategy and started feeling like a personality. Nine types, nine very sophisticated paint schemes. The work is not to trade your type for a better one. It is to notice the moment you reach for the familiar move and ask whether this situation is asking for it, or whether you are just driving the truck because it is the one in the lot.

Which brings me back to the yard, and to the thing I had wrong for years.

I thought the fleet was the achievement. It wasn’t. I knew those crews. I knew Steve and Brad and Harry — what each of them was carrying into the truck at six in the morning, what was waiting when they got home, which of them was in a season that was going to hold and which of them was in one that wasn’t. The trucks were identical. Steve and Brad and Harry were never identical, not for one morning, and every night those ninety identical trucks went home to ninety different lives. The black and gold only ever went as deep as the paint.

That is also what made the brand mean anything. The uniformity was never the product. It was a way of pointing at ninety particular people who showed up and did the work. Take them out and you still have the trucks, and the trucks are worth nothing.

So the question the internet raises isn’t really about sameness. The lot is going to fill up; it already has. The question is whether there is anyone in the cab?

Ninety Trucks, Ninety Driveways Reflection Sheet

What I have come to is unglamorous. Before I publish, before I say the thing in the meeting, before I offer the observation in a session that I can tell will land well, I try to ask one question. Is this mine, or did I pick it up in the lot? Not “is it true” — the median is usually true. True and borrowed are not opposites. The question is whether it came up out of a life or came in off a shelf, and I find I can tell, if I am willing to be slow about it for ten seconds.

Most mornings I don’t like the answer. The borrowed version is better written. It is always better written. That is the problem.

But I think about standing in that cold lot at six in the morning, looking at what I believed was uniformity, when what was in front of me was ninety people I would have had to ask, one at a time, to learn anything true about. The sameness was real. It was also, every single morning, the least interesting fact about what I was looking at.

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, and together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

AI assisted, not written.

Sources

Thomas Merton on the false self — developed across his work, most directly in New Seeds of Contemplation (1961).

The sayings of the desert fathers and mothers on not imitating another’s practice: the Apophthegmata Patrum (Sayings of the Desert Fathers).

What Silence Does That Words Cannot

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Some things will not arrive until we stop talking.

Watch what happens in almost any conversation when the talking stops. Three seconds go by. Then four. Somebody laughs a little, or changes the subject, or asks a question nobody needed answered. We are remarkably good at not letting a silence stand.

I have spent a lot of years now sitting with people in rooms where silence is the point — spiritual direction, retreats, bedsides. And the thing I keep learning is this: silence is not the absence of something. It is a presence with its own work to do. There are things it accomplishes that no amount of good language ever will.

Silence is an event, not a gap

The body seems to know this before we do. In a study at the University of Pavia, researchers tracked heart rate and blood pressure while people listened to a sequence of musical tracks, with two-minute silences inserted between them. Slower music was more relaxing than fast, which you would expect. But the deepest drop in heart rate and blood pressure did not come from any of the music. It came during the silent pauses in between (Bernardi et al., 2006). The silence was not a nothing between the somethings. Physiologically, it was the most restorative part of the whole sequence.

There is even a hint that silence builds something. A 2013 study found that mice given two hours a day of near-total quiet showed more new cells maturing into neurons in the hippocampus than mice exposed to music, white noise, or even their own pup calls (Kirste et al., 2013). It was mice, and it did not test memory or humans, so I would not lean on it too hard. But I notice that the one condition the researchers assumed was the control — the empty one, the nothing — turned out to be the one doing the most.

TRY THIS — Two minutes, nothing added

Set a timer for two minutes. Put the phone in another room. Do not put on music, not even the calm kind, and do not give yourself anything to accomplish.

Sit. Let the first wave of restlessness come, because it will, usually around forty seconds. Do not fix it. Just stay until the timer goes.

Afterward, notice one thing: what showed up in you once nothing else was being added?

The season I had no words

There was a season in my life when I had no words. Not fewer words — none.

I would sit and gaze off into the distance for long stretches. The people closest to me kept asking the same question: what is wrong? It was a fair question. But the honest answer was that nothing was wrong. I was simply not in a place to use words. Something in me had gone quiet, and it was not a malfunction. It was a passage.

I know now to call that a liminal space — one of those thresholds where the old way of being has ended and the new one has not arrived yet. At the time I only knew I had nothing to say and no desire to manufacture anything.

Here is what I did not expect. When I came out the other side, I did not go back to how I had talked before. My whole way of communicating had changed. I came out using about a third of the words I used to use.

Silence had not taken something from me. It had taken something out of me.

Why we fill it

We fill silence because it is uncomfortable, and because most of us were trained to believe that helping means saying something. When someone is in pain in front of us, speech feels like action and silence feels like abandonment. So we offer the reassurance, the reframe, the story about our cousin who went through the same thing. Almost always, we are managing our own discomfort and calling it care.

The desert monastics understood the cost of this. They had a word — hesychia, stillness — and they treated it as a discipline rather than a mood. When a young monk came looking for wisdom, Abba Moses did not give him a teaching. He said: go sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything. That is a strange kind of answer unless you have discovered that some truths will not be told to you. They have to surface on their own, in conditions quiet enough for them to come up.

The second sentence

Here is the most practical thing I know about silence, and it has changed more conversations for me than any technique. When a person finishes speaking and you do not rush in, they very often say something else. And the second sentence is frequently the true one.

The first sentence is the prepared one — the summary they brought with them, the version they have told before. The second one, the one that only comes if you leave room, is where the actual thing lives. I have watched it happen hundreds of times. People are not withholding. They simply have not reached it yet, and our hurry to respond keeps them from ever getting there.

TRY THIS — The count of three

In your next real conversation, when the other person stops talking, silently count three before you say anything. That is all.

It will feel much longer than three seconds. Resist the urge to nod it away or fill it with “mmm.”

Watch what happens. Often they will keep going — and what comes next will be the part that mattered.

What words could not hold

I have sat with a lot of people who had just lost someone.

Early on I thought my job in that room was to find the right thing to say. I would search for it the whole time I was sitting there — some sentence that would make the loss make sense, or at least make it lighter. I never found one. There is no such sentence. I have looked.

What I learned, slowly and mostly by failing at the other thing, is that words do not help in that room nearly as much as presence does. So now I sit. I do not explain the loss, or locate a meaning in it, or reach for anything about a better place. I sit, and I stay longer than is comfortable, and I let the silence be as large as the thing that happened.

Nobody has ever thanked me for what I said at a time like that. People have thanked me for staying.

Some things are too large for sentences

There is an old strand of theology called the apophatic way, and its claim is bracing: that the most important realities can be more truthfully approached by what we do not say about them than by what we do. Every word we put on something that large also puts a fence around it. Say God is light and you have said something true, and you have also quietly excluded everything light is not.

Grief works the same way. So does awe. So does love, past a certain depth. This is why the worst thing said at a funeral is almost always a sentence, and the best thing is almost always a presence — someone who came, and sat, and did not explain anything. Words divide and define, which is exactly what makes them useful and exactly what makes them too small for some rooms. Silence can hold what language has to cut into pieces.

What Silence Does That Words Cannot Reflection Sheet

An ordinary discipline

None of this requires a monastery. It requires a willingness to be, for a few seconds at a time, less useful than you would like to be. Two minutes with nothing added. Three seconds before you answer. A drive with the radio off. A meal where nobody narrates. These are small, and they are not easy, and they will show you things.

Because the question underneath all of it is not whether silence is pleasant. It is whether there is something trying to reach you that cannot get through the noise — including the noise you are making. There usually is. It has been waiting, patiently, for you to stop talking long enough to hear it.

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, and together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

Sources

Bernardi, Porta & Sleight (2006) — cardiovascular and respiratory effects of music and silence: Circulation / Heart

Kirste et al. (2013) — “Is silence golden?” hippocampal neurogenesis in mice: PubMed

Abba Moses, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers; the apophatic tradition.

When Matter Becomes Prayer

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When Matter Becomes Prayer

A companion to Thin Places — because the holy ground may be in your hands.

Last time I said the thinnest ground you will ever stand on is probably within a mile of your bed. Here is the next turn of that same screw: it may be closer than that. It may be in your hands.

Most of us were handed a quiet assumption somewhere along the way — that the spiritual life is the part of life that is not physical. Prayer happens with eyes closed. Holiness happens in sanctuaries, or at least in silence. Everything else — the dishes, the commute, the sanding of a board, the chopping of an onion — is the ordinary stuff you get through in order to arrive at the real thing. It is the life we have, right? It is also, according to nearly every contemplative who ever lived, exactly backwards.

The monk in the kitchen

In the 1600s a Carmelite lay brother named Lawrence, whom I love, was assigned to the monastery kitchen, work he did not particularly want. He spent decades there among the pots and pans, and what he discovered became one of the most beloved little books in Christian spirituality. He said he felt as close to God with his hands in the dishwater as he did kneeling at the altar. He put it with a kind of homely joy that still disarms people four hundred years later: “I turn my little omelet in the pan for the love of God” (The Practice of the Presence of God).

Notice what he is not saying. He is not saying he thought holy thoughts while cooking, using the omelet as background noise for a more important interior event. He is saying the turning of the omelet was the prayer. The egg, the pan, the wrist, the attention — all of it, offered. Matter became prayer in his hands, and he did not have to leave the kitchen to find God, because God had not left the kitchen either.

The most material faith there is

There is real theology under all of this, not just a nice sentiment. Christianity makes an almost scandalous claim about matter, that God took a body. “The Word became flesh” (John 1:14) — not became an idea, or a feeling, or a philosophy. Flesh. And ever since, the central rites of the faith have been stubbornly physical: bread, wine, water, oil, hands laid on a head. A sacrament, as the old definition has it, is an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible grace. Which is to say the material world is not a distraction from the spiritual one. It is the way the spiritual one reaches us.

Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit who spent his life with his hands in actual dirt as a paleontologist, said it as plainly as anyone has: “By virtue of Creation, and still more the Incarnation, nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see” (The Divine Milieu). Nothing here below. Not the sink, not the garage, not the body, not the work.

Running in the grey mist

I used to run marathons. Really — I did. I was never a world-class runner, not close, but I did all right.

I would lace up in the dark and get out on the road while the grey mist still hung over the street in the early twilight. And there were mornings when I stood there stretching and thought, I am not in a place mentally to run today. Some days I went anyway, for no better reason than that one foot could go in front of the other.

And then something would happen. A mile or two in, a rhythm would find me — breath and stride and pavement all arriving at the same time — and I would smooth out. The effort did not disappear. It changed, simple.

And then, in that rhythm, came the moment. I touched something. You know what I mean, don’t you? All was right with the world, and I was not running anymore. I was communing. I had no language for it then. I would call it prayer now.

How we learned to split them

If this is true, why does it feel so unfamiliar? Two reasons, and they come from opposite directions.

The first is old. There has always been an impulse in religion to treat spirit as high and matter as low — to assume the body is a problem to be managed and the material world a waiting room for something better. It is an ancient instinct and the church has flirted with it for centuries, but the Incarnation keeps embarrassing it. You cannot build a faith around God taking on flesh and then quietly teach that flesh does not matter.

The second reason is new, and it is the machine I have written about before. A culture organized around output does not want your attention on the onion. It wants the onion chopped fast so you can get to the next thing, ideally while listening to something that makes you more productive. Hurry makes matter mute. Not because the dishes stopped being holy, but because nobody is home while they are being washed.

Who sweeps a room

The practical tradition here is wonderfully unglamorous. George Herbert, who wrote in 1633, put it in two lines that have outlived nearly everything else he said: “Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws, makes that and th’ action fine.” The Hebridean households I wrote about in the last piece blessed the kindling of the fire and the milking of the cow. Jewish practice has a blessing for bread, for wine, for the body working as it should. None of these are poetic decoration laid over ordinary life. They are claims about what ordinary life already is.

The book on my father’s kitchen island

My father died. And when my brother and I went to clean out the house, we found the book he had been reading at the end: Chop Wood, Carry Water.

My father was not a religious man. He had no use for church and did not talk about his soul. So why was he reading that? I never found out. There was no one left to ask, and I have made a kind of peace with never having the answer.

But I read the book, it changed my life. Its whole argument is that the spiritual path is not somewhere else — it is in the chopping and the carrying, in the office and the kitchen and the ordinary hours. Living here, now, is what matters most. The end of my life will take care of itself, won’t it?

I still do not know what my father found in those pages. I know what I found. And I know he handed it to me without ever meaning to.

There is one more thing I only learned later. That book, published in 1984, is sometimes credited with almost single-handedly creating the modern literature on finding the sacred in ordinary work. My father — who had no use for organized religion — died with the founding text of the thing I would spend the rest of my life trying to understand sitting on the kitchen island. I have never known what to do with that, except be grateful.

When Matter Becomes Prayer Reflection Sheet

Matter does not become prayer. We do.

I titled this blog “When Matter Becomes Prayer,” and now I want to take part of it back. Matter does not actually become prayer at some point, as though a bowl of soup were inert until the right thoughts were applied to it. In the last piece I wondered whether the veil is thin everywhere and we are the thick ones. The same correction belongs here. The onion was always the handiwork of God. The water was always water of baptism, in its way. What changes is not the matter. What changes is whether anyone is present to it.

Attention, then, is the thing we actually bring. Not belief, not feeling, not the right words — attention. Simone Weil said that absolutely unmixed attention is prayer, and anyone who has ever lost themselves in making something with their hands knows the truth of it from the inside, whether or not they would have called it prayer at the time.

Practices for hands

Do one thing at a time, with your whole self, and let that be enough. Make something with your hands this week — bread, a repair, a meal, a line of paint — and do not listen to anything while you do it. Eat one meal slowly enough to taste it. Bless the thing in front of you, out loud if you can stand it. And when words will not come, which happens to all of us eventually, let the body pray instead: walk, dig, cook, hold a hand. The body has been praying since long before you had language, and it has not forgotten how.

Brother Lawrence stayed in that kitchen the rest of his life. He is not remembered for a system or a doctrine. He is remembered because he discovered that the distance between the sink and the sanctuary was a distance he had invented, and once he stopped defending it, God was simply there — in the pan, in the water, in the hands.

Your hands are already in the water. That was never the obstacle. It was the invitation.

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, and together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

Sources

Brother Lawrence — The Practice of the Presence of God: overview

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin — The Divine Milieu, “nothing here below is profane”: Center for Action and Contemplation

Rick Fields et al. — Chop Wood, Carry Water (1984).

George Herbert, “The Elixir” (1633); John 1:14; Simone Weil on attention.

Thin Places That You Don’t Notice

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Thin Places

The thinnest ground you will ever stand on is probably within a mile of your bed.

It is a Tuesday. You are standing at the kitchen sink with your hands in the warm water, or sitting on the back steps while the light goes long and gold, or in the chair where you always sit, and the house is quiet in a way it usually is not. Nothing happens. Nothing you could put in a report. And yet for a moment the ordinary goes quietly transparent, and you have the distinct sense that you are not alone in the room — that the world has worn thin right here, over the sink, on a Tuesday.

The Celtic Christians had a name for that: a thin place. The idea is that the usual distance between heaven and earth — between the material and the spiritual, the seen and the unseen — sometimes narrows almost to nothing. There is an old Celtic saying that heaven and earth are only three feet apart, but that in the thin places the distance is smaller still.

Yes, there are famous ones. That is not the point.

You may have heard the phrase attached to islands. George MacLeod, who refounded the Iona Community on that windswept Scottish island, is remembered for calling Iona “a thin place where only tissue paper separates the material from the spiritual” (The Living Church). Pilgrims say similar things about Lindisfarne, about Skellig Michael out in the Atlantic, about certain holy wells and standing stones. All of it is true, and if you ever get to stand on that kind of ground, go.

But if thin places are mostly islands off the coast of Scotland, then thin places are for people with money and vacation time, and that cannot be what the Celts meant. It is not, in fact, what they meant at all.

The Celts blessed the kitchen

Look at what they actually prayed. In the Carmina Gadelica — the great collection of Gaelic prayers and blessings that Alexander Carmichael gathered from Highland and Hebridean households in the 1800s — you find blessings for kindling the fire in the morning and for smooring it, banking the coals, at night. Blessings for milking the cow. For walking out. For making the bed and lying down in it (Carmina Gadelica). These were not pilgrims on a holy island. They were farmers and fishermen and tired women with cold hands, blessing the hearth in their own kitchens before dawn.

Which means the tradition we are borrowing from was never mainly about famous places. It was about the hearth. The doorway. The byre. The work of your own hands on an ordinary morning. They assumed the veil was thin right where they were standing, and they talked to God accordingly — not on retreat, but while lifting the peat.

The night on the back steps with Lincoln

One winter night I was sitting on the back porch steps with Lincoln. It was snowing. It was dark and cold and completely quiet.

Lincoln was a big golden retriever who almost never sat still — he loved everything and everybody, all the time, at full volume. But that night he sat. The two of us stared off into the dark together, our breath slowing until it seemed to wrap something gentle around us both.

And then everything stopped. The stars stopped moving across the sky. The sound around us stopped. Even the snow seemed to freeze mid-dance. We were still on the back steps, and we were somewhere else — a thin place. I did not decide that. It simply was.

And here is the part I still cannot explain: both of us knew. The dog knew. Something different was happening, right here and right now, and we were not observing it. We were being met. We felt seen.

Jacob was not on pilgrimage

Scripture backs this up in a way that should be a relief to all of us. Jacob was not on a spiritual retreat. He was running from his brother, sleeping rough in an unremarkable patch of wilderness with a stone for a pillow, and he dreamed of a ladder with angels going up and down between heaven and earth. He woke and said one of the most arresting lines in the whole Bible: “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I did not know it” (Genesis 28:16).

Read the second half slowly. The place did not change overnight. No one installed the holiness while Jacob slept. What changed was Jacob. The ground had been thin the entire time; he had simply been walking on it with his mind elsewhere, the way we all do — until a dream cracked him open enough to notice. He had been sleeping on the gate of heaven and calling it a rough night.

The ones near you

So look closer to home than you have been looking. A hospital corridor at three in the morning. A church basement with bad coffee and folding chairs, where somebody finally tells the truth. The cemetery you drive past on the way to work. The river in fog. The garage. The kitchen table after everyone else has gone to bed. The drive home from something hard, when you sit in the car in the driveway a minute longer before going in.

And the nearest one of all is about five and a half feet tall and goes everywhere you go. Your own body is a thin place — the breath that keeps arriving without your permission, the hands that know the work before you think it through, the gut that registers a room before your mind has words. If God is anywhere, God is at least as close as that.

Then there is this, which we have come to believe is the thinnest ground of all: sometimes the thin place is a person. The space between two people who are actually present to one another — in a direction session, in a marriage, at a bedside, in the silence after something true has finally been said — can be more transparent than any island. Ask anyone who has sat with the dying. They will tell you, often haltingly, that the room felt different. That they were standing somewhere they had not been before.

Sitting with Ernie

Ernie’s family asked me to sit with him. We do not know what to say, they told me. So I sat.

Ernie was coming to the end of his journey, and it had been a very good journey. There was nothing to fix and nothing to arrange. I did not have any words. Neither did Ernie. So we did not use any.

But I knew — the way the body knows things before the mind has language for them — that this was different. Important. Real in a way that most hours are not.

And when it was time, he left. I was holding his hand. In that moment I was standing against the other world. Not near it. Against it — close enough that I could almost have put my hand through and into it. I have never been able to describe it better than that, and I have stopped trying. Some things you do not explain. You carry them.

Why we walk past

So why do we miss so many of them, when they are this close? Consider Moses at the burning bush. The text says something easy to skip: he turned aside to see. Only then does the voice come, and the instruction — take off your sandals, the place where you are standing is holy ground (Exodus 3). The bush was burning before Moses noticed. What the moment asked of him was not belief but attention: the willingness to stop the errand he was on and go look at something that was not on his list.

We have built a world almost perfectly engineered against turning aside. Hurry is its native speed and distraction its default setting; there is always one more thing, one more scroll, one more errand. You cannot rush into a thin place. It does not open on demand and it will not compete for your attention. It simply waits, patient as a burning bush, for someone willing to be late for something else.

Or perhaps it is we who are thick

Here is where the mystics push us further, and we think they are right. If God is genuinely everywhere — if, as Isaiah heard the seraphim sing, the whole earth is full of the divine glory — then perhaps the veil is not thin only in a handful of blessed locations. Perhaps it is thin everywhere, and the variable is not the place at all. Perhaps it is us. Perhaps we are the thick ones.

That reframes the whole spiritual life. The goal is not to collect thin places, pilgrimage by pilgrimage, as though holiness were a destination with a gift shop. The goal is to become thin ourselves — porous, unhurried, awake — so that the ordinary Tuesday and the kitchen table and the person across from you begin to give off the light they have been giving off all along. The saints were not people who found more holy ground than the rest of us. They were people who had grown transparent enough to keep noticing it.

Thin Place Reflection Guide

How to grow thinner

None of this requires a plane ticket, though by all means go to Iona if you can. It requires smaller and harder things. Return to one ordinary place often enough that it stops being scenery. Keep silence long enough to get past the first wave of boredom. Go to the edges — dawn, water, doorways, the hours before the world has organized itself. Let grief and beauty do their slow work instead of managing them. Put your phone in another room and do one piece of work with your whole attention. And when something in you says stop, turn aside — do it, even if you are already late.

You might even do what those Hebridean women did, and simply bless the thing in front of you: the kindling of the fire, the making of the bed, the washing of the dishes, the hand you are holding. Not because the blessing makes the ground holy. Because it was holy, and the blessing is how you finally notice.

“Surely the LORD is in this place, and I did not know it.” That is not only Jacob’s line. It is the sentence waiting at the end of a great many of our days. The whole invitation of the mystical life is simply to shorten the distance between the presence and the noticing — until one day, God willing, there is no distance left at all.

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, and together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

Sources

Carmina Gadelica — Alexander Carmichael’s collection of Gaelic household prayers and blessings: sacred-texts.com

The Living Church — “The Thin Place of Iona” (George MacLeod on Iona): livingchurch.org

Scripture: Genesis 28:16–17 (Jacob at Bethel); Exodus 3:1–5 (Moses turns aside); Isaiah 6:3.

The Illusion We’re Living In

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What’s behind the matrix — and how we got handed the script.

There’s a reason The Matrix struck such a nerve with me. Beneath the science fiction was a question most of us feel but rarely say out loud: what if the life I’m working so hard to keep up isn’t entirely mine? What if some of what I call “just the way things are” was handed to me — a script written by someone else, running quietly in the background of my days? The film gave us an image for the suspicion: that we might be earnestly, exhaustingly living inside an illusion, and not even know it.

We want to be careful here, because this territory attracts a lot of heat. We are not talking about a secret cabal pulling every string. We are talking about something better documented and, in a way, stranger: that many of the “wants” we experience as most personally our own were, at least in part, manufactured — and there are historical receipts.

The machinery was built on purpose

In the 1920s, American industry had a problem: people mostly bought what they needed, and then they stopped. So a new idea took hold. Paul Mazur, a banker at Lehman Brothers, put it with startling honesty in the Harvard Business Review in 1927: “We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things even before the old have been entirely consumed… Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.” (Quote Investigator / HBR)

The man who knew how to do the training was Edward Bernays — Freud’s nephew and the father of modern public relations. Bernays grasped that you don’t sell people products; you sell them emotions, identities, freedoms. In 1929 he staged a group of debutantes lighting cigarettes at New York’s Easter parade and called them “torches of freedom,” rebranding a smoking habit as women’s liberation. It worked (History Today). The desire felt personal. It had been engineered.

The engineering reached into the products themselves. On a December day in 1924, the world’s leading lightbulb makers met in Geneva, formed what became the Phoebus cartel, and quietly agreed to make their bulbs worse — cutting lifespans from 1,500–2,000 hours down to 1,000, with fines for any bulb that lasted too long (IEEE Spectrum). It is the first well-documented case of “planned obsolescence”: designing things to fail so you’ll buy them again. The throwaway world we take for granted was, in part, a decision.

Even the dream had an author

Our highest aspiration turns out to have a byline and a date. The phrase “the American Dream” was coined in 1931 by the historian James Truslow Adams, and his original meaning was beautiful — “a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement” (Britannica). But somewhere along the way the dream got quietly translated into square footage and a second car, and we inherited the translation without ever reading the original. We were handed a script and told it was our own ambition.

The life you’re supposed to want

And it isn’t only things we’re sold — it’s a whole way of living, a template for what a life is even supposed to look like. There’s an approved sequence: the degree, the career ladder, the house in the right neighborhood, the milestones hit roughly on schedule. And there’s a quiet scoreboard running underneath it all, measuring you against everyone who seems to be doing it better.

We even have a name for the game. “Keeping up with the Joneses” began as a comic strip that debuted in 1913, about a family straining to match the neighbors next door — the Joneses, who were talked about constantly but, tellingly, never once shown (Wikipedia). The cartoonist based it on his own life, living beyond his means to match the family down the street. The Joneses were invisible then, and in a way they still are — a standard we chase without ever quite seeing it clearly.

Today the neighbors are global, and they are never off. Social media turned comparison into an around-the-clock feed of everyone’s curated highlight reel — the vacations, the renovations, the bodies, the milestones — and “lifestyle” became something we consume and perform at the same time. Marketers noticed this long ago and largely stopped selling products; now they sell you a lifestyle, and the quiet promise that buying it will finally make you a certain kind of person. Even our exhaustion got rebranded: hustle culture took being consumed by the machine and renamed it “the grind,” a thing to be proud of.

The lifestyle, like the dream, arrived pre-assembled. Few of us ever stopped to ask whether we would have chosen this particular life at all, if it hadn’t been handed to us with the price tag already attached.

I was sure I saw through it

In the late sixties I was a hippie in Detroit — long hair, and the absolute certainty that I saw through everything the establishment was selling. I was part of the pack. We knew the game was rigged, and we weren’t going to be fooled the way we thought our parents had been. When the draft lottery came, my number was 2 — about as low as it gets. So rather than wait for the Army to take me, I joined the Navy on my own terms. That much, at least, felt like a choice I was making.

What I didn’t notice was what boot camp was doing. Somewhere between the haircut and the drills and the endless repetition, the way I saw the world quietly changed — and not into something I had chosen. The kid who was so sure he saw through the illusion had simply traded one script for another. I had walked out of one pack and into a tighter one, and I never felt the switch happen. I thought I was the awake one. I was asleep. It would take me years to realize I’d been handed a new set of eyes and told they were my own.

The newest layer of the illusion

The most recent update to the matrix is the one in your pocket. The average American now spends more than five hours a day on a phone, unlocking it dozens — by some counts nearly a hundred — times a day, on apps engineered by very smart people to be as hard to put down as possible (Exploding Topics). This is not a moral failing on your part. It is the attention economy working exactly as designed. Bernays sold desire; the feed sells your attention — and it is winning.

The contemplatives saw it coming

None of this is new to the contemplative traditions. Twenty-four centuries ago Plato pictured human beings chained in a cave, mistaking shadows on a wall for reality — and the ache and disorientation of the one who finally turns around and walks out into the light. Howard Thurman warned that if you cannot hear the sound of the genuine in yourself, “you will spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls.” And the apostle Paul wrote what may be the oldest red-pill line of all: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2). Conformed is the key word. The default setting is to be shaped by the machine. Transformation begins the moment you notice it running.

Here is the ache the whole system depends on and can never satisfy: the next thing never quite does it. The purchase, the promotion, the upgrade, the scroll — each promises arrival and delivers a brief hit and a fresh wanting. Psychologists call it the hedonic treadmill. The saints called it the restless heart. Either way, the machine needs you a little dissatisfied, and the soul was made for something the machine cannot sell.

The Illusion We Are Living In Reflection Sheet

 

How much more is the right amount?

Years later I started Varment Guard, and I wanted it to be a different kind of company — one where the worker mattered, where everyone was treated the same, where the point was not simply the number at the bottom of the page. For a while I thought that was just how I would build it.

Then we grew, and the message started arriving from every direction: I was wrong. My partners said it. Most of my managers said it. Even the banks said it — we needed more profit, more margin, more growth. It wasn’t one voice; it was all of them, all the time, until questioning it felt naive.

Here’s the thing: I am not against making money. Of course a company has to bring in more than it spends. But the question nobody wanted to sit with was the one that actually mattered — how much more is the right amount? “More” was simply assumed to be the answer, forever, with no ceiling. And I slowly realized the pressure I felt wasn’t really about my company at all. It was the machine, insisting that “enough” is a word you are never allowed to say.

Waking up is a practice, not a purchase

The way out is not rage, and it isn’t escape to a cabin in the woods (though a little of that never hurts). It is awakening — the slow, unglamorous practice of noticing the script while it runs and choosing, in small daily ways, not to be conformed. Silence is a form of unplugging. Sabbath is a quiet rebellion against a culture that measures you by output. Gratitude short-circuits manufactured wanting by insisting you already have enough. And spiritual direction is, among other things, someone sitting with you while you learn to tell the difference between the desires that are truly yours and the ones that were installed.

You cannot un-see it once you’ve seen it — and that’s the good news hidden inside the hard news. The red pill, it turns out, is not a dramatic exit from the world. It’s just attention: the willingness to look honestly at the life you’re living and ask how much of this did I actually choose, and how much was I handed? That question is the beginning of freedom.

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, and together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

Sources

Paul Mazur, Harvard Business Review (1927), on shifting from needs to desires: quoteinvestigator.com

Edward Bernays and “torches of freedom”: History Today

The Phoebus cartel and planned obsolescence (1924): IEEE Spectrum

James Truslow Adams and the origin of “the American Dream” (1931): Britannica

“Keeping up with the Joneses” — origin of the phrase (1913 comic strip): Wikipedia

Smartphone / screen-time statistics (2025–2026): Exploding Topics

What Happens in a Spiritual Direction Session?

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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 work — including his accompaniment of individuals and small groups across faith traditions like 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.

Schedule with Jim: 

Schedule with Lynette:

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 and Lynette also serve at Linworth United Methodist Church.



When Is the Right Time for Spiritual Direction?

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There’s a question that comes up almost every time someone expresses interest in spiritual direction, and it usually sounds something like this: Am I ready for something like that?

Jim has heard this question more times than he can count — in pastoral care conversations, in introductory sessions, in the quiet pause before someone finally picks up the phone to schedule. And his honest answer, every time, is some version of this: there is no ideal moment. But there are seasons that tend to open people to it. Recognizing yours might be the most useful thing this post can offer.

When something is ending or beginning

In 2008, Varment Guard — the pest control and wildlife management company Jim co-founded after eight months of preparation, the one with “Failure was not an option” painted above the door — hit the full force of the financial crisis. The company survived. But the season of navigating that uncertainty, of trying to discern what was worth holding and what needed releasing, was one of the most clarifying of Jim’s life. Not because it was easy — it wasn’t — but because it forced a quality of attention that ordinary times don’t require.

Transitions do that. A job ending. A relationship shifting. Children leaving home. A diagnosis. Even positive transitions carry loss inside them, and most of us don’t have a space specifically designed to hold that complexity. Spiritual direction and spiritual formation make room for the full texture of transitions — the grief and the hope, the relief and the fear — without trying to flatten any of it. If you’re in a between-space right now, that’s not a reason to wait. It’s often exactly the right time.

When you’re trying to discern something

Discernment — the practice of understanding what is truly yours to do, to choose, to release — is one of the oldest reasons people have sought spiritual companionship. Jim and Lynette’s years at Six Seconds, the global emotional intelligence nonprofit, were rich with this kind of work: helping leaders and organizations understand not just what they wanted to accomplish, but what was worth wanting in the first place. That distinction is at the heart of discernment. And it’s one of the things spiritual direction is extraordinarily well-suited to hold.

It doesn’t have to be a dramatic crossroads. Sometimes discernment looks like trying to understand why a particular relationship keeps surfacing in your thoughts. Why a certain path feels both right and frightening. Why you can’t shake a sense of call toward something you don’t have language for yet.

When your inner life feels flat or distant

This one surprises people. They assume spiritual direction is for moments of intensity — crisis, grief, breakthrough. But some of the most significant formation happens in the seasons that feel quiet to the point of emptiness. The plateau. The long stretch of ordinary days when nothing seems to be happening spiritually, and you’re not sure whether that’s rest or loss.

Howard Thurman — one of the contemplative voices that has most shaped Jim’s own formation — wrote about the soul’s need for intervals of quiet that aren’t actually empty, even when they feel that way. A skilled director knows how to be present with you in those stretches without rushing you out of them. Which is often exactly what they need.

When you’ve had an experience you don’t have words for

Sometimes something happens — in prayer, in nature, in a moment of unexpected stillness — and you find yourself thinking: what was that? Not with alarm, but with a kind of alert attention. Something shifted. Something landed.

Jim grew up in Detroit with two professional artist parents who taught him, without using these words, that what’s beneath the surface of things is worth your most careful attention. That instinct has shaped everything he does as a coach, a spiritual director, and a person of faith. Spiritual direction is one of the few spaces in most people’s lives where that kind of experience is taken seriously on its own terms — not explained away, not spiritualized into a tidy category, but listened to with genuine care.

When you’ve been carrying something alone for too long

This may be the simplest of all. Some things aren’t appropriate for therapy. Some things aren’t quite what a friend or spouse is equipped to hold. Some things belong to the inner life in a way that doesn’t translate easily into the ordinary rhythms of conversation.

Lynette and Jim have both sat with people carrying things for years that had never quite had a container — not because they lacked good relationships, but because what they were carrying required a particular kind of listening. The kind that doesn’t rush, doesn’t fix, doesn’t need you to arrive at a conclusion by the end of the hour.

You don’t need to be in crisis. You don’t need to be spiritually advanced. What you need is a sense that your inner life is worth this kind of attention — and the willingness to find out what it might surface if given the space.

If any of these seasons sound familiar, a free, no-obligation 15-minute conversation with Jim or Lynette is a gentle next step. Just a chance to talk about where you are and whether this is the right kind of company for the road.

Peace and every good.

Schedule with Jim: 

Schedule with Lynette: 

 

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 & Lynette also serves as a pastoral caregivers in the United Methodist Church.

What People Get Wrong About Spiritual Direction

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There’s a particular kind of confusion that comes up almost every time spiritual direction is mentioned. People hear “spiritual” and think church. They hear “direction” and think someone’s about to tell them what to do. Neither is quite right, and the confusion is understandable — it’s an old practice with a name that doesn’t translate easily into how we talk now.

So let’s start with what it actually is.

Spiritual direction is a confidential, one-on-one companionship that creates space to notice where the sacred is already present in your everyday life — your joys, struggles, questions, and transitions. Not where it should be, or where you wish it were. Where it already is, whether or not you’ve had language for it yet.

That noticing happens through deep listening. A director isn’t formulating a response while you talk; they’re paying attention — to your words, to what’s underneath them, to the silences. Conversation, prayer, silence, reflection — these are the tools, but the posture underneath all of them is the same: compassion without judgment, curiosity without an agenda.

It’s also, importantly, not a single appointment that wraps something up. Spiritual direction tends to unfold as an ongoing relationship, typically meeting monthly, because the things worth paying attention to in a life rarely show themselves all at once. They surface slowly, in fragments, across seasons. A director who’s been walking with you for a year can hear an echo in this month’s session that connects to something you said eight months ago — and that kind of continuity is part of what makes the practice work.

And it’s open to anyone. You don’t need a particular faith tradition, or any tradition at all, to do this work. The starting point is always your own lived experience, not a doctrine you’re being measured against.

Is This What I’m Looking For? Reflection Sheet

Now, what it isn’t — because this matters just as much.

It isn’t therapy or counseling. A spiritual director isn’t trained to diagnose or treat mental health conditions, and a good one will know that boundary well and respect it. Plenty of people find real value in having both a therapist and a spiritual director at the same time — one tending to the mind, one tending to the soul, each doing its own work without trying to be the other.

It isn’t religious instruction. Nobody hands you a doctrine to follow or grades how faithfully you’re practicing. If you came expecting a syllabus, you’d be disappointed — and that’s by design. The conversation starts with you, not a curriculum.

It isn’t advice-giving or problem-solving. This might be the hardest one for people used to efficiency. A director isn’t going to hand you a three-step plan. Instead, they ask the kind of questions that help you find your own clarity — slower, yes, but often truer, because it’s clarity you arrived at rather than clarity you were handed.

And it isn’t a quick fix. Like most things worth doing, it unfolds gradually, session by session. If you’re looking for a fast resolution to something, this isn’t that. If you’re looking for a steady companion while you sit with something that doesn’t resolve quickly — grief, a discernment, a season of change — this might be exactly that.

So who is this actually for?

Anyone in a season of discernment. Anyone carrying grief that hasn’t found its shape yet. Anyone who senses there’s more going on beneath the surface of their days but hasn’t had a space — or a companion — to slow down enough to notice it.

If that’s resonating, here’s an easy next step: a free, no-obligation 15-minute conversation with either of us, just to talk it through. No pressure, no commitment — just a chance to see if this is the right fit for where you are right now. 

Schedule with Jim:

Schedule with Lynette: 

Peace and every good.

 

The Intelligence You Weren’t Taught

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She could name what she was feeling before most people in the room even knew they had feelings. She could read a tense conversation like a map, tracking the undercurrents, sensing what was unspoken. By every measure the research celebrates, her emotional intelligence was high. And yet, somewhere beneath all of that competence, something was restless. Something that didn’t have a name yet.

I think about her often. About the particular quality of her restlessness — not the kind that suggests incompleteness, but the kind that suggests there is more. A country just beyond the border of the map you’ve been given.

Emotional intelligence gave her a better map. What she was reaching for was a different kind of knowing altogether.

What EQ Gets Right — And Where It Stops

We have built our practice at spirit of EQ around the conviction that emotional intelligence changes lives. It changes how leaders show up, how teams hold conflict, how individuals navigate the interior terrain of their own experience. The research is clear, and decades of work with clients has confirmed it: people who develop their EQ are more self-aware, more empathic, more effective in their relationships, more resilient when the ground shifts beneath them.

But here is the honest edge of that map: emotional intelligence is a technology. A profound one. A necessary one. And yet a technology is only as generative as the spirit that animates it. You can have extraordinary self-awareness and still not know what your life is for. You can understand others deeply and still feel unmoored from any larger belonging. You can manage your emotions with great skill and still find, at the end of the day, that something essential is asking to be heard.

EQ maps the terrain. It does not always tell you why the terrain matters, or to what — or to whom — you ultimately belong.

That is where Lynette’s question begins.

Lynette’s Question — And the Research That Followed

Lynette Vaive has spent her career at the intersection of emotional intelligence, the Enneagram, and spiritual formation. Her doctoral research — a Doctor of Ministry focused on Spiritual Emotional Intelligence — grew from a question she kept encountering in the field: what happens when emotional intelligence is not enough? What is the deeper layer that some people access and others don’t? And can it be named, taught, practiced?

The framework she developed is called Spiritual Emotional Intelligence, or SEQ. It is not a replacement for EQ — it is a deepening of it, a third dimension that EQ by itself cannot fully reach. SEQ is organized around three domains: Awareness, Belonging, and Insight.

Awareness, in the SEQ framework, is more than self-knowledge. It is the capacity to be present to your own inner life with honesty and without flinching — to notice not just what you feel, but what your feelings are pointing toward. It is the kind of attention the contemplative traditions have always cultivated, and that modern life consistently works against.

Belonging is the recognition that we are not isolated selves navigating a competitive landscape. We are embedded — in community, in creation, in something that holds us whether we attend to it or not. SEQ invites us to notice that embeddedness, to feel it, to let it shape how we move through the world. This is the domain that changes how leaders relate to their teams, how partners relate to each other, how any of us relate to the stranger across the table.

Insight is the capacity to integrate what Awareness reveals and what Belonging grounds — to let that integration become wisdom that actually changes behavior, not just understanding. Insight, in the SEQ framework, is the difference between knowing and living differently because you know.

Within these three domains, Lynette’s research maps nine tiles — specific capacities that together describe what Spiritual Emotional Intelligence looks like in practice. But the framework breathes most fully not as a model to be mastered, but as a territory to be inhabited.

What Changes When You Go Deeper

I think of the woman at the beginning of this reflection. Her EQ gave her a map of her inner landscape. What SEQ names — what her restlessness was reaching toward — was the landscape itself. The felt sense that she belonged to something larger than her own competence. The capacity to let that belonging inform not just her behavior but her becoming.

Howard Thurman, the theologian and mystic who shaped the thinking of the civil rights movement and whose work has long been an anchor for me, wrote about the inner life with a clarity that few have matched. He understood that the most significant work any person does happens not on the stage of public action, but in the quiet interior where the self is formed and reformed in relationship to what is deepest and truest. He did not use the language of emotional intelligence. But he was describing its spiritual root.

SEQ is, in some ways, a contemporary articulation of what contemplatives have always known: that the quality of our presence to others depends on the quality of our presence to ourselves, and that the quality of our presence to ourselves depends on something we did not manufacture. A ground. A source. A belonging that precedes our effort.

In community and organizational settings, SEQ changes the texture of everything. Teams that develop Awareness together begin to notice the emotional undercurrents they used to ignore. Communities that practice Belonging begin to hold conflict differently — not as a threat to be managed but as an invitation to go deeper. Leaders who cultivate Insight find that their decisions come from a different place, quieter and more rooted than the reactive center most of us operate from by default.

Something shifts. Not dramatically, not all at once. But truly.

The Deeper Layer Is Not Out of Reach

She is still in the room, the woman from the beginning of this reflection. And now she has a name for what she was reaching toward. Not a label that fixes it, but a language that opens it — a way of attending to the Awareness, Belonging, and Insight that were always present in her, asking to be cultivated.

That is what the SEQ framework offers. Not a program, but a practice. Not mastery, but an orientation — a way of asking better questions of your own interior life and the lives you share with others.

Spiritual Emotional Intelligence  Reflection Guide— Three Domains, Three Questions

The map was never the territory. But there is a territory. And it is worth inhabiting.

If this stirred something in you, we would be glad to have you join the ongoing conversation at spirit of EQ — on Substack, in our Mighty Networks community, or through the work we do directly with individuals and organizations.

Peace and every good.