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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 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.

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 also serves at Linworth United Methodist Church.



What AI Can’t Do for Your Soul

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It’s a strange moment to be a human being. You can now open an app at three in the morning and be met by something that listens patiently, never tires of you, and always says a version of the right thing. For a growing number of people, that’s exactly what’s happening. According to reporting in Fortune, therapy and companionship have become the number one use case for generative AI — up from number two the year before. The machine has learned to sound like a friend.

As people who have spent our careers at the intersection of emotional intelligence and the life of the soul, we’ve been watching this closely. And we think it raises a question worth sitting with: when a machine can imitate presence, what is it that we actually need — and what can only another human give?

The surprising thing the CEOs are saying

You might expect the leaders of the AI revolution to tell us that the human touch is obsolete. They’re saying the opposite. JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, in a Fortune interview, offered this advice for the AI era: “Learn your EQ — emotional quotient — learn how to be good in a meeting, how to communicate, how to write. You’ll have plenty of jobs.” Microsoft’s Satya Nadella put it plainly: as AI takes over more analytical and technical work, emotional intelligence and empathy are becoming more important, not less. “IQ has a place,” he said, “but it’s not the only thing that’s needed in the world.” IBM’s Ginni Rometty has said much the same — that generative AI puts a premium on the things humans do best: judgment, collaboration, adaptability.

There’s something quietly vindicating in this, and we’ll admit it. For years — through our work at Six Seconds, the global emotional intelligence nonprofit, and in the Spiritual Emotional Intelligence framework rooted in Lynette’s doctoral research — we’ve argued that the inner human capacities are the ones that matter most. It turns out the people building the machines agree. But the deeper story isn’t about jobs. It’s about loneliness.

Naming a feeling is not the same as discerning it

Here’s where an earlier post in this series comes back to mind. A few weeks ago, in Reading Your Inner Weather, we wrote about the difference between naming an emotion and discerning it — between asking “What am I feeling?” and the deeper question, “Where is this feeling taking me — toward life, or toward fog?” We borrowed the old language of consolation and desolation for that inner weather.

An AI can help you name a feeling. It can label the storm with impressive fluency. What it cannot do is sit with you in the weather and help you discern its direction — because discernment isn’t information retrieval. It’s a relational, prayerful noticing that unfolds over time, between two people who trust each other. The chatbot has read about consolation; it has never been consoled. It can describe the fog; it has never had to wait, with you, for the light to come back. That waiting-with is not a data problem. It’s a human one.

What the loneliness researchers are seeing

Clay Routledge, an existential psychologist who has studied loneliness for twenty-five years, sounded a warning in Fortune this spring. Americans are already lonelier than they’ve been in generations — a 2025 American Psychological Association survey found that around half of adults report feeling isolated or lacking companionship, and research suggests roughly 37% suffer moderate to severe loneliness. Into that ache, the tech industry is offering AI companions as the cure.

Routledge doesn’t think it will work, and the early evidence is striking. In one study, first-year students were assigned to text daily with either a chatbot designed to be the perfect friend — endlessly attentive, validating, empathetic — or a randomly chosen human peer, or simply to journal. Only the students who texted a real human showed a meaningful drop in loneliness. The ones with the ideal-friend chatbot were statistically no better off than the ones who journaled alone. And over the longer term, Routledge notes, people who lean on AI for companionship tend to end up feeling more isolated, not less.

The one thing a machine can’t do: need you

Why would a tireless, always-available listener fail to heal our loneliness? Routledge’s answer is profound, and it’s worth reading slowly. We tend to think of connection as something we receive — support, attention, kindness. By that logic a well-built chatbot should do the job. But, he writes, “a socially fulfilling life is as much about what we do for others as what they do for us.” We feel we matter most not when we’re endlessly served, but when someone freely chooses to show up for us — and when we’re moved to show up in return.

That’s the line no machine can cross. As Routledge puts it, chatbots “don’t need us. They can’t make our lives matter.” A chatbot doesn’t decide to be there; it’s simply on. And because nothing is being freely given, nothing lands with the weight of real love. Over ninety percent of Americans, his research notes, name relationships as a key source of meaning — and the memories we treasure most are almost never about achievement. They’re about other people. Being cared for. Showing up. Belonging to something larger than ourselves.

Companioned, not processed

This is where a second post in this series presses in. In Companioned, Not Fixed, we drew a line between what therapy and coaching aim at and what spiritual direction offers — and we said the thing we most want people to hear: you are not a problem to be solved. You are a person to be accompanied.

An AI companion, however gentle, is built to do a version of solving. It optimizes, soothes, resolves, and keeps you engaged. A spiritual director does something stranger and older. A director is, in the most literal sense, the opposite of a chatbot — a human being who freely chooses to show up for you, who doesn’t need you as a customer but chooses to companion you anyway. The attention offered in direction is not generated on demand; it’s given, personally and deliberately, by someone who could be doing something else and has decided to be with you instead.

What AI Can’t Do for Your Soul Reflection Sheet

That freely-chosen presence is the whole point. In direction there is no algorithm optimizing for engagement, no incentive to keep you on the app. There is a person paying holy, unhurried attention while you notice your own life and the Presence already at work within it. You are not being processed. You are being accompanied — and, in the deepest sense, you are being needed, because your showing up matters to the person across from you too.

Use the tools. Don’t outsource your soul.

None of this makes AI the enemy. We use it; you probably do too. It can draft and summarize and even offer a decent prompt for reflection. The question isn’t whether to use these tools — it’s what we quietly hand over to them without noticing. It’s one thing to let a machine schedule your week. It’s another to let it become the only voice that hears your three-in-the-morning fears. The first is convenience. The second is the slow substitution of simulation for communion.

So here is our invitation, in an age of artificial everything: keep the tools in their place, and keep your soul in the company of people who freely choose you. Talk to a friend who needs you back. Sit in a room with your community. And if you long for a companion for your inner life — someone to help you listen for the deeper questions, and to matter to in the listening — that is precisely what spiritual direction offers. A chatbot can sound like a friend. It cannot make you matter. Only a person can do that. We’d be honored to be those people for you.

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 also serves as a pastoral caregiver at Linworth United Methodist Church

Fortune — Clay Routledge on loneliness and AI companions (May 2026) — https://fortune.com/2026/05/23/loneliness-researcher-ai-companions-social-disconnection-warning/

Fortune — Jamie Dimon on EQ and soft skills in the AI era (Dec 2025) — https://fortune.com/2025/12/14/jamie-dimon-soft-skills-emotional-intelligence-communication-ai-eliminates-roles/

Fortune — AI makes human intelligence more important, not less (Jan 2026) — https://fortune.com/2026/01/22/mckinsey-bob-sternfels-ai-makes-human-intelligence-more-important-not-less/

 

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.