Spiritual Direction or Spiritual Companioning, Which is Better?

by Garrett Foster

Have you experienced anything like the following? How might it help you to feel held, witnessed, and safe to ask the existential questions that are on your heart and mind?

Isabelle: Good morning, Jack. It’s nice to see you today.

Jack: Thanks. You, too. That photo is beautiful behind you. Is it another one of yours?

Isabelle: (NODS) Yes, thank you for noticing. I took it during a recent trip to the Cape.

Jack: If only the light could shine through all the dark clouds like that. (WRINKLES BROW)

Isabelle: Am I sensing a possible theme to explore today?

Jack: (SHRUGS AND LETS OUT A HEAVY SIGH) Maybe.

Isabelle: (NOTICES JACK TAPPING HIS FINGERS ON HIS CHEST) How about if we spend a few minutes slowing down and becoming grounded for our session?

Jack: That sounds fantastic.

Isabelle: While I light our candle to remind us that spirit is always in the midst and to mark the start of our sacred time together, I invite you to take a deep breath in and let it out. If it helps to gently close your eyes do so. Take another breath, this one deep from the belly, and as you let it out, make the exhalation last a little longer than the inhalation. Breathe in and breathe out. As you continue to follow your breath — think of it as riding one of the clouds in the photograph you just noticed — imagine yourself moving closer to the source of all that is. Take your time. (WAITS FOR JACK TO BECOME LESS AGITATED.) So, how would you like to start today? Should I offer a prayer, or would you like to? Or maybe you’d like to start with silence, or some music.

Jack: I’d like to pray us in.

Isabelle: Great. Thank you.

Jack: (CLOSES HIS EYES; ISABELLE KEEPS HERS GENTLY OPEN TO OBSERVE HIM AS HE PRAYS) Sweet Holy Spirit, great mystery, creator of all that is, thank you for this day. Thank you for this time for me to explore your presence in my life … to ask the important questions and to not be afraid of the answers. Help me to be as honest as possible in this safe and sacred space. You know it’s my nature to pretend that all is well. Today I pray for the courage and authenticity to not just look at the light but also the dark clouds. I pray for what needs to be said to be said, what needs to be heard to be heard, and to remember I am part of something I may never totally understand — and that’s okay. Amen.

Key Differences Between Spiritual Direction and Spiritual Companioning

This is how a typical spiritual counseling or interspiritual companioning session might start. Of course, there is nothing typical when both parties trust spirit in the process.

Notice how different it is from psychotherapy, coaching, or traditional counseling: the use of the candle; the awareness of the client’s expressions and body language; the language used; taking time to breathe; an invitation to start in whatever way feels right; and opening with a prayer that allows the client to ask for the courage to address what is really going on with him.

Interspiritual counseling and companioning, used here as a dual-approach modality, is like spiritual direction, only with key differences. How both are different from  psychotherapy, traditional counseling,  coaching, and mentoring, is the purpose of this post. Being aware of those differences is important to understanding which may be best for you or a loved one.

Counseling, Therapy, Coaching: What’s in a Name?

Counseling

The American Counseling Association, the world's largest association of professional counselors, defines counseling as “a professional relationship that empowers diverse individuals, families, and groups to accomplish mental health, wellness, education, and career goals.”

Counseling is typically shorter in nature than psychotherapy and tends to focus on one or two specific issues. Diagnosis and treatment are more generalized. Think of it as guidance from someone who is trained from an accredited organization or institution and who adheres to a set of rigorous standards.

The Free Dictionary defines therapy as “the treatment of physical, mental, or social orders or disease.” It is an umbrella term that includes fields such as chemotherapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, art therapy, horticultural therapy, and psychotherapy.

According to mentalhealthmatch.com, therapy “can be more long-term and focuses on you as an individual — how you see yourself and the world, your thoughts, and your behaviors, as well as the underlying patterns of why you do the things you do. If you were suffering from depression, you and your mental health therapist can explore how depression impacts your everyday life and how to develop better coping strategies so that you can feel better.”

Therapy

Psychotherapy is what many people think of as “talk therapy.” An individual will talk to a psychologist, psychiatrist, or other kind of mental health provider to develop better ways of coping and interfacing with the world. Diagnosis and treatment are critical factors.

While it is not always the case, people typically enter mental health therapy after realizing they feel “broken” in some way and need help putting themselves back together. A psychiatrist has the added ability to prescribe medications for depression, anxiety, and other mental disorders. This is very different from a spiritual counselor and companion who cannot prescribe medication but can provide healing modalities such as massage and chakra balancing.

Like counseling, the fields of psychiatry and psychology are regulated and require ongoing training and certification. Psychotherapy has several primary approaches including psychoanalysis, behavioral, cognitive, and humanistic. Holistic psychotherapy is integrative in that it uses both traditional and non-traditional treatments and healing modalities.

Coaching

Coaching is a relatively new field. While great strides have been made to regulate it, especially because of the work of the International Coaching Federation, it is still finding its way. Like spiritual modalities, insurance does not cover it. Coaching focuses on one or two specific areas in which the client would like to see tangible results in the shortest time possible.

If therapy or psychotherapy are about talking, coaching is more about doing. It identifies what someone wants or needs in their life by uncovering the pain or disadvantage in not achieving it.

Coaching is more directive than either therapy or counseling. It can include homework and email support in between sessions. A coach helps a person who is not in need of “fixing” to target small steps they can take, and to be held accountable in completing them.

Wikipedia defines a mentor as “someone who teaches or gives help and advice to a less experienced and often younger person.” Guidance, direction, and influence are all words that describe the mentoring relationship.

A mentor is more like a coach than a counselor or therapist. However, the relationship typically does not include payment. Mentoring is more like companioning in that it can involve the sharing of stories that are in the best interest of the person being mentored.

The Foundations of Spiritual Direction

Spiritual direction is perhaps the service that can best help us to understand spiritual counseling and spiritual companionship. Even though it is an offshoot of spiritual counseling, spiritual direction is better known and referenced much more than its parent offering.

Founded in 1990 by a small group of spiritual directors at Mercy Center in Burlingame, Calif., Spiritual Directors International (SDI) is an “educational nonprofit, serving over 6,000 members in 42 countries around the world, committing and growing access to spiritual companionship and deep listening, open questions and compassion our healing modality offers.”

Many believe that spiritual direction is primarily for Christians, despite having strong ties to a myriad of faith traditions including Judaism, Islamic Sufism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism, and Vajrayana Buddhism. The term “pastoral counseling” can also connote Christianity.

Depending on the specific path, spiritual directors may be referred to as “gurus,” “elder teachers,” “pastoral counselors” or even “friends.” In indigenous cultures, a person might likely consult a Shaman for spiritual direction.

Theresa Blythe, an author and leading voice in the field of spiritual direction, notes in her guide to spiritual direction: “Hundreds of years ago only Catholic priests, nuns and monks received spiritual direction — and usually it was from their superiors within their community. Today you are likely to find a person who is ‘spiritual but not religious’ seeing a Jewish director or perhaps a Catholic sister visiting a Protestant layperson for spiritual direction.”

Spiritual Companioning: A More Inclusive Alternative to Spiritual Counseling

Training programs, such as the Interspiritual Companioning and Counseling certification offered by One Spirit Learning Alliance are on the forefront of broadening the concept of spiritual direction and including spirituality in services that often ignore it.

While traditionally being associated with spiritual direction exclusively (hence the original name "Spiritual Directors International”), SDI has come to appreciate the more expansive and more inclusive approach of both the interspiritual and companioning. On their website, SDI says: “We believe the term ‘companion’ is broader and more inclusive, and points to the heart of the work, which is to walk alongside with others as friends, listening to and honoring the sacred stories being told. We recognize also that spiritual companionship can happen in a myriad of vocations and modalities, and so use the term as a more inclusive way of offering welcome to those who have not specifically trained as a spiritual director.”

The term “spirituality” originates from the Christian idea of the “Holy Spirit.” In the Middle Ages, it was broadened to include the mental and/or psychological challenges in life. It is not a leap to believe this paved the way for spirituality to influence all the services discussed here.

Spirituality is not typically a factor in more science- and medical-based psychotherapy. Many psychologists and other mental health workers do not even ask clients about their religious or spiritual beliefs. That doesn’t mean these things aren’t the crux of a problem or its solution.

In a scientific study exploring spirituality among health professionals, Lucas Guilherme Teztlaff de Gerone found “a remarkable relationship and importance of spirituality and religiosity in the health context; however, statistical indexes fall to 60% when asking health professionals [how] comfortable [they are] addressing the religious/spiritual issue during the treatment process.”

Extensive research has proven that there is a direct link between a person’s religious and spiritual beliefs and their physical, mental, and emotional well-being. In “Integrating Spirituality in Counseling Practice,” Gerald Corey says: “True spirituality results in making people calmer, happier, and more peaceful, and it is a mental attitude that can be practiced at any time.”

The practice of spiritual therapy arose from a need to tend to the well-being of the spirit. It makes use of talk and other traditional psychotherapy tools, but it also transcends them with the use of prayer, meditation, and silence. Most importantly, it does not focus on the need for a diagnosis or “treatment,” since this would imply that the client is somehow dysfunctional.

In “Spiritual Psychotherapy,” T. Byram Karasu, M.D. says: “… the way to soulfulness requires Love of Others, Love of Work, and Love of Belonging, whereas the way to spirituality requires Belief in the Sacred, Belief in Unity, and Belief in Transformation. By cultivating a soulful and spiritual existence, thus conducting one’s clinical practice [based on] these six tenets of transcendence, the therapist can guide the patient to reach his or her own authentic self.”

Karasu supports the idea that spiritual psychotherapy is not focused on fixing, treating, or diagnosing. He says: “It is interested in salvation and healing (not cure). It is undetermined, transformative, and noncausal, a transpersonal journey in omnidirectional time. In its most ardent form, spiritual psychotherapy is the induction of stillness, the cultivation of quiescence and harmony between mind, body, and soul. Spiritual psychotherapy aims not at ‘knowing’ but at enlightenment, whereby self-knowledge is not the culmination, but the starting point.”

Life coaching maintains that functioning, healthy people who are not in a state of crisis have all the answers they need within. A mainstream coach helps a client to become more aware of and better understand their behaviors, habits, motivations, and the obstacles that sabotage their efforts in achieving tangible and measurable goals in their relationships and life.

A spiritual life coach moves beyond this approach to also address a person’s core religious and/or spiritual beliefs, including their relationship with whatever they think of as “God” or the Divine. By working with spiritual principles and values, a spiritual life coach helps clients to go deeper and form a more solid connection with their inner life force and wisdom. This is not easy work and progress is often more of a felt experience than something to check off a list.

A mentor can also take a spiritual approach by helping someone to explore questions that are more existential. Instead of just asking what a person wants to accomplish, they might go deeper by addressing how it will coincide with the mentee’s religious upbringing or invite them to pursue a course of spiritual study that might better inform their work and life choices.

Spirituality Offers Unique Opportunities for Well-Being

By now, it should be clear that, while there is overlap between all these different services and approaches to a person’s well-being — psychotherapy, counseling, coaching, and mentoring — when the concept of spirituality is introduced, it becomes a gamechanger.

A person may or may not achieve certain goals; they may or may not receive a diagnosis; traditional modalities and practices may be used or not — but there will be an overarching focus on peace, love, purpose, gratitude, forgiveness, and other spiritual values that will make the experience even richer. Spiritual fulfillment will be realized or at least be in greater reach.

Spiritual counseling and spiritual companioning, the broadest and most inclusive of these approaches to working with others when used together, is the most specific and requires a unique set of skills including contemplative grounding and following Universal Ethical Guidelines. It is focused entirely on a person’s soul, without judgment or agenda. It focuses on where “God” is in their lives. It is a spiritual journey for those on any path or no path at all.

Like spiritual direction, spiritual counseling and spiritual companioning is just as suited for Jews, Muslims, humanists, and agnostics as it is for Christians. According to the Pew Research Center and other organizations, the number of people who describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious” or “unaffiliated is growing at exponential rates.

That is the most convincing argument for the need for more awareness of spiritual counseling/companioning. Persons who are “spiritual but not religious” are just as eager as their religious counterparts to discover their connection to a higher power. They are open to doing it in the non-traditional ways offered through spiritual counseling and companioning.

Since many have been shunned or wounded by the religion of their upbringing, there is often guilt and confusion about having to look outside their own faith traditions for answers. The more inclusive field of spiritual counseling and spiritual companioning alleviates this conflict.

Like spiritual directors, spiritual companions are trained to offer deep listening without steering those they accompany down any one spiritual path or another. They create a sacred space, which may include sitting in silence, spending time in prayer, and performing rituals.

This is how their work most clearly resembles that of the Desert Fathers and Mothers in the early days of Christianity who were sought out in caves and other hidden places, often at great distances, for even just a few minutes of stillness in which the word of God might be revealed.

A spiritual companion may also share details of their own story and journey if it is in the best of interest of the client. In this way it is like mentoring.

The Art of Companioning

In “Companioning Philosophy,” Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D. says: “Companioning is the art of bringing comfort to another by becoming familiar with her story (experiences and needs). Of course, this may well involve tears and sorrow and tends to involve a give and take of story. I tell you my story, and you tell me yours. It is sharing in a deep and profound way.”

This requires great discernment on the part of the spiritual companion who must walk the fine line of not becoming a friend while still appearing human and relatable.

Spiritual companions must not divulge details that may make the client feel the need to comfort them. Whatever is shared must be done in a way that is authentic and from the heart.

SDI adds that spiritual companions “do not proselytize, nor seek to influence or convince, but instead walk alongside people as they make their individual and unique spiritual journeys.”

As mentioned already, silence and prayer are effective tools in this work. Many people are uncomfortable and/or unfamiliar with praying out loud with another person or having someone pray out loud for them. Yet doing so can be liberating and inspiring and create a clear pathway to the Divine. Prayer becomes a conversation between companion, client, and spirit.

Many spiritual counselors will light a candle or keep an empty chair nearby as a reminder that spirit is always in the midst. They will center themselves in prayer and/or silence before a session and ask to be a channel for the Divine, knowing that spirit is doing the real work.

Like silence, meditation can help a person go deeper. This can be guided or unguided, contain few or many words, and be done with or without music. It is always best to check in with the person being companioned to see what makes them most comfortable. The person doing the companioning also always needs to remember to bring the client out of any meditative state.

A good spiritual counselor and companion will have a wide variety of prayers, poems, videos, music, images, and other resources to share. This must be done with discernment and sensitivity having the client’s best interest at heart.

If something is shared that is triggering, it should be used as a possible area of exploration. The spiritual counseling and companioning program offered at One Spirit encourages students to include resources they may use in a manual that is a requirement for completing their studies.

Directive or Non-Directive?

Other modalities and tools used in spiritual counseling and companioning include breathwork, chakra balancing, Shamanic journeying and healing, spending time in nature, the Enneagram, and dreamwork. All of these can be used in a directive or nondirective way.

In directive instruction, advice and/or homework may be given. In non-directive instruction, which is most common in spiritual companioning, the companion walks along the client’s side, giving them ample space to look within for their own answers and to notice how they most fully experience their own understanding of God.

The spiritual companion is trained to listen with their ears, eyes, and heart, paying attention to body language and other clues. Through deep listening; existential questioning; and inviting the client to sense what is happening in their body and heart, the companion helps them to question their religious and/or spiritual beliefs; address religious and/or spiritual wounding; discover passion and purpose; and develop their own set of spiritual ethics and values.

The companion has his or her own set of values and ethics which are learned and cultivated in any legitimate training program. These include but are not limited to respecting boundaries; pursuing continuing education; maintaining their own spiritual practice; avoiding “dual” relationships that may be a conflict of interest (for example companioning the brother of best friend); respecting time by beginning and ending sessions on time; and being in constant supervision with a group of peers and/or an experienced spiritual counselor and companion.

While honoring all religious backgrounds is a must in the work of spiritual companioning and spiritual counseling, it may be necessary to help a client to see when their spiritual beliefs are causing them or someone else harm. Mainstream counselors and psychologists may be reluctant to broach these subjects.

Whereas traditional psychotherapy often takes place in weekly sessions, spiritual counseling/companioning — like spiritual and traditional coaching — can happen bi-weekly or even monthly. Mentoring may happen even less frequently.

Conclusion

When it comes to the big questions like “What happens after we die,” or “Where is God in the tragedies,” someone trained to deal with and respond to these spiritual matters can make all the difference. While not a replacement for traditional therapy or counseling, spiritual companioning is a much-needed complementary service.

In a world where interfaith families, culture wars, and societal pressures can confuse anyone, a trained and experienced spiritual companion — think of them as a “soul whisperer” or “spirit doula” — can be one of the most valuable members on your self-care team. One Spirit created their Interspiritual Counseling and Companioning program (ISCC) in response to today’s world.

In the end, whatever is best for the client is always of the utmost importance.

What is best for you? Learn more about the spiritual companioning program that inspired me to become an interspiritual counselor and to write this article.

Garrett A. Foster is an interfaith minister and interspiritual counselor and companion, ordained and trained in the One Spirit seminary. His multi-dimensional approach draws heavily on the wisdom of the Enneagram, prayer, and writing as a form of expression and revelation. He works with all people but especially the LGBTQIA+ community; anyone dealing with a cancer diagnosis; and those on the mystic path. Learn more about him at garrettfoster.love.