Supervision of Spiritual Directors
Supervision of Spiritual Directors
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Supervision for spiritual directors is a contemplative, evocative, and compassionate process intended to enhance your growth as a director, so that both you and your directees can flourish.
Supervision for spiritual directors is a contemplative, evocative, and compassionate process intended to enhance your growth as a director, so that both you and your directees can flourish.
My Vision of Supervision
My Vision of Supervision
I see many similarities between the delicate work of the butterfly and the work of a spiritual director and supervisor. For over 25 years I have received the gifts of loving presence in spiritual direction and supervision. These faithful listeners waited patiently for my heart to open, sometimes covering a lot of dry and rocky ground. They compassionately traversed many of my circuitous stories, sometimes over and over, before my heart was able to respond. Their evocative questions gently drew out the good in me, often finding beautiful things that I and others could not see in me. The imprint of their presence never damaged me, but only left a sweet aroma of grace that now goes out from me into my world. These experiences have not only been remarkable, but irreplaceable! Through them, I received the love of God, encountered truth about myself and God, and deepened my compassion for myself and others. I suppose this is why I feel so drawn to butterflies!
However, I feel especially captivated by one particular butterfly: the Orange Barred Sulfur. I recently learned that there are certain plants that bees cannot pollinate. One of these plants is the firecracker plant, whose flower hangs in a such a way that makes it hard for certain insects, like bees, to pollinate it. Only the Orange Barred Sulfur is capable of maneuvering itself to reach the pollen inside this plant, earning it the auspicious title of “the acrobat of the butterfly world.” Though small, delicate, and seemingly plain, these butterflies play an important role that no one else can. I am captured by this thought—what work has God given me to do that no one else can?
The uniqueness of the Orange Barred Sulfur offers a beautiful analogy of what makes me unique in my supervision and direction ministry—In my work with people, I have witnessed how parts of the heart and mind can often be hard to reach, especially during difficult seasons of life—much like the firecracker plant. It is here that my ministry of spiritual direction and supervision can be a great gift. God has blessed me with a special capacity to provide loving presence to others in these hard-to reach-places. I am gifted in offering a spacious, compassionate, and evocative presence, and it is my passion to draw forth the beautiful gifts within each person and encourage them to offer their gift of presence to the world.
Why Seek Supervision?
Why Seek Supervision?
to help you grow in awareness and interior freedom.
to open yourself to the movement of the Spirit in your life and work.
to explore the fullness of your identity as distinct from your work.
to deepen your capacity for embodied presence and ministry to others.
to tend confidentiality and boundary issues more carefully. perhaps some members of your supervision group know your directees. necessitating using an individual supervisor to alleviate these issues.
to gather with peers in in a safe, confidential, and nurturing environment for supervision.
to talk about practical and ethical issues you might be wondering about and to practice in compliance with Spiritual Directors International’s Guidelines for Ethical Conduct.
Experiences to explore in supervision:
Experiences to explore in supervision:
Deeper awareness of your interior movements and countermovements (see handout on movements and countermovements in SD.
Mirroring Dynamic: The director is struggling with a similar situation as the directee.
Reacting to a directee’s resistance
Unresolved issue is triggered
Lack of freedom in a particular area
Struggles with the Directee- Strong positive or negative feelings
Moral, Theological, Spiritual or Cultural differences-
God presence is not attended to or felt.
Boredom, restlessness, distractions, difficulty listening to the directee
Movement away from a contemplative presence with a person to chattiness, preachiness, teaching, advice giving or problem solving
Feeling of being unfocused or lost (how did we get here? Where are we going? What are we doing?
Feelings of avoidance before a session.
Feelings of trying too hard with a certain directee
Feelings of discomfortable or inadequacy
A Significant breakthrough for you or directee
Issues with Transference or Countertransference
Concerns over self-care.
A directee abruptly stops coming for spiritual direction or unexpectedly ends the relationship.
Need for skills/knowledge
Blocks about the dimensions/arenas:
Need for Skills/Knowledge
Insecurity
Sensitivity/Introversion
Mismatch or Misunderstanding
Boundary Challenges
Personal Crises or issues that are stirred in the session:
Psychological or Spiritual Struggles
Supervision helps spiritual directors look deeply into their interior life as spiritual directors and as persons. The contemplative and evocative process enables hidden feelings and areas of unfreedom to come into the light. The more keenly spiritual directors notice their own interior movements, feel their own feelings, become aware of their areas of unfreedom and struggle, and savor their experiences of God, the more freely they will be able to offer these gifts to their directees. Supervision then, focuses primarily on a part of the direction conversation where you as director experience strong negative or positive feelings in which you moved away emotionally from the directee, yourself and God.”
Maureen Conroy, Looking Into the Well
Maureen Conroy, Looking Into the Well
What To Expect in Supervision
What To Expect in Supervision
In the session together, we will explore your inner felt sense of yourself, the other and the Spirit, paying special attention to relational dynamics, such as parallel processes, transference and shared graces. You will be accompanied in self-awareness with compassionate, contemplative, and evocative listening while we explore together the dimensions and arenas of your experience. We will create a sacred listening space to allow the movements of grace and freedom to unfold in the session, savoring each as they arise. This encourages deeper healing, interior freedom, flourishing and wholeness for you and your directee. We will conclude the session with noticing how the supervision conversation assists you in caring for your directee and conclude with any consultation questions you may have.
Preparing for Supervision
Preparing for Supervision
How to prepare, make use of the session, and reflect on your experience afterwards:
Before the Session:
Leave plenty of time for quiet, prayer, and grounding – just as you would prepare for a spiritual direction session.
Check in with all the dimensions of your experience, noticing how you bring yourself to this session.
Re-Read the CRF and then let it go, preparing yourself with what still has energy for your now as you begin your session.
During the Session:
After a time of quiet, we start the session by exploring your focus, asking you what has most energy for you today.
Stay mindful that your self-supervision process has continued since writing your CRF, and might have shifted considerably since you originally wrote up your case.
We will engage you about your present experience, rather than holding you to everything stated on the forms, allowing you to name an entirely new focus if self-supervision has resolved your original one or allowed something with more energy to emerge for you.
We will engage your inner experience, gently exploring multiple dimensions of your experience: emotions, bodily sensations, imagination, and the like.
We will notice movements of the Holy Spirit both in the spiritual direction session and in this supervision session:
Moments where you notice grace, freedom, freshness, and the like for the directee and for yourself.
and what may have distracted you from the Spirit’s movement.
We will pause often, both to sit with difficulties and to savor new experience as they arise, remembering that supervision is a process, rather than a conversation.
In formal case presentations, we will read the dialogue aloud, pausing to notice what the reading stirred in us,
Toward the close of the session, we will engage any consultation questions you have and offer you a moment to name any new freedom that has arisen, an what you will take away from the session.
Toward the close of the session, we will engage any consultation questions you have and offer you a moment to name any new freedom that has arisen, an what you will take away from the session.
After the Session:
After the Session:
We surrender the energy of the session back to God, the supervisee, and directee.
We do self-supervision:
checking in with all the dimensions of our experience to noting how we experienced ourselves before and during the session – and now that the session is complete.
If we discern that our directee might benefit from us bringing this session to supervision, we begin to write up our case.
Supervision Resource Videos
Supervision Resource Videos
Supervision Book Resources
Supervision Book Resources
Conroy, Maureen. Looking into the Well: Supervision of Spiritual Directors. Chicago: Loyola Press, 1995.
Bumpus, Mary Rose and Rebecca Bradburn Langer, eds. Supervision of Spiritual Directors: Engaging in Holy Mystery, Harrisburg, Pa: Morehouse Publishing, 2005.
Benefiel, Margaret, and Geraldine Holton, eds. The Soul of Supervision: Integrating Practice and Theory. Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse, 2010.
Cornell, Ann Weiser. Focusing in Clinical Practice: The Essence of Change. New York: WW Norton, 2013.
Ruffing, Janet. Explores issues that arise in the advanced stages of spiritual direction from both a practical and theoretical perspective.
Tucker, Lucy Abbott. Spiritual Direction Supervision: Principles, Practices, and Storytelling: A Workbook Designed to Support the Care and Growth of Your Spiritual Direction Practice. Bellevue, WA: SDI Press, 2020.
Liebert, Elizabeth. The Soul of Discernment: A Spiritual Practice for Communities and Institutions provides a clear and transformative social discernment model.
Reflective Practice: Formation and Supervision in Ministry
Paintner, Christine Valters. Awakening the Creative Spirit: Bringing the Arts to Spiritual Direction. Church Publishing, 2010. (Chapter 15- on bringing the arts to supervision.)
Rogers, Frank Jr. Practicing Compassion. Nashville: Upper Room, 2015. (Cultivating compassion is a topic of central importance in supervision; Frank’s beautiful books assist us in that.)
Sacred is the Call: Formation and Transformation in Spiritual Direction Programs, ed. Suzanne Buckley, 33-41. New York: Crossroad, 2006.
Bowen, Maria Tattu. “Do No Harm: A Case for Professional Boundaries and Supervision in Spiritual Direction.” In Presence: An International Journal of Spiritual Direction. Vol 23, No 3 (September, 2017): 29-37.
Dr. Perry tells stories of trauma and transformation and shares lessons of courage, humanity, and hope. Only when we understand the science of the mind and the power of love and nurturing can we hope to heal the spirit.
These essays speak of the unfolding bridge between faith and culture; --a journey to healing and authenticity; taking this practice that began in the first centuries of the church with the desert mothers and fathers into the future with spiritual direction.
Menakem, Resma. My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies
The Body Keeps the Score, uses recent scientific advances to show how trauma literally reshapes both body and brain, compromising sufferers’ capacities for pleasure, engagement, self-control, and trust.
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