GUIDANCE FOR DISCERNING IF, WHEN AND HOW TO LEAVE A SPIRITUAL COMMUNITY

GUIDANCE FOR DISCERNING IF, WHEN AND HOW TO LEAVE A SPIRITUAL COMMUNITY

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Support if you are considering leaving your spiritual community:

  • Do you feel betrayed or abused by a spiritual teacher?
  • Do you feel disrespected by members of your spiritual community?
  • Has your spiritual community become polarized by conflicts within its midst?
  • Do you need help in figuring out if you should stay with or leave your spiritual teacher and community?
  • Do you feel shame for believing in and trusting your spiritual teacher, such as after having had a sexual experience with the teacher?
  • Have you recently left your spiritual community and feel lost and betrayed?

If you are someone who has studied extensively with a spiritual leader or guru, perhaps living in a spiritual community led by your leader or teacher, only to find that your teacher has betrayed you through an abuse of power (e.g. sexual, money, or humiliation abuse), I can help you determine how to heal and what next steps to take.

If you have already left your community and feel a loss of identity, a need to process what occurred for you and a sense of where to go next, I can assist you in finding those answers deep within yourself.

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Soul Wisdom Online

How I can help you figure out the best choice for you:

I am trained and experienced in guiding you to discern if, how, and when to leave your spiritual community. I am also extensively trained and experienced in trauma healing work. As well, I am trained in guiding spiritual students into the necessary steps for determining what is best for them in their healing and integration from such experiences.

I went through a process of participating in a spiritual community for eighteen years and then recognizing some subtle abuses by the teacher. After a year of questioning if I should stay or leave, I decided to leave the community. This occurred eight years ago. It was an excruciating process for me, but I learned much about myself, such as how to stand on my own two spiritual feet, connecting more deeply with my own soul's guidance. I also learned over a few years what it was about me that led me to seek out such a community and spiritual teacher, projecting onto the teacher my own unmet longing for a perfect spiritual mother who could do no wrong. An abundance of healing occurred once I recognized these projections and worked through them.

For nine months (2019-2020), I participated in a mentorship program with Dr. Mariana Caplan, writer of Yoga and Psyche, The Guru Question, and other books. The focus of the mentorship was to work with spiritual communities in the ways described above. I was trained in and then provided preventive psychological support and healing for spiritual leaders and their communities, to help them prevent a fall into ethical and moral scandals of power abuse and betrayals. I assisted Dr. Caplan with a training for one such international spiritual community, a community with hundreds of members that has the courage and fortitude to work preventively to avoid potential scandals and abusive relationships.

In addition, I am an active member of the Association for Spiritual Integrity, (ASI), a voluntary international organization that provides community support to spiritual teachers/leaders who agree to abide by a code of ethics and commit to ongoing personal and professional spiritual growth and evolution.

Support for
spiritual teachers:

  • Have you lost followers and are not sure why or what to do about it?
  • Are you interested in preventing abusive behaviors in your community and want direction and guidance about how to go about this and see your potential blind spots?
  • When you are honest with yourself, do you feel you have abandoned some or all of the teachings that you have provided to your students?
  • Are you finding that you are living a double life — able to be and feel "spiritual" in your teacher's seat yet falling into negative personality aspects in the rest of your life?
  • Has your ego acted out when you have been in your teacher's seat in ways you are not feeling good about?

I offer shadow work for spiritual leaders and teachers in order to bring their shadow elements to conscious awareness. "Shadow" is the aspects of our personalities that are unconscious and projected onto others. Shadow work consists of working through projections onto students.

ONLINE WORKSHOPS FOR SPIRITUAL COMMUNITIES AND SPIRITUAL TEACHERS

I am available to provide workshops for spiritual community leaders and students that address the following:

  • Preventive psycho-spiritual principles and practices for avoiding power-related scandals and abuses
  • Somatic practices for integrating spiritual teachings into the body
  • Working with psychological and spiritual shadow within spiritual communities—a shadow that may be arising between teacher(s) and student(s) or among students. (Every spiritual community contains shadow elements.)

I have led yearlong shadow processing groups for eight years.

 

Please contact me if you would like to learn more about setting up such a workshop for your community leader(s) and/or members.

Soul Wisdom Online