Is Your Care Squad Complete? (For Spiritual Independents)

Is Your Care Squad Complete?

Think about the team of people you turn to when things get hard. A doctor or massage therapist for your body. A therapist to help you heal old wounds or navigate the tangles of work and family. Maybe a rabbi, minister, imam, or elder when you need guidance on your spiritual path.

But who do you call when the question isn't about your body or your childhood or your tradition, when it's about meaning? About purpose? About ethics and what you actually believe? Who helps you uncover what you already know is inside you about the sacred, about truth, about why you get up in the morning and what direction to move in next?

That's what a Spiritual Companion is for.

And right now, you can experience spiritual direction for free, by working with students in the Cherry Hill Seminary Spiritual Direction Certification Program.

These are trained, supervised practitioners who work with people navigating earth-based, Pagan, multi-religious, and non-traditional spiritual paths. They're serious about this work. And they need practice partners, people like you, to complete their training. Nine meetings between now and February 2026 over Zoom.

[Learn more about how Praxis works → https://abeltaine.blogspot.com/2025/01/embark-on-spiritual-journey-with-free.html]

Meet the students!

Lisa Lake has over 20 years of experience in counseling, mentoring, 12-step work, and community facilitation — and she brings all of that into her spirit tending with warmth, grit, and deep commitment. She is ordained through Sacred Well Congregation and has dedicated much of her work to the LGBTQIA2S+ community, running groups that provide safer space for queer and questioning individuals and care for their allies.

Lisa also has a particular gift for walking alongside spiritual and health workers: nurses, therapists, chaplains, social workers, people who spend their days holding space for others and rarely have anyone holding space for them. She is passionate about justice and particularly wants to support activists: people doing justice work who need a witness for the spiritual dimensions of that calling, the grief it carries, and the way it reshapes your sense of the sacred over time. Her philosophy is direct: "I am dedicated to walking with you on your spiritual path, not forcing you down mine."

Her home is Portland, Oregon (home base of Spirit Lights, the organization she founded), and is proud to offer a welcoming space for veterans and military families as well. You can find her at https://spiritlightsorg.wixsite.com/lady-lake-spidir .

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Tracy Bleakney spent decades as a psychiatric and mental health nurse, first in hospital settings, then in the community, walking with people during some of the most vulnerable and courageous moments of their lives. She later became a certified school nurse, learning early in her career how profoundly young hearts need safety, presence, and gentle understanding.

She is a Unitarian Universalist and mystic humanist who discovered spiritual direction almost by accident and found it transformed her own spiritual life. She's also a single mother and grandmother who understands the grind of a full life: "how we push forward even when weary, and how love can anchor us." She retired early from nursing due to a physical disability, and that experience of navigating life's unexpected turns with grace has deepened her capacity to companion others through their own.

Tracy is a beautiful match for UUs and spiritual independents, people who value theological openness, atheists, agnostics, and humanists, and those who want a companion who won't flinch at complexity. She's also a tender companion for people navigating complicated family systems, the particular loneliness of caretaking, and the spiritual questions that arrive with illness, limitation, or major life transition. Her invitation is simple: "Your journey is sacred, and you do not need to travel alone." tracybleakneyspiritualcare.com

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NO VACANCIES Gail Livesay Renfrow brings a beautiful framing to this work: spiritual companioning, she says, can be a mirror, a mentor, or a midwife... depending on where you are on your path. Sometimes you need someone to reflect your own wisdom back to you. Sometimes you need a more experienced guide. Sometimes you need someone to help you birth something new.

Gail is a wonderful companion for working professionals: people whose spiritual lives often get crowded out by the sheer fullness of their days. For moms who give so much and often struggle to find a single hour of sacred space for their own inner lives. And for anyone who has a spiritual practice they love but wants to tend it more intentionally, to fan the flames, as she puts it, rather than let it remain something they do alone.

Her practice, Spirit Care for You, is rooted in interfaith spiritual companionship that honors the divine spark in everyone. Find her at spiritcareforyou.org.

When Relationships Change Us: Why Justice Workers Need Spiritual Direction

Andrew Schulz is not someone I ever expected to quote in a blog post about spiritual companioning. The podcaster and comedian who interviewed Donald Trump before the 2024 election and publicly voted for him has spent the past months becoming one of the administration's sharpest critics. This week, he called the killing of Alex Pretti (a 37-year-old Veterans Affairs nurse shot by Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis) "murder in cold blood" and the administration's response "fucking disgusting."

What changed?

Schulz recently became a father. His Netflix special "Life" explores his journey through fertility challenges and into fatherhood. And while I can't speak to what's happening in his heart, I can observe this: relationships change us. Being in loving relationship with other people, a partner, a child, opens us to caring about other others. It builds the muscle of empathy.

When Schulz looks at footage of federal agents in masks interrogating children in New York City parks, when he sees the administration rushing to label a murdered American citizen a "domestic terrorist," he's not just seeing policy. He's seeing someone's child. Someone's person. The capacity to hold the humanity of strangers grows from the practice of holding the humanity of those we love.

This is why spirit tending matters so urgently right now.

Spiritual direction work: the practice of accompanying someone in their unfolding relationship with the sacred, with justice, with themselves, is fundamentally about building connection. It's about creating the kind of fierce support in safer spaces where people can metabolize their experiences, name their truths, and reconnect with their deepest values. It's about relationship as the container for transformation.

And we need this work everywhere, not just in private offices and church basements.

We need spiritual companions among activists who are burning out from bearing witness to cruelty. We need them in organizing spaces where people are navigating moral injury and collective trauma. We need them with justice workers who are trying to hold hope while the world feels like it's unraveling. We need them creating the conditions where people like Andrew Schulz, people who are waking up to their own capacity for solidarity, can keep waking up instead of shutting down.

Because here's what I know from 14 years of this work: people don't change through argument or shame. They change through relationship. Through being seen, held, and accompanied as they discover what they truly believe. Through having someone witness their courage as they choose empathy over tribalism, connection over cruelty.

The work of spiritual companionship is not neutral. It's not about helping people feel better so they can return to business as usual. It's about supporting people as they align their lives with their values, as they build the internal resources to show up for justice again and again, as they learn to hold complexity without collapsing into cynicism.

Ready to start that journey? You can offer spiritual direction work [Click Here]. You can receive spirit tending [Click Here].

This is why I'm so passionate about training more spiritual companions, and training them well. Through the Cherry Hill Spiritual Direction Certification Program, we're forming companions who can hold space across difference, who understand trauma and consent, who can work with earth-based practitioners and multi-religious seekers and people who've been harmed by institutional religion. We're creating a cohort of practitioners who understand that this work belongs in the streets as much as it belongs in sanctuaries.

Join Us

Our March 2026 cohort is forming now. We have 8 students enrolled and room for 6 more. If you've been feeling the call to this work, if you sense that your gifts belong in the service of others' spiritual unfolding, I invite you to apply. The application deadline is February 15th.

We need more people who can do this work. We need more spaces where transformation becomes possible. We need more practitioners who understand that accompanying people in their spiritual lives is also accompanying them in their moral development, their capacity for empathy, their willingness to see the humanity in those they've been taught to dismiss.

Andrew Schulz is learning what many of us know: relationships change us. Love expands our circle of care. Connection builds the capacity for courage.

And spiritual companioning is the practice of tending these relationships, with ourselves, with each other, with the sacred, with the world we're trying to build together.

If you're ready to learn how to offer this kind of companionship, we're ready to train you.

Applications for the March 2026 Cherry Hill Spiritual Direction Certification Program close February 15th. Learn more and apply at  https://abeltaine.blogspot.com/2025/01/cherry-hill-spiritual-direction.html.

Beloved, You are whole, holy, and worthy.

Rev. Amy