Services

Contact Joni at joni@spiritualgeography.net to schedule your complimentary 20 minute consultation to see how Spiritual Geography can work for you.

Services for Individuals

Do you feel lost in your spiritual journey? Maybe you're uncomfortable in your current religious faith or religious organization, or maybe you're searching for alternatives in the more "new age" arena. You want to keep growing and learning but don't know where to turn. Turn here. We can set up a series of one-on-one sessions to explore your spiritual journey and where you want to go from here. In three 45 minute Skype or phone sessions we will explore your spiritual timeline, spiritual values, and spiritual framework and come up with a plan for your next steps on your spiritual journey. Contact Joni at joni@spiritualgeography.net to schedule your complimentary 20 minute consultation for more information.

Public Workshops

We also provide workshops and retreats that can be tailored to the needs of the group. Workshops include the following:

 

Spiritual Geography – Discover your spiritual location and landscape 

Participants in this workshop will begin to explore their own spiritual values. We will learn about different spiritual frameworks for understanding our unique lens of faith and explore how our spiritual values impact our lives. Participants will do the Spiritual Geography Card Deck© values card sort exercise and a spiritual time line exercise. There's plenty of time to talk, laugh, explore, and learn about each other!  (3 hours)

 

Why truth doesn’t matter:  speaking in a way that leads to changes of heart and mind

In these contentious times do you ever get the feeling we’re talking AT each other instead of TO each other? It’s as if we

feel everyone would agree with our position if we could only explain it well and they took the time to listen.  In this 2 hour workshop, we’ll unpack some of the reasons why facts, truth, and explanations don’t change minds and learn some tools to help make our communication more effective. We will address how we develop our worldview, why we accept or reject new information, how your heart leads the way in processing new information, and the difference in liberal/conservative speech patterns.

We’ll then take this information and spend the remainder of the workshop time working in small groups to practice framing your message in language and phrasing more palatable for convincing someone who believes the opposite than you do. (2 hours)

 

How can I forgive when I feel like screaming?

 Forgiveness is a multi-layered concept and forgiving someone is a process. In this workshop, we’ll learn a model of forgiveness that creates steps towards forgiveness. Participants will have opportunities to practice some of the steps, processing in small groups. Some may chose to listen and not share; some may be ready to take a step toward forgiveness. We will end with a healing meditation to close any wounds that may have been opened during the session. (2 hours)

 

Building bridges: Using counseling concepts for improved communication and breaking down the barriers between us

We all want to feel … and be … heard. This workshop will teach listening and communication skills learned by counselors and adapted for non-counselors. These skills will help you build communication bridges with people who have different viewpoints than you do. In this session you’ll (1) learn and practice basic listening and communication skills, (2) learn ways to maintain a respectful response when in a confrontational situation, and (3) learn self-care and self-protection techniques. (2 hours) 

 

An example retreat description:

 

Telling Our Stories - Participants in this retreat will explore their own spiritual values, then use these values to tell stories from their life. Stories contains struggles and choices. Layering personal values on top of these stories allows participants to understand how their personal values guide their decision-making. Participants will do the Spiritual Geography Card Deck© card sort, prepare a spiritual timeline, and use their values to create a statement of where they are presently and to create an aspirational mission statement for their future. (minimum 6 hours)

Services for Groups and Organizations

Churches, spiritually based nonprofits, and other spiritually based organizations have challenges that are unlike secular institutions. In addition to the "normal" requirements for strategic development (values, vision, and mission), often these groups have values that are presumed to be coming from a sacred place. Adding this sacred element can sometimes exacerbate tension in the strategic planning process. Leadership may conflate individual values with corporate values. We can help sort that out by providing consulting services to work through individual values of the leadership team at the same time as the perceived values of the organization as a whole. 


Services for Helping Professionals

Spiritual Geography Workshop for Counselors-in-Training 

We see from where we are. We understand from where we’ve been.

  •  There Once Was a Mountain: We begin our workshop by developing an understanding that the transcendent is only partially knowable. “There once was a mountain so high a person could hike a lifetime and never reach the top, so broad there were different ecosystems in different areas.” By taking the discussion out of a religious context, those who are religious may more readily accept incomplete understanding and those who are agnostic or atheist may more readily enter into the conceptual underpinnings.  
  • Spiritual Geography: We move into a personal exercise using the Spiritual Geography Card Deck©, our proprietary values card sort, to prioritize the spiritual and religious values that are most and least meaningful to you. We experience our “spiritual mountain” from where we are right now. We analyze the results both individually and in small or large groups, depending on the size of the workshop. The most important and least important values are potentially countertransferential issues for counselors. 
  • Tracing your journey: As with physical geography, we live in different places, travel to different places, meet different people, experience different schools and organizations, etc., all of which influence our personal understanding and experience of the transcendent. Each participant creates a spiritual timeline of their personal experiences, concentrating on existential issues.
  • Course corrections: What has changed in your belief system over your lifetime? How? Why? Changes in beliefs often require something external creating cognitive dissonance. We’ll examine our automatic responses for new information either outside (discomfort and rejection) or inside (pleasure and acceptance) our existing framework and understanding. 
  • Meeting other travelers: What happens when you interact with people who believe things outside of your framework? We’ll look at our reactions in preparation for exploring the mountain, where we use our fundamental counseling questioning and listening skills to work in pairs or trios to explore other’s understandings.  

Colleges and universities can hold Spiritual Geography Workshops either by hosting a workshop (counseling students are invited and pay for attendance if choose to attend) or purchasing a workshop outright.


 

 

 

Finding Your Way - Body, Mind, and Spirit

Spiritual Geography

 

Sold by:

Spiritual Geography, LLC
P.O. Box 207

Boyds, MD 20841