Support Group for Ex-Spiritual Community Members
This 8-week support group, 90 minutes per session is for people who left their spiritual organization/community and feel betrayed and abused by the teacher, the community, or its members.
Start date will be determined once 8-10 people sign up and are ready to start, likely summer or fall of 2025. Cost is $600.
The sessions will be structured as follows:
Session 1: Introductions. Group members share their stories about their spiritual group, what initially drew them to the spiritual group and their experiences in the group.
Session 2: Continued sharing of above.
Session 3: Discussion about the process of leaving the group and where group members now find themselves.
Session 4: Continued discussion of above
Session 5: Processing emotions of anger, grief, shame, guilt — for the time spent at the spiritual organization and for the role that each played as a participant in the organization. (Deborah shares some tools for healing these difficult emotions and moving past them.)
Session 6: Continued emotional processing.
Session 7: Group members discuss how their spiritual path has been impacted as well as how to honor their path moving forward, whether or not that path includes spirituality or not.
Session 8: Group determines if they would like to continue with the group process or finish up. Closure occurs for those finishing up. Otherwise, another round of sessions will occur.
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 group and individual shadow work for spiritual leaders and teachers 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/ex-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. I have offered group support for spiritual community leaders and followers for the past five years. I also spoke at international conferences on faith leaders and family violence prevention twenty-five years ago, while working as a Program Coordinator for the California Department of Health Services, Family Violence Prevention Program for thirteen years. Along with a colleague, I created a workbook for faith leaders to address their congregations about family violence prevention and intervention.
Soul Wisdom Group: Leading a Soul-Filled Life
This online group will begin in fall of 2025. The purpose of the group will be to learn practices that will help you become deeply connected with your soul wisdom. You will become better able to live your life based in this deep inner wisdom.
Group members will give and receive helpful support and feedback.
The group will be very experiential and help you in the following ways:
· To become more deeply aware of your unique blueprint for your life and its manifestation.
· To learn how to tune into your intuition, which is your soul wisdom. And to learn how to communicate to others from it.
· To learn about and explore your personality’s deepest core wounds and how they point to your more in-depth work on yourself in this lifetime.
· To explore ways in which your personality-self projects onto others and onto the world aspects that feel shameful and unlovable. These projections interfere with living more fully from your soul’s wisdom.
Start Your Journey to Soul Wisdom Today—
Click here to schedule your complimentary exploratory phone consultation.