Pastoral Counseling is the professional integration of psychology and spirituality in the healing arts of counseling. It is a psychotherapeutic approach that appreciates the mystery of being human and works to empower people to be responsible and healthy. Pastoral Counseling enables others to draw upon their own faith and spiritual belief as resources in the process of healing pain and pathology, improving relationships, and managing life itself.

Pastoral Counseling provides treatment for:

• Acute Trauma
• Adolescent issues
• Career choice
• Critical Incident Stress Management
• Grief & Bereavement
• Job Transitions
• Life Transitions
• Marital Stress
• Mindfulness and Stress Reduction
• Parenting issues
• Pre-marital counseling
• Separation & Divorce

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable, and therefore no popular.

Carl Gustav Jung

A human being has so many skins inside, covering the depths of the heart. We know so many things, but we don’t know ourselves! Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there.

Meister Eckhart

Psychotherapy is a counseling process aimed at understanding and impacting the intra-personal as well as the interpersonal dynamics of those seeking help. It engages the ways in which a person thinks, feels, and behaves toward oneself and others, and seeks to change enduring patterns of coping that have become ineffective. Psychotherapy is considered more in-depth than pastoral counseling due to the importance of making changes at the emotional, relational, spiritual, and neurological levels of one’s being.

Psychotherapy provides treatment for:

• Alcohol abuse or dependence
• Anxiety
• Depression
• Marital affairs
• Obsessive-compulsive behaviors
• Stress related to medical issues
• Trauma related to childhood abuse

Happy marriages begin when we marry the ones we love, and they blossom when we love the ones we marry..

Tom Mullen

Marriage counseling or relational counseling helps couples to identify where their relationship has gotten off-track. Often the demands of busy schedules, jobs, children’s activities, social engagements, and even church can interfere with the ongoing maintenance of the friendship and intimacy upon which marriage and relationships thrive. Also, most couples have not invested, in an intentional way, in the art and science of communication and conflict management.

With some guidance and with learning some helpful concepts and new tools, most couples will benefit from just a few sessions (5-10) of couples counseling; though depending on the nature of past hurts and disappointments, counseling may take a longer time to assist with healing and creating a hopeful future. If you’ve thought about starting counseling for some time, it is best to come in for a checkup sooner than later.

We are, as it were, more or less ‘human’ insofar as we are in the ‘school of love.’ The only qualification required of pupils in the school is the willingness to wake up..

Alan Jones

We experiment with different ways of praying, different ways of coming to it and living with it, knowing now more clearly than before that there is no one way, no set method, and there cannot be. We learn to respond in the moment to the moment in which abiding eternal being appears to us..

Ann and Barry Ullanov

My practice as a Spiritual Director is grounded in the western Judeo-Christian tradition of the Care of the Soul. However, nurturing the spiritual and emotional well-being of persons reaches back as far as the collective memories of humans can be extended, in both western and eastern cultures. It is the practice of helping another person awaken to the movement of the Divine in one’s life. The fruits of Spiritual Direction are a deepened awareness of and grace for one’s humanity, a sense of growing freedom and a deeper commitment to what your heart and mind hold dear in life.

Holy Listening is the foundation of all relationships between director and directee. The director invites the directee to listen deeply to his or her life, noticing and paying attention to one’s inner life. Frederick Buechner wrote about this kind of deep listening in his book Now and Then, “If I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher, it would be something like this: Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.

Spiritual Direction usually takes place in once-a-month sessions, one hour in length. This can be a time to nurture your soul and enrich your life.

Is it not known to all people that the dream is the most usual way of God’s revelation to humankind?.

Tertullian

Remembering dreams is like irrigating a field, watering a garden, or planting seeds in the ground..

John Sanford

Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens..

Carl Jung

Dream groups are devised to give people the opportunity to explore their dreams alongside others, in a supervised and gentle manner.

Ideally, a dream group is comprised of 6-8 people who meet weekly for two hours to discuss their dreams in a safe and considerate atmosphere. In a typical dream group session, each participant is given a chance to share a dream, after which one or two dreams are explored in depth. The weekly meetings continue for eight weeks. The cost is $400.00 and is payable at the first meeting.

Dream group participants have the advantage of hearing many reflections and perspectives on a dream, although it is the dreamer who ultimately determines the dream's meaning for him- or herself.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI®) assessment has helped millions of people worldwide gain insights about themselves and how they interact with others—and improve how they communicate, learn, and work. It provides a powerful framework for building better relationships, driving positive change, harnessing innovation, and achieving excellence. The MBTI assessment makes Carl Jung's theory of psychological type both understandable and highly practical by helping individuals identify their preferences in four areas:

Introversion vs Extraversion: our primary orientation to the outer world; where we get energized

Sensing versus Intuition: how we take in information from the world

Thinking versus Feeling: how we make decisions based on the information we value

Judging versus Perceiving: how we deal with the world

Dr. John B. Rowe is a certified instructor in administering and interpreting the MBTI. Contact him about filling out this questionnaire on-line and scheduling a one-hour session to interpret your results.