“ARTIST, PRODUCER, SPIRITUAL DIRECTOR, MAMA, GARDENER… BUT REALLY…
PUBLIC GOOD, PUBLIC THEOLOGY, BEAUTY, EARTH AND GOOD FOOD… THAT’S WHAT I’M ABOUT. “ This is how Carin Huebner describes herself. MysticMag finds out more.
What can you tell us about your own personal journey and how you came to be the person you are today?
I knew at a young age that I wanted to be an artist and that I was very spiritual. I’ve followed a winding and weaving path of both of those things. Through college transfers, multiple cross-country moves, and many tears and celebrations, I found myself on the cusp of a graduate degree and a new vocation. When I finished my undergraduate degree in photography, I was so fearful of putting pressure on my art to support myself full time, so I looked for a way to defer the inevitable and looked for another reason to go to school. Ha. I had been making work about spiritual journey and beliefs for many years and felt a pressure and responsibility to get a degree in spiritual journey. I thought, at the time, that it would be a degree in biblical studies, but through a number of synchronistic interventions, found myself in a Spiritual Direction program.
Thanks, in part, to that program I became a Spiritual Director and have become the most expansive, most true, and most whole version of myself I’ve been able to access so far—and I get to help others access their capital S selves as well.
I’ve been deconstructing my religious indoctrination and healing in the spaces of my own religious trauma and spiritual abuse for years. I have always been sensitive to the hurts and injustices caused by institutions and especially religious institutions. I can very clearly see the hurt that toxic beliefs can cause for folx and am passionate about helping folx access healing and liberation from their religious pasts in order to connect to themselves, to others, and, if they believe in a source beyond, to the divine.
What would you describe ‘spiritual direction’ to be?
Spiritual Direction is the art and practice of a Spiritual Director holding space for an individual to wonder at the largest questions of life through wondering at the daily happenings, relationships, and connections of their right-now lives. In the space, I am a mirror to reflect the client back to themselves without all the programming and conditioning of their brain. We are able to sink into the essence of life and living, who and how the client is, and who and how they believe the universe or the divine is.
Years ago, someone in my context named me as a signal disruptor and that’s exactly what I do today. I am free from all of the narratives in the client’s mind and can see them simply as they are. So for an hour, I’m able to disrupt all those signals of who and how to be so that we can wonder at who and how they truly are.
I’m in the business of facilitating space for folx to access their most expansive selves.
How would you quantify ‘healed people heal people’ and what is your approach to this?
Ha. It’s funny, because I don’t love love love this language. It’s so either/or. I’m transitioning to something that’s not quite so catchy, but more accurate: healing folx, creating access for folx to heal.
In my graduate program we always talked about how hurt people hurt people. It was a catchy way to acknowledge that when we’re traumatized and not finding spaces of healing in that trauma, we pass that hurt on to anyone around us or that we’re in contact with. I think of a person experiencing major stress in their lives because of family life or work hardships and that yells at a grocery store cashier—it can be as simple as that. It could also be simply being in relationship with the folx around us that we love, they, unfortunately, get hurt by our past hurts.
Healed people heal people is a call for folx to do what’s accessible to them and within their power to seek healing so that we can all heal a bit and leave this world better off for it.
Through Spiritual Direction, we heal through having our stories held. It’s so impactful to have a space that is 100% for ourselves. A judgment-free zone where someone isn’t going to share what they think or how they feel about something we’re experiencing… a place where a friend isn’t going to say “me too!” and hijack our experience. A space where a religious leader isn’t going to gate-keep our thoughts to be in-line with doctrine.
Spiritual Direction is a space for folx to be present 100% to themselves and their journey and have a mirror (the Spiritual Director) to reflect it all back to them.
The nature of the space is inherently healing: being heard is a doorway to healing.
We’re also able to use tools in the space to break down given beliefs, wonder at current/held beliefs, and wonder at how to bring our actions and behaviors more in alignment with our held beliefs. Essentially, we do a dance of wondering to establish enough self trust, agency, and authority to be able to wonder at the possibility of what the person believes and how they could live differently if they leaned into it—how they could find a fulfilling life and existence now.
We dive into everything from family of origin hurts, past trauma, spiritual abuse, and religious trauma. Everything is on the table. We use this dance of hearing and question-asking to wonder at opportunities for healing and being more unified with self.
A massive piece of healing in the space is reconnecting to intuition. So many of the folx that I sit with have been severed from their bodies and their intuition. This happens through religious conditioning, cultural conditioning, familial conditioning, etc. In the space, we’re building self trust, one brick at a time, so that my clients can begin listening to and for themselves again.
What is your goal in the professional arena and how do you work to achieve this?
My personal goal in my professional and personal arena is that everyone would know that they are loved and that they are inherently worthy because they exist that they exist that they exist.
I work to achieve this through Spiritual Direction by allowing folx to borrow how I see them for a while until they’re able to begin seeing themselves more loved, more whole, more expansive. So many people have been given such severe limits on who and how they are… I ask questions that break down those limits so that we can wonder together at their fullness.
With folx that don’t have access to sitting with me 1-on-1 or in my group program, I try to give away as much value by way of content that I possibly can. By giving away as much content as possible, I have a Spiritual Direction practice with global impact—I’m trying to help as many folx access healing and liberation for themselves as I possibly can.
How useful has intuition proven to be in your life and what advice to others?
Intuition is almost everything in my practice. Given, I have 7 years of experience and years of training to call on, but accessing and listening to my intuition is everything. Every person I sit with is different and has a different story even if they’re dealing with the same categorical issue. I sense where a person is, how they’re coming into the session, I use body language to interpret reactions and read where they are and where they may be headed next. I rely heavily on intuition, then, to sense where we’re going next and what question to ask and how to ask it.
There were years where it was hard for me to access my intuition for myself, but always SO easy to access it for others. I feel things in my body and get pictures and words that pop into my head that we’re able to use in session. The beauty of Spiritual Direction is that we use my intuition to ask the questions, then hone the client’s intuition by wondering at the questions… They can answer or just tell me about their feelings. Clients that come in with a lot of I-don’t-knows begin to give me feelings and answers.
When we commune with our bodies, our minds, and our spirits… we’re able to access a knowing that goes beyond anything else. We hold all the wisdom we need inside us, we just need a signal disruptor sometimes to help us get past all the conditioning to listen and truly hear.
If you would like to find out more about , visit http://www.carinhuebner.com/ or follow on https://www.instagram.com/squarespace/
