2025 Curriculum*
* Course details are subject to change
Wednesday, June 11: Foundations of Spiritually Informed Psychotherapy
Module 1: What Is Spiritually Informed Psychotherapy?
Instructor: Sarah McCaslin, MS, MDiv, LCSW
This opening session introduces participants to the core principles of spiritually informed psychotherapy (SIP), including its historical roots, clinical relevance, and ethical considerations. Drawing from interfaith, interspiritual, and psychological traditions, we will explore how spiritual perspectives can enrich the therapeutic process and deepen our understanding of the human condition.
Learning Objectives:
- Define spiritually informed psychotherapy and differentiate it from pastoral counseling and spiritually neutral therapy.
- Identify key historical influences and theoretical underpinnings of SIP.
- Reflect on the clinician’s own spiritual location and its relevance to clinical work.
Module 2: Spiritual Assessment and Clinical Integration
Instructor: Sarah McCaslin, MS, MDiv, LCSW
This module explores concrete approaches to integrating spiritual assessment into clinical intake and ongoing treatment. We’ll examine tools such as genograms, spiritual lifemaps, and open-ended inquiry, as well as practices that support spiritual meaning-making in therapy. The module includes case-based discussion and experiential reflection.
Learning Objectives:
- Describe the role of spiritual assessment in clinical practice.
- Utilize at least two tools for exploring a client’s spiritual or existential worldview.
- Identify appropriate boundaries and interventions for integrating spiritual practices into psychotherapy
Wednesday, June 18: Embodied Practices and Expanding Spiritual Frames
Module 1: Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) in Spiritually Informed Psychotherapy
Instructor: Dharmachari Ananta
This session introduces the foundational principles of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and its relevance for spiritually informed psychotherapy. Participants will explore mindfulness not just as a therapeutic technique, but as a spiritual practice that cultivates presence, compassion, and resilience for both client and clinician. The session includes didactic content and experiential practices.
Learning Objectives:
- Define MBSR and describe its origins in contemplative and clinical traditions.
- Identify at least two mindfulness practices suitable for use in psychotherapy.
- Explore the therapeutic benefits and potential spiritual resonance of mindfulness practices.
Module 2: Listening to What Hurts: The Sound of Spiritual Trauma
Instructor: Lana Hurst, MA, MDiv, MHC-LP
What do we hear when we let silence meet the sacred? Using Jean Laplanche’s metapsychology, this session will define key concepts—enigmatic message, implantation, intromission, translation, après‑coup, traumatism—and explore how they frame religious and spiritual trauma. Participants will learn an ethic of ‘radical listening’— tuning the ear to places where doctrine becomes foreign body and where the work of translation has stalled.
Learning Objectives
- Define Laplanche’s core concepts (enigmatic message, implantation, intromission, translation, après‑coup, traumatism) and describe how they frame trauma.
- Identify ways religious/spiritual messages implant as “foreign bodies,” producing symptoms when translation is blocked.
- Understand how an ethic of ‘radical listening’ can help clients approach stalled inscriptions with dignity and curiosity.
Wednesday, June 25: Healing Spiritual Wounds in Clinical Practice
Module 1: Translating the Sacred: Gender, Sexuality, & the Mythosymbolic
Instructor: Lana Hurst, MA, MDiv, MHC-LP
Gender identity and sexual orientation are not fixed biological facts; they are living translations of messages we first receive from the Other—our caregivers and initial community. Drawing on Jean Laplanche’s metapsychology, this session explores how those messages implant as enigmas and how, over time, we translate them through the mythosymbolic codes available to us—religious stories, spiritual practices, cultural myths, etc. Together we’ll examine how clinicians can accompany clients in re‑translating inherited messages about the body and desire into forms that feel truer, freer, and more alive.
Learning Objectives:
- Describe how gender and sexuality can be understood as ongoing translations of enigmatic messages received from the other.
- Examine the role of spiritual and religious frameworks as mythosymbolic resources that shape, constrain, or expand the possibilities for translating those messages.
- Explore how clinicians can support clients in engaging stalled or painful inscriptions with curiosity, allowing for the emergence of new, self-authored meanings related to gender and sexuality.
Module 2: Spiritually Integrated Approaches to Disordered Eating and Body Image Healing
Instructor: Nikki Rollo, PhD, LMFT, CEDS-C
Eating disorders often carry complex relationships to shame, control, embodiment, and identity — areas deeply intertwined with spiritual narratives and values. This session offers an integrative approach to treatment, addressing how spiritual frameworks can support recovery and reconnection to the body as sacred. We’ll consider how clinicians can support and compassionately engage clients across diverse spiritual and cultural contexts in eating disorder and body image recovery work.
Learning Objectives:
- Explore how spiritual narratives about control, purity, or identity may contribute to disordered eating.
- Identify at least two spiritually integrated practices that support recovery from eating disorders.
- Develop strategies for working with clients to reframe the body as a site of sacred connection.
Wednesday, July 9: Reimagining Spiritual Competence and Decolonizing Knowledge
Module 1: Expanding the Frame beyond “Spiritual and Religious Competence”
Instructor: Fatima Mirza, PhD, LCSW
Spiritually competent? or proficient in integrating spirituality in therapy? This session challenges narrow definitions of religious literacy and offers a broader, more relational approach to spiritual and cultural humility. Drawing from her work in interfaith dialogue, education, and healing-centered practices, Fatima Mirza invites participants to reflect on how we encounter the sacred in others—and how our frameworks can honor complexity without collapsing difference.
Learning Objectives:
- Critique conventional models of spiritual/religious competence in psychotherapy.
- Explore practices that foster attunement to diverse sacred worldviews and experiences.
- Deepen self-awareness of one’s own spiritual/cultural location in therapeutic relationships.
Module 2: Healing Knowledge: Indigenous Wisdom and Epistemic Justice in Psychotherapy
Instructor: Rebeca Brau Martinez, MS, MFT-LP
This module explores how Indigenous spiritual traditions can inform a more just and expansive clinical practice. We’ll consider how Western psychotherapy often privileges certain ways of knowing while silencing others — and how reclaiming spiritual and ancestral knowledge can be a path toward healing for both clients and clinicians. Through storytelling, ritual, and dialogue, participants will examine the ethical and clinical implications of integrating Indigenous perspectives in practice.
Learning Objectives:
- Define epistemic justice and explain its relevance in clinical settings.
- Identify at least one way Indigenous spiritual traditions can inform therapeutic healing.
- Reflect on the clinician’s role in challenging epistemic dominance and uplifting marginalized wisdom traditions.
Wednesday, July 16: Depth Psychology and Dreams
Module 1: Depth Psychology and the Sacred Psyche
Instructor: Shivam Gosai, LMHC
This session introduces foundational concepts from depth psychology—persona, shadow, archetypes, the collective unconscious, and the numinous—as they relate to psychological healing and spiritual transformation. Participants will explore how symbolic material from the unconscious can serve as a guide for inner work, and how therapists can recognize and support the emergence of the sacred in the clinical encounter.
Learning Objectives:
- Define core depth psychology concepts including persona, shadow, archetypes, and the collective unconscious.
- Explore how symbols and projections can inform the therapeutic process.
- Reflect on how the sacred psyche may emerge in client narratives and image-making.
Module 2: Dream Work as Soul Work
Instructor: Shivam Gosai, LMHC
This session offers practical tools for working with dreams in therapeutic and spiritual contexts. Participants will learn three primary approaches to dream engagement—association, amplification, and animation—and explore how dream images can offer insight into both personal and transpersonal dimensions of the psyche. The session emphasizes a respectful, curious posture toward dreams as expressions of the soul’s unfolding narrative.
Learning Objectives:
- Distinguish between association, amplification, and animation as methods of dreamwork.
- Describe how dream symbols reveal both personal and collective unconscious material.
Wednesday, July 23: Repair, Renewal, and the Ethics of Healing
Module 1: Responding to Moral Injury & Fostering Moral Repair
Instructor: Kelly Murphy Mason, PsyD, MS, LICSW
Moral injury arises when individuals experience, witness, or participate in events that transgress their deeply held personal beliefs. Often overlooked in clinical contexts, moral injury is distinct from Post-Traumatic Stress and Major Depressive Disorder and carries profound implications for individual outcomes. This module will explore the cumulative effect of moral stressors over time and help clinicians recognize moral injury in their clients, especially in those with military and healthcare backgrounds. We will consider some spiritually-informed approaches that can foster moral repair, enable greater community care, and encourage meaning-making.
Learning Objectives:
- Define moral injury and distinguish it from mental disorders such as depression and PTSD;
- Identify populations where moral injury may be present or moral distress may be increasing with moral stressors;
- Adopt spiritually-informed strategies to support moral repair, community care, and individual healing.
Module 2: Cultivating Spiritual Awareness for Human Flourishing
Instructor: Kelly Murphy Mason, PsyD, MS, LICSW
Research has shown the robust role that healthy spirituality can play in promoting personal growth and fostering resilience. This module explores the insights of positive psychology alongside those of existential analysis, reviewing interdisciplinary findings on the dynamics of human flourishing and drawing upon theological and philosophical understandings of the human condition. Together, we will reflect on what it might mean for us to not merely survive, but thrive, individually as well as collectively. We will consider ways to integrate spiritual practices into our personal and professional lives, in the service of increasing happiness and life satisfaction, mental and physical health, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, and close social relationships.
Learning Objectives:
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- Articulate key concepts in models of human flourishing, including its psychological and spiritual domains;
- Explore spiritual practices and perspectives that promote personal growth and foster greater resilience;
- Identify clinical approaches and treatment planning that improve established measures of human flourishing.