Becoming a Member

Path to UUSDN Membership


What Makes a Spiritual Director?

For millennia people have turned to one another for spiritual guidance, direction, and companionship. Spiritual companions, guides, or directors come from a variety of backgrounds and types of spiritual formation. Seekers (directees) ultimately determine who is right for them. The process of becoming a spiritual director is a particular kind of spiritual formation, and is ongoing for as long as one serves in that role.  

We UUSDN members agree that spiritual directors:


Who are members of UUSDN?

We are Unitarian Universalist religious professionals and lay people who take many different paths into spiritual direction. We want to assure those looking for directors within our network that our directors have been formed as spiritual directors, continue to grow, and are accountable both to their directees and to one another. 


How to become a member of UUSDN?

We know there are many paths through formation to become a spiritual director, so we want to be in conversation with you about your formation. We expect our UUSDN spiritual companions to have completed training, be engaged in an ongoing formation process, and have a level of readiness needed for ethical and skillful professionalism. We expect our UUSDN members to be grounded in UU communities and literate in the breadth and diversity of our UU theologies and practices, recognizing we cannot be proficient in all of them. The profession does not yet have an accrediting body, so UUSDN has established the following path toward membership.  


Path to membership:


We think that essential components of formation paths are training, formation and supervised praxis, yet are aware that there are many forms of solid preparation. Here is a path many of our members have taken, equivalent paths are also welcome:


Training

(Very partial list of Training programs our members have found worthwhile. If your program is not on the list, we will look at the program description on their website, or you can ask a program representative to send your membership guide a description of your program.) 

Formation:

Supervised Praxis:

*Your membership team will help you discern what might be equivalent.

Accountability:

To suggest changes or corrections, please email us at: UUSDNMembershipTeam@gmail.com