100 years = 1 cm

Growing up in San Antonio, we would often take visitors to Natural Bridge Caverns which is about an hour away into a new world. When you descend into the cavern, you’ll have sensory overwhelm as your eyes adjust to the darkness and your olfactory system is hit with the pungent smell of bat guano. The structures within are fascinating and to see Mother Nature at work is a humbling reminder of strong presence.

It takes 100 years for 1 centimeter to form on a stalactite or stalagmite. An entire century! Not even an inch! 100 millimeters. And yet, each drop of water carries with it minerals and each drop leaves a deposit and another and another so much so that the deposit forms into something you can touch and feel and see. There is something magical happening with each drip that can so easily be ignored or dismissed or take for granted.

I think we can do the same with our own growing. The patience required when one invests in their internal world is similar to what happens within those caverns. Each session has the potential of a drop that contains something that will be visible months/years later. The work in those sessions matters because the formation is made up of many of those micro moments where we choose healthier ways of being.

Hope Springs Forth

We looked onward with hope at the end of 2024. 2025 asked us to cling to these words with all we could and all we had and then some.

My cousin Erica’s husband, Matt, was diagnosed with stage 5 kidney disease at the end of 2024 and on dialysis. He was placed on the transplant list that could have him waiting 8-10 years. Erica was pregnant with their second son. The urgency was real for all of us. My sister and I signed up to be living donors. After rounds of tests, I was determined the better candidate due to a marker I share with Matt that they only see in blood relatives (which we are not). I asked the nephrologist how this was possible and he said “really good luck”.

To this day, I am still in awe of the pure grace of this reality.

Matt and I underwent transplant surgery on September 30th. After his surgery, his surgeon told me his body began to respond immediately to the new kidney. He is off dialysis and has gone from 8% kidney function to 68%. My remaining kidney picked up the burden of both pretty quickly as well. Our bodies are incredible.

I’m thankful for the CPMC team: our surgeons, nephrologists, nurses, techs, social workers and all involved from the onset. You gave us both a gift that has changed us forever. I’m humbled by the love and support that overflowed from family, friends, our partners, my mental health colleagues and our faith community. I am also grateful to my clients who were so kind and encouraging in their learning why I would be taking a medical absence and their care for and investment in Matt, whom they’ll never meet.

Hope springs forth. We need this reminder when things are dark and confusing. Matt will have a full life of energy to wrangle a baby and toddler and watch them grow into boys and adolescents and adults. He and Erica will get to celebrate their 10 year anniversary this coming year with hope that they’ll see their 20th.

Spiritual Direction

My friend TJ is a trained spiritual director who completed her Master of Spiritual Formation degree in May 2025. In addition, TJ is a facilitator with The Allender Center, where she was trained in Narrative Focused Trauma Care.

I am thrilled TJ is offering her skills of compassion, depth, vulnerability, and her desire for others to find beauty and abundance in this incredible way.

I asked her to share more about how spiritual direction can offer those wanting to connect more deeply with themselves and their spirituality.

“Spiritual direction offers intentional time and space to attend to the sacred and divine in one’s life.”
— TJ Poon

Spiritual direction offers intentional time and space to attend to the sacred and divine in one's life. Spiritual directors offer generous listening and a witnessing posture, joining the directee in attuning to the movements of the Divine (as defined by the directee) in their lives. While called “direction,” this process is non-directive and allows the person to freely explore the sacred movements in their life with the presence of a loving witness. My desire for people I walk with in spiritual direction is that they would continually find themselves feeling more loved and free - secure in their belovedness, and free to explore their spirituality.

Because spiritual directors are trained to be able to support directees from a variety of spiritual backgrounds, spiritual direction can be enjoyed by people of varying faith traditions or even people who aren't sure where they are spiritually. People who find themselves questioning the faith they grew up with, or just wanting to make it their own, often find spiritual direction to be supportive as they explore where they are.

Spiritual direction takes place in a format that is similar to therapy, usually in one-on-one sessions. However, spiritual directors do not diagnose or attempt to provide mental health guidance. Rather, they offer an intentional space to focus on the spiritual aspect of a person’s life. Sessions are centered on the sacred, and spiritual directors look to the “third chair” (the presence of the holy) as the primary actor in the relationship.

That being said, spiritual direction can be an excellent complement to therapy. Sometimes issues come up in one's life that hold a spiritual dimension that might benefit from more exploration than a therapeutic process can give. Spiritual direction can be a supportive place to explore those questions, while not interfering with the counselor/client relationship or that unique healing work. 

The metaphor of “panning for gold” is a good one for the spiritual direction process. Often, a directee brings the facts and facets of their life that might be quite jumbled and look like nothing special on the surface. In direction space, a spiritual director sits with the directee as they “sift” those experiences, looking together for the gold - where the Divine shows up and is at work in places that maybe hadn't been seen before. 

If you are interested in pursuing spiritual direction, you can contact TJ at www.tjpoon.com or Spiritual Directors International (SDI) maintains a directory of spiritual directors. 

Elbow Room

“How did [other people] find it so easy to saunter through the world with all their muscles relaxed and a careless eye roving the horizon, bubbling over with fancy and humour, sensitive to beauty, not continually on their guard and not needing to be? What was the secret of that fine, easy laugher which he could not by any efforts imitate? Everything about them was different. They could not even fling themselves into chairs without suggesting by the very posture of their limbs a certain lordliness, a leonine indolence. There was elbow-room in their lives as there had never been in his.”

-That Hideous Strength, C.S. Lewis

I’ve shared before about the bittersweet nature our job as therapists is. Recently, I have said goodbye to 3 clients who did incredible work over the years which meant that it was time for us to say goodbye professionally. Around the same time, I finished reading The Space Trilogy by CS Lewis and the quote above made me think about each of the 3 clients’ growth that I had the honor of participating in and witnessing.

Each wanted to feel more assured and steady and secure in themselves. They saw ways they were struggling to do find inner solid ground that impacted how they saw themselves and the world around them. Over the course of our work together, exploring their defense structures, their fears and old patterns of relating, they found their footing and it became more and more sturdy. They gave themselves the elbow room to breathe and be themselves and invite closeness without being threatening. I hope we can all find an easiness in the ways we “saunter through the world”.