ONESPIRIT ACCREDITED SUPERVISOR
Catherine Wright
What year were you ordained? 2008
What inspired you to pursue training with OneSpirit? My desire to deepen my spiritual practice to navigate life with beauty and wisdom.
What services do you provide? One-to-One supervision sessions, inspire my clients to be more creative and more kind with all the challenges of their work. My own main spiritual practice is dance and movement. And my faith path is nature-based. Movement and dance deepen my sense of my place in the ‘family of things’. I love and value the journey from the mind to the heart and to the body. I love working with the body. It connects us to our deepest wisdom. My offer is to work in ways that help clients experience the body as a portal to the Divine.
What motivated you to expand your ministry by becoming a Supervisor? An important strand in my ministry for many years has been to walk alongside professionals offering heart-centred work in the world.
How can clients get in touch with you? By email: catherine.wright@phonecoop.coop; through my website: catherinewright.co.uk; or by phone: 07866 382294.
What do you consider the most rewarding aspect of being an ordained interfaith minister? I feel the extraordinary privilege of being invited into the ‘inner circle’ in moments of joy and sorrow and beauty and fear. I love to create sacred spaces to hold us all as we navigate life in all its wonders and challenges.
What do you consider the most rewarding aspect of being an accredited supervisor? Watching ministers flourish. Sometimes from no ministry at all… growing into ministers who are fulfilling their sense of their purpose here on earth.
How do you put your personal ministry into practice? This being human is sometimes a really tough gig! Through my personal ministry, I find my way through to living my life with dignity, beauty and compassion. I offer dance as a spiritual practice, and ceremony and individual sessions. I am also passionately committed to Conflict Resolution and offer sacred space to help people find good ways to resolve conflict.
Where do you see your ministry taking you in the future? Well…. I am now 72! So I guess I am grateful to have a future. I feel that this is the final movement of the symphony so to speak. My longing is to live with joy as long as I can and to die with grace when the time comes.
How do you personally interpret the words “interfaith” or “interfaith minister”? “Interfaith” for me is mostly about the spaces between faiths. If someone has a very strong commitment to a particular religion… they would, I imagine, (in moments of grief and celebration) naturally turn to a Minister who shares that religion. But if their faith is a little more nebulous, and falls into the spaces between religious faiths, then I think an “interfaith minister” might be a natural person to turn to.
Why do you believe supervision plays an essential role in developing and deepening a minister’s practices? Oh MY! I have regular supervision. I would be lost without it. I am supported with the dilemmas that face me, in all sorts of areas of my ministry. Money; Personal relationships; Managing conflicts; Dealing with disappointments… all can be part of a minister’s experience. I find Supervision helps me find MY deeper wisdom and peace.
What inspires you to do this work? I think that being human is amazingly, profoundly wonderful and terrible. And a deep spiritual practice helps me hold myself in all the variety that comes my way. My love of life holds me tenderly… AND it holds me as I sit with: my fear that I am never good enough; my terror that everything is going to be lost; and my worry that I make a mess of everything. Finding a steady place of safety and love for myself is my aim. And I am inspired to be alongside others as they too navigate the rapids of the journey through life.
What aspects of your work do you find the most inspiring, rewarding, etc.? Oh, people! I find the people I work with endlessly inspiring and amazing. Watching people flourish is gorgeous. It is deeply rewarding to witness people getting more and more curious about their own process, and finding freedom and joy.
How do you bring forward innovation and creativity to your supervision practice? Innovation and creativity keep me alive. I read, I write and my own practice is frequently enriched by my attending other people’s workshops and trainings.
What sets your ministry apart from others? That’s a tricky one! The thing I love the most is the emphasis on the wisdom of the body and the medicine of movement.