Spiritual Therapy with Chelsie Skowyra
The Jordan Lang Podcast: Episode 02
Content Warning: violence against BIPOC during a mental health crisis
Welcome to episode 2 of the Jordan Lang Podcast. We are officially diving into season 1’s theme of emotional and mental wellness with today’s episode which is a conversation on Spiritual Therapy with Chelsie Skowyra. This is part one of a two part conversation with Chelsie.
Chelsie is a spiritual therapist and reiki master who bridges the gap between psychology and spirituality to provide support for anyone on a journey of self-exploration. She is a Pisces Sun, Capricorn Moon, Pisces Rising with a love for the ocean, curating playlists, and writing. She currently lives in Michigan with her husband and nine year old dog, Jiffy
Introduction
Chelsie has had formal training as family + marriage therapist, but after years of practicing, she experienced burnout + secondary traumatic stress. In her transition out of this work, she had a spiritual awakening.
“If I had been able to go in with this mindset and foundation into the work that I was doing, I think I could possibly still be in community mental health. Because the way that I do the work now supports my healing and my selfcare much more than it did the way I was doing it in the past.” - Chelsie Skowyra
Aside from her work, she loves:
- to curate playlists.
- anything to do with water.
- traveling (when able to safely!)
- planning trips
- concerts/live music
Q: What is the difference between traditional therapy and Spiritual Therapy?
Chelsie shares that there are many restrictions around traditional therapy in her experience. She does make an important note that traditional talk therapy shouldn’t be undermined and can definitely save lives. However, it is for some people & not for others.
She shares a memory of her first experience in traditional therapy as the client, where they spent most of the first session deciding which diagnosis code to use so that the insurance would cover X amount of sessions together. Going a bit further, Chelsie shares how on one hand a diagnosis can be very helpful and supportive, but for others, they just want someone to help them get their shit together & help support with holding space and provide outside insight.
So, the biggest difference is that Spiritual Therapy doesn’t need to be so heavily diagnostic focused & incorporates more spirituality and holistic views and that type of practices.
I’ve personally had sessions with Chelsie and can attest to her using intuition as her guide so often as the space allows for it, sharing things like:
“My guides are telling me to pull cards to clarify,” or “let’s pull up your birth chart.”
Therefore, another big difference is that Spiritual Therapy allows for more of an opportunity to follow intuition in sessions, rather than following the specific guidelines that are set in place within traditional therapy.
“The business of mental health is way different than I thought it was before getting into the field; there’s this whole bureaucratic type of system that has some pretty strong foundations in white supremacy and patriarchy.” - Chelsie Skowyra
Chelsie doesn’t quite vibe with that…neither do I!! She shares how when she thinks back to all the theories she learned in school, up to 90% were written by white men. The other 10%? White women.
There are blind spots here and in the scope of traditional therapy, we need to be able to open ourselves up to have a better understanding.
Q: Who is it for?
Chelsie shares that Spiritual Therapy is for those soulful individuals who are looking for that loving guidance and support and not needing the mental health diagnosis necessarily. Folks going the spiritual therapy route are not needing crisis intervention -- or a higher level of care.
It’s for the people who have experienced the traditional therapy, they appreciate it, they understand it…and they’re ready for something that just feels a little different.
Those seeking Spiritual Therapy want to nurture that spiritual part of themselves, and be able to implement self care that’s more than “basic.” It’s not so much what we choose to do as the act of self care, but the choice itself that is the self care.
I personally can relate with this so much as a mom in that when I make that choice of “I’m going to take a bath” it’s not the bath itself. It’s the CHOICE to take time for myself in taking a bath that is an act of self care.
Chelsie shares a bit further that Spiritual Therapy is for the people who want to explore who they are and do that with the support and sounding board of someone they can trust.
Q: What are the benefits? Short term + long term.
There are SO many benefits to therapy! Chelsie shares some with us:
Short Term Benefits
Taking the time for the self once per week or every other week can be so beneficial. Chelsie says she likes to feel like the therapy session itself is the ritual, and you have this time together with your therapist to just focus on YOU. In doing so, it helps to reduce stress, improve creative functioning, and you can begin to learn new ways of being and slowly begin to implement them.
Which leads to…
Long Term Benefits
You start having this deep understanding of the self and how you interact with the world and how you respond to it. In doing so, you are able to have this beautiful process that YOU enjoy. Chelsie shares how Spiritual Therapy teaches you that there’s going to be both good and bad days, but you know your heart through it all and you’re able to connect to the self.
Spiritual Therapy allows you to create that sacred life that you want to live for yourself. SO much of it is just in the day to day and moment to moment and being able to infuse the sacredness into what you already have.
I know for me personally, having that time and space for myself has been extremely helpful in more difficult points of my life. It’s been helpful just feeling SEEN and HEARD and VALIDATED. I’ve often asked myself “Am I crazy for feeling this way?” when feelings like guilt, shame, etc. come up. Having Chelsie be able to say “You’re allowed to feel that way! That’s great feel those feelings. Now, let’s move you through. And try these things next time you feel this way,” has made all the difference in a positive way.
Q: What are the most common misconceptions about therapy?
Chelsie shares how incredible it is that this younger generation is much more aware! However, there’s a stigma that’s still there.
One of the misconceptions she’s heard is that you have to have a severe mental illness in order to go to therapy. Like you have to be so so sick and not able to take care of yourself. Which couldn’t be further from the truth! ANYBODY can benefit from any type of therapy.
Another common misconception she’s heard is that all therapists are the same. There are so many different therapies and degrees...don’t give up if you have one bad therapy experience. You can find your person. On that note, Chelsie share’s that you also have the right to END therapy. You have the right to say “this relationship isn’t working for me.” and it doesn’t have to be anything so personal. In the event that this happens, your therapist is trained and will remain professional. (In the event that something happened and a repair needs to take place, that’s a different situation.) Chelsie goes on to say that she does believe most therapists want it to be a more collaborative partnership rather than a hierarchy relationship.
Chelsie shares one of the things she loves about social media are all these posts saying “therapy is cool.” YES therapy IS cool. She says that there’s even a TikTok trend of kids making power points for their therapists to better explain what they’re experiencing. I LOVE THIS!!
Q: What do sessions with you look like?
I personally already knew the answer to this, having had several sessions with Chelsie myself, but I always love hearing about her sessions!
“Sessions with me are super collaborative because I see myself as meeting the person where they’re at while simultaneously holding that space that I know that they really want to be at but don’t quite know how to get to.” - Chelsie Skowyra
She begins with meditation, to ground each session. From there, she and her client go into story-sharing, meaning making (her fav process to guide and support people through especially in shadow work, which we’re talking more about in Episode 03!).
During the session, Chelsie intuitively uses all the fun spiritual tools -- let’s pull a card on this and ask your guides what they think! She’s attuned in Reiki, so being able to pull the energetic body into it is really powerful. She’ll channel the energy that’s coming through and then being able to process it with the client afterwards.
Each session is ended with a card to close things out and leave her client with a message to take on with them throughout the following week until the next time they meet again.
Chelsie shares how she always see her clients as they are the experts on themselves. She is the expert on her process, but they are the experts on themselves. Her favorite phrase to use is “correct me if I’m wrong…” This helps the clients get even clearer for themselves and helps them to better learn how to communicate and understand when they’re talking with a loved one.
Having had this experience with Chelsie multiple times, I truly love the way she intertwines all the different tools within each session. Using the different tools to help it all make sense.
Q: Within this work, is it important for those claiming to be Spiritual Therapists to be certified and licensed? Why or why not?
This was a question I felt was super important to touch on, and I’m so thankful for how deeply Chelsie goes into the answer! She shares how this is one of those super gray weird areas. She personally does not practice Spiritual Therapy under a specific license because of the restrictions within that which she briefly mentioned at the start of our chat together. However, she is license eligible & has held a license within Michigan before.
Chelsie shares how the board of mental health & licensing process is tricky. One of the things she loves & respects about the board + process is that you’re sure that person knows their shit -- the training for therapists is a lot. Its’ not just reading a book and understanding the concepts. There’s so much supervision involved. Chelsie personally had over 4000 hours of supervision. Then you have to be supervised after graduation as well (another 2000 hours). I loved this and am so grateful.
HOWEVER, therapists have to pay for that -- up to $100/hour. They also have to take your licensing exam which costs upwards of $700-1000 for the information/testing material. And once they’re finished and able to begin working, it’s not much above min wage in pay. So it’s around 6 figures to get the degree and then you have to pay even more afterwards with renewal fees, continuing education, etc.
There’s no licensing board for Spiritual Therapists. Chelsie says for those practicing in this field to use their ethical heart before they claim to be trained as a therapist. It’s not just reading “The Body Keeps The Score,” which is amazing book. There’s really nothing compared to someone who’s actually experiencing the trauma in the moment + talking through the steps with your supervisor while in training.
Chelsie says that she’s a recovering people pleaser, so when she first started, she would have someone who wants her to agree with them on how much their life sucks. She needed to learn how to help people get past the victim mentality. She shares how if she didn’t have any of that experience, she wouldn't be the therapist that she is today.
Another downside to the board + process is all of the paperwork for insurance, not even for the clients. Chelsie says that she wants to write notes that the client can benefit from after and that she would spend hours fixing language just to make sure insurance would cover it.
Although there is no true licensing board for Spiritual Therapy, Chelsie says she believes someone using the title should have at least a Master’s degree, be license-eligible, have the supervision hours, and hold themselves accountable for continuing education.
“The reason why I felt so called to claim that title of Spiritual Therapist is because I think the mental health world needs a reckoning. It needs a re-do.” - Chelsie Skowyra
Again, this space is a very gray area. If you’re working with someone who claims to be a Spiritual Therapist, Chelsie says that you have every right to ask to see their degree. In fact, the client has every right to question the credibility of their therapists’ credentials.
In terms of Spiritual Therapy, there’s no replicating the experience of going to Grad School, the hours and hours supervision, and the cohort of your classmates and having those conversations to help you learn and grow and develop as a therapist. Chelsie shared that she went in with VERY naïve mindsets and if it wasn’t for very tough conversations we had in the classroom, she wouldn’t have learned as much.
In this space, it’s SO important for the relationship to feel good and feel safe. This is why Chelsie says she always gives her new clients a Consent form to sign before beginning any sessions. This form includes things like what Spiritual Therapy is, what it isn’t, and then confirms that all of this is okay with the client before beginning. Chelsie believes that her experience shows where there’s so much growth that can happen within the system of mental health.
I want to make sure to personally clarify that Chelsie does not have these sessions with anyone who is in crisis mode; thanks to her in-depth training and knowledge, if they are, you refer them to someone who can help them immediately — a specialist, calling 911, etc. I really do think that this is a key thing for people to know. Someone who has gone through all the training and all of the hours, they’ll know what to look for and be able to identify. This is why it’s truly important to find someone who does have the credentials and knows what TF they’re doing so it’s a safe experience all around for everyone.
During her time as a clinical therapist, Chelsie worked with actively suicidal individuals and is extremely aware of the level of care that they need. In this space of Spiritual Therapy however, she’s not working with a psychiatrist who she can talk to about her clients’ medications. She doesn’t have an emergency services office. She does include emergency hotlines on her consent form for those who may need it.
I was brought back to a realization which we hope to continue in a future conversation about how telling people to call 911 is a both/and type of situation. It’s what therapists are trained to do, and what we as humans in school are taught to do. BUT sometimes people in those mental health emergencies aren’t getting the right reaction from the authorities who show up from a 911 call and aren’t trained to de-escalate.
Even just saying “call 911” in this conversation reminds me of the privilege I hold as a white woman. Of course *I* can call 911. But for a person of color (POC), it may not be safe for them to do. All they need is help and they thought they were doing the right thing by calling 911. I’ve included the emergency hotlines Chelsie includes on her consent form below:
-- National Suicide Hotline: 800-273-8255
-- Text "HOME" to 741741 for Crisis Counseling
-- BlackLine: an emergency crisis support line specifically for BIPOC individuals. Call or Text: 1 (800) 604-5841
If you’re seeking further clarification on this topic of education and training for a Spiritual Therapist, Chelsie would love to dive more deeply into this with you! Check out the “Connect with Chelsie” section at the bottom of this page :)
Q: If you could give one piece of advice to someone listening in right now who may be struggling, what would it be?
Chelsie closes out this conversation on Spiritual Therapy in such a beautiful way by going back to one of the statements she made at the beginning: you aren’t your emotions, you experience them. She goes on to say that if you can take a moment to remember that, then do one small thing for yourself, even if it’s just placing your hands on your heart. She encourages you to trust that the shitty experiences and emotions will pass.
Healing is cyclical, it’s not a perfect cycle. It’s messy it’s not linear. But it is going to all be okay. - Chelsie Skowyra.
It’s all going to be okay.
To conclude this episode…
Mmmm, a massive THANK YOU to Chelsie for this incredible conversation on Spiritual Therapy. I hope that you enjoyed listening/watching/reading. If you have any questions or feedback, I would love to connect with you! Feel free to share a comment below, send me an email, or rate + review The Jordan Lang Podcast on iTunes.
Thank you for tuning in. Thank you for your love and support. I’m grateful for each of you listening and being here.
Sending you lots of love, xo
