The Heart Compass brings together ideas about what makes life bearable. The first understanding we need to have is that human beings are driven by a search for meaning, and that meaning can be found even in the seemingly worst or life's circumstances. We are driven by belief in God which gives that search a direction and a companion. Healing here works with both, rather than treating either as decoration.
Many psychologists approaches adopt approaches where the focus is on the symptoms: the anxiety, the sleeplessness, the low mood. Even though these matter, and need to be tended to in a timely manner they are the result of an underlying cause. But people rarely arrive only with symptoms. Many arrive carrying a question about whether their life is going anywhere, whether what they are doing counts, whether the loss they are carrying had any purpose in it. Starting with meaning does not ignore the symptoms. It puts them somewhere.
For many of us, faith is central to how we understand life, it belongs in healing, and you will not have to translate it into clinical language to be understood. If it is not, nothing here depends on it. The ideas this approach draws on — that people need purpose, that the heart is not separate from the mind, that suffering asks something of us — are older than any one tradition and do not require you to share mine.
In our approach we try to merge different traditions to find a common thread for healing and belonging. Our core therapy model is centralized on the core belief that we are not only driven by what we want or simply wounded by what happened, but pulled forward by what we are destined for. Faith plays a central role in this sysem and holds that this pull has a source, a divine creator we call God. Put together, they change the question in a counselling session from "what is wrong with you" to "what is this asking of you, and what will you do with it". The three neurocenters — brain, heart and gut — are how that question gets worked through in practice.