About us
Still Lake Listening opened its doors in 2019, following three years of formal training, study, and supervised practicum in spiritual direction. Since then, we have been companioning others through contemplative listening, and creating spaces of care, reflection, and honest exploration.
Before this formal training, both of us spent decades in pastoral and lay ministry roles within churches and parachurch organizations. These years of teaching, mentoring, leadership, and walking alongside others continue to shape how we listen today.
Michelle’s spiritual formation began on the rocky ridges of her homelands, surrounded by prairies, trees, and a thousand miles of wild. Her path has included university-level theological studies, leadership in teaching, preaching, and music across multiple church denominations, as well as work in ranch life, film production, and project management. Her long interest in Celtic Christianity and contemplative practice informs her inclusive and affirming approach.
Sandra’s belief beginnings were a tangle of religious systems and her own experience of the Sacred. Her eventual masters level theological studies led her into a deep re-examining of belief and identity, eventually guiding her toward spiritual direction. Her background includes decades of lay ministry, mentorship (including within the 2SLGBTQIA+ community), and work in special needs and respite care. This lived experience continues to deepen her capacity to sit with both knowing and unknowing.
We remain committed to ongoing learning in areas such as grief, trauma, religious trauma, and identity. We are continuing our training in IFS-informed spiritual companioning through the Center for Engaged Compassion.
Both of us meet regularly with our own spiritual directors and engage in peer and professional supervision. This helps ensure that our listening remains grounded, ethical, and supported.
Still Lake Listening exists as a place of shared humanity, compassionate presence, and trust.
More on Michelle
I am a compassion-based spiritual director, partner, mom, cook, and lover of trees and those tiny mushrooms hidden in moss (they’re so cool!). I’ve held space with the dying and have experienced a messy, entangled journey with core shame, betrayal, and crisis of identity. I’m a Queer Contemplative who has slogged through her own versions of complex trauma, family system dysfunction, loss of loved ones (miscarriages and parents), loss of home and career, divorce, and physical suffering (chronic disease). I have come out the other side with some scars, an intact sense of humour and mischief (although my partner still rolls her eyes at some of my jokes), and hopefully a smidgen (the beginnings?) of wisdom. We love listening, asking spacious questions, and exploring things of the soul.
More on Sandra
I am a spiritual director and compassionate listener – a Queer Human Becoming, still returning home to who I am by design. Much of my life’s work has been encompassed in being mum, offering special needs respite, lay ministry, and walking alongside marginalized and hurting people. My own journey with spiritual direction has been grounding and disruptive, both. It has been a sloooow untangling of entrenched beliefs that were hurtful to others and crippling to my own wild Soul. What remains now are Wonder, non-judgement, and the Abiding Love that seems to hold it all. Together we can Be With your life story, trauma, spiritual abuse, core shame, struggles that feel sticky and complicated – any of the places where it hurts. We do not have to do this alone. You are welcome here.
