For helpers · Levels 1 and 2
You already walk with people. Be formed for it, and never do it alone.
Companions, Active Listeners, Change Partners, accompaniment ministers, spiritual directors and coaches who do not bill. Four ways in, below: take a course, try the Pathway Studio, help someone through Raphael, and follow your own pathway to flourishing in the Presence+ app.
01
Take a course.
About an hour each, from Divine Mercy University faculty, in the Model of the Person. Enroll, sign in or create a free MindSpirit account, and the course opens on Emmaus and joins your pathway.
The Presence That Heals: Human Relating Skills for Spiritual Direction
The most powerful skill in spiritual direction isn't a technique. It's you.
Decades of counseling research looked for the magic-bullet technique and found something else: the practitioner's presence matters most. Learn why your way of being is the first instrument of accompaniment — and how to form it.
1 hr · 1 lesson · Intermediate
With Stephen Grundman, Ph.D., Lorli Pregel and Fr. Shawn Aaron
Meeting Souls Where They Are: The Art of Spiritual Direction
Accompaniment across the stages of the spiritual life
Most people who need spiritual direction don't know how to ask for it. Learn the one skill that changes everything: meet the person where they are.
1 hr · 1 lesson · Intermediate
With Fr. Charles Sikorsky, LC, J.D., J.C.L. and Stephen Auth
When God Feels Absent: The Relational Art of Accompanying Spiritual Dryness
Presence is the intervention. Learn how to offer it.
Sooner or later, everyone you accompany hits a wall in prayer, and they arrive frightened that their faith is going with it. In one real 17-minute session, watch a spiritual director accompany a devout woman through that exact crisis without reassuring, fixing, or explaining it away. Learn the relational skills — reflective listening, validation, working with a person's own images — that carry someone through spiritual dryness.
1 hr · 1 lesson · Intermediate
Listening Where God Is Already at Work: Spiritual Direction and the Human Sciences
The best thing you can say in spiritual direction is often nothing at all.
You do not need the perfect thing to say. You need to learn to listen. In this single-session course, Fr. Robert Presutti of Divine Mercy University shows how the best spiritual directors get out of the way so a person can hear God for themselves. Draw on the classic masters and on what the human sciences have learned about deep listening, and earn 1.5 NBCC clock hours in an evening.
1 hr 30 min · 1 lesson · Intermediate
With Fr. Robert Presutti, LC
What we have built
For helpers, we have built 78 courses.
the courses that teach the craft of being with someone: how to listen so a person feels heard, how to stay present when there is nothing to fix, and how to tell the voice of God from the noise. The core is formation in accompaniment and spiritual direction, with Fr. John Hopkins on reaching men who think they have no time for God, Fr. Benedict Groeschel on childhood wounds and trust, and a set of courses on human relating skills, presence over platitudes, and the stages a soul passes through. Around that core sit the situations a helper meets most: a friend whose prayer has gone dry, a family member living with someone's PTSD, a child who is grieving, a man who will not slow down, and the moment when it is time to say, gently, that a counselor should also be involved. None of these courses assumes a license. Every one assumes you are already walking with people and want to do it well, and each ends with the question the whole network is built on: how do you know it is helping?
By topic
Courses for helpers, sorted by the work.
Listening and accompaniment first, then spiritual direction, then the situations you will meet most: grief, marriage, children.
Listening and accompaniment
The Presence That Heals: Human Relating Skills for Spiritual Direction
The most powerful skill in spiritual direction isn't a technique. It's you.
Decades of counseling research looked for the magic-bullet technique and found something else: the practitioner's presence matters most. Learn why your way of being is the first instrument of accompaniment — and how to form it.
1 hr · 1 lesson · Intermediate
With Stephen Grundman, Ph.D., Lorli Pregel and Fr. Shawn Aaron
Someone to Walk With: The Everyday Benefits of Spiritual Direction
You already suspect it would help. You’re also sure you don’t have time. This course is built around a man who thought the same — until he’d spent four years in monthly spiritual direction and couldn’t imagine deciding anything without it. Watch his story, see what actually changed in his prayer, his family, and his work, and learn from DMU scholarship and the classic spiritual writers what makes accompaniment work.
1 hr · 1 lesson · Intermediate
With Fr. Charles Sikorsky, LC, J.D., J.C.L. and Gregory B. Dyer, CPA
Someone to Walk With: The Everyday Benefits of Spiritual Direction
You already suspect it would help. You’re also sure you don’t have time. This course is built around a man who thought the same — until he’d spent four years in monthly spiritual direction and couldn’t imagine deciding anything without it.
1 hr · 1 lesson · Intermediate
With Fr. Charles Sikorsky, LC, J.D., J.C.L. and Gregory B. Dyer, CPA
Spiritual direction
Three Voices, One Relationship: Discerning God, the Enemy, and the World
Stop interrogating every spiritual experience. Learn to read where a soul is actually moving — and to trust the God who is already at work in it.
Was that God — or was that just me? It's the question every directee eventually asks, and that can leave even seasoned directors reaching for an answer quickly.
45 min · 1 lesson · Intermediate
With Fr. Robert Presutti, LC and Fr. John Pietropaoli, LC
Three Voices, One Relationship: Discerning God, the Enemy, and the World
Was that God — or was that just me? It's the question every directee eventually asks, and that can leave even seasoned directors reaching for an answer quickly.
45 min · 1 lesson · Intermediate
With Fr. Robert Presutti, LC and Fr. John Pietropaoli, LC
When God Feels Absent: The Relational Art of Accompanying Spiritual Dryness
Presence is the intervention. Learn how to offer it.
Sooner or later, everyone you accompany hits a wall in prayer, and they arrive frightened that their faith is going with it. In one real 17-minute session, watch a spiritual director accompany a devout woman through that exact crisis without reassuring, fixing, or explaining it away. Learn the relational skills — reflective listening, validation, working with a person's own images — that carry someone through spiritual dryness.
1 hr · 1 lesson · Intermediate
Prayer and discernment
Prayer that has gone dry, decisions, and hearing God.
Meeting Souls Where They Are: The Art of Spiritual Direction
Accompaniment across the stages of the spiritual life
Most people who need spiritual direction don't know how to ask for it. Learn the one skill that changes everything: meet the person where they are.
1 hr · 1 lesson · Intermediate
With Fr. Charles Sikorsky, LC, J.D., J.C.L. and Stephen Auth
Your Wound Is Not Your Obstacle: St. Thérèse on Grace, Holiness, and the Little Way
You don't have to be healed to be holy.
Many of us carry the quiet assumption that we need to heal — emotionally, psychologically, spiritually — before we can truly give, truly pray, truly grow. Thérèse of Lisieux never believed this. Fr. Marc Foley, OCD, shows us why she was right, and what her insight means for how we accompany ourselves and others.
1 hr · 1 lesson · Intermediate
With Marc Foley, O.C.D.
When Fear Becomes Faith: Fr. Groeschel on Childhood Wounds, Trust, and Prophetic Living
Your fear has roots. Your faith can have wings.
What if your difficulty trusting God began long before you understood what trust was? Fr. Benedict Groeschel — one of the most beloved Catholic psychologists of our time — explores the childhood roots of fear, the saints who found their way through, and what it looks like to arrive at genuine surrender. Three lessons. Real tradition.
2 hr 30 min · 4 lessons · Intermediate
With Fr. Benedict Groeschel, C.F.R.
Grief, loss and suffering
Bereavement, aging, trauma, and the question of why.
When Children Grieve: Helping Kids and Families Through the Death of a Loved One
Whether you sit with grieving families professionally or you are simply the adult a child turns to, this course gives you what to say and what to do.
When someone dies, children take in far more than the adults around them realize, and they grieve in ways that look nothing like adult grief.
1 hr 30 min · 1 lesson · Intermediate
With Paula Darcy and Khris Ford
When Children Grieve: Helping Kids and Families Through the Death of a Loved One
When someone dies, children take in far more than the adults around them realize, and they grieve in ways that look nothing like adult grief.
1 hr 30 min · 1 lesson · Intermediate
With Paula Darcy and Khris Ford
Accompanying Couples Through Intimacy, Suffering, and Self-Gift
Be ready for the questions about intimacy that couples actually bring — the awkward, the painful, and the ones no class prepared you for.
Explore the intimate questions married couples actually ask and learn how to answer with competence, compassion, and the Catholic understanding of sexuality as self-gift.
1 hr · 1 lesson · Intermediate
With Lisa Klewicki, MAT, Ph.D. and Fr. John Hopkins, LC
Children and parents
Anxiety, grief, screens, and the long game of being present.
What Your Child Isn't Saying: Recognizing Childhood Anxiety, Bullying, and Digital Risk — A Clinical and Catholic Formation Course
Recognizing Childhood Anxiety, Bullying, and Digital Risk — A Clinical and Catholic Formation Course
Ian Masson, LPC, NCC, RPT, Director of the IPS Center at Divine Mercy University, presents clinical warning signs of childhood anxiety across developmental stages — including bullying, digital safety risks, and the role of family relationship and faith community as protective factors.
45 min · 1 lesson · Beginner
With Ian Masson
What Your Child Isn't Saying: Recognizing Childhood Anxiety, Bullying, and Digital Risk — A Clinical and Catholic Formation Course
Clinical Indicators of Childhood Anxiety, Bullying, and Digital Risk — through a Catholic anthropological lens
45 min · 1 lesson · Beginner
With Ian Masson
The Elephant in the Living Room — Counseling the Multigenerational Family
When adult children and aging parents share a home, family roles can become strained. Dr. Kathie Erwin shows how to address unspoken tensions, renegotiate roles, protect the couple’s bond, and honor older adults through Divine Mercy University’s whole-person psychology and Christian principles.
1 hr 15 min · 1 lesson · Intermediate
With Dr. Kathie Erwin, Ed. D and Fr. Charles Sikorsky, LC, J.D., J.C.L.
02
Try the Pathway Studio.
Answer a few basic questions about helping someone, and add the ways you have found that help. The Studio is where helpers learn from each other, and what you contribute can become part of someone else's pathway.
Questions like these
- A friend says she has not slept properly in three weeks. What do you say first?
- Someone tells you he is drinking more than he wants to. What is yours to do, and what is not?
- A person in your small group has gone quiet. How do you invite without pressing?
- When is it time to say, gently, that someone else should also be involved?
Then: contribute a way that helped. Short, concrete, yours.
03
Sign up for Raphael and help someone in need.
Raphael is the app Level 1 and 2 helpers help through. It holds the conversation, the one-minute Regular Outcomes measures after it, and the warm hand-off when a person needs the next step. On your phone and on the web.
Be matched
A community coordinator pairs you with someone who asked for help, at the level you are formed for.
Walk with them
Conversations in the app or in person; after each one the person says how they are doing and how it is going between you, and you hear it.
Hand off warm
When one relationship is not enough, the next helper is already known, and the record goes with the person.
People who already help
You would be in good company.
A few of the coaches and guides who help through the Presence+ app today, in their own words. They are Level 3; you can begin at Level 1 or 2 and the formation is the same Model.
Lora Lyons
Catholic and somatic coach
Wife, homeschool mom and Lay Carmelite with fifteen years of accompanying those who know they are made for more. Master's in Communication Management; certified in Metanoia Catholic coaching and somatic coaching. For transitions, feeling stuck, or simply longing for more peace and purpose.
Christine Schroeder
Board-certified health and wellness coach, spiritual director
Founder of Restore 23, offering Christ-centered health and wellness coaching and spiritual direction for adults of every vocation. A former occupational therapist, she offers a safe, compassionate, judgement-free space to grow in self-awareness and discern God's presence in daily life.
Tina Butera
Catholic mindset coach, educator
A language teacher and instructional coach who learned that words matter, including the ones we say to ourselves. She partners with educators and caregivers to understand how thoughts shape emotions, choices and relationships, and to respond rather than react.
Jessie Marushak
Catholic mindset coach
Helps people break free from what is holding them back and find the freedom God designed them to have, uncovering the thoughts, beliefs and wounds that keep them stuck.
Virginia Koch, Ph.D.
Leadership coach, founder of Knots Untied Coaching
Forty years teaching leadership, most recently at the University of Central Florida, now combined with Catholic mindset coaching to help clients understand and apply their God-given talents across all of life. Host of the Catholics on Campus podcast.
Mama Jane Snyder
The Catholic Womanhood Coach, founder of Wisdom Wellness Coaching
Forms Catholic women in their interior life so they can heal mentally, emotionally and spiritually. A Master Catechist, Billings Ovulation Method instructor, Catholic mindset coach and Gallup strengths coach; co-creator of the Cycles and Sanctity podcast.
Meet them in the Presence+ app Level 3 coaches and guides, with Companions and listeners in each community and licensed clinicians through Mindspirit.
04
Explore your own pathway to flourishing.
You are not only a helper. In the Presence+ app every person, including you, has a pathway: the courses, practices and relationships that are yours. Everyone gives feedback and everyone receives it, so your own growth is measured the same way as the people you help.
What a pathway holds
- ✓The courses you have taken and the next ones suggested for your step
- ✓Practices you keep: prayer, examen, the habits you are building
- ✓The people walking with you, and the ones you walk with
- ✓Your own Regular Outcomes over time, so you can see whether you are flourishing
Not sure which door?
Coaches and spiritual guides who hold a credential and bill by the hour are Level 3 and work in Mindspirit; that door is under For clinicians. Everyone else who helps without billing belongs here.