Personal coaching with two guides at once: a guided series in the disciplines of the heart, self-compassion, self-forgiveness, and the four immeasurable qualities of mind, taught by a neuroscientist and a physician together.
Three ninety-minute sessions online, with comprehensive guidance through the Practical Spirituality workbook, and a full year in a monthly working group led by both doctors.
spīrāreLatinto breathe · breath · essence
Spirituality is an exploration of our deepest essential desire.
The word descends from the Latin spīrāre, to breathe: the breath, the essence, the animating life within. Practical spirituality is the skillful transformation of that inner essence, the disciplined turning of desire toward what it most truly seeks.
Two guides, one client. The practices teach you to hold spacious, healing heartfulness open for life.
Each session names a discipline and the principles that organize it. The previews below outline those principles. They do not unfold them. The unfolding is the work we do together, in sequence, over the full series, where each practice is taught, practiced, and carried into the days between.
The practices that enact each principle are taught within the series.
How each principle is practiced is held for the full sequence.
The graduated method for each is taught session by session.
Self-compassion makes self-forgiveness bearable. Self-forgiveness frees the heart enough to turn outward. The four immeasurable qualities of mind carry that turning into the whole field of your relationships. Taken alone, each helps. Taken in sequence, they build something that holds.
Every session is held by both doctors at once, a neuroscientist and a physician, so the science of the practice and the care of the whole person meet in the same room.
Three ninety-minute sessions move through the Practical Spirituality workbook in full, so the disciplines are not only described but worked, page by page, with you.
A twelve-month membership in the monthly working group keeps the practice alive long after the sessions close, in the company of others doing the same work.
For those who wish it, a referral is available to a specialized psychiatrist to consider whether at-home oral ketamine might complement the coaching.
Two guides who have each spent a career at the meeting place of science and the care of the whole person, working with you together.
A neuroscientist who has dedicated his career to the science of spirituality, and who translates that science into personal, contemplative care.
Dr. Ferguson is Founding Director of the Neurospirituality Lab at Mass General Brigham, where his research maps the brain circuits underlying self-transcendence, mystical experience, and the practices that change a human heart. He is among the few individuals to have held dual faculty appointments at Harvard Medical School and Harvard Divinity School, a rare standing at the meeting place of rigorous neuroscience and the contemplative traditions.
What he studies in the laboratory, he also teaches and practices.
This series is where that work becomes personal: the science of compassion and forgiveness, taught with care, in the service of your own transformation.
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The coaching series stands complete on its own. For clients who wish to go further, a referral is available to a psychiatrist who specializes in ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, for a consultation on whether at-home oral ketamine might complement the transformative work of these sessions.
Ketamine works differently from most medicines of the mind. Rather than slowly adjusting the chemistry of mood, it acts on the brain's glutamate system, the principal signaling pathway for learning and change. In the hours and days that follow, the brain enters a heightened state of neuroplasticity: synapses form more readily, old patterns loosen their grip, and the architecture of habit becomes, for a time, unusually willing to be revised.
Why this pairs with spiritual work
Transformation has always been the aim of contemplative practice: a real change in how the heart is disposed. Ordinarily that change is slow, because it works against the grain of long-set patterns. When self-compassion, self-forgiveness, and the immeasurable qualities of mind are practiced inside that opening, they do not merely move through you. They have the chance to take root in the very wiring that holds them.
Whether this path is right for you is a decision made with the referring psychiatrist, never a requirement of the coaching.
Entirely optional, and never a condition of the coaching.
The principles, in your pocket, between sessions.
SoulSignal carries the work of the series into ordinary days. It listens for where you are, matches you to a practice that meets the moment, and keeps the disciplines of self-compassion, self-forgiveness, and the immeasurable qualities of mind close at hand, so what opens in coaching has somewhere to continue. The companion app is free, and it deepens the series rather than replacing it.
Now available for iPhone from the Apple App Store.
Download on the App StoreIf the disciplines outlined here speak to where you are, the full sequence is where they are taught, practiced, and carried home, with two guides at your side and a year of practice ahead.
Email Dr. Michael Ferguson, PhD, to schedule a free consultation.
mferguson@bwh.harvard.edu