Offered through the Institute for Christian Studies
Spirals of Love and Healing: Empathy, Re-stor(y)-ing, Re-connecting, Transforming
Jim Olthuis · September 15 to October 20, 2026
This course will explore the journey of personal healing as an interactive, inter-relational dance of trust and attunement. The therapeutic dance is a four-stage spiralling process: Letting-in (developing trust and safety), Letting-go (owning and visiting trauma and pain), Letting-out (releasing, rebirthing), and Letting-transform (re-integrating, re-connecting). In the process a sacred healing space of love opens up with its own unique rhythm and energy where love engages, heals and transforms.
Trace the four-stage spiral of letting-in, letting-go, letting-out, and letting-transform
Explore healing as an inter-relational dance of trust and attunement
Consider how a sacred space of love engages, heals, and transforms
ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR
Jim Olthuis is professor emeritus of philosophical theology at the Institute for Christian Studies, where he taught for more than four decades, and a practising psychotherapist. His books include The Beautiful Risk: A New Psychology of Loving and Being Loved and Dancing in the Wild Spaces of Love: A Theopoetics of Gift and Call, and he is the editor of Knowing Other-wise: Philosophy at the Threshold of Spirituality.