by Judy Rees, first published in Resource magazine February 2008

Is it possible to understand another person’s spiritual experience? And in this age of individual faiths, how can we share our experiences of the divine, to recapture a sense of spiritual community?

A rather unusual way of exploring people’s spirituality is starting to catch on. It’s called Clean Language.

Matthew Dodwell, an active Quaker in his home city of Bath and a member of the recently-launched Clean Language and Spirituality Group, is one of those backing the method. He explained: “When I first came across Clean I was struck by how it was absolutely the right tool for this job, without a shadow of a doubt. It seems to me that if we used this tool in our parish communities they would simply become more light-filled places, where people could be free to explore their own spiritual experience with others, putting their attention on their experience rather than on their relationship with the other person.” 

Clean Language works by exploring the metaphors which underpin a person’s thinking, usually below the level of consciousness, and which spill out in the language they use. To do this, the coach or therapist uses a limited range of questions which have been designed to contain as few assumptions as possible, and so minimise contamination of the client’s internal processes.  The results are frequently stunning, with sessions promoting rapid change which tends to stay changed.

Clean Language was originally devised during the 1990s by a psychotherapist, David Grove, to help people transform their lives after major trauma. Nowadays, it is being used increasingly in coaching and counselling, and with groups, to facilitate positive change.

Clean can also be used as a modelling technique – to find out how somebody does something, with no intention to change it. Most usually, that ‘how somebody does something’ is in the form of a metaphor – which is a way of compressing a lot of information into a small, easily-communicated package.

Whether or not you agree with M Scott Peck and others that mental and spiritual growth are essentially the same thing, it seems that many techniques can work equally well in both the mental and spiritual arenas. And that seems particularly true of Clean Language.

So what is it like to explore your spirituality using Clean Language? Matthew describes his experience as ‘a privilege. He said: “I felt accompanied on a journey into the most important of spaces.

“I was dipping in and out of my ‘centre’. Being in that centre has reinforced it and given me more information about it. I often forget that this space is so important to me – to live in it just a little bit more has been wonderful. It has given my system more information about itself, which has made the whole thing more real.

“The way I use words in this realm is utterly unique to me, and they are the biggest words imaginable. In giving them space, time and attention and enquiring into them, they come alive in different ways. Being in this God-filled space is joy – the field expands and  radiance pours out.”

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This entry was posted on Thursday 7 August 2008 and is filed under Applications of Clean.

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