Spiritual Guidance Mentor Certificate

Engaging body, mind, and spirit, this holistic coaching program will teach you how to provide support, encouragement, and direction to spiritual seekers while obtaining the necessary skills and experience to serve others. 

A college degree is not required for admittance to this program. Noncredit certificate courses cannot transfer to graduate programs. 

15 months

Certificate of Completion

Online

Overview

The Spiritual Guidance Mentor Training (SGMT) certificate was developed for individuals who wish to mentor and guide others on their Spiritual Path and/or learn more about themselves. This mentoring is a kind of holistic coaching that engages body, mind, and spirit. Students will learn how to provide support, encouragement, and direction to spiritual seekers while obtaining the necessary skills and experience to serve others. A spiritual guidance mentor operates within a focused set of issues that most seekers face at some point. A spiritual guidance mentor is not a psychotherapist or licensed counselor but rather acts as a wise spiritual advisor or an experienced guide along the Spiritual Path.

An effective spiritual guidance mentor is someone who is actively engaged in a set of spiritual disciplines, who has a clear sense of personal ideals, regular prayer and meditation life, and an ongoing study of one’s own dreams. People already working in these professions find great value in the SGMT certificate program: counselors, social workers, psychologists, teachers, art therapists, yoga instructors, energy workers, clergy, health care providers, nonprofit professionals, and those in community and prison outreach. The SGMT certificate can also enhance one’s own spiritual life and foster personal spiritual growth.

Course Delivery

Courses at Atlantic University are delivered in an asynchronous online environment. Asynchronous learning happens on your schedule. While your course of study, instructor, or the program will provide materials for reading, lectures for viewing, assignments for completing, and exams for evaluation, you can access and satisfy these requirements on your own schedule, so long as you meet the expected deadlines. Common methods of asynchronous online learning include self-guided lesson modules, pre-recorded video content, virtual libraries, lecture notes, and online discussion boards or social media platforms.

Program Objectives

As a result of the assigned reading material, assignments, discussions, and practicums the student will be able to:

• Understand their role as a spiritual mentor and the qualities that they will need to nurture in themselves in order to enhance their effectiveness;
• Develop a framework for evaluating a person’s spiritual experiences that are based on traditional approaches and on personal experiences;
• Develop strategies for dealing with a mentee’s negative self-view to include exhibiting skills that emphasize listening to and supporting a mentee during times of particular confusion and ambiguity in life, with the intention of eliciting underlying feelings, themes, and direction;
• Articulate the differences and similarities between mentoring and counseling/psychotherapy and outline methods and statements that communicate to clients their work aligns with the mentoring model;
• Mentor/guide others, and/or lead workshops in such areas as dream work/dream interpretation, finding their mission in life, and meditation and the inner life;
• Draw upon first-hand, expanded self-awareness through working with dreams, meditation, and/or finding one’s mission in life and through this process will have acquired a deeper understanding of mind-body-spirit integration;
• Describe their understanding of the interrelationships between the levels of body-mind-spirit after encountering a variety of transformative experiences.

Program Expectations

A noncredit SGMT certificate student is attending Atlantic University to acquire knowledge and wisdom in a different capacity than those enrolled in the Master of Arts in Transpersonal Psychology program; they are taking the courses as noncredit and they are not working toward an advanced degree. With this is mind, below is a guideline to better understand the differences between the expectations of a graduate and a noncredit student:

Noncredit students are

• Held to the course deadlines for assignments;
• Required to read the assigned material and to respond on the topic assigned (versus digressing from the assigned topic);
• Required to complete practicums when assigned;
• Expected to write clearly using proper grammar and punctuation.

Noncredit students are not

• Held to meet strict APA standards on writing assignments;
• Required to take Proctored Exams.

At the discretion of the faculty member and depending on the course, some assignments may be identified as optional for noncredit students. Faculty members may also elect to modify assignment requirements for noncredit students, such as word count or page count.

All grades for noncredit students are either Successfully Completed (SC) or Not Successfully Completed (NC). This grading criterion is used for all assignments and the final course grade.

Spiritual Guidance Mentor Training Program Tuition

Invest in yourself to aid in the lives of others. Earn a Certificate of Completion* from an accredited university!

Each Spiritual Guidance Mentor Training course is $855 for 12 weeks of online instruction. 

Learn more about tuition and payment plans.