Ultimately, my beliefs about god are not the focus of our spiritual counseling sessions, but I share this to help you understand that I too struggle to make sense of it all. With the support of my own healers and counselors, I have come to my own space of living and breathing these sacred questions. You and I are partners, as we all are, with Love, to serve Love for the sake of our beautiful, wounded world. Your work is breath-taking, a molecule at a time. You and I are the servants of healing compassion.
About Royce Fitts
Spiritual Counselor & Dream Worker
Meet Royce
I’m Royce Fitts, a Spiritual Counselor and Dream Worker with decades of experience as a clinical psychotherapist. I understand this beautiful tension that exists at the heart of a healer’s life.
Some of the hardest, most enriching and loving work we will ever do is to try, in the face of it all, to create meaning, beauty and healing in our personal lives and in the life of the larger world. This is our calling.
Open-hearted Spiritual Counseling and DreamWork will unlock our greatest allies and deepest resources. This is about discovering and learning to express your heart’s deepest values. Although I am an ordained minister, my process is not about dogma, rigid religion and rules, nor shame-based god-talk.
If invited, I am honored to walk along your side as we explore your path and work toward your healing. Spiritual Counseling and DreamWork is about deep, honest soul-searching for you to become your most authentic, healthy self. This is for you, your loved ones and for our beautiful, wounded world, for us to be “a light unto our courageous path.”
that you may have an authentic life, a life in all fullness
This may sound strange, but in the seasonings of my life, in arriving at a place that defines, as best as possible at any one moment, who I am and how I can contribute to the goodness in the world and be a compassionate healer, I often call myself an atheist-agnostic-believer-dreamer.
These terms may seem like terrific contradictions and hard to comprehend. Maybe these terms are even offensive to some – though, I don’t intend them to be so – but I think, if we are honest, we all carry many identities within us. Perhaps you’ll see some of your own experience in these definitions, changeable and as fluid as they are. When I’m faced with questions about how to balance caring for others and my own self-care, and when I look at all the pain, cruelty and woundedness in the world, I look to my understanding of myself, and of the universe, to see my way through.
May I explain this fluidity?
Further explanation of these terms
When I experience the anguish of pain and suffering in my soul, in the soul of the world, in the universe of “all that is”, I cannot, in those moments, believe in the existence of god or goddess. How empty our worlds – and words – are, empty of the divine in all its forms(s). It’s not cruel to state that we have no divine(s). This is “just is.” We are alone.
We are random in universes of randomness. I take heart in what is called natural theology or philosophy, concluding that there is no such thing as the super-natural. No divine intervention. No miracles. No one with whom to plead for one and, no one to thank, for that matter. We are what we are. We are what we get. We are what we give.
I am peaceful in this knowledge of the nothingness of god/dess. I am not flaming with any fundamentalist fire that demands I fight the belief systems of those who do have some version of God. Ultimately, our life and universes are about being – being you, being me, experiencing the beingness of all. We have mystery, lots of mystery. We’ll probably never understand it all. And that’s OK. Hopefully, for our common good, we will understand more and more and make less and less mystery. And, I do know this: we have room, lots of room, for love and wholeness and kindness and ethics and healing.
I am both firm and fluid. Often, I have a case of the “I don’t knows.” I do not mind changing my mind. I must, in fact, change. I have ambivalence about all. I experience the beingness of the universes and I am in awe, bigly. I experience the mystery and wonder of how this world happened without some form of divine process and intervention. I mean, really, how did that tree evolve that kind of leaf for that specific purpose? How many leaves died trying? Was there some form of divineness that nudged that leaf along?
I must be real, must be honest: I do not know, and yet, I think I know. I experience the curses and blessings of seeing all sides of issues. I am blind and deeply insightful, all at the same time. I have room to believe that there is no god/dess. I have room to believe that, maybe, there is, or are, divine(s). I celebrate mystery and suspect that within mystery is some form of loving divinity. There is so much I do not know and yet, I do know this: we have room, lots of room for love and wholeness and kindness and ethics and healing.
I do believe. I was raised Christian. Deeply Christian. Fundamentalist Christian. I grew, mostly away, from all that, and I served as pastor in my early years. I studied theology, grew to love those explorations. I found faith and freedom and passion – and curiosity, too. Somewhere along that path, I found a form of theology called “process.” It speaks of god/dess as being deeply relational to the universes and that in this deep relation is an on-going creation and re-creation of all, even recreation, the “play of creation”. I love that god/dess is changeable and is affected by the experiences of beauty, joys, tragedies, sorrows, mistakes of all of beingness.
In turn, I affect god/dess. I am within god/dess. Everything I experience, “all that is”, is experienced by god/dess. Planets blowing up: god/dess feels. New leaves on new trees: god/dess feels. Discoveries of medicine: god/dess feels. Everything of everything is experienced by god/dess. God/dess yearns for wholeness, beauty, adventure, and even seeks to bring it about, nudges it along as best as is godly possible, never stopping, always willing for creation to be re-creation, for the goodness and healing of all.
This is mystery. I am lovingly mystical and embrace mysticism and mystery with joy. I experience Jesus as my personal, mysterious, and mystical friend. The Jesus story inspires me as no other story! His compassion, courage, tenderness, fireceness for justice and love offers healing for all time. Jesus is one of the many, many whitecaps on the ocean of creation. Leading, pleading, challenging me, and all creation to re-create into what we know, and we do know this: we have room, lots of room for love and wholeness and kindness and ethics, and healing.
The mystical and mysterious are often, most often for me, experienced in dreams. I experience synchronicities, terror, wisdom, evolution, humor, healing, challenge, sensuality, outrageousness, courage, sacrifice, honor and dishonor, the past, present, and the future in my dreams. A dream is a full-service station of wonders and wanders. I believe we evolve through our dreams. We invent ideas, songs, stories, books, god/desses in dreams. We visit and are visited by our ancestors. Dreams come with loads of grace, knowing that we will likely dismiss most, if not all of them, yet dreams keep coming and do not cease. I cannot stop dreaming and cannot stop paying attention to them. I am cursed and blessed to tend to my dreams and I am on a mission to curse and bless others to do so as well, because our dreams want to heal us, want to heal our beautiful wounded world.
When it comes to dreams, my own health and wholeness – and yours, and that of all beings across all our universes – are at stake. We must pay attention to the nightmares within or we will create the nightmares without (yes, I am talking about things like wars and rumors of wars, hate, suffering, greed and projections of evil). I must dream, we all must dream. Dreams come to offer wholeness, growth, insight and healing. And, we do know this: in our dreams, we have room, lots of room for love and wholeness and kindness and ethics, and healing.
Experience
My Credentials
I have nearly 40 years of seasoned experience as a human relations professional, psychotherapist and theologian working in the areas of spiritual and emotional health.
- Doctor of Ministry Degree in Pastoral Care and Counseling with a focus on Individual, Couples and Family Psychotherapy from Christian Theological Seminary, Indianapolis, Indiana (1992)
- Ordained and Certified as a Dream Work Minister and Facilitator through the Marin Institute for Projective Dream Work, Fairfield, California (founded by my mentor and dream teacher, the late Dr. Jeremy Taylor)
Professional Memberships:
U.S. State Licenses:
- Marriage and Family Therapist #35000903A, Indiana
- Mental Health practitioner #1065; Certified Marriage and Family Therapist #019, Nebraska
- Marriage and Family Therapist #108, Wyoming
- Marriage and Family Therapist #0001714, Colorado
- Marriage and Family Therapist #CMFO223842, New Mexico
A few words about my understanding of god
Everyone who is honest with themselves will admit that it occasionally feels impossible to reconcile this whole “god” concept with the pain and suffering that is always part of life. I know I struggle with this, so I look to something called Process Theology to help me understand why we keep looking to the metaphor of god despite the injustice, madness, and grief that are part of the human condition.
Here’s one way to explain how I approach god’s presence in our imperfect world: It’s one of our common stories and beliefs that “God is Love.”
We know that Love does all it can to stop suffering. Your love would, certainly. And so would mine. So then, why doesn’t god stop suffering? The only possible assumption is that if god COULD stop it all, intervene in it all and fix it all, god WOULD, because Love does that sort of thing. But, we know, we see, that our world hasn’t ever been “fixed”. Why? Well, it’s not because god doesn’t want to or that Love doesn’t want to, the logical conclusion, at least, in process understanding, is that god simply CAN’T.
Ugh… how depressing.
There’s something else we know about Love, however. Love is always there, even when it can’t make the pain go away. And so, god is always there – when we feel, when we hurt, when we cry, when we question, when we yearn, and when we heal. One beautiful metaphor to hold all of this is that we are within god, we are within love.