Hannah Swanson
ABOUT
WHO I AM
I'm glad you're here.
My name is Hannah. Held is my practice, but it came out of my life — and my life has been, like most, a mix of beauty and loss and quiet becoming. I am shaped by my story. I am not defined by it.
I’m certified in spiritual direction through Sustainable Faith’s School of Spiritual Direction, and I’ve spent more than fifteen years training leaders and accompanying people through faith, loss, and transformation, in ministry, higher education, and leadership development.
I am a pastor's kid who has deconstructed and renovated my faith. My theology holds more questions than answers. I trust a God who is closer than the air we breathe, who meets us not in certainty but in presence.
I know what it is to feel spiritually homeless. To lose both parents. To walk through divorce. To watch everything you thought was solid fall away, and find, slowly, that something more trustworthy was underneath it all.
In 2012, grief arrived and did not leave. What it offered me was a doorway into the practices that now shape my work: attunement, breath, and a return to the body.
I am still becoming. That is not a weakness of this work. It is its foundation.
I'm privileged to live in the sweetest pocket, walking distance to my family, my best friend, and the ocean. Nature continues to be a grounding, healing force. I share this home with Oliver, a goldendoodle who has never once withheld his presence. He is, in his way, a very good spiritual director.
the tradition
Being with,
rather than performing for.
Growing up, I thought hearing God's voice meant Morgan Freeman through an intercom with explicit instructions. For a long time, I outsourced authority. I assumed someone else in the room was holier, better equipped, had a more direct line than I did. I thought I could miss God altogether.
A book and then a conversation, then another. Slowly, I began to notice the subtle nudges I had been too busy and too loud to recognize. I began to try, not to get it right, but to trust that God would meet me in the gap between my trying and His generous hope for me.
This is the quiet work of spiritual direction. Not teaching. Not advice. Not someone telling you what God said. It is learning to trust that you have known the voice all along, and finding, in the presence of another, the courage to act on what you hear.
Held is rooted in the contemplative tradition: stillness, silence, breath, and presence. Of being with rather than performing for. It is a space for those who are questioning, deconstructing, or rebuilding. For those unsure what they believe but still drawn toward something holy. For those wounded by the church and cautious with its language.
Your longing is enough. Your curiosity is enough. You are welcome here.
why held
Rest is not something we arrive at.
It is something we practice.
For a long time, I believed belonging required perfection. That love depended on getting it right. That my body was something to manage rather than inhabit. That faith meant knowledge.
I spent years unlearning these stories — not without cost.
What I found instead was this: I was first called good. That becoming is holy work. That rest is not something we arrive at once everything is resolved. It is something we practice in the presence of God, in the middle of what is unresolved.
Held exists because rest is not meant to be learned alone. Because grief needs witnesses. Because faith after certainty needs companions. Because the long return to the body requires patience and care.
This is not a place to be fixed. It is a place to be met — by God and by one another.
If something here is resonating, reach out.
Held is a community of accompaniment. A gathering place. A practice rooted in the body: movement, breath, an invitation to notice the sacred in the ordinary.