About Us
Welcome to the Loved Called Gifted website!
I am delighted that you have found your way here. I'm Catherine Cowell and the photo is me with my marvellous husband Stephen Dainty. I host the Loved Called Gifted podcast, and Stephen does a fabulous job of editing it. We got married in 2023 and we live together with my two adopted sons in Stoke on Trent.
I have never been very good at just doing one thing at once. I've usually got a few things on the go, that I am deeply interested in and pursuing passionately. Here are some of them.
I am a Spiritual Director, with a passion to see people connecting with the Divine in ways that work for them. I want to create spaces where people are free to be honest, to be themselves and to explore the ideas and questions that are live for them at the moment, without worrying that someone is going to tell them what they should or shouldn't think and believe. I am a committed and enthusiastic Christian and I am also interested in the spiritual lives and experiences of people whose beliefs and journeys are different to mine.
I have discovered over the years that faith isn't a static thing. It morphs and changes throughout our lives. Things that we were certain about a few years ago might suddenly stop making sense. Questions we thought we'd answered have a habit of reappearing. So we need spaces where we can be honest about such things. And I love to create those spaces. So if you want a retreat facilitating, I'm your woman!
I'm involved in helping to host quite a number of regular gatherings that have that open kind of philosophy. If you are local to Stoke on Trent and you fancy joining us for any of our gatherings, you can find information about them here.
One of the things that stopped making sense to me a few years ago was just how masculine the Christian faith is. We all know that God is beyond gender and that we are all, female and male, created in God's image. But you'd be forgiven for thinking that's not the case, if you've spent much time reading the Bible and worshipping with other Christians. That raised all sorts of questions and I spent about 10 years on a journey of exploration, which led me to write Finding God's Feminine Side (and working out how we lost it in the first place).
Parenting has been exhilarating and challenging. I have discovered first hand the challenges of additional needs parenting (what I like to call Advanced Parenting). Like many parents in my situation, I have had to 'learn on the job', as it were. And what I have learnt has been both fascinating and life changing. My spiritual life has deepened on the journey and I am a much better, more rounded person now than I was fifteen years ago. I now offer mentoring, support and spiritual direction to parents facing similar challenges. I run the And Breathe course with my good friend Margaret McGregor. And I am researching for a PhD in applied spirituality, exploring the lived experience of additional needs parents through the lens of spirituality.
More years ago now than I care to admit, Sean Kennedy and I met over coffee at a Church Without Walls meeting in North Staffordshire. Church Without Walls was an alternative Christian worshipping community that started as an Anglican fresh expression and which I facilitated for a few years. It didn't take us long to discover that we were both on the path to becoming life coaches and that we had a common interest in understanding people and a shared enthusiasm for exploring ideas through long conversations over cups of tea.
The thing that most excited our interest was a desire to see people free to be themselves, to discover their passion and fulfil their potential. We could see that there were quite a lot of things that conspire to get in the way of that. Including unskilled leadership, limiting organisational structures and cultures, and the internal psychological barriers and wounds we all carry that have a habit of tripping us up.
We developed the Loved Called Gifted course together. It is a faith based course that is designed to help people to discover their life purpose. I went on to develop that into a version that would work for people of all faiths or none, called Precious Powerful Passionate. We wrote a book on finding your life purpose called Loved Called Gifted (you'll notice that we quite like that name). We also wrote a book that describes a totally alternative approach to leadership. That's called Church Uncorked. We worked together on lots of projects over the years. As well as writing books together, we created courses, ran seminars, facilitated groups and helped teams to understand one another and work together more effectively. These days, we mainly meet up for coffee and conversation. Though I have persuaded Sean to join me to record the odd podcast together.
That probably sounds like quite an eclectic mix of stuff. And I guess it is. But there is a synergy. Running through everything that I do, whether that's spiritual direction, coaching, facilitation of conversations, leading retreats, hosting gatherings, creating podcasts, writing books or supporting parents, is a passionate belief that we are all loved and precious; that we all have something unique to offer the world, that we will be more able to do that if we are free to be ourselves. And that we all have a place in the heart of the Divine who loves us passionately and completely.
I hope that you enjoy exploring the website and that you will find things to interest, amuse and help you on your journey.
Catherine Cowell
March 2025