Jim Manzardo, Intern

Jim Manzardo is an intern completing his Masters in Pastoral Counseling degree at Loyola University Chicago.  If you are looking to work with someone who is non-judgmental, compassionate, and genuinely interested in understanding your life’s journey, Jim might be a good fit for you.  He brings to his internship many years of experience as a certified pediatric hospital chaplain accompanying families through the trauma, diagnoses, and treatment of their children’s acute, chronic, and life-threatening conditions as well as, for some, through the dying and acute grief processes.  Jim also has extensive experience building trusting relationships with and supporting the healthcare staff who care for the children and their parents.

Jim draws from counseling approaches that encourage openness to life’s ambiguities and unanswered questions, that understand the human need for affirmation, mentoring and solidarity, and that value the transformative impact of self-compassion and being in the present moment. Jim’s work and life experience and his studies have solidified in him that each person is a complex and beautiful tapestry, shaped by significant relationships from before birth to the present, by personal choices, by how we think and feel about ourselves and the world around us, by personal suffering, by our genes, and by the communities in which we have lived.  Jim honors the human spirit potential to survive, strive and thrive through life struggles, and he is skilled at guiding others in hearing their own unvoiced questions and in finding the words to express their feelings and the respect to understand and value them.

From his training in spiritual companioning and mindfulness, Jim integrates his appreciation of the uniqueness and inherent wisdom and compassion of each person and the freedom that comes when we let go of either/or thinking and when our story is shared, listened well to, and held in a trusting, nonjudgmental and empathic relationship.

Jim’s life and work have been formed and sustained by his marriage, by his biological family, by colleagues, friendships and his spiritual community, by regular mentoring and counseling relationships, by mindfulness practice, by being a lifelong learner, by exercise (running and cycling) and conscious nutrition, by musical expression, and by his awe and respect of Nature (especially through gardening, simple living and camping).