Russell's Professional Background

Russell Siler Jones is a psychotherapist, author, and teacher whose work centers on the intersection of spirituality and psychotherapy. For nearly three decades, from 1996 through Summer 2025, his professional life was rooted in a psychotherapy practice in Asheville, North Carolina.

He remains deeply grateful for the people who entrusted him with their stories and for the conversations that, in his words, helped lessen suffering and expand aliveness.

His current work focuses on teaching, supervision, and writing. He founded the Residency in Psychotherapy and Spirituality for CareNet/ Wake Forest Baptist/ Advocate Health in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in 2008 and continues to direct the program for associate-licensed therapists.

He developed ACPE’s workshop-format curriculum and certification program in spiritually integrated psychotherapy, teaches frequently at conferences and workshops, and writes about the many ways spirituality and psychotherapy inform one another. He has also written a book on these themes and, over several years, contributed a monthly blog for Psychology Today. He now writes Spiritize (Spirit Eyes) on Substack.

Across his teaching and writing, Russell explores the many ways people experience the Really Real, long for connection, seek it, hide from it, wrestle with it, and surrender to it, and how therapists and others can help people live more fully by attending to these patterns of longing, seeking, hiding, wrestling, and surrender.

Personal Life

Russell lives just east of Asheville, North Carolina, in the woods across a pasture from family who are among his dearest friends. He is married to Jeanine, a fellow psychotherapist and spiritual seeker. They have two adult children, both of whom he describes as role models: one works to help communities respond to the impacts of climate change, and the other built his website.

He begins and ends most days with a walk or run in the woods and time in meditation. He is nourished by the company of friends and family who do not live across the pasture, by the presence of trees, by books, and by wisdom drawn from Christianity and other spiritual traditions.


Content & Course Format:

The SIP training program is a multi-disciplinary, inter-spiritual, multi-racial community of persons gathered for education, connection, and formation in the work of spiritually integrated psychotherapy. It serves licensed and pre-licensed mental health professionals (i.e., counselors, social workers, marriage and family therapists, pastoral counselors, psychologists, psychiatrists, addiction specialists, and more), as well as graduate students in any of those disciplines who seek to explore the ways spirituality, religion, and the search for meaning influence their own lives and the lives of their clients.



For more on current trainings and the core curriculum click here.