About Leslie
Founder of Seed Deep Abbey · Spiritual Director · Formation Guide
I’m Leslie — founder of Seed Deep Abbey, spiritual director, formation guide, and seminarian at Portland Seminary at George Fox University.
I built Seed Deep Abbey because I needed it and could not find it.
For most of my adult life, I was the competent one. Married for over two decades, faithfully serving in the Church, raising a family, holding everything together. The emotional wounds of my first family had formed me into a strong, competent, and highly functional woman. My competence and strength kept me safe and in control. From the outside, my life looked stable and secure. On the inside? I was barely managing.
Then my marriage disintegrated. Menopause came on almost overnight. My identity unraveled. And the woman I had built — the strong, capable, faithful, in-control woman who had gotten me through everything — could not get me through this.
What I needed in that season was not advice or a five-step plan to recover the woman I had been. No. What I needed was someone who could help me let her go. Not strengthen her. Not redeploy her. Let her go. So I could tell a new story.
The Church had no idea what to do with me. So, I went looking: through seminary, pastoral training, spiritual direction, years of contemplative practice, and trusted community. And I learned how to tell a new story about my life - about me - grounded in belovedness, beauty, and belonging.
Then I created a space where other women in this same season could be accompanied on that path.
Seed Deep Abbey is what I learned how to do.
Seed Deep Abbey was born from living through those unraveling moments and learning how to rise as a new creation in Christ.
The training that shapes this work…
Formal theological and spiritual formation training
Masters in Spiritual Formation (Portland Seminary at George Fox University (grad. Spring 2027)
Certification in Pastoral Care at Exchanged Life Ministries
Spiritual direction and mentoring at Renew Ministries at Northpoint Community Church
Lived personal experience of grief, identity loss, and renewal
Divorce & loss of foundational relationships
Abuse recovery
Codependency recovery
Family relationship recovery
Financial and material prosperity recovery
Menopause (!)
Recovery of vocation and calling
Ongoing formation within trusted spiritual communities
Discerner in The Companions of the Holy Cross
Seminary cohort and spiritual direction
Personal spiritual direction and mentorship
Personal therapy
What I do
My Work…
Is spiritual direction — the slow, attentive companionship of a woman as God uncovers her true self.
I do not coach. I do not advise. I do not give five-step plans. I do not promise that the next chapter of your life will be more impressive than the last.
What I do is sit with you in the long process of letting the woman you had to become to survive lie down, and watching for the woman God planted in you to rise.
This means I listen carefully to you and the Holy Spirit. I ask questions that go beneath your defenses. I notice where God may already be at work. I offer practices that help you stay grounded as the old self releases and the true self emerges. I tend the rhythm and safety of the space. Sometimes, I teach. I exhort, and I challenge.
I trust the Spirit's pace. I trust your interior wisdom. I trust that the true self, hidden in Christ, cannot be manufactured — only revealed.
These convictions shape every aspect of Seed Deep Abbey — from courses, to spiritual direction, to community life.
Why Seed Deep Abbey?
Seed Deep is a response to…
A response to women who feel spiritually homeless. A response to those whose lives no longer fit tidy narratives. A response to the near-total absence, in the Christian women's space, of anyone that knows how to walk a woman through the dying and rising of the false self in mid-life.
Most of what is offered to women in our season is more. More striving. More productivity. More positive thinking. More five-step plans. More performance dressed up as spirituality.
Seed Deep Abbey is less. Less doing. Less managing. Less performing. More presence, more truth, more rest, more Christ.
The Abbey is a place for healing, transformation, and becoming — held within the steady presence of God and a community that knows how to listen.
The Abbey is a place for healing, transformation, and becoming — held within the steady presence of God & a community that knows how to listen. 🕊️
Closing Invitation
If you are tired of the woman you have had to be…
If you are lost, hurt, grieving, or mad as hell…
If you are done being managed, fixed, optimized, or rushed…
There is a place here where the only work is to let God uncover the woman He planted in you, slowly, in the company of women walking the same ground.