I am an interfaith chaplain, artist, and spiritual care provider offering grounded accompaniment through profound transitions, dissolution, and return.

My work centers on sacred witnessing. I practice the disciplined art of staying present at the edges of grief, illness, burnout, creative rupture, spiritual questioning, and identity change. I do not direct or interpret another person’s experience. I tend the conditions that allow truth, insight, and remembrance to arise on their own.

I hold an MA in theology and spirituality from Hartford International University for Religion & Peace (formerly Hartford Seminary), with academic grounding in feminist theology, interfaith engagement, and social justice. I currently serve as a Resident Hospital Chaplain, completing a year-long clinical residency focused on palliative care and behavioral health, and I am pursuing board certification through the Association of Professional Chaplains.

My spiritual orientation is interfaith and contemplative, with Zen Buddhism as a central influence. I understand suffering as layered: physical, psychological, spiritual, and existential. I approach healing not as intervention or improvement but as a process of subtraction, the gradual release of what obscures one’s inherent wholeness and inner authority. This work rests on disciplined trust in the intelligence of the psyche, the soul, and the universe.

My chaplaincy is shaped by long familiarity with impermanence, illness, and death, and by a steady confidence in the body’s wisdom and the soul’s capacity to orient toward truth. Hope, in my work, is not aspirational or a bypass. It is sober, grounded, and earned. It is the quiet knowing that transformation is possible when awareness is present.

I hold a BFA in Painting from Lyme Academy College of Fine Art. My creative practice is not separate from my chaplaincy work. Both arise from the same devotion to attention, presence, and the living moment.

Artists are trained to see. Chaplains are trained to witness.

You can view my artwork at rochellebayless.com.