Back from the Borderline

There’s a tragic irony to living in an age when almost every spiritual teaching ever recorded is available to us, yet so many of us struggle to sit quietly with God for even ten minutes. We devote years or even decades of our lives studying consciousness and constructing elaborate explanations of reality. I know because I’ve spent much of my adult life doing exactly that. And then, every so often,...

Cameron LaBar was nine years old when he was prescribed Paxil. Twenty-six years later, he’s still taking antidepressants, measuring his daily dose of Lexapro with a tiny oral syringe as he attempts to taper off medication he’s taken for nearly his entire remembered life. He’s thirty-five now, with no previous experience of adulthood without psychiatric drugs. The question he’s been living with now...

Are we thinking ourselves into a new dark age? We’ve spent the better part of seventy years trying to understand ourselves through psychology. We know about attachment styles, childhood trauma, unconscious motivations, and all the reasons we supposedly behave the way we do. We’ve diagnosed our exes, analyzed our childhoods, and built an entire industry around the promise that knowing ourselves bet...

We’ve learned so much about healing, but have we learned how to love? After eight conversations with 95-year-old Jungian analyst and author Anne Baring, I found myself questioning some of the beliefs I’d spent years defending, including my own understanding of spiritual development. In this deeply personal epilogue, I’m reflecting on our generation’s hunger for spiritual wisdom, the temptation to...

For seven conversations, Anne Baring and I have been investigating the forgotten feminine face of God. We’ve explored Sophia, Mary Magdalene, the Grail, and the religious traditions that preserved aspects of the sacred feminine. Now, in our eighth and final conversation, we’re asking what all of that knowledge is supposed to do to us. We start at Chartres Cathedral in France, where a medieval laby...

In medieval southern France, a woman stood up during a religious debate and challenged the men who claimed the authority to speak for God. A Catholic cleric told her to return to her spinning, because theology was no business of hers. Her identity was Esclarmonde de Foix, and she belonged to a Christian religious culture in which women could teach, exercise spiritual authority and administer sacre...

A spiritual teacher dies, her community has to continue without her, and centuries later the written record can no longer tell us exactly how her teachings moved from one generation to the next. What, if anything, survives? This is Part 6 of my multi-part series with Anne Baring, a writer and Jungian analyst who has spent decades studying Divine Wisdom, Christian mysticism and the feminine dimensi...

Mary Magdalene has spent nearly two thousand years buried under other people’s interpretations of her. Repentant prostitute. Devoted disciple. Apostle to the apostles. Mystic. Wife of Jesus. Suppressed leader of early Christianity. This episode asks us to actually meet Miriam before deciding who she was. This is Part 5 of my multi-part series with Anne Baring , a writer and Jungian analyst who has...

What kind of spiritual world could have formed Yeshua before Christianity existed? This is Part 4 of my multi-part series of conversations with Anne Baring, recorded across September and October 2026. While each episode can stand on its own, I recommend beginning with Part 1, The Forgotten Feminine Face of God , and following the series in order. ☽ Christianity often starts its story when Jesus be...

What if early Christianity contained a path centered on direct knowledge of the divine within us, and that path was pushed outside the Church that survived? This is Part 3 of my multi-part series of conversations with Anne Baring, recorded across September and October 2026. While each episode can stand on its own, I recommend beginning with Part 1, The Forgotten Feminine Face of God, followed by P...

What if the history of Europe contains a civilization most of us were never taught about? This is Part 2 of my multi-part series of conversations with Anne Baring, recorded across September and October 2026. While each episode can stand on its own, I recommend starting with Part 1, The Forgotten Feminine Face of God, which introduces Anne and the larger history we’ll be following together. ☽ In th...

For thousands of years, the Western image of God became increasingly male. Anne Baring has spent much of her life studying what we lost when the feminine disappeared from our understanding of the divine. This is Part 1 of my eight-part series of conversations with Anne Baring, recorded across September 2026. Over the course of the series, we’ll explore the work Anne has spent much of her life devo...

In 2020, I almost paid $4,000 for a shadow work course. One of the first books I was told to read was Carolyn Elliott’s Existential Kink . I read it, tried to understand what I was being sold, and kept getting the same bad taste in my mouth. It’s been six years since then, and I’ve come back with receipts. I understand why it bothered me now. This episode digs into the history behind some of onlin...

Aleister Crowley had a beautiful idea, and then he built a religion around himself. This episode takes Thelema seriously enough to examine what Crowley was actually teaching. True Will sits at the center of it, alongside The Book of the Law , Aiwass, the Aeon of Horus, sex magick, Babalon, and Crowley’s claim that humanity had entered a new spiritual age. He drew heavily from the Golden Dawn and H...

I’ve spent a lot of this series thinking about what happens when the body gets so used to effort that it forgets how to stop. By the time I got to this final episode, I found myself somewhere I didn’t expect. I was thinking about grace, and the spiritual cost of living as though everything depends on your ability to stay useful, vigilant, and in control. In Part Three of The Braced Body , we’re ta...

Your body can be exhausted and still refuse to rest. You lie down, your jaw stays tight, your shoulders keep working, and some part of you remains ready for the next demand. This is Part Two of a three-part series on chronic bracing. We move from why the body learned to stay tense into what it can do instead. Drawing on Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, Hubert Godard, bodywork, and basic physics, I look at...

Do you clench your jaw without noticing? Do your shoulders stay tense even when you’re finally sitting down to rest? Does your body still feel like it’s working long after the day is over? This episode started with something completely ordinary. I was making the guest bed, lay down for a minute, and noticed that even though I was trying to rest, my entire upper body was still working. My shoulders...

A lot of us are walking around with religious trauma and a God-shaped hole. I was raised inside a version of Christianity, and I know what it can leave in the body. Shame, fear, sexual repression, homophobia, spiritual surveillance, and the feeling that your body itself was a problem. Leaving can honestly sometimes be the only answer. For some people, atheism feels better than trying to rescue any...

This year, I had the chance to attend Contact in the Desert , which is a conference devoted to UFOs, psi phenomena, consciousness, and anomalous experience.  While I was there, I joined a live podcast panel hosted by my friend Michael Phillip of Third Eye Drops . Also on the panel were psi researcher Adam Curry and Josh from the Polarity YouTube channe l, so the conversation went exactly wher...

This week, I was doing an I Ching reading, and one line stood out to me: “To find what you seek, leave the child and follow the adult.” This episode was inspired by that line. I use it to think through spiritual maturity, especially in a culture where adulthood often feels empty, exhausted, and totally cut off from wonder. We talk about the younger self that still wants someone to come save us, ha...

Dion Fortune was one of the great occult teachers of the twentieth century, and one of my personal favorites. In this episode, I’m joined by Ike Baker for a conversation about Fortune and her legacy. We begin with Ike’s own relationship to her, including the story of visiting her grave in Glastonbury, then move into her work on magic, psychology, psychic hygiene, ritual, Qabalah, polarity, Christ,...

This episode is the opening lesson from my new Patreon series, House of Cards. House of Cards is an ongoing study of the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot through depth psychology, mythology, symbolism, dreams, and contemplative practice. Every week we move through the deck one card at a time, treating tarot as a language of psyche, symbol, and myth. I’m releasing this first lesson publicly because it expla...

This might be the most personally confronting episode I’ve recorded in a long time. A few days ago, I had to send a text message I had been absolutely dreading. I spent days worrying about how this person would feel, what they would think, whether they’d be hurt, disappointed, blindsided, angry, or quietly resentful. Then the moment came when I needed to send the damn text already. So I did. And g...

For much of my life, many of my closest friendships have been with gay men. Not because they were fun little accessories or stereotypical sidekicks, either. We didn’t even always have that much in common on paper. Yep, these friendships were built the old-fashioned way through grief, bad decisions, long as hell voice notes, laughter at completely inappropriate moments, and enough years of showing...

Female cruelty often works insidiously enough to make the person on the receiving end of it gaslight the hell out of themselves. The punishment that’s served up tends to arrive socially or emotionally, often in somewhat polite ways, which is part of what makes it so hard to call out without sounding rude, crazy, or dramatic. This episode takes a hard look at female shadow as something deeply shape...