The Contemplative Path Podcast

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit contemplativepath.substack.com Fear, craving, and the wish for a more comfortable world are some of the oldest concerns in contemplative traditions. You’ll explore how Buddhism, existentialism, and Marie Curie’s scientific outlook each point toward the same insight: fear loosens its grip when you turn toward it and seek to understand it...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit contemplativepath.substack.com Isaiah 58 describes a fast that has nothing to do with food. It asks what happens when you take the yoke away from your midst, and what that yoke might be. You’ll explore the yoke of pride that tempts you to control others through your expectations, the pointing finger, and the demand that people change so...

Gratitude can steady you, but it can’t be forced, and it shouldn’t be used to gloss over real pain. You’ll explore why “positive vibes only” rings hollow, how suffering and depression narrow what we perceive, and why listening often helps more than cheerful advice. You’ll consider how a morning media diet shapes mood, and how contemplative traditions, from Buddhist contentment to Eckhart Tolle’s e...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit contemplativepath.substack.com Why does spiritual practice sometimes ask us to stay with discomfort instead of escaping it? You’ll explore how contemplative practice helps you face what’s in front of you with courage and authenticity, without sugarcoating it or running toward distraction. You’ll reflect on a daily reading about the cont...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit contemplativepath.substack.com Autopilot mornings — phone first, news first — make it easy to forget you’re a spiritual being as much as a physical one. This is a rule, in the old monastic sense: short, repeatable words for resetting your inner compass before the day takes over. The practice moves through the sacred web beneath ordinary...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit contemplativepath.substack.com Creative blocks often come from lines of approval, acceptability, and fear. You'll explore a short blessing for stepping beyond them, releasing the need to be admired or chosen, and creating from love. Creativity doesn't need a finished product. Sometimes it's simply an exhale. You're hearing this one firs...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit contemplativepath.substack.com Ignatian contemplation invites you into a Gospel story with your full imagination — its sights, sounds, and textures becoming as personal as your own memory. You move through the practice’s classic preparation: inviting the Holy Spirit, withdrawing from the sensory environment around you (the yogic descent...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit contemplativepath.substack.com This talk explores balance not as the absence of chaos, but as the capacity to hold multiple parts of life — professional, personal, physical, spiritual — without letting one dominate. Recorded during a season of major upheaval — a cross-country move, a career transition, total instability — it traces how...

Old expectations have a way of drowning out the quiet, new thing trying to emerge. In this Lectio Divina practice on Isaiah 48:6-7, you'll sit with the same short passage three times, letting a word or image surface a little more with each round. A time of open prayer follows, then space to simply rest and receive. You’ll now find this audio meditation on my Insight Timer page . Press play when yo...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit contemplativepath.substack.com Trace the prayer of recollection from Osuna's Third Spiritual Alphabet — the text Teresa of Ávila's uncle gave her — through to yoga's chitta vrittis and pratyahara. You'll withdraw from the senses, settle into stillness, and rest in God's presence, then journal what surfaces.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit contemplativepath.substack.com Celtic monks pictured the Holy Spirit not as a gentle dove but as a wild goose — loud, untamed, and just as likely to surprise or contradict you as comfort you. You'll sit with that image alongside a decades-old newsroom memory of wind as a sign of the Spirit, then move to harder ground: how to catch your...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit contemplativepath.substack.com In this contemplative talk, I explore Mary’s Magnificat — “My soul exalts the Lord” — as a mirror for our own hidden thrones of ego, ambition, and control. Contemplate how humility, not achievement, is the doorway to God’s presence, and consider a moment of stillness at your own point vierge . A gentle, gr...

Some passages don't just get read — they get through. This one did, for me: "The Lord is near," from Philippians 4, echoed from Psalm 145's Qarov Adonai . In this guided meditation, we take that single Hebrew phrase and let it become breath — inhale, exhale, Qarov Adonai — until it moves from something you think to something you feel. It's a short practice, meant to anchor you in the truth that Go...

Morning congestion has a way of making the first breath of the day feel like a small negotiation. This practice offers a gentle way through it. Drawing on the yogic understanding of prana and apana, we begin with a few rounds of alternate nostril breathing to settle and center, then move into quicker, energizing breaths through the left nostril alone — a technique traditionally linked to awakening...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit contemplativepath.substack.com Social media has taught us that yoga is about the pose — the deep backbend, the peak arm balance, the perfect thumbnail moment. But the word asana actually means “seat.” The original postures weren’t performances; they were simply a stable place to sit for meditation. In this reflection, I trace that idea...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit contemplativepath.substack.com A short, unhurried movement practice to ease the body awake before your day or your meditation. Working mostly from the floor, you'll open the hips, mobilize the spine through cat and cow, and gently activate the core and glutes before rising to ground through the feet and wake the torso. Rather than jolti...

On a humid Friday morning — mosquitoes and all — I found myself reflecting on a word I’d been circling for a long time but hadn’t quite named: misfit . A fellow Substack writer, Bob Holmes , gave me the language I needed. The great mystics and contemplatives who came before us — Julian of Norwich, Hadewijch, Teresa of Ávila, the Desert Fathers and Mothers, Thomas Merton — they too didn’t fit neatl...

There are seasons when the story we’ve told about ourselves for so long begins to feel less like identity and more like a cage. Isaiah 43 speaks directly into that place — not with easy comfort, but with something more startling: the insistence that something new is already moving, whether we have noticed it or not. This guided Lectio Divina practice moves through the four traditional movements —...

This week the days got away from me — the morning quiet crowded out, the prayer rushed, the stillness harder to find than I’d like to admit. So on this Friday morning I did what I always do: I sat down, I settled in, and I let the words of Isaiah 43 do what they’ve always done. Meet me exactly where I am. This is a Lectio Divina meditation — a practice of sacred, slow reading that invites you not...

Some mornings, the breath practice isn't enough. The mind won't settle, the thoughts keep circling — and what you need isn't more stillness, but movement. In this walking meditation recorded just before sunrise, I invite you to step outside with me and discover how changing your environment can break the grip of rumination, reconnect you to the present moment, and open a small door of hope. Whethe...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit contemplativepath.substack.com In a culture obsessed with connection, solitude has become quietly countercultural — even suspect. But the great contemplative traditions have always known what modern life keeps helping us forget: that the inner life cannot flourish without stillness. Drawing on the wisdom of James Allen, the Desert Mothe...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit contemplativepath.substack.com What if peace in the world begins with peace within you? In this gentle morning meditation, Beth guides you through a metta (loving-kindness) practice drawn from Buddhist tradition, woven together with an ancient Celtic blessing and a reflection on the words of Jesus: “Peace be within you.” Starting with y...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit contemplativepath.substack.com In the depths of despair, something unexpected often breaks through — a hymn rising from memory, the song of a bird on a morning walk, a quiet sense that you are not alone. This reflection explores the spiritual practice of surrendering to stillness and rediscovering your unbreakable connection to God. Roo...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit contemplativepath.substack.com In a world of constant distraction and digital noise, it’s easy to move through life on autopilot — missing the quiet ways God is calling to us. In this guided meditation, we walk through the Examen , a time-honored spiritual practice rooted in the Ignatian tradition and used by Jesuits twice daily for cen...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit contemplativepath.substack.com This guided meditation draws on the mystical language of Hadewijch, who describes the soul as a “bottomless abyss”—not a place of lack, but a depth vast enough to receive what is infinite. Through gentle breath, embodied awareness, and spacious listening, we explore where we have lived beneath our own dign...