{"podcast":{"title":"Back from the Borderline","slug":"back-from-the-borderline-4079851","podcast_index_feed_id":4079851,"rss_url":"https://feeds.acast.com/public/shows/60e8deaefb090f0013116d69","website_url":"http://backfromtheborderline.com","image_url":"https://assets.pippa.io/shows/60e8deaefb090f0013116d69/1735679446378-b2e8272f-396f-4979-a13e-2172ecffa88e.jpeg","author":"mollie adler","episode_count":358,"summary":"Back From The Borderline is a podcast about depth psychology, symbolism, spirituality, consciousness, and the search for a more meaningful life. I started this show years ago while trying to understand my own mind. Somewhere along the way, the questions became much bigger than me. They led into Carl Jung, mythology, Christian mysticism, dreams, tarot, philosophy, esotericism, religious history, artificial intelligence, and the symbolic patterns that quietly shape the way we see ourselves and the world around us. The word borderline has taken on its own meaning over the years. It speaks to the edge almost all of us eventually reach. That place where our old explanations stop working and we’re asked to learn an entirely different way of seeing. That’s the space my work inhabits. Some episodes are conversations with researchers, psychologists, philosophers, historians, and spiritual teachers. Others are long-form essays where I follow a question wherever it leads. Lately I’ve been especially interested in symbolic literacy, the way images, myths, dreams, and archetypes quietly organize human life, often long before we’re consciously aware of them. I’m not very interested in being “ce…","last_synced_at":"2026-09-08T16:23:45.590679+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/back-from-the-borderline-4079851"},"episode":{"title":"The Braced Body: The Spiritual Cost of Always Being in Control (Part 3)","slug":"the-braced-body-the-spiritual-cost-of-always-being-in-control-part-3","published_at":"2026-08-11T09:00:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/back-from-the-borderline-4079851/the-braced-body-the-spiritual-cost-of-always-being-in-control-part-3","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/back-from-the-borderline-4079851","url":"https://shows.acast.com/back-from-the-borderline/episodes/the-braced-body-the-spiritual-cost-of-always-being-in-contro","audio_url":"https://sphinx.acast.com/p/open/s/60e8deaefb090f0013116d69/e/6a775b3272138046c6144662/media.mp3","summary":"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 taking everything we’ve learned about chronic tension and nervous system bracing into much deeper spiritual territory. I’ll get into the old argument between Augustine and Pelagius about human effort and grace, why Sabbath has something to say about our inability to stop working, and how ideas like kenosis and alchemy can help us think about surrender without turning it into weakness or self-erasure. We’ll also spend some time with Meister Eckhart and the older mystical traditions that understood spiritual life as something we participate in rather than something we manufacture through enough effort. Somewhere underneath all of this is a problem I know very well in myself. You can get very good at understanding/taking care of /improving yourself, and still be living as though receiving anything you didn’t somehow earn is dangerous as hell. I wanted to know what happens when that habit reaches our spiritual lives too, and whether the body might know something about grace that the intellect has been trying to understand for centuries. CONTINUE THE WORK: Join the BFTB Patreon → https://patreon.com/backfromtheborderline You’ll get: ☆ Weekly bonus episodes ☆ House of Cards (my tarot study group) ☆ Archetypal tarot + astrology forecasts ☆ Full ad-free archive access (every BFTB episode since 2021) If you want to actually work through it: Use MOODS → https://app.moods.world/   MOO…","meta_description":"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 fi…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":3413,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/back-from-the-borderline-4079851/episodes/the-braced-body-the-spiritual-cost-of-always-being-in-control-part-3/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/back-from-the-borderline-4079851/the-braced-body-the-spiritual-cost-of-always-being-in-control-part-3.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}