Back from the Borderline

Cameron LaBar, online advocate known as Cold Plunge Cam, shares his lifelong experience with psychiatric medication and tapering. Clinical psychologist and withdrawal researcher Anders Sørensen joins him to explore childhood prescribing, emotional numbness, withdrawal mistaken for relapse, identity, spirituality, and the uncertainty of imagining adulthood beyond medication.

A fascinating journey through psychology, mysticism, and the limits of self-knowledge. The discussion explores how science became separated from questions of meaning, why modern people feel spiritually homeless, and how therapy culture, diagnoses, algorithms, and self-help can turn uncertainty into a profitable search. It also revisits The Cloud of Unknowing and the possibility of living well without explaining everything.

A deeply personal reflection on whether spiritual knowledge truly transforms us. The conversation explores the hunger for elders, the commercialization of spiritual longing, the limits of extraordinary experiences, and the spiritual ego hidden in self-improvement. It also considers sacred marriage, receiving grace, and how compassion, humility, and ordinary relationships reveal genuine change.

Anne Baring, British author, Jungian analyst, and historian of religion, returns for a final conversation on the sacred feminine. She explores the rose, the Chartres labyrinth, and the heart’s inner guidance. Topics include childhood wounds, guilt, sacred sexuality, the Fall, spiritual homelessness, and the sacred marriage within.

Anne Baring, a writer and Jungian analyst exploring Christian mysticism, joins a journey into medieval Languedoc. They discuss Esclarmonde de Foix, Cathar women who taught and led, the movement’s mystical vision, and its brutal persecution by Rome. The conversation travels through Montségur, Mary Magdalene, Francis of Assisi, Joan of Arc, hidden spiritual traditions, and the challenge of honoring history without romanticizing it.

Anne Baring, a writer, Jungian analyst, and scholar of spirituality, explores how feminine wisdom survived through Black Madonnas, sacred caves, pilgrimage, and devotional practice. She traces links between Mary Magdalene, Sophia, medieval France, the Grail, wounded kings, and courtly love. Together, they consider how images, rituals, and stories preserve ancient traditions, and why spiritual renewal requires inner transformation, compassion, and service.

Anne Baring, a writer and Jungian analyst specializing in Christian mysticism and feminine spirituality, reexamines Mary Magdalene as Miriam, an educated initiate and spiritual authority. They explore her possible marriage to Yeshua, rivalry with Peter, the Gospel of Philip, the controversial Gospel of the Beloved Companion, and the teachings behind her symbolic ascent through fear, wisdom, and transformation.

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 begins preaching. In this conversation, Anne and I go further back and ask what was already there.Anne takes us into her understanding of the Essenes and Therapeutae, contemplative communities she believes preserved an older Wisdom tradition concerned with healing, direct experience of the divine and disciplined development of consciousness. They called themselves Children of the Light. Anne places Yeshua inside this religious world and describes him as an elder brother and teacher who had gone further in his spiritual development and could show others what a human being was capable of. We talk about what spiritual training was actually for. Anne describes meditation, inner vision and ascension, along with an understanding of healing based on restoring harmony within the person. The heart served as an organ of discernment, while religious knowledge was expected to alter how someone lived rather than remain an idea about God. The women around Yeshua come into focus in the second half of the conversation. Anne describes Mother Mary and Mary Magdalene as advanced initiates and teachers rather than the passive figures many of us inherited through Christian tradition. We talk about women as healers, the spiritual education of children and Anne’s beautiful description of motherhood and caregiving as forms of initiation into love and service. Some of Anne’s reconstruction draws on historical and late-antique texts, while some comes from modern channeled material, especially the work of Stuart Wilson and Joanna Prentis. I spend time in the introduction explaining these sources and why I’m willing to investigate visionary material without treating it as documentary history.The episode ends exactly where the next conversation needs to start. Anne describes Christianity as having lost the inner mystery school she believes was intended to develop alongside its public teaching. Part 5 is devoted entirely to the woman she places near the center of that missing tradition: Mary Magdalene. ☿EXPLORE ANNE BARING’S WORKThis series draws on Anne Baring’s book, Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit: The Forgotten Feminine Face of God. You can listen to the complete audiobook for free on YouTube, narrated by Anne herself, and explore her books and research on her official website at annebaring.com. ESSENE + WISDOM TEXTS DISCUSSEDThe Essenes: Children of the Light — Stuart Wilson and Joanna PrentisThe Power of the Magdalene — Stuart Wilson and Joanna PrentisThe Essene Gospel of PeacePistis SophiaThe Egyptian Book of the DeadAUTHORS + SCHOLARS TO FOLLOWStuart WilsonJoanna PrentisFlavius JosephusDr. Annine van der MeerMarguerite RigogliosoCarl Jung☽WANT MORE BFTB? Join the paid membership → https://www.patreon.com/backfromtheborderlineThere are hundreds of private episodes going back to 2021, plus new Premium audio, House of Cards (my ongoing Rider-Waite-Smith tarot study), and an even larger Ultra Premium archive with access to Votive House, my twice-monthly live conversation series. Paid audio can also be connected directly to Spotify, so you can keep listening where you already listen.WANT SOMEWHERE TO TAKE WHAT THIS EPISODE BROUGHT UP FOR YOU? Try MOODS → https://www.moods.world/MOODS is my reflective intelligence platform for dream work, tarot, symbolic reflection, and deeper inner inquiry. Bring it a dream, a question, something happening in your life, or an idea from the podcast you want to spend more time with. You can start free for 7 days at moods.world. Paid BFTB members also get MOODS for $15/month instead of $22. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 Part 2 on Marija Gimbutas and the civilization of Old Europe.☽In this conversation, Anne and I enter the world of Gnostic Christianity and a Yeshua many of us were never introduced to: a teacher concerned with awakening human beings to the divine light within themselves. That understanding of Jesus sits uneasily beside the Christianity that eventually gained institutional power in Rome.We start with Parmenides, the pre-Socratic philosopher whose surviving poem describes a journey into darkness, guidance from the daughters of the Sun, and knowledge received directly from a goddess. Anne sees him as part of a more ancient visionary tradition that continued into Gnosticism, where gnosis meant direct knowledge of the divine rather than religious belief alone.From there, we get into the Gnostic Yeshua, the discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts, and why a Christianity built around the divine light within the human being came into conflict with the Church that gained power in Rome. Sophia is at the center of the episode. In Pistis Sophia, Divine Wisdom descends from her celestial home, becomes lost, and has to find her way back toward the Light through thirteen metanoias, or changes in consciousness. Anne compares her story with the Christian interpretation of the Fall, especially the guilt and disobedience that became attached to Eve. Sophia gives us another way of understanding what has gone wrong. She has lost touch with where she came from and mistakes a lesser light for the true one. Her task is to wake up, learn to see differently, and remember.We also spend part of the conversation with Carl Jung. Anne trained as a Jungian analyst, and she talks about Jung’s own visionary experiences, Philemon, The Red Book, his fascination with the Gnostics, and the task he believed he had failed to complete before his death: restoring the reality of the soul to Western consciousness. Near the end, Anne reads from Trimorphic Protennoia, where the Divine Feminine speaks in the first person, and The Hymn of the Pearl, a Gnostic poem she has lived with for roughly sixty years. Both return us to the idea running through this entire conversation: that spiritual life begins in remembering what we are and where we came from.☿EXPLORE ANNE BARING’S WORKThis series draws on Anne Baring’s book, Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit: The Forgotten Feminine Face of God. You can listen to the complete audiobook for free on YouTube, narrated by Anne herself, and explore her books and research on her official website at annebaring.com. GNOSTIC TEXTS DISCUSSEDPistis SophiaTrimorphic ProtennoiaThe Sophia of Jesus ChristThe Hymn of the PearlThe Nag Hammadi codicesThe Gospel of ThomasThe Gospel of PhilipCARL JUNGThe Red BookSeven Sermons to the DeadAnswer to JobALSO MENTIONEDParmenidesG.R.S. MeadPeter KingsleyOrpheus and the Orphic traditionHeraclitusPythagorasPlato and AristotleZosimus of PanopolisG.I. GurdjieffFather Richard RohrMarie-Louise von FranzPhilemonTheodosius ITaxila☽CONTINUE THE WORK: Join the BFTB Patreon → https://patreon.com/backfromtheborderlineIf you want to actually work through it: Use MOODS → https://app.moods.world/ MOODS is a private place to take what’s coming up and see it clearly without performing it or involving anyone else. You can try it free for 7 days to see if it's right for you. If you join my Patreon first, you’ll also unlock discounted access. See you inside. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 this conversation, Anne takes me into the work of Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas and the world she called Old Europe, a network of Neolithic cultures across southeastern Europe that she spent decades studying through figurines, vessels, settlements, burial sites, goldwork and recurring religious imagery.Anne explains why Gimbutas believed this world was centered on the Great Goddess, how she read birds, snakes, spirals and water as part of a shared sacred language, and why she argued that these societies were matrilineal, broadly egalitarian and unusually free from organized warfare.We also talk about the later movement of steppe peoples into Europe, the fierce opposition Gimbutas faced during her career, and the later ancient DNA research Anne sees as supporting an important part of her migration theory.The conversation also becomes beautifully and unexpectedly personal. Anne speaks about growing up with a mother who received channeled writings, the out-of-body experience Anne had at thirteen, and the dream that brought Jules Cashford to her and eventually led to the ten-year writing of The Myth of the Goddess.Anne also remembers seeing the objects from The Lost World of Old Europe in person at the Ashmolean Museum, including the great painted vessels that left her speechless. We end by asking why this history still matters to her, and what she would say to Marija Gimbutas if she could sit across from her now.☿EXPLORE ANNE BARING’S WORKThis series draws on Anne Baring’s book, Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit: The Forgotten Feminine Face of God. You can listen to the complete audiobook for free on YouTube, narrated by Anne herself, and explore her books and research on her official website at annebaring.com. BOOKS BY MARIJA GIMBUTASThe Language of the GoddessThe Civilization of the Goddess: The World of Old EuropeALSO MENTIONEDThe Myth of the Goddess by Anne Baring and Jules CashfordMessages From a Transcendent Dimension by Anne BaringJoseph CampbellThe Hermetic Order of the Golden DawnFederico FagginIain McGilchristSEE THE OBJECTSThe Lost World of Old Europe exhibition via New York University’s YouTube channel [click here to view]☽CONTINUE THE WORK: Join the BFTB Patreon → https://patreon.com/backfromtheborderlineYou’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/ MOODS is a private place to take what’s coming up and see it clearly without performing it or involving anyone else. You can try it free for 7 days to see if it's right for you. If you join my Patreon first, you’ll also unlock discounted access. See you inside. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.