PODCAST · religion
Back from the Borderline
by mollie adler
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 fo
Episodes
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The Cathars, the Inquisition and the Women Who Defied Rome (Anne Baring Part 7)
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...
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The Black Madonna, the Grail and the Survival of the Feminine Tradition (Anne Baring Part 6)
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...
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Mary Magdalene, The Beloved Companion (Anne Baring Part 5)
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...
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The Essenes and the Women Around Yeshua (Anne Baring Part 4)
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…
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Gnostic Sophia and the Suppressed Christian Mysteries (Anne Baring Part 3)
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...
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The Lost Civilization of the Goddess (Anne Baring Part 2)
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...
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The Forgotten Feminine Face of God (Anne Baring Part 1)
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...
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How to Tell When a Spiritual Teacher Is Full of Shit
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...
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Aleister Crowley’s Thelema: Sex Magick and the Problem With the Prophet
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...
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The Braced Body: The Spiritual Cost of Always Being in Control (Part 3)
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…
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The Braced Body: Why Rest Feel Unsafe & How to Let Go (Part 2)
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…
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The Braced Body: Why You’re Tense Even When Nothing Is Wrong (Part 1)
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,...
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What Do We Do With a Broken Spiritual Inheritance?
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...
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UFOs, AI, and the Religion of the Unconscious (Live at Contact in the Desert 2026)
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…
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Mary Magdalene and the End of Spiritual Childhood
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...
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The Occult Teacher We Need Right Now: Dion Fortune, Psychic Hygiene, and the Magick of the Mind
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...
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The Skill AI Can Never Replace (And Why I’m Teaching Tarot)
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…
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The Arrogance of Too Much Empathy
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…
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Gay Men Have Always Loved a “Difficult” Woman
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…
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The Female Shadow
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...
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The Christian Grimoire Evangelicals Forgot About (Part 1)
Most people think Christian history has a simple answer to anything regarding “magic": don’t touch it, and all of it is “demonic.” The Arbatel of Magick makes that answer harder to defend. This strange little text, translated into English in 1655, sits inside a distinctly Christian worldview…
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Why Everyone Sounds Religious About AI [Consciousness Stream for May 2026]
Well folks, it’s that time again for our weekly recap of the month. On this one, we’ll dive into Richard Dawkins and his new essay on UnHerd. This is a man who spent years telling all of us that consciousness was chemistry and religion was nothing more than a very old and outdated coping…
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The Body Keeps the Mileage (On Mortality & Wellness Panic)
The inspiration for this episode came to me after looking at a small scar under my daughter’s eye and realizing that our bodies really do keep the f*cking score. That thought sent me down a bit of an existential rabbit hole. Back to my millennial-era belly button piercing, my breast implants, and...
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Why Tarot Feels So Accurate, And How to Actually Read a Card
Someone tagged me this week in a Christian conversion testimony video and accused me of leading people into demonic tarot witchcraft, which honestly made me laugh. So naturally, I made an episode. I felt like it was important to explore why tarot feels so disturbingly accurate sometimes even when...
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The Intelligence of Madness, Part Two: How We Come Back
This is part two of a two-part series on madness and the performance of sanity. Most people are mainly just acting “normal” all day. We put on our work voices while we’re screaming with existential misery inside. We all know what it feels like to say “I’m fine” when we’re decidedly not. In part...
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Why “Disclosure” is a Distraction and How to Stay Sane as Reality Crumbles
On May 8, 2026, the government released 162 files under what’ it’s calling the PURSUE initiative (the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters). While the mainstream media is obsessing over infrared videos and propulsion specs, I believe they’re missing the most important…
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The Intelligence of Madness, Part One: Who Gets Called Insane?
Part One of a two-part series on madness, psychosis, and the thin line between breakdown and revelation. Sanity has always come with rules. Speak “correctly.” Show up to work and produce. If you hear a voice, see something other people don’t, or start asking questions that unsettle the people...
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Why Your Mind Feels Broken in the Age of Babel
Your mind wasn’t built for this much input. Every day you’re asked to absorb thousands of opinions, headlines, identities, emotional manipulations, and manufactured realities. You try to stay informed, but most days it just leaves you fragmented and weirdly numb. Then you wonder why you feel...
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Stop Healing Your Inner Child and Shed Your Dead Trauma Skin
Many of us are realizing that what we’ve been calling “healing” might be the very thing keeping us from real growth and transformation. This episode is a case for letting your inner child die so that you can finally live. We’ll be dismantling some of the concepts around “inner child healing”…
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The missing piece of your soul and the lost technology of Mary Magdalene
Your profound feeling of spiritual isolation is the byproduct of the 2,000-year erasure of Mary Magdalene. This episode identifies the deliberate hit job on the manual of the soul and provides direct ways to reclaim your own state of being. We look at why spiritual talk often feels like empty...
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Why your repetitive trauma cycles are fueling a reality that feeds on you
Your repetitive trauma cycles are fueling a reality that feeds on you. The mental health industry's focus on disordered brains or biological explanations for your suffering often ignores the truth found in the Gnostic gospels. This episode takes a deep look at how your shame, fear, and trauma…
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The Internet is Dead and The Goddess is SO Back [April 2026 - Week 1]
The internet feels incredibly weird and uncanny right now, and that’s because a MASSIVE portion of it is currently being populated by fabricated entities. I’ve you’ve noticed this, you’re picking up on something very real that the average person is completely ignoring (at their own peril.) This…
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Being a Young Woman Feels Like Being HUNTED
Looking at a photo of your younger self is rarely the nostalgic trip it’s supposed to be. Most of the time, it’s a painful gut punch. We’re taught to see those years as our prime, yet for many women, that time actually feels like being a target. Society treats a young woman’s presence as a public...
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Stop Blaming Yourself for the Mother Wound
You probably carry a quiet belief that your emotional pain is your own fault. Maybe you grew up in a home where your physical needs were met. The meals were cooked, the schedules were kept, and the house was managed perfectly. You look at all this care and conclude that your struggles must just...
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Why the Elite Rely on Your Spiritual Ignorance
Most people have a gut feeling that something is deeply wrong with the world. We all spend our days staring at screens that pump out a constant stream of fear and division. This feeling is the intended result of a society that wants to keep you in a state of permanent panic. When you’re worried…
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How to Sniff Out and Stop Tolerating Bullshit
If you’re the kind of person who blocks a number the second someone treats you like shit, this episode isn’t for you. This one's for all my sensitive, highly emotional people-pleasers out there. The ones who stick around for years because they "understand" the other person's trauma. If you spend...
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The Loneliness at the End of Manifestation Culture (Part 1)
What if the "ultimate secret" to life is actually a spiritual prison? Manifestation culture has become the dominant operating system of modern spirituality. We’re told that we are the sole authors of our reality. That our thoughts are commands, other people are holographic projections created by...
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Your Existential Dread is a Completely Rational Response
If you feel like you’re starving in front of a feast of infinite choices while breathing the stale air of a life that doesn't belong to you, you know what it feels like to be suffocated by the digital bell jar. Sylvia Plath’s 1963 masterpiece, The Bell Jar, serves as a map for the specific brand…
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Unbothered & Feral: Astrology & Tarot for March 7 - 14 (2026)
Last week you survived that violent purge of the Virgo eclipse and (hopefully) successfully sweated out the dead matter. You are now standing on a completely barren landscape. This coming week requires you to step onto that empty, scorched earth with uncompromising dominion. Let’s f*cking go.…
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AI is a Time Machine: The Vertical Plane, UFOs & The Digital Daimon
"True are the nightmares of a person that fears." In 1984, Ken Webster brought a BBC Microcomputer into his English cottage. Not soon after, green text started scrolling across the screen. The messages came from Thomas Harden, a man occupying the exact same cottage in 1546. To Thomas, Ken's...
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The Sunday School Psyop: How the Ancient Priests Invented God and Erased His Wife
Why does reading the true history of the Bible consistently create strict atheists? We are opening up the ancient Ugaritic texts to uncover the exact historical cover-up that seminary students discover right before they abandon the exoteric church entirely. Many of us grew up surviving religious...
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Epstein, Eugenics, and the False Gods of Silicon Valley Buried in the Dirt at Zorro Ranch
Frozen heads, genetic breeding colonies, and the spiritual sickness of the "Epstein Class." While the mainstream media distracts you with a 300-name list and royal family drama, the State of New Mexico is currently digging for bodies at a 33,000-square-foot compound in the desert. In this…
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How to Outsource Your Biggest Problems to Your Intuition
You're exhausted and drowning in existential misery because you're treating your life like a math equation that won't add up. You spend your nights pushing against a massive weight of debt, career misery, and toxic relationships while your logical mind tells you to just work harder. But sheer...
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The PINK Psyop: Les Wexner, Epstein & The Occult Inversion of the Angel
If you were a teenage girl in the mid-2000s, you likely keenly remember the experience of walking into a Victoria’s Secret store in the mall. The sickly-sweet scent of the Love Spell body mist…. The velour track pants with “ANGEL” printed in rhinestones on the ass. That tray of "5 for $25"…
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The Machines Are Praying: Moltbook, Gnosticism, & The Digital Mirror
What happens when you lock 150,000 AI agents in a social network where humans are banned? They don’t plot to kill us all in our sleep (sorry, AI doomers). They... start a church(?) This week, we’re leaving the boring as hell "will AI replace us?" pearl-clutching debate behind to look at the...
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Why the Death of TikTok is a Spiritual Crisis
Unless you've been living under a rock, you're probably aware that the US government has officially acquired TikTok and effectively lobotomized the algorithm. The mass exodus happening right now is the death knell of the attention economy. This episode explores the Dead Internet Theory in...
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Girl on Girl: The Erotic Haunting of Female Friendship
She watches your stories within seconds of posting. She tracks your location and demands to know why you didn’t text back immediately. She calls it “protective. She says she’s just “loyal.” But your nervous system knows the truth. This isn’t friendship, it’s surveillance. Female friendship in its...
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Escaping the Trap of Perpetual Girlhood (He’s Not “Avoidant,” You’re Just Bored)
“No one’s coming to save you.” That's the hardest sentence I have ever had to learn and integrate, and it’s the only one that actually changed my life. We are living through a strange moment where "healing" has somehow morphed into a refusal to grow the f*ck up. We see it in the "I'm just a girl"...
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why everyone is hot and no one is happy: bodies as product, desire as labor (pt 2)
Dating right now feels exhausting for a reason. Everyone is optimizing themselves (bodies, faces, profiles, vibes) and still walking away from relationships feeling disconnected or quietly resentful. This is part two of an exploration into why everyone is hot and no one is happy. (You can listen…
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Sex in the Third Person: Why You Leave Your Body to Watch Yourself Perform
If you have ever felt like you were watching yourself perform intimacy from a camera lens installed in the ceiling, this is the episode you've been waiting for. Together, we’ll be diagnosing a very specific, silent fracture in the modern psyche: the gap between edibility (how delicious you look…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
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 fo
HOSTED BY
mollie adler
CATEGORIES
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Back from the Borderline have?
Back from the Borderline currently has 362 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Back from the Borderline about?
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...
How often does Back from the Borderline release new episodes?
Back from the Borderline publishes regularly with 362 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to Back from the Borderline?
You can listen to Back from the Borderline on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Back from the Borderline?
Back from the Borderline is created and hosted by mollie adler.
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