Fear doesn't want to destroy you. It wants to wake you up.

In this episode Jacob gets unusually honest — three failed recording attempts, 63-hour work weeks, bills backed up, air conditioning out, and a podcast he's terrified isn't good enough. This is what fear actually looks like from the inside. And this is how he's dealing with it.

Drawing from C.S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters, the Bhagavad Gita, Thich Nhat Hanh on Mara, Proverbs, and a genuinely unsettling dream after watching a horror movie with his daughter, Jacob explores fear not as an enemy to defeat but as a threshold — an entryway back to presence.

This episode covers:

• Fear defined as a contraction around imagined loss
• Self-doubt as fear with a voice
• Gratitude as a practice when everything is going wrong
• The Buddhist figure Mara and why the Buddha needed him
• Facing your inner demons instead of running from them
• A guided moment to sit with your fear without fixing it
• Closing with Psalm 23 and Thomas Merton's Prayer of Unknowing

If fear has been louder than your faith lately, this episode is for you.

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Standing Nowhere is a contemplative spirituality podcast exploring mindfulness, meditation, and what it means to be human through vulnerable storytelling.