Our premier episode dances with the themes and ideas of 'Stop Listening,' the first track on Derek Webb's new album, 'Fingers Crossed.' The song itself also provides a musical backdrop to the phone calls and correspondence we're featuring this week.

Ep 01: Stop Listening

Recording &amp; compiling conversations about spiritual de/reconstruction, curating them by topic, and releasing them in episodes. Let’s stop having detached debates on social media and really talk.

Personal Journals

Society & Culture

History

Philosophy

Places & Travel

Arts

Literature

Performing Arts

Design

Food

Fashion & Beauty

Visual Arts

Music

THE FIRST EPISODE IN OUR MULTI-EPISODE SEASON FINALE!

With music being so integral to this podcast, running in parallel to the conversations and correspondence we feature, it’s not surprising that the conversations themselves start to sound like music in their own way. They flow like the components of a song. Verses, choruses (etc) repeating. 

The more you listen to these stories, the more you can’t help but see their intersections—where they share space, and where they diverge. We’ve weaved together a lot of conversations, but nothing we’ve ever released has ever been at this scale or scope.

The idea is to expand to a larger dialog than ever before. To extend our “choir,” that cloud of witnesses, beyond any statement we’ve ever been able to construct. These stories will be told over more than a single episode, with different people having more or less to say at different points along the path.

“Verse,” this first part, is the one dealing with our points of origin. It’s not about where we are now, or even how things crumbled to get us there. It’s about where we came from, and how that shaped everything.

s3e13: Verse

This episode specifically roots us in the sciences of process. A conversation with a molecular biologist invites us to probe deeper… smaller… into our very cells. To find what they have to say about release, surrender, context, and adaptation. How we’re sustained by the things we let go of along with the new things we grasp. In commitment to process, the patterns of evolution emerge — weaving unities within diversities, and teaching us about how our experience changes us.

s3e12: Refrain (A Meditation for Your Cells)

It’s easy to view our growth as a separate thing from our grief. 
…Impatiently, we might perceive the process of grief as something that we need to “get through” so that we can “move on” to growth… But in reality, growth is happening alongside grief as we adapt. 

There’s some comfort to be found there. People a bit further down the line will tell you how much they learned in grief. And if you’ve had a harder season, where grief has seemed all-encompassing, it’s good to know that you aren’t in stasis. You are still in process and progress. You are still moving forward. 

AND AS WITH SO MANY OTHER THINGS, VIEWING ‘DECONSTRUCTION & RECONSTRUCTION’ AS SOME SORT OF BINARY ISN’T ULTIMATELY HELPFUL.

s3e11: Reprise

One of the key benefits to embodiment is that it’s substantial by definition. 

In a room (sanctuary) or a nation where many people are prone to detachment and disembodiment, a lot of hollow ideas and promises get promoted as answers, and hope is placed in vapor. A community in which on-the-ground advocacy is discouraged while prayers for intervention abound is no place in which to be fully alive. 

Maybe you are the miracle you need to see. 

This episode, we continue with a meditation not only on embodiment, but groundedness, real advocacy, and life beyond the limiting narratives and labels placed upon us.

s3e10: Come Home (To Your Body) Part 2

Some of the most resonant stories in our culture are about either finding or coming back to a place where you belong. Home. But the ultimate home to come home to is yourself.

Part 1 (of 2) in our return to the theme of full embodiment, which is central to recovery and reconstruction.

Ep 01: Stop Listening

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