Back from the Borderline

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 Crowley’s claim that humanity had entered a new spiritual age. He drew heavily from the Golden Dawn and Hermetic Qabalah, then remixed and recast those traditions through his own revelation and his own ideas about freedom, sexuality, and authority.

I’m interested in the point where spiritual freedom starts giving one man an extraordinary amount of interpretive power. Crowley’s treatment of women, the role of the Scarlet Woman, the use of sex as magical technology, and the theology built around Babalon all deserve much more scrutiny than either Satanic Panic or Crowley worship tends to allow.

True Will can absolutely be understood as disciplined vocation rather than appetite, and many modern Thelemites read Crowley critically while taking consent and individual freedom seriously. The harder work here (that I attempt to undertake in this episode) is taking a hard look at the actual religion without turning it into either “evil” or “enlightenment”.

This is a study of Aleister Crowley’s Thelema from inside the Western mysteries, with plenty of sympathy for the questions Crowley was actually asking and very little patience for the places I think his answers went badly wrong.

Next week, we’ll be following Crowley’s massive influence all the way into online spirituality, Existential Kink, modern shadow work, sacred sexuality, and the high-ticket coaching economy.

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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/
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.
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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 can do instead. Drawing on Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, Hubert Godard, bodywork, and basic physics, I look at why yielding has such a bad reputation, how the floor and the bed support movement, and why “relax your shoulders” often changes almost nothing.

We also talk about the exhale, the fear of letting another person help, and the difference between yielding and giving up your choices. You’ll hear a few small practices that can help your nervous system notice support before it adds more effort. If you haven’t heard Part One, start with The Braced Body, Why You’re Tense Even When Nothing Is Wrong. Part Three will move into grace, surrender, and what it means for spiritual trust to reach the body.

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/
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.

Artwork credit: “Surrender” by Tom Sullivan (Saatchi Art China)
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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, and noticed that even though I was trying to rest, my entire upper body was still working. My shoulders were tense. My jaw was clenched. It was such a small moment, but it sent me down a rabbit hole. I wanted to understand why so many of us keep holding ourselves together long after we no longer have to.

In Part One of this series, we’ll look at why chronic jaw clenching, neck pain, shoulder tension, and the feeling of always being “on” can become so familiar that we stop noticing we’re doing them. We’ll also talk about why understanding your childhood, your attachment style, or your nervous system doesn’t automatically change these habits, even when you know exactly where they came from.

Along the way, I’ll borrow ideas from Moshe Feldenkrais, Wilhelm Reich, Donald Winnicott, Wilfred Bion, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. I want to see whether their work can help explain why the body keeps preparing for demands that ended years ago, and why receiving support can feel so much harder than we expect, even if it seems really simple on the surface.

By the end of this episode, I hope you’ll start catching the moment your body begins to brace. That’s where change begins. You can’t work with something you can’t see. This is Part One of the series. In the next episode, we’ll stop asking why we brace and start looking at how the body learns to trust support again.

If you’re curious about trying the Feldenkrais Method yourself, FeldenkraisProject.com is a great place to start. The free lessons can help you notice how your body moves and where you may be using more effort than you need. You can check it out here: https://feldenkraisproject.com/.

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/. 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.
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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 honestly sometimes be the only answer. For some people, atheism feels better than trying to rescue anything with Jesus attached to it. Others move toward witchcraft, occultism, or a private spiritual life built from candles, books, rituals, and scraps. At the same time, plenty of people are running back to traditional Christianity because the modern world feels hollow, lonely, and stripped of beauty.

Both responses make sense. Burning the whole thing down can feel like the only honest answer when religion harmed you. Returning to the old Church can make sense when the alternative looks like “buy things, optimize yourself, and die.” At least the Church has ritual, saints, feast days, candles, moral demands, and a story larger than the self.

But neither response heals the wound on its own.

This episode is about the broken spiritual inheritance of the West, especially Christianity, and why we keep swinging between rejection and return. We leave the Church and lose old languages for grief, prayer, beauty, and moral life. Or we return and pretend the harm was exaggerated, as if shame, control, misogyny, homophobia, and fear of the body were just minor details. The Church absolutely preserved beauty, but it also caused immeasurable harm.

I’m interested in what happens after you’ve left, told the truth, stopped pretending the harm/abuse was acceptable, and still have to decide what you’ll carry forward.
This episode moves through religious trauma, Christianity, Mary Magdalene, the Grail, the Church of Rome, the broken masculine and feminine inside Western spirituality, and the problem of building a new spiritual life without pretending you made yourself from nothing.

Not everything can be saved, but not everything should be burned to ash. Both things can be true.

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/
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.