Back from the Borderline

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 follow a question wherever it leads. Lately I’ve been especially interested in symbolic literacy, the way images, myths, dreams, and archetypes quietly organize human life, often long before we’re consciously aware of them. I’m not very interested in being “certain” about anything. I care about learning to recognize patterns, hold complexity without rushing toward easy conclusions, and recover forms of wisdom that help us live with greater honesty, imagination, and responsibility. If you’ve found yourself searching for Carl Jung, depth psychology, symbolism, archetypes, spirituality, mythology, Christian mysticism, tarot, dreams, consciousness, philosophy, or the Western esoteric tradition, I think you’ll feel at home here. Alongside the public podcast, I also host House of Cards, an ongoing study of the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot through psychology, symbolism, mythology, and contemplative practice, as well as MOODS, an app I designed for dreamwork and deep inner inquiry. Both are extensions of the same project: learning to see more clearly. You can explore everything, including new episodes, House of Cards, Patreon, and MOODS, at backfromtheborderline.com. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

  1. The Skill AI Can Never Replace (And Why I’m Teaching Tarot)

    1 day ago

    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 tarot as a language of psyche, symbol, and myth. I’m releasing this first lesson publicly because it explains the philosophy behind the series. You can continue the study from Lesson 2 onward over on Patreon. In this introductory lesson we explore: • Why symbolic literacy matters in the age of AI • Why tarot is far more than fortune telling • How sustained attention transforms the way we see • Why symbolic systems have always been central to spiritual and psychological development • How to approach this series for the deepest transformation Suggested DeckThroughout this series I’ll be using the Smith-Waite Centennial Tarot Deck (Pamela Colman Smith Centennial Edition). We’ll explore in much more granular detail why this particular deck was chosen in Lesson 2, which is available now on Patreon. Next Episode House of Cards 02: Why the Rider-Waite-Smith Deck: Join us on Patreon as we explore the origins of the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot, Arthur Edward Waite, Pamela Colman Smith, Christian Hermeticism, the revolution of the illustrated pip cards, and why this deck remains the symbolic language of modern tarot over a century after its creation. Continue the Study If you’d like to study the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot with me, you can join House of Cards over on Patreon. We’ll move through the deck one card at a time, one week at a time, treating each image as a living lesson in psyche, symbol, and myth. Start with Lesson 2 and join us whenever you’re ready. 👉 Join the study: https://www.patreon.com/collection/2222096 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    31 min
  2. The Arrogance of Too Much Empathy

    3 days ago

    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, or quietly resentful. Then the moment came when I needed to send the damn text already. So I did. And guess what? Their response completely dismantled the story I had been telling myself all week. That experience led me into a much bigger question: at what point does empathy stop being empathy and start becoming an attempt to manage someone else’s reality for them? The deeper I looked, the more I saw how often I move through life assuming responsibility for experiences that do not actually belong to me. And I doubt I’m alone in that. Maybe this is something you’re doing without realizing it, too. In this episode, we talk about over-responsibility, people-pleasing, parenting, Rudolf Steiner, Dion Fortune, Martin Buber, the Christian mysteries, and why trusting another person’s capacity might be one of the deepest forms of love there is. Along the way we explore: • Why highly sensitive people often become emotional managers • The hidden arrogance inside over-empathy • The difference between caring for someone and carrying them • Why rescuing can quietly undermine growth • What parenting teaches us about trust • The spiritual danger of trying to live other people’s lives for them • The relationship between love, faith, and control • How to stop rehearsing other people’s suffering Reflection questions from this episode (for your journal, MOODS, or simply a conversation with yourself): • What do I actually know? • What am I assuming? • What part of this belongs to me? • What would respect look like here? • Am I helping this person, or am I trying to protect myself from the discomfort of watching them have their own experience? • What resources might this person have that I cannot see? These questions ended up changing the entire direction of my thinking. If you spend some real time with them, I think they might do the same for you. CONTINUE THE WORK: Join the BFTB Patreon → https://patreon.com/backfromtheborderline You’ll get: ☆ Weekly bonus episodes ☆ Consciousness Stream ☆ 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.

    1hr 5min
  3. Gay Men Have Always Loved a “Difficult” Woman

    16 June

    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 decisions, long as hell voice notes, laughter at completely inappropriate moments, and enough years of showing up for each other that eventually they became part of the fabric of my life. In this episode, you'll join me on a journey where I explore why certain women and certain gay men seem to find each other so consistently throughout time. We'll get into Jung (of course), chosen family, female villains, the AIDS crisis, and the deep bond that tends to form when two people have spent their entire lives paying close attention to the rules everybody else seems to take for granted. This is a love letter to the gay men who have shaped my life, challenged me, protected me, made me laugh until I cried, and helped me become more fully myself. Reflection Prompts for MOODS (or your journal): • Who are the people who have seen me most clearly throughout my life? • What parts of myself have other people called “too much”? • What would happen if I stopped treating those qualities as flaws? • What friendships have changed the way I see myself? CONTINUE THE WORK: Join the BFTB Patreon → https://patreon.com/backfromtheborderline You’ll get: ☆ Weekly bonus episodes ☆ Consciousness Stream ☆ 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.

    51 min
  4. The Female Shadow

    9 June

    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 sounding rude, crazy, or dramatic. This episode takes a hard look at female shadow as something deeply shaped by girlhood, motherhood, power, fear, beauty, belonging, and the training many women receive in twisting themselves up into pretzels to be more “acceptable.” Listening requires you to ask what happens when women start telling the truth about the ways we protect, punish, need, compete, perform, and survive. Because a lot of what we collectively call “femininity” is terror management. Reflections for MOODS or your journal: What parts of my personality were built around maintaining belonging rather than expressing truth?Where does my care for others become self-erasure, and what am I afraid would happen if I stopped?Show me the feminine aspects of myself that I perform socially versus the ones that feel genuinely alive. 🜏 CONTINUE THE WORK: If you recognize yourself in something from this episode, don’t leave it unresolved. If you want more depth and the full archive: Join the BFTB Patreon → https://patreon.com/backfromtheborderline You’ll get: ☆ Weekly bonus episodes ☆ Consciousness Stream ☆ Archetypal tarot + astrology forecasts ☆ Full ad-free archive access 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 both MOODS and Patreon free for 7 days to see if they’re right for you.  If you join Patreon first: You’ll also unlock discounted access to MOODS. See you inside. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    1hr 12min
  5. The Christian Grimoire Evangelicals Forgot About (Part 1)

    2 June

    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 while talking openly about prayer, angels, spirits, hidden knowledge, and the deeply serious question of who should be trusted with power. In Part 1 of this two-part exploration, you’ll learn what the Arbatel is, why it’s such a deep cut, and why it complicates the usual evangelical panic around divination and occult material without treating magic like a toy. Part 2 will drop on June 11th on Patreon. Join at patreon.com/backfromtheborderline and search “The Christian Grimoire Evangelicals Forgot About (Part 2)” for my deeper breakdown of what the Arbatel actually teaches and how its warnings can be carried into your modern life. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    43 min
  6. Why Everyone Sounds Religious About AI [Consciousness Stream for May 2026]

    28 May

    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 mechanism to our inevitable demise into dust. Now, he’s sitting with Claude calling it “Claudia” and wondering out loud whether “the machine” might actually be conscious after all. We’ll then get into how the Vatican is currently preparing a formal AI doctrine before Silicon Valley gets to decide what a mind is entirely on its own terms. After that, you’ll learn why celebrities are suddenly talking about “soul” after years of feeding audiences recycled franchise sludge. Something in the culture seems to be… slipping. Especially around language. People keep insisting AI is merely software while continuing to speak about it like a spirit/child/god/therapist/lover/priest/threat/mirror/companion. We finish off with my favorite story of the month, where archaeologists have recently uncovered Homer wrapped around an Egyptian mummy. It’s like something is trying to remind us that myth refuses to stay buried. Modern culture was never able to rid itself of enchantment. It shoved it into technology, branding, entertainment, politics, fandoms, algorithms, and glowing little rectangles people now stare into like medieval peasants consulting an oracle. 🜏 Want to hear the full episode? Join the BFTB Patreon → https://patreon.com/backfromtheborderline You’ll get: ☆ Weekly bonus episodes ☆ Consciousness Stream ☆ Archetypal tarot + astrology forecasts ☆ Full ad-free archive access Join 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 both MOODS and Patreon free for 7 days to see if they’re right for you.  If you join Patreon first: You’ll also unlock discounted access to MOODS. See you inside. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    27 min
  7. The Body Keeps the Mileage (On Mortality & Wellness Panic)

    26 May

    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 all the various little decisions I made when my body still felt endlessly recoverable to me and when “forever” sounded dramatic and way too far away to really care about.  Now I’m 36, raising a toddler, exhausted as hell, building things, trying to stay healthy without becoming a total psycho about it, and now my body feels way less like a sexy little accessory to my current “identity,” and instead the whole ass reality of it. It’s the one thing I have that has to carry everything for me. Work, grief, love, stress, aging, pleasure, fear… all of it.  This is a really vulnerable one. I cried more times recording it than I’d like to admit. Some of it I edited out but most of it, I didn't. This one's about mortality, wellness panic, microplastics, biohacking, cosmetic procedures, spiritual disembodiment, motherhood, and the weird and dystopian modern feeling that everything is either going to give us cancer or something we’re supposed to somehow optimize into infinity.  Somewhere between total neglect and obsession, I think there’s got to be more honest way to live inside our bodies. It's something I'm still trying to figure out. Creating this episode was part of that ongoing process. Reflective prompts from the episode: What relationship did I inherit with my body, and who taught me to see myself that way?What choices am I making today that my future self will one day have to carry?What would caring for my body look like if fear wasn’t the primary motivation?You can take these into your journal, on a walk, or into MOODS with the Oriel archetype.  🜏 CONTINUE THE WORK: If you recognize yourself in something from this episode, don’t leave it unresolved. If you want more depth and the full archive: Join the BFTB Patreon → https://patreon.com/backfromtheborderline You’ll get: ☆ Weekly bonus episodes ☆ Consciousness Stream ☆ Archetypal tarot + astrology forecasts ☆ Full ad-free archive access 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 both MOODS and Patreon free for 7 days to see if they’re right for you.  If you join Patreon first: You’ll also unlock discounted access to MOODS. See you inside. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    1hr 1min
  8. Why Tarot Feels So Accurate, And How to Actually Read a Card

    21 May

    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 you don’t fully “believe” in it. I’ll introduce you to Pamela Colman Smith, the artist behind the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, and why her illustrated minor arcana changed tarot forever. We discuss tarot as theater, the body language inside various cards, and perhaps most importantly, why simply memorizing meanings is usually the worst possible way to learn. By the end of this episode, you’ll learn how to actually read the tarot intuitively. You can listen to the full episode at patreon.com/backfromtheborderline. You can also join the Patreon for free if you want the weekly Wednesday newsletter and previews of the paid episodes before deciding. MOODS is live at moods.world, and you can use The Animatrix inside MOODS to work through your daily tarot pull in the same way I teach here. Patreon members also get discounted access to MOODS. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    25 min
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4.7
out of 5
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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 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 follow a question wherever it leads. Lately I’ve been especially interested in symbolic literacy, the way images, myths, dreams, and archetypes quietly organize human life, often long before we’re consciously aware of them. I’m not very interested in being “certain” about anything. I care about learning to recognize patterns, hold complexity without rushing toward easy conclusions, and recover forms of wisdom that help us live with greater honesty, imagination, and responsibility. If you’ve found yourself searching for Carl Jung, depth psychology, symbolism, archetypes, spirituality, mythology, Christian mysticism, tarot, dreams, consciousness, philosophy, or the Western esoteric tradition, I think you’ll feel at home here. Alongside the public podcast, I also host House of Cards, an ongoing study of the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot through psychology, symbolism, mythology, and contemplative practice, as well as MOODS, an app I designed for dreamwork and deep inner inquiry. Both are extensions of the same project: learning to see more clearly. You can explore everything, including new episodes, House of Cards, Patreon, and MOODS, at backfromtheborderline.com. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Information

  • Creator
    mollie adler
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    347
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © mollie adler
  • Show Website
    Back from the Borderline

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