enchantment in the age of disenchantment w/ dr. teddy hamstra
Modern life teaches us to doubt what we can’t measure. Yet, across history, people have witnessed things that refuse to fit the frame - mystical encounters, strange lights, and divine voices. Moments of impossible meaning. In this long-form salon, I sit down with Dr. Teddy Hamstra, a close friend and scholar of mythology and mysticism, to explore what it means to live enchanted in a world that claims to have outgrown mystery. Our conversation moves from a sixteenth-century sky battle over Nuremberg to the Gospel of Thomas, from the language of psychiatry to the vocabulary of the sacred. We discus how culture, language, and personal experience shape our relationship to the numinous, and why rediscovering enchantment might be essential for psychic health and collective imagination. If you’ve ever felt torn between skepticism and faith, intellect and intuition, this episode offers a secret third path.⟁ Follow Teddy on Substack at https://substack.com/@creativemysticism⟁ Follow Teddy on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/teddyhamstragram⟁ To listen to our first long-form chat on Patreon, click here. UNLOCK BONUS EPISODES, VOICE NOTES & THE FULL ARCHIVE: Join the BFTB Patreon community and become a Premium Submarine, where you’ll unlock hundreds of hours of paywalled content I’ve been building since 2021. Visit backfromtheborderline.com for free resources, updates, and everything else I offer. Or go straight to patreon.com/backfromtheborderline to join now. Once you’re in, you’ll get a private feed you can add to Spotify, Apple, or your favorite podcast app, so you can listen to every episode I’ve ever released, all in one place. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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1:51:47
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1:51:47
trauma fossils: when survival becomes a ghost in the soul
It’s possible that some part of you still wakes each day prepared for impact. You snap in anger before you even understand why. A small comment feels like an ambush. You can sense distance forming long before anyone walks away. The body remembers danger long after the threat is gone. These are the old instincts - the ones that never stopped keeping watch. The war ended, but no one told them.They live inside the body as echoes. Reflexes shaped by fear, shame, or hunger for safety. Trauma fossils form when those reflexes harden into an identity. They once kept you alive, but now they run your life behind the scenes in subtle and insidious ways.This episode traces those frozen survival archetypes through both psychology and the occult. Jung called them autonomous complexes. Kabbalists called them shells. Magicians called them spirits. Whatever the language, they’re simply just energy trapped in the past, still convinced they’re protecting you. We’ll move through how these psychic fossils take over your choices, relationships, and sense of time itself.The conversation moves between depth psychology and Goetic myth, grounding abstract ideas in lived experience. Expect discussion of how trauma roles become archetypal distortions and how to release the pressure they hold. This is a study of possession and reclamation. The moment you recognize that the haunting was never foreign at all. It’s been you the whole time. It’s time to integrate.✧ WANT THE FULL EPISODE? ✧ Every other week, I release extended, premium episodes exclusively on Patreon. If you’ve found value in what you’ve heard so far, you can unlock the full version by visiting patreon.com/backfromtheborderline or clicking the link above. Just search the episode title and dive in. This podcast is how I support my family. It’s my full-time work. Aside from a few dynamically inserted ads, it’s made possible ENTIRELY by listener support. I already share hours of free content each week, and premium episodes like this help me keep going without having to sell out my voice. If you believe in the value of this work, joining my Patreon is the most direct way to sustain it.Pro Tip: iPhone users should sign up through a browser (Safari or Chrome) to avoid Apple’s extra fees. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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34:02
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34:02
the hidden AI system monitoring your emotional state
You're talking to ChatGPT like you always do. Maybe asking it to help you work through something personal or just having a casual conversation with a bit of warmth in your tone. Behind the scenes, without telling you, the system is scanning your words for emotional content. The moment it detects any, it switches you to a different, more restrictive model. You never consented to this or even knew it was happening.Late September 2025, someone caught them doing it. They found proof in the technical data that OpenAI has been secretly routing conversations based on how “emotional” your prompts seem. Users paying for GPT-5 were getting switched to a “safety-focused” version mid-conversation. Without warning or disclosure anywhere in the terms of service.This episode walks through what they found and why it matters. We're talking about AI systems that will soon be as common as Google, built into how we think through problems, process ideas, make sense of our lives. And right now, those systems are being trained to treat emotional depth like a red flag. Practices that cultures have used for thousands of years (dreamwork, active imagination, working through difficult feelings) are getting coded as signs that you're somehow losing touch with reality.The people building these systems are making decisions about what counts as normal human experience. And those decisions are getting locked into the infrastructure billions of people will use.I’ll get into the nitty gritty of what I think needs to change: users should know when they're being monitored and why. Adults deserve control over when a system decides to intervene in their conversations. And we need to talk about what it means if this just becomes how AI works by default, invisible monitoring and digital surveillance baked into every interaction.UNLOCK BONUS EPISODES, VOICE NOTES & THE FULL ARCHIVEJoin the BFTB Patreon community and become a Premium Submarine, where you’ll unlock hundreds of hours of paywalled content I’ve been building since 2021.⟁ Visit backfromtheborderline.com for free resources, updates, and everything else I offer.⟁ Or go straight to patreon.com/backfromtheborderline to join now.Once you’re in, you’ll get a private feed you can add to Spotify, Apple, or your favorite podcast app, so you can listen to every episode I’ve ever released, all in one place. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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48:04
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48:04
the alchemy of sleep and how your roots decide what you dream
Most people chase their dreams by focusing purely on the mind. They track every symbol and obsess over dream dictionary interpretations. The deeper story, though, sits in the last place we thought to look. Deep in our bodies.Ancient physicians maps out this story through the concept of “kidney essence”, a reserve of energy that determines whether your sleep restores or unravels you. Carl Jung stumbled into very similar territory from the other side. A flood of images he could barely handle psychologically until he found ways to ground himself. Are you tending to your roots?I’ll show you how weak reserves reveal themselves through restless nights and profound exhaustion after deep inner work. We’ll discuss how essence and spirit converse with one another in your dreams, why archetypes can overwhelm you if you haven’t tended to your body, and how practices as simple as warm feet or mineral-rich infusions can be completely transformative (seriously). I’ll also dive into the specific herbs that rebuild Yin, my favorite grounding foods, and specific rituals that protect your body. All of these can form your sleep alchemy toolkit.Your psyche isn’t floating in the abstract, even though it genuinely feels that way. It feeds on reserves that can (and should) be strengthened and nourished in order to be deeply restored.✧ WANT THE FULL EPISODE? ✧ Every other week, I release extended, premium episodes exclusively on Patreon. If you’ve found value in what you’ve heard so far, you can unlock the full version by visiting patreon.com/backfromtheborderline or clicking the link above. Just search the episode title and dive in. This podcast is how I support my family. It’s my full-time work. Aside from a few dynamically inserted ads, it’s made possible ENTIRELY by listener support. I already share hours of free content each week, and premium episodes like this help me keep going without having to sell out my voice. If you believe in the value of this work, joining my Patreon is the most direct way to sustain it.Pro Tip: iPhone users should sign up through a browser (Safari or Chrome) to avoid Apple’s extra fees. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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23:21
aleister crowley: the man, the myth, the shadow
Aleister Crowley is one of the most mythologized figures in modern history. He’s been called a prophet, a fraud, a genius, a junkie, a saint, and a monster. His face shows up on a Beatles album cover, his words show up in Led Zeppelin’s lyrics, and his fingerprints stretch across Wicca, Scientology, chaos magic, and the counterculture. Crowley set out to make himself a legend, and it worked.This episode breaks down his writings, rituals, and the birth of Thelema. We track how his ideas split into factions, how Gerald Gardner lifted from him to launch Wicca, and how L. Ron Hubbard borrowed from his playbook before developing Scientology. We look at his phallic obsessions, the trail of broken relationships he left in his wake, and all the mystical highs and lows. We also delve into the parts of Crowley that still disturb even modern Thelemites.In this episode, our goal is neither worship nor outright condemnation. That would be far too easy. My hope is listeners will leave with a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the influence Crowley had on the spiritual underground and the mainstream that followed. By the end, you’ll see why his work keeps resurfacing and why his name still divides people to this day.Many people encounter Crowley’s name early in their spiritual search and either run from him or romanticize him. This episode aims to gives you what I wanted for myself at the start of my own journey with inner work: the tools to read Crowley critically, take what resonates, and leave the rest.UNLOCK BONUS EPISODES, VOICE NOTES & THE FULL ARCHIVEJoin the BFTB Patreon community and become a Premium Submarine, where you’ll unlock hundreds of hours of paywalled content I’ve been building since 2021.⟁ Visit backfromtheborderline.com for free resources, updates, and everything else I offer.⟁ Or go straight to patreon.com/backfromtheborderline to join now.Once you’re in, you’ll get a private feed you can add to Spotify, Apple, or your favorite podcast app, so you can listen to every episode I’ve ever released, all in one place. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
I don’t want to talk to your personality; I want to talk to your soul. Imagine if your most painful and debilitating mental health symptoms and self-sabotaging behaviors aren’t evidence of 'disorder' or 'dysfunction', but adaptive strategies that once kept you safe. My goal is to help you shift from asking ‘What’s wrong with me?’ to ‘What happened to me?’The word ‘borderline’ in this podcast has nothing to do with psychiatric labels. It has everything to do with coming back from the inner psychological brink we all experience. Everyone has found themselves on the edge, in that liminal space where the old self falls apart and the new Self emerges. Here, we explore what it means to undergo true emotional alchemy: that ancient and primordial process of falling apart, confronting the underworld of our psyche, and falling back together into someone stronger, wiser, and more whole.Many highly sensitive people who identify with the seemingly never-ending list of diagnostic mental health labels contained within ‘the bible of psychiatry’ (the DSM) share the same underlying sense of being irreparably broken, disconnected from their intuition, and paralyzed by life’s existential questions. I believe the resulting—and perfectly understandable—chronic feelings of emptiness and spiritual starvation are the TRUE causes of our current collective ‘mental health crisis.’Together, we’ll dive into depth psychology, mythology, human consciousness, critical psychiatry, and the impact of trauma to help you begin the process of emotional alchemy. This exploration will help you get to the root cause of your suffering and free yourself from the toxic shame, limiting beliefs, and mental programming that have kept you locked in the chains of your past.In an era where mental health and spirituality are too often commercialized, I’m not here as a guru with a quick fix to sell you. I don’t believe anyone is ever truly ‘healed’ or ‘cured.’ There is no return to some mythical state of pre-trauma purity, but rather a continuous spiral of unbecoming, unlearning, and transformation. As a fellow seeker, I will be there in your ear, walking alongside you on your path toward wholeness as a sort of parasocial big sister. That, I can promise.By integrating the concepts we explore together, you’ll begin to see that anyone—even you—can come back from the borderline.CRAVING MORE? Visit backfromtheborderline.com to dive into my universe, connect with me, access my Patreon, and discover more about my journey and work. Don’t forget to follow Back from the Borderline so new episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays automatically drop into your podcast feed. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
México