Show Notes

LISTEN NOW Molly Baskette has spent decades helping progressive churches come alive. A longtime UCC minister, preacher, author of Real Good Church, and self-described transformation junkie, Molly has recently made a major vocational turn: leaving parish ministry and stepping into work as a psychedelically assisted spiritual care provider. That's plenty to talk about right there! But we also discuss calling, burn out, and leaving church well: not in bitterness or collapse, but

LISTEN NOW Documentary filmmaker Haydn Reiss joins us to talk about Robert Bly, poetry, translation, longing, grief, and the mysterious art of finding the right words for what the soul knows. We explore Bly’s cultural impact, his gift for speaking to the hunger of men, the strange alchemy poetry can work in a life, and what it means to preserve voices that still have the power to change us. Along the way, we also discuss William Stafford, Rumi, Coleman Barks, and why poetry m

LISTEN NOW What does it mean to live in relationship with our dead? In our episode “Speaking with the Dead,” we discussed Michael’s recent contact with his deceased best childhood friend. We knew we needed someone with real experience and insight to help us think through the meaning of that encounter, so we called on Perdita Finn . You may remember Perdita from our episode “Portal to the Great Mother,” where she and her husband Clark Strand joined us to talk about their rosar

LISTEN NOW In part two of our conversation with feminist theologian and bestselling author Meggan Watterson, we explore the radical story of Thecla from the Acts of Paul and Thecla . Refusing the roles assigned to her by society, Thecla claims her own spiritual authority by baptizing herself in the arena designed for her death. Tied to our exploration of Thecla is a conversation about love as the deepest spiritual power: not love as sentiment or romance, but love as force tha

LISTEN NOW Feminist theologian and best-selling author Meggan Watterson joins us for a crackling conversation about the Gospel of Mary , the "apocryphal" Christian text that gives voice to Mary Magdalene’s spiritual authority and visionary insight. In this episode, Meggan shares the moment she first encountered Mary’s words, “I will teach you about what is hidden from you,” and the profound experience of direct contact that convinced her this overlooked gospel has the power t

LISTEN NOW On the anniversary of a friend’s death, a simple ritual—a candle, a glass of tequila, a cigarette, and Pink Floyd's One of My Turns —becomes something neither of us can easily explain. In this episode, we're sharing direct experiences of communicating with loved ones who have died. We can't prove anything, but we will discuss what it means when the contact feels real—when grief opens up into presence, when imagination is more than fantasy, when the boundary between

LISTEN NOW In this episode of The Gospel of Direct Experience , we’re joined by Matt Cardin , acclaimed writer of cosmic horror and author of the new book Writing at the Wellspring: Tapping the Source of Your Inner Genius . What unfolds isn't just a discussion of creativity; it's also an initiation into darkness—darkness as terror and generative source and spiritual/cultural necessity. Matt reframes the "demon muse" or "genius" not as a benevolent guide from beyond but as a

LISTEN NOW What if the rosary is not a relic of patriarchal religion, but an ancient spiritual technology—older than Christianity itself—designed to open a living relationship with the Sacred Mother? In this episode we're joined by Clark Strand and Perdita Finn , founders of The Way of the Rose and co-authors of the book by the same name, for a deeply embodied conversation about the rosary as a portal: tactile, erotic, ecological, and alive. Drawing on paleolithic bead tradi

LISTEN NOW In this episode, we finally discuss the new documentary The Age of Disclosure and what it suggests about UFOs, government secrecy, and the possibility of non-human intelligence. Already convinced of the reality of UFOs, your hosts explore the deeper challenges of disclosure itself: psychological operations, selective truth-telling, and the difficulty of knowing what to trust when intelligence agencies are shaping the narrative. We discuss why so many credible insi

LISTEN NOW What if Christianity began not as a set of doctrines to believe, but as a mystery school—an initiatory path meant to awaken direct experience of the divine? In this episode, Jeff and Michael trace the ancient roots of the Christian story through the lost mystery traditions of the ancient world. From the Eleusinian rites to the “dying before you die” experience, they explore how Jesus may have carried forward an older, hidden stream of spiritual practice—and what it

LISTEN NOW Jeff and Michael sit down with Victoria Loorz , author of Church of the Wild , founder of the Center for Wild Spirituality , and co-founder of the Wild Church Network , for a conversation about finding the sacred beyond church walls. They talk about the experience of hearing God beneath an oak tree, encounters with owls and vultures, and why wilderness has always been the place where spiritual transformation begins. Together they explore what it means to face ecolo

LISTEN NOW Psychedelics are often framed today as medicines for trauma and therapy—but what if they are something more? In this episode, we sit down with Justin Levy , founder of Spirit House in Portland , Oregon, to explore psychedelics as a path of devotion, surrender, and cultural rebirth. Justin shares his journey from early rave experiences to work with kundalini, capoeira, and ayahuasca, and how these threads wove together into a living spiritual practice. Together we a

LISTEN NOW In this episode, Michael finally shares the wild story he’s been holding back for decades: the day in 2006 when he slipped from a meditation session in his Queens apartment back through time—waking up in his 15-year-old body in 1990. Was it something like a dream, an out-of-body journey, or actual time travel? Jeff and Michael follow the thread from memory and synchronicity into questions of how we experience time itself—linear, cyclical, radial, and kairos . Episo

LISTEN NOW In this episode, we speak with Nicholas Collura—a board-certified chaplain, spiritual director, and Enneagram teacher—about...

LISTEN NOW In this episode, we explore The City & the City by China Miéville as a powerful metaphor for cognitive blind spots, social...

LISTEN NOW What is spiritual direction, really? In this episode, Jeff and Michael explore the practice not as a professional technique or...

LISTEN NOW Welcome to our very first live AMA episode—unscripted and full of spirit. Listeners showed up with real questions about...

LISTEN NOW In this powerful and personal episode, we sit down with Emma Mcilroy—queer feminist, immigrant, entrepreneur, and CEO of...

LISTEN NOW What if the path to salvation isn’t belief—but integration? Building off our last episode, Jeff and Michael unpack a...

LISTEN NOW What if the spiritual texts we grew up with only told part of the story? In this episode, Jeff and Michael explore the...