We live in bodies that don’t know how to rest. Even when the room is quiet, our nerves stay braced for impact. Always ready to defend, explain, and perform to survive. Most of us try to convince ourselves that this is just “our personality,” but it’s not. It’s conditioning. We will explore exactly how trauma, technology, and centuries of inherited fear have made stillness feel deeply unsafe, and how spiritual seekers often mistake this for individual resistance or failure of some kind.

Through the lenses of Celtic mysticism, Jungian psychology, and shamanic initiation, we’ll explore what it means to truly cross the threshold guarded by fear. Why does peace feel threatening to so many of us? Why do our bodies panic at the moment the soul begins to open itself to the numinous? We’ll look at ancestral hypervigilance as both a survival code and a forgotten initiation. This is the descent into the hidden architecture of safety, the underworld gate every meditator and mystic eventually meets and must cross.

The second half of the episode moves through the return process – how to re-establish safety inside your psyche, what it means to rediscover the “inner homeland,” and how rest itself becomes a revolutionary act. For anyone who’s done years of inner work yet still can’t relax, this conversation offers a map for you that will (hopefully) allow you to begin to turn fear into a guide, and to remember what it feels like to be safe in your own soul, maybe for the first time in your life.

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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.

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.

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