The Fool's Path

In this episode, I share why I’ve decided to step away from the podcast—at least for now.After five years of meaningful conversations and connections, I’ve been reflecting on the more complicated parts of creating publicly: anonymous feedback, declining ratings, my own sensitivity, and the ways I sometimes shaped my responses to remain in another person’s favor. I also explore my decision to leave social media and my desire to read and think for nourishment rather than continually turning everything into content.This isn’t a judgment of anyone else’s choices, nor is it necessarily a permanent goodbye. It’s an attempt to make more room for my family, my private practice, and whatever creative project might come next.To everyone who has listened, subscribed, shared an episode, or reached out with encouragement: thank you.

In this episode, I’m reflecting on love, polyamory, jealousy, projection, and the strange multiplicity of the human psyche. This is not an episode arguing that polyamory is better than monogamy, or that everyone should rethink their relationship structure. I’m more interested in what polyamory opens up as a psychological image: the idea that we are not always as unified as we pretend to be. We are full of different longings, fears, desires, wounds, and contradictions. I also spend time with jealousy and compersion, and how love can reveal both the most generous and the most possessive parts of us. Ultimately, this episode asks whether love — in whatever form it takes — can help us become more honest, more conscious, and more responsible.

In this episode, I explore Jung’s complicated relationship to monogamy, sexuality, and love. Jung’s own life with Emma Jung and Toni Wolff seems to resemble what we might now call a vee relationship, similar in some ways to the painful arrangement between theologian Karl Barth, his wife Nelly Barth, and Charlotte von Kirschbaum. I also bring in Otto Gross and the provocative idea that conventional monogamy might suffocate the soul — even the troubling claim that a mistress could be necessary for psychic vitality. Rather than romanticizing this, I try to sit with the tension: Jung saw sexuality as something that could become hallowed when expressed through love, but his own life also shows how easily depth, eros, and spiritual language can be used to justify real human harm. This is not an episode offering easy moral conclusions. It is an attempt to think with Jung without worshiping him, to take eros seriously without excusing betrayal, and to ask whether love, once named as sacred, still has to answer to the wounds it leaves behind.

In this episode, I reflect on Hermann Hesse, Carl Jung, psychotherapy, and the double-edged sword of introspection. Drawing from an essay on Hesse and a concern raised by JF Martel on Weird Studies, I explore how the search for authenticity can become either a path toward responsibility or a trail of tears for the people around us. As a Four on the Enneagram, this tension speaks deeply to me: the longing for depth, beauty, and self-understanding is real, but so is the danger of turning inwardness into self-absorption. This is a reflection on shadow, therapy, narcissism, and why true self-knowledge has to return us to love, repair, and responsibility.

In this episode, I reflect on a section from Herman Hesse’s Demian where Emil Sinclair says that Novalis touches him more deeply than almost any other writer, maybe even more than Nietzsche. Since I’ve already known how important Nietzsche was for Hesse, this made me curious about Novalis and his strange, beautiful idea of magical idealism. I explore Novalis as a poet, philosopher, mystic, and thinker of imagination, love, illness, and healing. Rather than treating imagination as an escape from reality, Novalis helps us see imagination as one of the ways reality becomes meaningful and alive. I connect this to Demian, depth psychology, dreams, individuation, and the difficult task of becoming more whole without losing our grip on the world.