Show Notes
Send us Fan Mail Your prayer is distracted. Your mind wanders to your grocery list. And you're quietly wondering if you're doing it wrong. Here's the good news: Teresa of Ávila, the first woman Doctor of the Church, spent twenty years struggling through distracted prayer, and she became the greatest teacher of contemplative prayer the Western mystical tradition has ever produced. In this episode, Nina Hirlaender OFS introduces the real Teresa of Ávila: the charming nun torn between the conven...
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Send us Fan Mail What does God's voice actually sounds like? A thought arrives in prayer, clear and strong, and you can't tell whether it came from God or from your own mind. When the decision matters, that uncertainty can feel daunting, and the fear of getting it wrong can leave you anxious and second-guessing every step. Here's the hopeful part: hearing God's voice is a skill you can learn. In this episode, Nina Hirlaender OFS draws on the ancient wisdom of Anthony of the Desert and I...
Send us Fan Mail Eight hundred years ago this week, St. Francis of Assisi died happily, singing, owning nothing. This year, people stood in line for hours just to see his bones. Why does the world still belong to this barefoot man? In this episode, released during the Church's Jubilee Year of St. Francis marking the 800th anniversary of his death, Nina Hirlaender OFS traces the astonishing legacy of history's most beloved saint: the Canticle of the Creatures that gave Pope Francis's Laudato S...
Send us Fan Mail The old chapter closed. The new one hasn't opened. And the intelligent, productive part of you is getting restless — because it knows how to act and plan and figure things out. It does not know how to wait. In this eighth and final episode of The Soul's Eight Thresholds of Transformation, Nina Hirlaender OFS arrives at Yule — the Winter Solstice, the longest night, and the turning point where darkness reaches its maximum and the light begins, quietly, to return. Through the N...
Send us Fan Mail A flock of birds joined our drum circle inside a sea cave on the Cornish coast. What they unlocked in ten minutes had taken one woman years to carry alone. In this seventh episode of The Soul's Eight Thresholds of Transformation, Nina Hirlaender OFS guides you through Samhain, the Celtic threshold of shadow — the sacred season when the soul stops moving forward and turns inward to meet its own unfinished stories. Through the extraordinary acoustics of Merlin's Cave at Tintage...
Send us Fan Mail There's a version of you that's already over. You can feel it in the quiet dread of playing a role that stopped fitting somewhere along the way. What you haven't done yet is give it a proper ending. In this sixth episode of The Soul's Eight Thresholds of Transformation, Nina Hirlaender OFS takes you inside West Kennet Long Barrow — a 5,000-year-old Neolithic chamber in the English countryside — to explore the Autumn Equinox, the Celtic threshold of release. Through the story ...