Howl in the Wilderness Podcast
This podcast is a howl in the wilderness of modernity. A call to the renegades, lovers and lone wolves who are working to restore soul in their lives and the world.
Howl in the Wilderness started out as The Medicine Path Podcast with Brian James back in 2018 primarily as a way for me to share conversations with some of the teachers, healers and fellow practitioners I’d met while on my own path of soul recovery.
After a couple of years and a hundred episodes later, it became clear to me that the podcast wanted to be about more than just my personal journey of healing and transformation. While working as yoga therapist and psychedelic integration coach, it was apparent to me that people were suffering from what the shamanic traditions call soul loss, but the events of 2020 brought into stark relief the fact that the culture and world at large were also suffering from a loss of soul, and that this collective soul loss was at the root of much of what the individualistic therapies were attempting to address.
In my own life and practice I had discovered that the depth psychology of Carl Jung and post-Jungians (particularly James Hillman and Thomas Moore), along with the mythopoetic sensibility of Robert Bly, Michael Meade and Martín Prechtel provided me with what had, up until then, been missing in my spiritual and therapeutic explorations thus far. To put it simply, I was missing soul — as not only the connective tissue between mind, body and spirit, but also as a link to the realm of ancestors, myth and imagination.
They say that “every quest begins with a question,” and I now had a couple good ones that still haven’t let go of me, five years and another hundred episodes later. Questions like “What is soul?” “What does it mean to live a soulful life?” and “What is the soul of the world?” aren’t questions to be answered once-and-for-all, but as the poet and spiritual genius Rilke suggested, they are questions to be lived.
This humble project, which has featured conversations with some well-known authors and artists (Thomas Moore, Anne Baring, Stephen Jenkinson, Max Gimblett, Laraaji, Martin Shaw, James Hollis, Michael Meade and Murray Stein to name a few) and many more who might be less well-known but are no less inspiring, has somehow become the number one resource for post-Jungian depth psychology and, despite my resistance to shameless self-promotion, has made its way into the top 2% of “spirituality” and “self help” podcasts.
I’ve been told that some of my interviews are being used in trainings at the Jung Institute in Zurich and at the Pacifica Graduate Institute in California (and probably a few more that I haven’t heard about.) As someone who never got a university degree, this has been both a source of amusement and validation that I must be doing something right.
Somebody once called me the “Gen X Bill Moyers” and I take that as a huge compliment. I’ve always admired his deep curiosity, humility and dedication to exploring the deepest questions of life in service to social justice and restoring (and re-storying) the soul of the world.
I’ve come to see this podcast as a form of soul activism, and am deeply grateful to the hundreds of guests and handful of loyal supporters who have helped sustain this project over the past seven years. I have no idea how much longer it’ll go on, but for now I’ll keep living the questions out loud as long as I hear the call of other lone wolves howling back across the wilderness.
