How can you rewrite your thoughts with meditation? Why should you meditate on a loving God to bring positive change to your outlook on life? Can you create a thriving “thought garden” by meditating on the love from God?
In this podcast episode, Dawn Gabriel speaks with Bo Stern-Brady about neurotheology and how to use meditation in your faith.
Meet Bo Stern-Brady
Bo Stern-Brady is a speaker, writer and the co-founder of Soulspace – an innovative meditation app that helps anchor runaway thoughts to the love of God.
She is the author of three books that focus on growth-through-suffering, a message developed and refined during her husband’s four-year battle with ALS. Her story and writing have been featured in countless publications worldwide, including Huffington Post, Focus on the Family and NBC News.
Visit Bo Stern-Brady’s website and find out more about Soulspace on Facebook and Instagram.
IN THIS PODCAST:
- Rewrite your thoughts with meditation
- Meditation in religion
- Create your mind garden
Rewrite your thoughts with meditation
It’s [been] a wonderful journey to figure out how to address this issue and address the neuropathways that form these immediate thoughts that take over our lives and steal our shalom. (Bo Stern Brady)
Shalom is the knowledge that nothing within you is missing, and that nothing within you is broken. You are whole and cared for in this moment.
Meditation is a tool that you can use to sit with your thoughts, learn about them, and learn how to challenge and rewrite them so that you do not live in a continual state of reaction and reactivity.
By maintaining a sense of control and self-awareness by harnessing the power of your thoughts, you can remain connected to your shalom and to your inner peace.
It wasn’t until I [entered] more meditative and experiential places with God that my anxiety started to shift … I feel like your app has been one of those places that mixes an almost physical way of experiencing God. (Dawn Gabriel)
Meditation in religion
Meditation has existed for a long time, both within religion and outside of it.
Forms of prayer can be seen as types of meditation, practicing gratitude, and being present with yourself and with God.
I believe that as we confess we are healed, and so I love the idea of these ancient practices … to visualize the love of God in a specific way … I think these are practices that are very helpful in interrupting toxic thought patterns that we let run away with us, and bring the Holy Spirit into new places in the galaxy of our minds. (Bo Stern-Brady)
Create your mind garden
Visualize God’s love as nourishing you and your thought “garden”.
Renovate your mind, notice what you want to change, and then make positive shifts in your mindset through meditation and mindfulness with the love of God. If you notice a thought, a weed, then pull it out and plant something new.
Nope, not in my garden … I have work to do here, I acknowledge that, but this is not shame. This garden is life-giving and even if it looks dead right now, I know there [are] seeds underneath. There is potential here for food and beauty, and I’m going to work in the garden without shame. (Bo Stern-Brady)
Imagine all your thoughts as plants or flowers of some kind and work in your garden with love instead of with judgment or shame.
Notice what you are telling yourself through your thoughts. Are they true? Are they supportive, even in difficult times?
Connect with me
- Instagram @faithfringes
- Email Dawn@faithfringes.com
- Practice Of The Practice Network
Resources Mentioned And Useful Links:
- BOOK | Bo Stern-Brady – Beautiful Battlefields
- BOOK | Bo Stern-Brady – Ruthless: Knowing the God Who Fights for You
- BOOK | Bo Stern-Brady – When Holidays Hurt: Finding Hidden Hope Amid Pain and Loss
- BOOK | Dallas Willard – Renovation of the Heart: Putting on the Character of Christ
- BOOK | Andrew B. Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman – How God Changes Your Brain: Breakthrough Findings from a Leading Neuroscientist
- BURNOUT IN PERFECTIONISTS AND ENTREPRENEURS with KHARA CROSWAITE BRINDLE | EP 48
- Soul Care Retreats for therapists: runs 23rd to 25th September 2022
- Sign up for my free spiritual reflections email course
- Rate, review, and subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and TuneIn.
Podcast Transcription
[DAWN GABRIEL]
Hi, I’m Dawn Gabriel, your host of Faith Fringes podcast, recording live from Castle Rock, Colorado. I am a licensed professional counselor, owner of a counseling center and a sacred space holder for fellow therapists. This podcast is for those who want to explore more than the traditional norms of the Christian culture. I create intentional space to explore your own spiritual path, a space that allows doubt, questions and curiosity without the judgment or shame, a place to hear another story and dive deeper into how to have a genuine connection with God. For my fellow therapist, listening, I will often pull back the curtain of our layered inner world that comes with our profession. I bring an authentic and experienced way to engage your spiritual journey in order to connect you with your deepest values for true renewal and soul care. But really this podcast is for anyone listening who’s desiring a deeper and genuine connection with God. For those of you wanting to engage your spirituality in new ways, Faith Fringes is for you. Welcome to the podcast.
Bo Stern-Brady is a speaker, writer and the co-founder of Soulspace, an innovative meditation app that helps anchor runaway thoughts to the love of God. She is the author of three books that focus on growth through suffering a message developed in refined during her husband’s four-year battle with ALS. Her story in writing has been featured in countless publications worldwide, including Huffington Post, Focus on the Family and NBC News. Bo believes God is always good, coffee always works and life always wins. She is married to the second love of her life and they split their time between their homes in Bend and Portland, Oregon. Welcome to the podcast Bo.
[BO STERN-BRADY]
Thank you, Dawn. It’s really fun to be with you.
[DAWN]
Yes, I’m so excited because I have used your app Soulspace for a long time now. I feel like it’s been over a year. Oh, probably two years. How long has it been?
[BO STERN-BRADY]
Oh yes, it’s two, about two years. So yes, you’re an early adopter. That’s awesome.
[DAWN]
Yes. I was looking for something that had meditation with a Christian and also Christian combination. But what I was finding out there was really boring Christian ones or just complete secular ones and I really wanted the mix and I feel like your app is perfect.
[BO STERN-BRADY]
Thank you.
[DAWN]
So tell my listeners a little bit, some background of why you created this app and what it means to you.
[BO STERN-BRADY]
Well, I went through a long battle in from 2011-ish to 2015. My husband had ALS and so I was his caregiver through that time and also a pastor, I’ve been a pastor for 20 years. So during that time, everything was stretched. Everything was challenged. It was like every day was a new crisis, a lot of life or death, rescuing him from a literal life or death situations. Then he died in July of ’15 and I had some time to just sort of recoup and refuel and get to know myself and that thing. Then I started dating again 18 months down the road and my life was going really well and things were really good and all of a sudden, I got Vertigo one day, just out of the blue. It tipped some dominoes in my brain that everything, I felt like I was going to die.
It was irrational, but it was so real in my brain. My brain was really running ahead to try to keep me safe and say bad things are happening, put up the, draw the do the, so I launched into this season of anxiety, like nothing I have ever known. I was incapacitated by it for about two months. The people around me are so lovely and wonderful, and they kept nudging me toward to get help. So I went to my doctor and she said, you have sort of lost your mid-range capacity. You have lived in fight or flight for so long that you’ve lost this ability to process regular trouble. Everything’s a crisis. So you need to go back to therapy, which I did, because I had thought I’m doing so good and I feel so good and I’m fine.
So back to therapy to reprocess some of the trauma associated with that battle. You need to try meditating and I’ve always been, I’ve always loved the word and been in it, but meditating was always boring for me and I didn’t enjoy it and my thoughts would run away and then I felt like a failure at it. So I turned to some help with like head space and calm some secular and they did help. They brought immediate, like to the anxiety when I would wake up in the morning and feel like everything was spinning out of control, but I so longed for it to be tied to truth. I so longed for that, not just to bring rest my soul, but like security and this steadfast, my thoughts are anchored to something.
I just put in the back of my mind, I would love it if there was an app out there like that and I started looking at some Christian apps and I felt like they were a little bit more like devotional set to read out loud and I didn’t like them. Then one day out of the blue, somebody sent an email to my work, a pastor at a large church and they had just started coming and they said, “Hey, we’re developing this app called Soulspace. We want to know if you’d like to just brainstorm with us.” I met them for coffee and I just loved them so much and I was so excited about the project that by the end, I was way too busy at the time, but by the end, I’m pretty much begging them if they’ll let me be a part of it.
So I started writing and we just, we took a year of writing meditations and recording them and using them and going, “Nope, not that. Oh, yep, that.” Then what it came down to was almost a meditative formula where we always isolate a thought, identify that thought and then connect it to the truth of the word of God. So I think this idea of anchored thoughts, capturing runaway thoughts, taking every thought captive, I think trying to set that into some sort of five-minute format has been the challenge in my life, but also such joy. It’s been such a fun thing to develop. We just hear from people nearly every day that are struggling with the same exact thing I was struggling with and overwhelmed. Then we launch into a pandemic a couple of months after our launch and everyone’s just stuck at home and stuck inside their own heads. So it’s been really a wonderful journey to figure out how to address this issue and address the neural pathways that form these immediate thoughts that take over our lives and steal our Shalom.
[DAWN]
Yes. For people who don’t know what Shalom is, go ahead and tell them.
[BO STERN-BRADY]
Nothing missing, nothing broken. Shalom is this whole, the holistic care of God that if I live inside this Psalm 139 idea that where could I go from your presence, where could I flee, you know all my thoughts, you know when I sit and stand, you know all these things about me and so I know that I am cared for. I’m not avoiding all trouble and I’m not without these issues that spin my thoughts off, but I am not alone in them. When I find myself in that place, I can ask for help in rewriting neural pathways that want to take me a direction that will lead to my anxiety or fear, or even for some people’s suicidal ideation. There’s all of these, our thoughts are just so powerful. I think that for a long time, I felt either helpless in the shadow of my own thoughts, or I felt like they’re just automatic and they’ll be fine. So when I ran up against a thing I couldn’t handle, I really had to develop a way that worked for me to tack my thoughts to something beyond my own feelings and beyond what’s swirling externally.
[DAWN]
I can tell, I can tell that it’s whoever, before I knew about you and whoever was putting this together, I could tell they were deeply engaged in, they knew anxiety. They also knew God and they knew how to mix them together. And I loved it as a therapist, but also as for personal, because as a therapist, I had struggled with anxiety too. I was like, I’m doing all the coping skills and putting together everything, but it wasn’t until I actually entered into some more meditative and experiential places with God that my anxiety started to shift. I do, I just feel like your app has been one of those places that mixes like this, almost like a physical way of experiencing God as well, because you’re entering in, it’s probably the neuro pathways, but meditation just brings you to the here and now, but there’s this experience, whoever is recording the voice is amazing by the way.
[BO STERN-BRADY]
Yes, she’s phenomenal.
[DAWN]
Her voice, the music, it’s just such a great blend, but the truth is so huge. It’s not in like the cheesy devotional truth that I had experienced on some other apps. It’s like this, it’s real. I love it.
[BO STERN-BRADY]
I think that what we believe about who God is so self evident to us that we rarely question it. My dream as I sit down to write any one of those meditations is how can I gently lead someone to question any misassumptions they have about the character of God? Because if, I mean, the world can be following falling apart, but if I trust Him and I know He can be trusted, it’s going to have an immediate impact on my anxiety level. But if I harbor these secret ideas that maybe. He doesn’t love me or He can’t see me, or He can’t be trusted then all bets are off. What will I depend on then? I mean, government, friends, but merit, what will I depend on if it’s not this thing of, I can count on one thing that is immovable?
[DAWN]
I love that because it is, it’s a deeper wrestling with who do I really believe when nobody’s looking, who do I really believe God is? You have to wrestle with that. Because you’re right, when you are faced with anxiety and sometimes Christians go to shaming, like, well, if I was a better Christian, I wouldn’t be struggling with this. So talk a little bit more about that. How do you get from like, I feel ashamed that I’m not believing enough in God, too. It’s actually okay to question and actually hear some truth to anchor. Talk more about that process.
[BO STERN-BRADY]
I think that’s an interesting thing. That feels to me like the secret idolatry of believers, that I am enough to do this right and perfectly. If I struggle in any area, well, then it’s almost like us framing like God’s expectations are too high of me and I can’t do it. Getting to this place of like, God has no expectations of me, He just loves me right here, sitting in my chair, doing nothing special. Does He have ideas for my life that will be beneficial and better? Sure, but those ideas are not dependent on His love for me. So if I understand that I have nothing to bring to the table, except my heart that says, I need you and I need to be connected to your love, it really does deal with that.
We deal with this a lot in the app, shame is toxic. How do we identify it? How do we get rid of it? It is a big deal. I had to deal a lot with that after my husband’s illness, just reliving some of the things I thought I didn’t do well enough at, I wasn’t good enough at. So you’ll hear in the app, we often talk about establishing a word bullet that we shoot into shame and we say it, whatever it is, every day or every time a thought hits, whenever I have a thought of shame about how I cared for my husband, I say the same word bullet. I cared for my husband imperfectly, but faithfully for 30 years. I made mistakes, but neither he, nor Jesus remembers them.
[DAWN]
Oh, I love it.
[BO STERN-BRADY]
That is just something I shoot, shoot, shoot until it lets go. It has. It’s revolutionized that part of my life and enabled me to be a wife now who is generous with herself. So these kinds of things, the spiritual formation, letting the thoughts of God be formed inside of us, the six dimensions, our thoughts and feelings and decisions and body and soul, and will, no there’s relationships, letting the full dimension of God’s character be formed inside of the full dimension of our human experience to me is our biggest, greatest pursuit. There’s just no shortcuts. It’s not in a 30-minute sermon every week. It’s not in the perfect Bible study. It’s every day, thought by thought, experience by experience, partnering with the holy spirit to say, change my thinking and make me more like you.
[DAWN]
It’s more, what I’m hearing it’s more of a practice, not just, yes, I’m going to try it and see if this works. It’s like a training.
[BO STERN-BRADY]
Even, I think the church has abdicated the idea, both of meditation and confession as spiritual practices, both of which are highly emphasized in the New Testament, as these are essential for your growth and your health. And meditation can be both. As we launch into this idea of I’m examining my own heart to look for traces of shame or of pride, or of places where I’m not generous with the world or places where I have anger that bruise in there, it’s like a form of meditating and confessing what isn’t true of God inside of my life. Then it’s also something that you can take out and say, Hey, I want to just, I want to talk to you Dawn about this and say, I realized this is in my heart and I’m confessing it to you because I believe that as we confess, we are healed. So I just love this idea of these ancient practices, Lectio Divina and Visio Divina. These things will often in the app will, will visualize the love of God in a certain specific way, like a fire by a, under a starry night sky. I think these are practices that are really helpful in interrupting so many toxic thought patterns that we’ve just let run away with us and bringing the holy spirit into new places and the whole galaxy of our minds.
[DAWN]
I know the word pictures are so powerful because it takes you out of that one part of your brain and puts you into this creative experiential part. I feel like it’s so powerful. I mean, usually it’s funny as a therapist, we look at cognitive behavioral therapy has been around forever and it’s your thoughts affect your feelings, which affect your actions. But I feel like there was always a missing part. That was like the sensation, the body awareness of it. So I do think that the creative analogies or the, I’ve never heard it called Visio Divina. I’ve heard of Lectio Divina and I use that, but the Visio, I guess I do Visio Divina and don’t realize it. That’s what it’s called.
[BO STERN-BRADY]
Yes, and it’s been so powerful for me even like it, when I look at my soul as a garden and I overhear this whole garden of regrets. And it enables us to slip past some of our firmly held objections that want to keep us safe from, from things we’re not ready to deal with and if we can see it another way, I think so often we see God in another better truer way.
[DAWN]
Can tell me more about that. That sounds delightful.
[BO STERN-BRADY]
Well, that’s been a big thing for me. I’ve been really attached this year to Dallas Willard’s renovation of the heart and this whole like renovating the place inside of you. For me metaphors are so powerful and important. So that was the metaphor that I chose for myself, was my soul is a garden and I have all of these places growing, orchards or places. When I look at the garden and I pray in the morning and I take a look at it and say, how is the garden, what’s going on in these places where there’s just this shriveled up plant that hasn’t gotten the stuff it needed? Where’s my marriage in this and where are my relationships in this? How are my feelings in this?
Like I said, there’s always this place, that garden of regrets, if I would’ve, I could have, I should have, and what fruit could be there if I were willing to reimagine what those regrets have sewn into my life in terms of what I learned, the beauty that came in spite of my mistake, the way God forgave me. It’s just this lovely idea of being in a garden instead of picturing myself in a cemetery. It’s a whole different idea. God just says, oh, this part of your garden could be life giving, even though it’s not planted with the seeds that you wanted. So yes, just really visualizing His love in a real way, in a creative way. Especially in a way has been really important for me in spiritual development.
[DAWN]
Hi there. It’s me, Dawn. I just wanted to take a moment and say that if you’ve been listening to something today and you feel maybe nudge to go deeper into your faith journey, I offer a free eight-week email course called Spiritual Reflections. I promise it’s only one email a week. It’s a short exercise and a short email and included is a journaling workbook that has guided exercises that will help you explore more of what you were brought up to believe. Even if you’ve been disillusioned or hurt on your faith journey yet still deep down, you’re desiring to authentically connect with God and you can feel that then this course is for you. Just go to faithfringes.com to sign up for your free spiritual reflections course today.
[DAWN]
Another thing I noticed Bo, when you were talking about it, it’s almost like it took your thoughts out from your head and it made it more objective by putting out in front as a garden. So you didn’t have to, like, you don’t have to attach shame to a flower or a plant that’s withered. It gets it away from the personalization that we run so quickly in our head. I think the enemy loves that when we can, that’s what shame does, it keeps us stuck in our thoughts, our negative cycle but yes, garden sounds so inviting. I can look at that and it takes the shame away, honestly. It helps you just objectively say, oh, well, it’s a flower that I need to grow or water. It’s not, —
[BO STERN-BRADY]
Yes, there’s work in a garden. You still have to cultivate, but there’s also so much rest there. There’s so much rest in peace. When we travel inside and, I don’t want to use language that makes this off putting to people, but when you travel inside and look at the landscape of your soul, it ought to feel, you ought to find peace because we are connected to the prince of peace. He’s made of peace. His name is peace. So there should be peace there. Or we know there’s sort of an interloper in that. There’s a something going on there that we need to say, okay, nope, not in my garden. Nope, you don’t get to belong here. I have work to do here. I acknowledge that, but I don’t, this isn’t, it’s not a shame. This garden is life giving. Even if it looks all dead right now I know there’s seed underneath. So there’s so much potential here for food and for beauty and I’m going to work the garden without shame.
[DAWN]
I think when you were talking about that, I was thinking, and yes, sometimes some of our listeners, or even us personally have had like a hurricane come through or tornado come through. Like you were sharing with your husband’s ALS, that’s a trauma that definitely changes the landscape of the garden. So it’s not, there is going to be a time where it is harder and it does break through the neuro pathways. It sounds like you’ve researched that. Can you say more about like, what happens with neuro pathways when there is a trauma and how do you get through that? How does meditation help that?
[BO STERN-BRADY]
So just a quick story, right after I got married the second time in July of ’19 my husband and I split our time between Bend and Beaverton. So we’re about three hours apart and we’re mostly live in one place together, but I work in Bend one weekend, a month. So I was in Bend and I texted him in the morning in Beaverton. He didn’t text back right away, which isn’t normal for him. So about 10 minutes in, I felt it land. I felt this and I picture it like an orange balloon coming down from the sky and the balloon says your husband is dead. I know that’s ridiculous. In my rational brain I know that’s ridiculous, but in my world, husbands die.
I mean, I speak at women’s conferences all the time. I can’t tell you how many women have lost two husbands. It’s possible. So that was very real. You could say that wasn’t truth, that he was dead, but I didn’t know if that was truth or not. So I’ve learned that in that moment, that’s my brain running ahead, wanting to keep me safe. You’ve been here before, you know what this looks like, you know what this feels like, you need to keep yourself safe. I know that as that balloon drops, I have this choice of whether to pop it up, pop it up, pop it up, keep it in the air, keep stewing in it, keep worrying about it, keep whatever, or I can let that balloon drop. This is what I did because I’ve been in this long enough now.
I sit down and say, Jesus, I think that my husband has died. I know while that’s probably not true, it’s just as real in my body right now as if it was true. So what I need right now is a prevailing truth. I don’t need to know that he’s alive. I need a prevailing truth and right away, the thought drops. I am safe in the love of God, no matter what, just no matter what. This is where I’m safe. This is where I find my safety. I just sat and did deep breathing and connected my thoughts over and over again to that truth. That’s the prevailing truth. That’s the prevailing truth until I could calm again and find out that my husband was alive, which is good.
That’s a neural pathway in my brain that is always going to be the worst news. There’s no mid-size bad news. There’s only the worst bad news. So I’m just learning to retrain my thinking in that. I’m learning to reroute the neural pathway, because neural pathways are such a gift that I didn’t have to get up and figure out how to walk this morning. My brain has made a shortcut for me, but they are not a gift because I mean, when they are a shortcut that leads you to the wrong thinking time and time again, I’m not enough, I’m ashamed of who I am, I’m not gifted, I will never be loved, all of those things that have formed in our brain sometimes from early on. Psalm 139 says my thoughts from a far off. I’m so fascinated with that God knows all the pathway my thoughts have traveled to get here, to figure out, to go through experience and time and all of these things that create this automatic thought, my husband is dead. So he saw that thought from 2010, come into 2019 and knew the whole pathway of it and knew the way to fight it and establish truth and peace.
[DAWN]
Wow, I love that. What was that? Psalm 139, you said?
[BO STERN-BRADY]
Psalm 139.
[DAWN]
Haven’t thought of it that way before, but I love that because it’s so true, like who else knows all the patterns? We probably aren’t even identifying them, especially if we feel trapped in that loop of the negatively but God does know each thought that have led to that, the millions of thoughts and the experiences. I love that because you, what you represented when you were talking is you have choice in there. So many times people forget we have choice to get out, I think because we’re just running and we’re not slowing down to identify what is this loop? What am I really saying to myself? Even people who teach people how to slow their thoughts down, forget to do it. I mean, I forget to do it. So I do think it’s such an important practice to slow down, meditate, really get in there and see like, what am I really telling myself and is it true? It might be, but it might not.
[BO STERN-BRADY]
Mine’s the biggest thing. It’s the biggest thing. It’s such a, maybe punch drunk word right now. It’s overused and it’s used in ways that Christians don’t appreciate. So we like to just shelve it on the corner, but it is so important I think. Honestly I think Psalm 139 is filled with neural pathway stuff. It’s filled with it and it’s so fascinating to me like before a word is on my tongue you know it all together. Again you know the pathway it traveled to get to my mouth. It’s come through a lot of things. So it just reestablishes for me there, I don’t have to be in charge of this. If I keep going to Jesus, He knows the in and out of me so well and if I attach to that, it cuts off a lot of the work of trying to muscle my way through saying, don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid, don’t be anxious, don’t be anxious. That is the most counterproductive thing.
[DAWN]
Don’t think of the white elephant. Don’t look, don’t think about an elephant. I love that. It’s also, I think allowing people to just settle in to God is love. So many times some people have been brought up where it’s, at least I have been brought up a little more conservative, a little more strict and it was not this like loving relationship. It was more of a judging relationship with God. I think grounding on truth, when I sit with people and say, well, where actually are you finding that truth? Where is that truth? They realize, oh, this is not a truth. This is a false belief I’ve been holding onto as truth. I love that you ground it back into the scriptures. Would you say though, that people who maybe aren’t Christian, how do they respond to your, the Soulspace app? Do you find that they still are enjoying it as well?
[BO STERN-BRADY]
I don’t have much data on that actually. I’m not at the helm of the tech part of it. So they send me reviews they think I want to see, that they think I’ll like to see. We have had a couple that I’ve seen of people of like this isn’t really my belief system, but I like, especially people just really like Jamie’s voice.
[DAWN]
It’s so true. She’s awesome.
[BO STERN-BRADY]
So, I mean, it would be great in my mind. I would feel so fulfilled if there were people who don’t know God who are willing to still say, I want to attach my thoughts to something that doesn’t shake. But yes, I can’t, I don’t know what the statistics would be on that.
[DAWN]
No, I was just curious. If people want to get to Soulspace app, it’s on any platform, but I noticed that you guys added like a group subscription. Can you tell me a little bit more about how people can get ahold of it and what different offerings?
[BO STERN-BRADY]
So soulspace.co (not dot.com) is our website. There’s lots of different things on there we have. We have a really quite robust free subscription that I’m really proud of because it’s always free and there’s not a secret paywall there. So you can do a daily meditation every single day with us. We’ve got kids stories and nighttime stories and lullabies and nighttime blessings for sleep and just lots of, I feel like I’m definitely missing some things. Oh, the Bible in a hundred days, going through this story of God in a hundred days, which we’ve loved and that’s been so popular. Then yes, there’s some group subscriptions. I’m not sure what they’re running right now. I think we’re also the most affordable app out there.
[DAWN]
I purchased the year subscription. It was not bad at all, totally worth it.
[BO STERN-BRADY]
Yes. I think we’re somewhere around 19 bucks on the year. So it’s just been really popular and fun to see it grow and see people love it. Small groups gather around it and people, you know, we have some courses on the app. In fact, I wrote a course about navigating the loss of a spouse out of my own experience. That’s really dear to my heart. So yes, that’s where to find it and always shoot us feedback because we are a startup, we are in development. We are just a scrappy little team of about seven people right now and so we are really always looking for how does it help? Especially with therapists, we want to know how do we help make this a useful tool for you? How do we make it the most useful for you to get it in to the hands of people who are trapped inside their own thinking?
[DAWN]
Yes, I love it. I recommend it to my clients. I don’t see clients anymore recently, but I have a team of therapists I work with and they, I actually do the meditations for our team meetings. Especially if I’m running behind and haven’t prepared one, I’ll be like, oh, let’s do Soulspace. But yes, so I encourage them to share that with clients, I think yes, I would love to, and maybe we can talk off air. I’d love to put a link on my website and then we can share that with clients, maybe we offer a group rate for them. But yes, I think just allowing clients to know, like this really helps, explaining what you just explained on here, the neuro pathways and anxiety. I mean, you do use so many words in there that I think would totally correlate with therapy.
[BO STERN-BRADY]
We really tried to work hard to blend science and scripture. We don’t feel like it’s either or. We really feel strongly, like so much work has been done in the area of meditation, helping to work inside the destructive neural pathways in our lives. So like, I’m a huge fan of many of the leading thinkers that way. I think the field of neuro theology is really exciting and up and coming, and I’m just excited to see where we go with that as people who want to become more like Jesus.
[DAWN]
I haven’t heard that. It’s called neurotheology.
[BO STERN-BRADY]
Yes. I follow Andrew, I think it’s Andrew Newberg. His book is Your Brain on God, the study that says 12 minutes of meditation every day on a loving God changes the plasticity of the brain.
[DAWN]
Okay. Wow.
[BO STERN-BRADY]
But it has to be meditation on a loving God. So in order to get there, sometimes we have to do some unlearning. Otherwise our thoughts go immediately to the abusive father or the drunk dad or the? So that’s our goal in Soulspace, to help people unwind some of the deception that comes in so easy and early and attached to a real view of a loving God.
[DAWN]
I love that. I wonder, I haven’t looked at all your courses. I do more the daily meditations, but I work a lot with people with the religious trauma or religious abuse. I wonder if a course on that, like working would help. Just a thought. You’d be the person to write that. I think you’re hired.
[BO STERN-BRADY]
That’s brilliant. That’s a great idea.
[DAWN]
Because I see that a lot and my listeners, I’ve done quite a few episodes on that, but, well, I have so enjoyed our time today, Bo. Thank you so much. Anything else you want to say to listeners or to therapists? A lot of therapists listen to my podcast, too. Anything you’d like to say to them?
[BO STERN-BRADY]
Oh gosh, just thank you. You’re so important in the body of Christ. I mean, from a pastor to a therapist, I just want to thank you for being just the people that we can send people to for real true help. It just matters so much what you’re doing and we’re just so grateful.
[DAWN]
Well, thank you for your amazing tool to help with that. I appreciate your time and your story and just your honesty and how it’s impacted your life. I think it’s really special to hear the story behind it.
[BO STERN-BRADY]
Thanks, Dawn. It was so fun to be with you.
[DAWN]
Thank you for listening today to the Faith Fringes podcast. For those of you wanting to take a deeper dive into your own faith journey, you can grab my free email course, Spiritual Reflections on my website, faithfringes.com. If you’re a therapist and would want to work with me, I offer sacred space holding for you through my consulting, as well as my soul care retreats. To find out more, go to my website or email me at dawn@faithfringes.com.
I love hearing from all my listeners. Drop me an email to tell me what’s on your mind. You can also connect with me on social media. I’m on Facebook and Instagram at Faith Fringes. As always, if you’re enjoying this podcast, I would love it if you could show it by your reviews. Go to Apple Podcasts and leave your review so that others can find this podcast and get curious about their own spiritual journey. Thanks again for listening.
Faith Fringes is part of the Practice of the Practice network, a network of podcasts seeking to help you market and grow your business and yourself. To hear other podcasts like Faith in Practice, Beta Male Revolution, Empowered and Unapologetic or Impact Driven Leader, go to the website, www.practiceofthepractice.com/network.
[DAWN]
This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regards to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or any other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.