From a coffee farm in rural Colombia to the psychoanalytic couch, Macario Giraldo has spent his life listening for the quiet forces that shape a human life: language, loss, desire, and love.

At the age of ten, Macario left his family to join the La Salle Christian Brothers, a Catholic religious order that would become his home for the next twenty-five years. Beneath the structure of faith and vocation, an early sense of separation endured. Over time, it found expression as a desire for something he had long deferred: a family of his own.

A Fulbright scholarship brought Macario to Washington, D.C. It was here that he received a rare dispensation from the Church to leave the brotherhood and encountered psychology and the work of Jacques Lacan, which would shape the rest of his analytic life.

In dialogue with Colette Soler, an analysand of Lacan, as well as clinicians Marianne Goldberger and Hugh Mullan, Macario developed a distinctive approach to group therapy informed by Lacanian psychoanalysis. In his work, he listens not only to what is said, but to what stirs between people: the unconscious processes that emerge in groups, including conflict, desire, identification, and shared symbolic history.

In this episode, we explore:

✦ Cause and triggers

✦ Group therapy as a modern ritual

✦ Lacanian thinking beyond the individual

✦ The fantasy of complete satisfaction

✦ Listening as a psychological practice

✦ The journey to become your own friend

Macario invites us to wonder about the desires that take shape in relation to others, the limits of certainty, and how, over a lifetime, we might learn to live more truthfully with ourselves and with one another

Chapters

0:00:00 Introduction

0:03:21 Picasso and the Desire of Others

0:08:27 Presence, Absence, and the Fort-Da Game

0:15:18 From Coffee Farm to the Christian Brothers

0:18:53 Discovering Jacques Lacan

0:24:49 Jouissance: The Pursuit and Crisis of Desire

0:30:34 The Unexplored Gold Mine of Group Therapy

0:38:34 The Power of Listening

0:41:35 Anxiety is an Index of the Real

0:48:27 Faith after Dogma

0:55:35 The Journey to Become Your Own Friend

0:58:13 Gardens, Love, and Wonder: The Closing Note

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Plants are our ancient teachers, whispering and nudging… if only we’d listen. Dr. Monica Gagliano is an evolutionary ecologist who has turned the green world into something wonderfully surprising. Her research reveals plants that listen, remember, make choices and even teach one another. Some can sense eclipses before they happen. Others communicate in ways we’re only just beginning to catch up with.

In 2008, Monica did something bold: she stepped out of academia and followed her curiosity into the forest, literally. Blending scientific experimentation with Amazonian plant ceremonies and the guidance of shamans, she helped spark the field now known as plant intelligence. Since then, her work has captured imaginations around the world, appearing in The New York Times and the National Geographic.

In this episode, we explore:

✦ Pushing back against the scientific status quo

✦ Letting nature show you what it knows

✦ Welcoming indigenous plant teachings into scientific practice

✦ Paying attention as a joyful act of devotion

Monica invites us into a playful and daring question: what do plants actually know… and what might they be trying to tell us?

Chapters

0:00 Intro: Science, wonder, and pushing boundaries

03:03 Initiation on the Great Barrier Reef

12:53 “Plants rescued the scientist in me”

20:57 Monica’s first experiments with plants

27:10 Bringing empathy into science

32:37 "More-than-human" is a place

37:33 It's the human that needs saving

42:44 Indigenous science and plant communication

50:54 The ancient tree that spoke to her

56:14 Trees synchronize during solar eclipse

01:03:51 Attention is the beginning of devotion

Follow Monica:

Website: https://www.monicagagliano.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_monicagagliano_

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Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/wonderstruck/id1671879661

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Mark Vernon is a former priest turned psychotherapist who has spent the last 30 years exploring one central question: how do we find meaning in a secular age?

After a crisis of faith pulled him away from the Church’s inner sanctum in his youth, Mark turned to Plato and Jung in pursuit of a deeper understanding of purpose, connection, and the soul. Today, his writing bridges ancient philosophy, religion, and modern psychology, a powerful triad he also applies to his work as a therapist.

In this episode, we discuss:

✦ The overwhelm of conflicting meanings and remembering the sacred

✦ The spiritual thread connecting Dante, William Blake, and Jesus

✦ How wonder helps us access the divine

✦ Why psychotherapy is a path for ‘spiritual intelligence’

Mark's work invites us into the depths of wonder and spirituality as a necessity for the soul.

Chapters

0:00 Intro: The modern crisis of meaning

5:08 Psychotherapy and the vertical dimension of life

11:25 The cloud of unknowing and mystical experiences

18:19 Kairos time: Moments of spiritual significance

23:01 William Blake on joy and eternity

27:04 Death as a transcendent and transformative experience

33:08 Early Christianity's deeper mysteries and meanings

40:44 Humility as an expansive spiritual virtue

50:56 Owen Barfield and the evolution of consciousness

57:35 Ontological shocks and transformative experiences

1:02:41 Outro: The importance of sacred experiences

Follow Mark:

Website: https://www.markvernon.com/

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YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@PlatosPodcasts

Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination: https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/awake/

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Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/wonderstruck/id1671879661

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6fS5boWGwYTShddG7SKlVw

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.