Top 10 Episodes - #1! How The Enneagram Informs Us In Crisis

We are at #1! How the Enneagram Informs Us In Crisis is our most listened to podcast over the past 5 seasons - and what a fabulous episode. I re-listened to it last week and plan on listening again this week - it is so helpful!

This episode was actually our first “Pandemic” podcast, airing on March 27, 2020. We decided to create two podcasts a week while we were all quarantined at home, and for me it was a welcome distraction from the news and heartache around the world.

We will be on a short break after this week - planning and preparing for Season 6! This summer was a much needed respite for all of us. Spending time with family, lunch and lovely conversations with friends, swimming! (a personal favorite), and lots of time in the outdoors - it was nice to experience summer again. I pray you have been enjoying this summer as well and taking time to slow down, breathe, and enjoy God’s beauty.

I have been a bit reflective while looking back at our 5 seasons and looking forward to Season 6. There is so much to be thankful for: God leading me to Potter’s Inn; the many incredible guests who have been willing to join us in the conversation; the lovely friends that have been made; the people who have learned the importance of soul care; and of course for you, our Patrons.

Because of you and your support, we have had over 144,000 downloads from 137 countries! Just imagine, all over the world there are people learning how important it is to take care of their soul and learning that they are BELOVED by God.

We get comments from listeners all the time, but one in particular really touched us last year:

“Thank you so much for your podcast and care for souls. As someone who has had a major transition this past year from pastoring to becoming a Mental Health worker, this year has been challenging. Your podcasts are very Spirit driven and are helping ground me. Your podcast on being the beloved really helped me combat the feeling of not being enough. Thank you. Keep up the great work.”

You make this all possible - we really can’t thank you enough for your belief in us and our mission!

Excited and grateful,

Pam

________________________________________________________

 
#1-Summer-Banner-lion.jpg
 

SHOW NOTES

Important Information Regarding This Particular Podcast:  We do not consider this podcast to be an introduction to the Enneagram. We assume in the podcast that the listener will have some orientation and understanding of the Enneagram. We have listed some books and a previous podcast below for you as resources to discover more about the Enneagram.

—————————

In these days of global crisis, we felt it was imperative for us to have a conversation with seasoned experts and trusted authors, Doug and Adele Calhoun on how the Enneagram helps us understand how each of us react differently under stress, fear and the pandemic facing us at the present moment.  

For those of you who have been introduced to the Enneagram and understand your own type and the types of those you love who are around you, this podcast will prove valuable, if not invaluable. See if you don’t agree with us while listening! There is something for every single person in this podcast.

This is a longer than usual podcast, but worth every minute! We added a break in the middle so you can stretch your legs, get a drink of water, or pause it to listen to later.

The Enneagram has been used by Potter’s Inn for over a decade to help each of us understand ourselves. It was the great reformer, John Calvin who wrote in the opening pages of the Institute that “The greatest way to know God is to know ourselves.”

The diagram below shows the Enneagram numbers and their relationship to other numbers and types.

Enneagram diagram.png
Doug-Adele-Oct-2018.jpg

SPECIAL GUESTS DOUG AND ADELE CALHOUN

Adele and Doug Calhoun have served on the pastoral staff of four churches and are currently co-pastors of spiritual formation at Highrock Covenant Church in Arlington, Massachusetts. As certified Enneagram instructors, they enjoy resourcing spiritual leaders and pastors through spiritual direction and teaching the Enneagram.

Adele is the author of Spiritual Disciplines Handbook, Invitations from God, and coauthor of True You. Doug is adjunct faculty at the Transforming Center and at Potter’s Inn Soul Care Institute, and he is board chair of Del Camino Connection.

USEFUL RESOURCES

Moment to Breathe - Prayers for each Enneagram



CONTACT US

podcast@pottersinn.com


INTERESTED IN MORE SOUL CARE RESOURCES?

Check out our recommended reading, books on spiritual growth, and our soul care blog. Want to experience soul care in person? Learn more about our soul care intensives and retreats. 

Top 10 Episodes - #2! Cultivating Daily Shalom: Using The Daily Examen

We are #2 on out top 10 Episodes list!

It really is a great episode, and so very practical. If you have never used the Daily Examen, this will be a great primer for you to get started. We also have a downloadable PDF (in the show notes) that has the 5 Steps listed and briefly explained. Steve goes into more detail in this episode, and I think that is one of the reasons it’s one of our top 10 episodes. It is a practice much needed for the 21st century!

I will admit that I am still getting used to using this helpful tool. When I actually sit down to go thru the 5 steps, I always take more time at #3 (Review your feelings). Not because I have so many more feelings than everyone! But because I have always struggled to recognize and acknowledge those feelings - it is a lifelong struggle.

And that’s what I love about the Daily Examen - it acknowledges that feelings are an important part of our soul. And to imagine this was created 400 years ago! The idea that God can talk to us through our feelings was a revelation to me, and something I had not heard in all my years of attending church. And it has been liberating me in how I view God. I am so thankful that St. Ignatius created it, and so thankful that Steve shares it with us in this podcast.

Feel free to share the Five Steps PDF with your friends and family, and encourage them to listen to the podcast! St. Ignatius’ wisdom is something we can all use.

With love,

Pam

________________________________________________________

 
#2-Summer-Banner-lion.jpg
 

SHOW NOTES

The art of reflecting on our day is almost a lost art in our busy and over-committed life. However, in this week’s podcast, Steve explores an ancient spiritual exercise called The Daily Examen. Steve walks us through five easy steps used to reflect back upon our day, to see where God was in our midst and to foster a heart of gratitude.


RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE PODCAST

CONTACT US

podcast@pottersinn.com

INTERESTED IN MORE SOUL CARE RESOURCES?

Check out our recommended reading, books on spiritual growth, and our soul care blog. Want to experience soul care in person? Learn more about our soul care intensives and retreats. 

Top 10 Episodes - #3! What is a Soul Friendship?

We are on #3 of our Top Ten List! This originally aired in Season 2, and I really love this conversation between Kaylene Derksen and Tara Owens, the founder of Anam Cara Ministries. This episode introduced me to John O’Donohue, a writer that I have grown to love and cherish. If you haven’t read his book “Anam Cara: A Book Of Celtic Wisdom”, I would highly recommend it! This podcast just might pique your interest in learning more about “Anam Cara.”

“One of the tasks of true friendship is to listen compassionately and creatively to the hidden silences. Often secrets are not revealed in words, they lie concealed in the silence between the words or in the depth of what is unsayable between two people.”
— John O'Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

We have just two weeks left of the Top 10 Series. Then we will move on to our 6th season! No official start date for Season 6, but you will be the first to know when it is decided.

I will end with a blessing, which happens to be our Moment to Breathe this week. Another gem from John O’Donohue and his book Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom.

May you be blessed with good friends.
May you learn to be a good friend to yourself.
May you be able to journey to that place in your soul where
there is great love, warmth, feeling, and forgiveness.
May this change you.
May it transfigure that which is negative, distant, or cold in you.
May you be brought in to the real passion, kinship, and affinity of belonging.
May you treasure your friends.
May you be good to them and may you be there for them;
may they bring you all the blessing, challenges, truth,
and light that you need for your journey.
May you never be isolated.
May you always be in the gentle nest of belonging with your anam ċara.

Grateful for you,

Pam

________________________________________________________

 
 

This is WEEK 8 of our summer series The Roaring Summer of ‘21 Series: The Best of the Best! We have gone back thru all 5 of our seasons and come up with 10 episodes that have been our most listened to and will be airing those episodes over the next 10 weeks.

Today is our 3rd most popular podcast, What is a Soul Friendship? Kaylene was joined by Special Guest Tara Owens in the episode.

SHOW NOTES

Today we are talking about friendship. Not just any kind of friendship, but a spiritual, soul friendship. What is a soul friend? (In Gaelic it is known as Anam Cara). And how does it tie in to having a spiritual director? Listen in on this conversation with Kaylene and Tara Owens, founder of Anam Cara Ministry, and learn!

Today’s Guest - Tara Owens

Tara was born in Montreal to British parents who moved to Canada for a better life for their growing family. Canadian by birth and British by blood, she has lived all over the US, and now lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Tara discerned the call to spiritual direction while completing a Master of Theological Studies in Spiritual Formation at Tyndale Seminary in Toronto. She was captured by the incredible privilege it is to companion someone as they discern the voice of the Loving Creator in their lives.

Tara founded Anam Cara Ministries in 2007 as a place of where true soul friendship can be found. ‘Anam Cara’ is an ancient Celtic word meaning ‘soul friend,’ one of the essential qualities of a spiritual director.

RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE PODCAST

Where to find a Spiritual Director:

Moment to Breathe - A Friendship Blessing by John O’Donohue - from his book Anam Cara: A Book Of Celtic Wisdom


CONTACT US

podcast@pottersinn.com

INTERESTED IN MORE SOUL CARE RESOURCES?

Check out our recommended reading, books on spiritual growth, and our soul care blog. Want to experience soul care in person? Learn more about our soul care intensives and retreats. 

Top 10 Episodes - #4! What is Soul Care?

We are on #4 of our Top Ten List. This one is from the very beginning - our 2nd episode! It’s an excellent “primer” on what Soul Care really is and ends with what has become a favorite poem of mine - For One Who Is Exhausted by John O’Donohue, which if you remember was also a poem from last week’s episode. It’s so relatable! And so timely in the days we live in.

The podcast Show Notes (below) mention a few suggested books that have been on my reading list for a while. I just started to read Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander by Thomas Merton, and have been surprised at how relevant his writings are in our world today. Despite being cloistered for over 25 years, he still understands what many of us struggle while being “…in the world.”

“To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender oneself to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. More than that, it is cooperation in violence. It destroys one’s own capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of one’s own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes the work fruitful.”
— Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

This quote reminds me of another book I read a long time ago. At the time I didn’t realize it would be my first introduction to Soul Care. It was called “Let Your Life Speak” by Parker J. Palmer.

I was working in a church at the time and feeling pulled in hundreds of different directions - I was depressed, overwhelmed, and anxious. Then my counselor suggested I read this book, and for the first time I heard about self-care and not needing to be everything to everybody. It was ok for me to say no!

At the time, it felt like I was being so incredibly selfish to not be “doing” church 24x7 (and sadly, I was actually told that very thing as I tried to simplify my life). Yet how simple, and oh so difficult it is, to understand what it means to take care of ourselves… to take care of our SOULS.

“Eventually, I developed my own image of the “befriending” impulse behind my depression. Imagine that from early in my life, a friendly figure, standing a block away, was trying to get my attention by shouting my name, wanting to teach me some hard but healing truths about myself. But I— fearful of what I might hear or arrogantly trying to live without help or simply too busy with my ideas and ego and ethics to bother— ignored the shouts and walked away.

So this figure, still with friendly intent, came closer and shouted more loudly, but I kept walking. Ever closer it came, close enough to tap me on the shoulder, but I walked on. Frustrated by my unresponsiveness, the figure threw stones at my back, then struck me with a stick, still wanting simply to get my attention. But despite the pain, I kept walking away.

Over the years, the befriending intent of this figure never disappeared but became obscured by the frustration caused by my refusal to turn around. Since shouts and taps, stones and sticks had failed to do the trick, there was only one thing left: drop the nuclear bomb called depression on me, not with the intent to kill but as a last-ditch effort to get me to turn and ask the simple question, “What do you want?” When I was finally able to make the turn— and start to absorb and act on the self-knowledge that then became available to me— I began to get well.

The figure calling to me all those years was, I believe, what Thomas Merton calls “true self.” This is not the ego self that wants to inflate us (or deflate us, another from of self-distortion), not the intellectual self that wants to hover above the mess of life in clear but ungrounded ideas, not the ethical self that wants to live by some abstract moral code. It is the self-planted in us by the God who made us in God’s own image— the self that wants nothing more, or less, than for us to be who we were created to be.

True self is true friend. One ignores or rejects such friendship only at one’s peril.”
— Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak

With Gratitude,

Pam

________________________________________________________

 
 

This is WEEK 7 of our summer series The Roaring Summer of ‘21 Series: The Best of the Best! We have gone back thru all 5 of our seasons and come up with 10 episodes that have been our most listened to and will be airing those episodes over the next 10 weeks.

Today is our 4th most popular podcast, and is one of our very first episodes (#2!) - What is Soul Care?

SHOW NOTES

Join co-hosts Steve Smith and Joe Chambers as they give more definition to what soul care is and how it relates to… icebergs and the Brooklyn Bridge? Yup, both of those! Steve shows us the stress caused by living divided lives and lays out the importance of caring for all aspects of the human experience: physical, emotional, relational, vocational, and spiritual.

LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE PODCAST

BOOKS RECOMMENDED


CONTACT US

podcast@pottersinn.com

INTERESTED IN MORE SOUL CARE RESOURCES?

Check out our recommended reading, books on spiritual growth, and our soul care blog. Want to experience soul care in person? Learn more about our soul care intensives and retreats. 

Top 10 Episodes - #5! Soul Care in Exhaustion

Patreon Banner REVISED.jpg

We are on #5 of our Top Ten List, and this episode was recorded smack dab in the middle of the pandemic - August of 2020. It was also our first episode for Season 4 on September 1 - we named the entire season “Soul Care in Anxious Times,” which seemed quite appropriate.

This episode, “Soul Care in Exhaustion” had more downloads in it’s first day than any other episode. It was a quick response from our listeners - I have a feeling they (and you!) understood the feeling of exhaustion that Steve had shared so vulnerably. I know I did.

Steve shares in the podcast how he worked toward recovery (it is also listed below in the Show Notes). And as I re-listened to this episode, I was thinking… “what did I do to recover?”

I love how Steve listed specific actions he took as he worked toward recovery - it helps me center on what I can do in the moment of my exhaustion. What did I do?

  • I swam… A LOT! Water is so calming for me and our YMCA kept the pools open as often as they were allowed.

  • I got involved - I stepped out of my comfort zone and got involved in the election (all from home, of course). That may seem like an odd way to recover, but it helped me focus on the issues at hand for a small portion of my day - then forgot about it for the rest of the day.

  • Spent more time outside - lots of yard work, sitting on the front porch, taking my dog for a walk. All of it helped.

Those are just a few of mine. Now, please share what YOU have done to help in your recovery. Scroll down to the comment section and tell us! I’ll also share a few more of mine down there.

With Gratitude,

Pam

________________________________________________________

 
Summer Banner #5.jpg
 

SHOW NOTES

This week’s episode is Steve sharing his recent struggles with exhaustion… that deep in the heart, soul weary exhaustion that many of us are struggling with now. It’s a beautiful episode that will speak to your heart and soul and help you find the unforced rhythms of grace.

What Steve did to help his recovery

  • Pulled away from the news

    • Let go of newspaper

    • Limited tv news/ads

  • Delete, snooze, and hide toxic people from social media

  • Took off to Blue Ridge Mountains for time away

    • Made a dam at creek - a symbol for the things damned in him that needed to get out

  • Let nature bring healing and rest

    • Put ourselves out in God’s glory – do daily detoxing

  • Read the red letters of Jesus – focused on Jesus and nothing else

MENTIONED IN THE PODCAST