What is The Unfolding?

This is a place for people who are spiritual, perceptive, and who care deeply about the future of humanity and the earth. People who are tired of endless polarization and simplistic answers and looking instead to hold tension, complexity, and nuance in the service of integration and holistic understanding.

We all sense that we are at a crisis point in history, and as many of the structures and beliefs that hold our modern world together are falling apart, we have an opportunity to discover the truths, old and new, that are being revealed, and to cultivate timeless wisdom. 

Weaving together history, ancient wisdom, cultural analysis, and personal reflection, I’m seeking to shed light on how we’ve arrived at this moment in our evolution and find practical insight for moving forward. 

Who is Rebekah Berndt?

I’m a writer, spiritual director/coach, critical care nurse, and recovering activist. While I’m rooted in my natal Christianity, I have an interspiritual orientation and a particular interest in contemplative traditions, esotericism and Western occultism. 

I grew up in charismatic evangelical Christianity and later became an Episcopalian. I’ve spent a lot of time in meditation groups, learning energy healing, and practicing magic. I’m always looking for the intersections and integration between animism and theism, paganism and Christianity. My primary spiritual practices these days are meditation and praying the rosary. I also love a good high-church liturgy and occasionally cast spells.

A lot of my early adulthood was spent deprogramming myself from fundamentalist Christian dogma— fear of going to hell, sexist beliefs about women, and sexual puritanism, to name a few. Later, I became a hardcore lefty activist, until I burnt out. I’m now in the process of deprogramming myself from a lot of social justice dogma, and the parallels are uncanny.

I would still consider myself broadly on the left, but these days I’m much more curious and interested in learning from a variety of perspectives: right, left, orthodox, heterodox, traditional, and progressive.

What can I expect?

• Essays examining current events, cultural trends, and religion from a spiritual and historical perspective

• You Do Not Have To Be Good, a spiritual advice column published twice a month

• Twice monthly podcasts where I interview some of my favorite friends and thinkers on spirituality and our planetary unfolding

I’m not yet paywalling any of my content, and I will always have a robust free option, but please consider a paid subscription to support my writing, and be part of developing subscriber-only features as they evolve.