Aldea Spiritual Community

Gratitude: The Key To (Almost) Everything | Kathleen Roberts & Guest Panel (5.31.26)

Join Kathleen - plus special guests Arianna & Kris - for a wide ranging conversation that touches upon personal stories and heartfelt examples of the transformative power of gratitude. 

Doing The Work (Part 4): Meeting The Self | Jake Haber

As we conclude our series Doing The Work, we arrive at a surprising realization: perhaps all of the healing, reflection, emotional awareness, and courageous inner work has not been about becoming someone new — but about uncovering who we truly are underneath it all. This week, we explore the idea of the “Self” through spirituality, mindfulness, and Internal Family Systems (IFS).
 
Quotes:
 
“I am conscious of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another.”— Henry David Thoreau
 
“I contain multitudes.”— Walt Whitman
 
“You are the sky. Everything else—it’s just the weather.”— Pema Chödrön
 
“Feelings come and go like clouds in a windy sky.”— Thích Nhất Hạnh
 
“Thoughts are like passing clouds. Feelings are like passing weather. Neither defines the vastness of what you are.”— Adyashanti
 
“The beauty of the Self is that it is already there. It just gets eclipsed… The Self is in everybody. It can’t be damaged and it knows how to heal… Self is not a part. Self is the essence of who you are…”— Richard Schwartz
 

Doing The Work (Part 3): Triggers & Thorns | Jake Haber

In Part 3 of Doing the Work, we explore the tender places inside us that get activated by triggers, irritation, jealousy, embarrassment, and conflict. Rather than seeing our reactions as failures, this message invites us to treat them as pointers toward deeper self-understanding, healing, and freedom.
 
We look at how childhood wounds and core unconscious beliefs can shape our reactivity, and how awareness creates space between what happens to us and how we respond, leading us down a path of healing and self-discovery.
 
Quotes:
 
“ If you think you are enlightened, go and spend a week with your family.” — Ram Dass
 
“Feelings like disappointment, embarrassment, irritation, resentment, anger, jealousy, and fear… are moments that teach us where it is that we’re holding back.” — Pema Chödrön
 
“Anything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” — Carl Jung
 
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” — Viktor E. Frankl
 
“Avoidance is the best short-term strategy to escape suffering, but the best long-term strategy to guarantee suffering.” — Steven Hayes
 
“The work of mindfulness is not to create a perfect life. It is to help us meet an imperfect life with greater presence and less resistance.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Doing The Work (Part 2): Minding The Body | Jake Haber

In Part 2 of "Doing The Work", we explore a powerful shift: what if real transformation doesn’t primarily happen in the thinking mind, but in the body itself? So much of what we experience - anxiety, grief, fear, love, trauma, and healing - is not just an idea, but something lived and carried in our nervous systems.
 
We dive into the wisdom of the body, the intelligence beneath our reactions, and the invitation to become more present to what is happening within us. Rather than seeing the body and spirit as separate, we look toward integration, wholeness, and learning to trust the deeper intelligence already alive within us. 
 
Quotes:
 
“Healing happens in the body, not in the thinking mind.” — Resmaa Menakem
“You can be fully in charge of your life only if you can acknowledge the reality of your body.” — Bessel van der Kolk
“We are not thinking machines that feel; rather, we are feeling machines that think.” — Antonio Damasio
“You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” — Mary Oliver

Doing The Work (Part 1) | Jake Haber

In this opening message of our series "Doing The Work", we explore the quiet, often invisible work of the spiritual life. So much of our instinct is to look outward—at the world, at others, at what needs fixing. But again and again, the wisdom traditions point us somewhere else: inward.
 
This message is an invitation to shift our orientation—from trying to fix everything around us to tending to what’s happening within us. Because the reality is, the work is already in front of you. It shows up in your everyday life, in your reactions, your relationships, your moments of ease and your moments of difficulty.
 
In taking responsibility for our inner world, we reclaim a sense of power and possibility. And from that place, something deeper begins to emerge—peace, clarity, and a more grounded way of being in the world.
 
This is the work. And you’re already doing it.
 
Quotes:
 
Dalai Lama
"We can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace with ourselves. And that work is quiet, often invisible, but essential"
 
Richard Rohr
"We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking"
 
Ram Dass
"I can do nothing for you but work on myself, you can do nothing for me but work on yourself"
 
Marcus Aurelius
"You have power over your mind—not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength"

Water In The Desert | Jim Burklo

Jim Burklo—pastor, author, and former Senior Associate Dean of Religious and Spiritual Life at USC—joins us to talk about his new book Water In The Desert. In this wide-ranging conversation, he offers new ways of seeing God, love, Jesus, the Bible, and church.
 
Learn more about Jim at https://www.jimburklo.com/

Multidimensional Relationships | Jake, Olivia, Carl, and Marni

Relationships of every kind — from friends to family and everything in between — are essential to a healthy and whole spiritual life. Join us for a unique, podcast-style conversation between four friends as we explore the power of multi-generational relationships, vulnerability, freedom, and safety.
 
Quotes:
 
“It is only in relationship that the self can be revealed—not in isolation.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
 
You must love in such a way that the person you love feels free.” —  Thich Nhat Hanh

Great Big Love | Victor Shamas

On Sunday, April 12th, we connected with our new friend Victor Shamas, who drew from his background in research and psychology to explore the ways quantum physics resonate with a growing sense of connection, love, and oneness in our world. The morning culminated in the introduction of Great Big Love: a new collaborative initiative with Aldea centered around cultivating connection, presence, and shared experience.

Rebirth (Part 3): Easter Sunday | Jake Haber

For Part 3 of our Rebirth series, this Easter Sunday message explores the final movement of the journey: not a return to what was, but a transformation into something entirely new.
 
Across this series, we’ve traced a universal human pattern—Friday as loss, Saturday as the in-between, and Sunday as rebirth. But what we discover on “Sunday” isn’t a restoration of the old life. It’s something unfamiliar, expanded, and often unrecognizable.
 
Through the Easter story, we encounter a profound truth: even resurrection carries scars. Not erased, not hidden—but transformed. What if the hardest parts of your story aren’t obstacles to new life, but essential to it?
 
This message (which includes a heartfelt intro from Roger Pierce) invites us to reflect on our own cycles of death and renewal—personally and collectively—and to consider what it might look like to step into a future that doesn’t simply repeat the past, but transcends it.
 
Quotes:
“Jesus’ wounds were not erased by resurrection; they were transformed. That is the pattern.” — Richard Rohr 
“Resurrection is not a coming back to life as we knew it, but a going forward into a life we have never known.” — Cynthia Bourgeault 
“At the crack of dawn on Sunday, the women came to the tomb carrying the burial spices they had prepared. They found the entrance stone rolled back from the tomb, so they walked in. But once inside, they couldn’t find the body of the Master Jesus. They were puzzled, wondering what to make of this. Then, out of nowhere it seemed, two men, light cascading over them, stood there. The women were awestruck and bowed down in worship. The men said, ‘Why are you looking for the Living One in a cemetery? — Luke 24:1-8
“Faith is a bird that feels the light and sings while the dawn is still dark.” — Rabindranath Tagore
 

Rebirth (Part 2): Holy Saturday | Jake Haber

Part 2 of our Rebirth series explores something we rarely talk about… the in-between.
 
We know endings.
We celebrate new beginnings.
But what about the waiting?
 
In the Easter story, this is Holy Saturday: the space between death and resurrection. But it’s also something we all experience:
 
The job that hasn’t come yet.
The healing that hasn’t happened yet.
The clarity that hasn’t arrived yet.
 
What if this space isn’t empty?
What if something is forming beneath the surface?
 
This message invites us to see the waiting not as wasted time, but as sacred ground where transformation is already unfolding.
 
If you’re in a season of uncertainty or transition… this one is for you.
 
Quotes:
 
 
“The interval between the decay of the old and the formation of the new… is a time of waiting.” — Charles Handy 
“Faith is the willingness to live with uncertainty.” — Richard Rohr 
“The dark night… is not the absence of God, but the presence of transformation.” — St. John of the Cross 
“All human wisdom is summed up in two words; wait and hope.” — Alexandre Dumas