Dear Listeners,
I’m joined today on Whiplash by my friend Leah Raidt for a conversation about searching for the aliveness and mystery of spirituality. How do we learn to trust ourselves after growing up in religious environments that often taught us to disconnect from our bodies, suppress uncertainty, and mistake appearances for holiness? Together, we explore Catholicism, embodiment, gender, discernment, and the strange tension of loving a tradition that has also wounded us.
Leah Raidt (they/she) serves to uplift and advance LGBTQ+ artists and narratives toward collective liberation through meditation, facilitation, filmmaking, poetry, performance, producing, and presence (and they’re on Substack as well!). Throughout this episode, Leah reflects beautifully on spirituality as something that helps us hold paradox and reconnect with the mystery of being human. We talk about growing up in Catholic culture, the pressure to perform certainty, and the ways religious systems can flatten moral imagination by discouraging people from listening to their own intuition and embodied experience.
A powerful thread in this episode is the idea of “aliveness.” Leah describes spirituality as a practice of remembering who we are and reconnecting with the divinity within ourselves and one another, while I reflect on my own experience as a transgender Catholic trying to reconcile what I was told about God with what I knew in my body.
Thank you, as always, for supporting Whiplash. This Substack is fully reader and listener supported, and I’m deeply grateful to the paid subscribers who make these conversations possible. If this episode resonates with you, please consider sharing it with a friend, leaving a review, or supporting the show through a paid subscription.
With gratitude,
Max Kuzma
🎧 Listen to the podcast here on Substack (where you can toggle between video with subtitles and just the audio file, and read a transcript by clicking the button on the top of the episode page on the web), Spotify (which has video and in-app transcripts), Apple Podcasts (which has in-app transcripts), and YouTube.
