Lion Counseling Podcast

🎙️ Episode 52 – Story, Symbol, and Meaning: Another Legacy Highlight with Jonathan Pageau

In this second Lion Legacy Highlight with Orthodox icon carver and symbolic thinker Jonathan Pageau, we dive even deeper into the intersection of faith, art, EMDR therapy, and how storytelling reveals hidden meaning in our lives.
Jonathan reflects on the cultural moment we're in—where meaning is collapsing for many, and how recovering symbolic thinking may be the key to healing our fractured world.

🔍 We explore:
  • Why modern culture feels fragmented, anxious, and void of meaning
  • The collapse of religious authority and narrative coherence
  • How symbolism isn’t abstraction—it’s structure for the soul
  • Why humans are wired for meaning, not just information
  • The surprising overlap between trauma therapy and symbolic thinking
If you've ever felt disconnected from the deeper meaning of your life—or if you're looking for a way to integrate faith, art, healing, and masculine identity—this short-form conversation is rich with insight.

👇 COMMENT BELOW:
What’s a story or symbol that shaped how you see the world?

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Click here to watch a video of this episode.’
🦁 About the Lion Counseling Podcast
The Lion Counseling Podcast exists to help high-achieving Christian men overcome trauma, anxiety, and burnout through faith-integrated therapy and coaching. New episodes every Tuesday.

Creators and Guests

Host
Mark Odland
Founder of Lion Counseling, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, Certified EMDR Therapist

What is Lion Counseling Podcast?

The Lion Counseling Podcast helps men escape the cages that hold them back and become the Lions they were created to be. It exists to help men obtain success, purpose, happiness, and peace in their career and personal lives. The podcast is hosted by the founder of Lion Counseling, Mark Odland (Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and Certified EMDR Therapist), and Zack Carter (Counselor and Coach with Lion Counseling). In their podcasts, they address a variety of topics relevant to men, including: mental health, relationships, masculinity, faith, success, business, and self-improvement.

Mark Odland:

And my guest today is Jonathan Pageau. Jonathan, welcome to the Lion Counseling Podcast.

Jonathan Pageau:

Great to be here.

Mark Odland:

Yeah. Thank thank you so much for doing this. It's truly an honor. I know being a a patron in in your symbolic world, we've had a chance to talk a little bit off off the camera, and, I was looking back at my notes, we've talked about art, faith, EMDR therapy, graphic novels, dream interpretation, AI, and tattoos. And specifically how you probably never get a tattoo even if it was in the oldest tattoo shop in the world in Jerusalem.

Mark Odland:

Correct?

Jonathan Pageau:

That's right. Probably not.

Mark Odland:

Yeah. Yeah. Well, to start out, for those of you who for those out there who maybe aren't familiar with with your work Jonathan maybe you can share just a little bit about your background, your story, and you know no pressure just covering your whole life up until now. But yeah, anything you'd share about your background would be great.

Jonathan Pageau:

Sure. So I guess the first thing to say is that I'm mostly an artist. One of the things that I've done is created images for churches, created icon carvings, liturgical art for churches. But I guess the thing now that I do mostly is I discuss Christian symbolism. I discuss symbolism in general and, you know, how the different patterns of meaning affect our lives and how we can recognize them Mhmm.

Jonathan Pageau:

And and see them properly. And so I have a YouTube channel where I talk about that. I I do conferences. I also write children's books. You know?

Jonathan Pageau:

So I do a whole bunch of things that are kind of around the the theme of image making and storytelling, trying to kind of help people reconnect with the deeper meanings that that imbue our lives.

Mark Odland:

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I know that you talk about a lot of of deep of deep things. This isn't shallow conversations that that you're delving into, but apparently, it's tapped into a kind of a huge I don't know, void is the right word or or need because there it seems like it's attracted a lot of people who are interested in this in these things.

Jonathan Pageau:

Yeah. I think that we're in some ways in a kind of crux. We're at a civilizational moment, I guess you could call it, where, for the last one hundred years, give or take, things have been kind of collapsing or fragmenting. It's been happening for more than that, but things have that has accelerated, maybe at least since World War II. Yeah.

Jonathan Pageau:

And so we kind of feel the fragmentation of our narrative, the fragmentation of our religious institutions, of our societies, you know, basically, the social fabric. And that is coupled with a kind of, you know, the the the popularization of a kind of reductionism where people struggle to see meaning aside from just a bunch of things bumping into each other. And that culminated in the new atheist movement, really, you know, in the in the early two thousands that kind of cemented this really reductionist way of thinking. And that type of thinking just infected all of the institutions and kind of trickled down into popular culture. And so because of that, people, you know, basically are struggling to understand what is the meaning of the world and how everything fits together, you know, why we should exist.

Jonathan Pageau:

But at the same time, there's also now a counter movement that is happening in all different fields. In cogsci, we see it happening even in physics in different fields there. People are kind of understanding that there needs to be these patterns of perception and patterns of meaning and that the world isn't arbitrary at all and neither are human desires or human it's not true that humans have a subjective overlay on top of a kind of objective world, but rather our very overlay is structured by the same natural forces that that make the world exist. And therefore, there's like it's almost like a a three sixty, right, where in the very process of trying to reducing everything and making everything into these kind of physical forces, at some point it flips back and then kind of re fills the world with meaning and patterns. And for sure, I think cogsci and and even psychology has been a big part of that.

Mark Odland:

Yeah. And, yeah, that that's so interesting. I mean, I was at the Dave Ramsey Entre Leadership Summit in Denver this last week, and it was really interesting because these themes of the the the breakdown of our of authority in the world, the anxiety that that comes with it. And and just this sense that people feel scattered, the and and that disconnect for meaning and purpose and understanding the world around them, understanding themselves. It does seem to be an interesting time that we live in.

Mark Odland:

Interesting is the understatement I