Learn to live your faith from the inside out
A structured path of Catholic interior formation — in prayer, discernment, and emotional honesty before God — for the adult who is done believing on the surface and ready to live it all the way down.
The interior life is not a specialty for mystics — it is the birthright of every baptized person, and I intend to help you claim it.— Leigh Baumann
What you'll learn
What you'll be able to do
- Establish a consistent, living prayer practice built on interior awareness rather than obligation or routine.
- Apply the Ignatian Examen and discernment of spirits to real daily decisions — relationships, work, conflict, and vocation.
- Recognize and name interior movements (consolation, desolation, shame, compulsion) and bring them honestly into conversation with God.
- Integrate the sacramental life — especially Mass and Confession — as an active identity-shaping system rather than a checklist.
- Navigate spiritual dryness, the dark night, and seasons of doubt without discouragement or abandonment of the path.
- Live a unified life in which prayer, work, relationships, and virtue are no longer compartmentalized but flow from a single, formed interior center.
How it works
A school that adapts to you
This isn't a set of static videos. Every lesson is generated live and tuned to where you actually are.
We learn your level
A quick placement check tailors your starting point so you're never bored or lost.
Lessons adapt as you go
Each lesson is written for your pace and your goal, adjusting as your skills grow.
Your AI coach keeps you moving
Checkpoints, feedback, and gentle nudges turn progress into a real result.
The curriculum
What's inside your school
6 modules · 20 lessons
The Interior World — Learning to See What Is Happening Inside You
This foundational module establishes the entire program's premise: most Catholics have never been taught to observe their own interior life. Before any practice, prayer method, or virtue can take root, participants must develop the basic skill of interior attention — noticing what is actually happening in thoughts, emotions, desires, and resistances. This module is the prerequisite to everything that follows. Differentiated reflection prompts are provided for different life stages: single young adults, married adults with children, and those in later-life seasons of transition or loss.
- 1.1What Is the Interior Life? (And Why You've Never Been Taught It)Included
- 1.2Noticing Interior Movements — Consolation, Desolation, and the Signals BetweenIncluded
- 1.3The Daily Examen — Making Your Life Legible to YourselfIncluded
Prayer as Relationship — Moving From Obligation to Encounter
With interior awareness established, this module rebuilds the participant's relationship with prayer from the ground up — not as a technique to master but as a living relationship to enter. It addresses the single most common Catholic wound: the experience of prayer as dutiful, empty, or mechanical. It then tackles the modern assault on interior attention and equips participants with the attention practices that make sustained prayer possible. A new prerequisite lesson on silence as prayer is added here to bridge interior awareness and active prayer practice — an essential step that the original draft jumped past.
- 2.1What You Were Never Told About Prayer (And Why It Kept Failing)Included
- 2.2Silence as a Form of Prayer — Learning to Be Present Before SpeakingIncluded
- 2.3Conversational Prayer — Learning to Actually Talk to GodIncluded
- 2.4The Battle of Attention — Reclaiming Your Mind for Prayer and PresenceIncluded
Discernment — Making Decisions With God in Real Life
With prayer established as a living practice, this module trains the most practically transformative skill in Catholic spirituality: discernment. Not as abstract theology but as a lived, daily capacity to read interior signals, recognize the movement of God versus the movement of ego or fear, and make real decisions — about work, relationships, vocation, and conscience — in genuine dialogue with God. The original module's sequencing is preserved and strengthened by adding a foundational lesson on the rules of discernment before emotional honesty and vocational application, ensuring participants have the framework before the practice.
- 3.1Clarity vs. Confusion — Reading the Interior Signals of Alignment and MisalignmentIncluded
- 3.2Emotional Honesty Before God — Resentment, Fear, Shame, and CompulsionIncluded
- 3.3Vocational Discernment — Work, Calling, and Avoiding Identity CollapseIncluded
The Sacramental Life as Transformation System
This module reclaims the sacraments — particularly Mass and Confession — from the register of obligation and checklist into the register of identity-shaping encounter. Participants do not learn new doctrine about the sacraments; they learn how to live from them. A third lesson on the broader sacramental ecosystem (Baptismal identity, Anointing, Matrimony, and Holy Orders as formation structures) is added here to complete the coverage required by the target outcomes and to prevent the module from feeling narrowly focused on only two sacraments.
- 4.1Mass as Formation, Not Attendance — Living From the Liturgy All WeekIncluded
- 4.2Confession as Interior Liberation — Not a Checklist, But a Healing EncounterIncluded
- 4.3Baptism, Matrimony, and the Sacramental Architecture of Daily LifeIncluded
Virtue, Relationships, and the Formed Character
Formation of the interior life must eventually shape the exterior life — the actual texture of how a person acts, relates, chooses, and endures. This module moves from interiority to embodied character: virtue practiced under real conditions, relationships understood as spiritual formation laboratories, and the experience of spiritual dryness navigated without discouragement. The module's original structure is preserved; a new prerequisite lesson on conscience formation is inserted at the opening to ground the virtue lessons in interior moral awareness rather than behavioral compliance — closing a significant gap in the original draft.
- 5.1Conscience Formation — Developing the Interior Moral CompassIncluded
- 5.2Virtue as Practice, Not Aspiration — Patience, Humility, Courage, and Chastity in Daily LifeIncluded
- 5.3Relationships as Spiritual Formation — Marriage, Family, Forgiveness, and Loving WellIncluded
- 5.4Spiritual Consolation and Dryness — Growing When God Feels AbsentIncluded
Integration — Living a Unified Life From a Single Interior Center
The culminating module draws together every thread of the formation path and answers the program's animating question: 'How do I live a single, integrated life in which prayer, work, relationships, virtue, and suffering are not compartmentalized but flow from one formed interior center?' Two significant additions strengthen the original draft: a dedicated lesson on the Dark Night as a fully separate, properly contextualized experience (distinct from ordinary dryness covered in Module 5), and a new closing lesson on sustained formation — what comes after this program, how to maintain momentum, and how to build a community of ongoing accountability. These ensure the curriculum delivers its final target outcome.
- 6.1The Dark Night — Transitions, Loss of Clarity, and Rebuilding Trust in GodIncluded
- 6.2No More Split Life — Unifying Prayer, Work, Relationships, and HabitIncluded
- 6.3Sustained Formation — Community, Accountability, and the Long ArcIncluded
Who it's for
Is this you?
The spiritually hungry young adult
She's committed to the faith but prayer feels hollow and she suspects there's a deeper room she's never been shown how to enter.
The married man at midlife
He goes to Mass faithfully but his interior life and his daily work feel completely disconnected — and the gap is starting to cost him.
The mother in the thick of it
She wants a faith that holds up under the relentless demands of family life, not one she has to put down every morning to get through the day.
The man in vocational confusion
He believes God has a call on his life but can't read the signals — and needs honest, grounded tools for discernment, not generic encouragement.
The woman navigating a dry season
She hasn't left the Church but God feels genuinely absent, and she needs a path through the dark night that doesn't ask her to pretend otherwise.
The intellectually serious Catholic
He's read the theology, he knows the tradition — but his actual interior life hasn't caught up, and he knows it.
Questions
Frequently asked
Your teacher
A note from your teacher
Leigh Baumann
I want to say something plainly, before we go any further: if you have been a faithful Catholic and still feel like something essential is missing — like you're going through the motions of a faith that never quite took root in your actual interior life — that is not a sign of failure. It's a sign of hunger. And hunger is exactly the right place to start.
I've spent years walking alongside Catholics who are serious people. Educated, thoughtful, often deeply devoted — and still privately convinced that prayer isn't really working for them, that they can't hear God when they try, that the gap between Sunday Mass and Monday morning is somehow unbridgeable. What I've come to see is that almost none of them were ever taught the interior life. They were taught what to believe. They were never shown how to live it from the inside.
That's what this school exists to correct. Not by adding more content to your already full plate, but by teaching you a set of interior skills — real, practicable, rooted in the great tradition of Catholic spirituality — that most Catholics never encounter outside of a directed retreat. The Ignatian Examen. The discernment of spirits. Conversational prayer. Emotional honesty before God. The sacramental life as an active formation system, not a series of obligations to meet. Conscience formation. Navigating the dark night. Unifying your interior life so that prayer, work, relationships, and virtue are no longer compartmentalized but flow from a single center.
I won't promise you consolation every day. I won't tell you this path is easy, or that the tradition has tidy answers to every hard question. What I will tell you is this: the interior life is real, it is available to you, and you can learn it. The Church has been teaching it — sometimes quietly, sometimes in the margins — for centuries. The mystics, the Jesuits, the Desert Fathers, the great women of the tradition — they all point toward the same interior country. This school is a guided path into that country, built for the adult Catholic living in the middle of a demanding modern life.
If you're ready to stop believing at the surface and start living it all the way down, I'm glad you're here. Come in.
— Leigh Baumann
Start your journey today
Join get instant access — learn at your own pace with an AI coach in your corner.
$49/mo
Recurring billing · cancel anytime
Secure checkout · Instant access
- 6 modules, 20 lessons
- AI-adaptive lessons tuned to your level
- Quizzes & checkpoints to lock in progress
- Your own AI learning coach
- Learn on any device, at your pace
- Full access for as long as you're subscribed