Shift Your Spirits

Susan Grace is a writer, intuitive, and empathic astrologer dedicated to the Collective’s call to usher in the End of Suffering. She has read thousands of charts for people of all walks of life from all over the world. She says she does this work to ensure no one feels alone in the massive shift happening in the world.

And she has some important messages we need to hear right now.

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Slade:

You write on your site, I climbed my way out of a deep dark well I had fallen into by feeling my way through astrology and listening to the whispering guidance from souls beyond the veil.

Tell me the story behind that.

Susan:

Well I looked up and found that everything was falling apart. And I fought it for a long time. I tried to hold everything up with duct tape. I could feel that energies bigger than me were saying, You don't understand. You're done here.

So I finally gave in and I just felt like something bigger than me was guiding, and I thought, Alright! Whatever you feel like you need to take down, because it's in my best interest, go ahead. But if we're going to do this, we're gonna do it all right now. Because I'm not doing this for ten years.

And I swear, it was like the planets went, You heard the lady. And just... WHAM! It took everything down! All the rest of it!

And I had to trust it. I had to trust that it was in my favour, that it knew what it was doing, and I had to ride it out.

I ended up on the other side, exactly where I needed to be, course-corrected. And that made me start to dig into astrology and say, I need to understand what's happening here. Because I can't figure this all out by myself. I've got my limited perception as a human, can't figure all this out by myself. I need help.

And so I just started digging and digging and digging and digging into the astrology to learn what was happening. And that's how I got started.

Slade:

How far back does your interest in astrology go? Was this something that you dabbled in when you were younger? Do you have a lifelong history with astrology?

Susan:

Well, I have a lifelong history with horoscopes, just sun signs, right?

When I was coming up, there was no internet. We had things like newspapers and magazines. And I would follow horoscopes for the same reason. I needed help. I'd take all the help I can get.

But then, once the internet came out, and once I saw my chart, I saw my chart in 2012, and that changed me forever. Then I was like, Oh, this is what I need! This is the key I've been looking for.

Slade:

Wow... So how did you get from that epiphany to actually doing readings for other people professionally?

Susan:

Social media.

When I first started really reading, I felt like these astrologers I was listening to were talking a lot about all the mechanics within a chart, but they weren't putting it all together. I kept ending up saying to myself, I hear what you're saying, but what do you mean? What are you talking about? What does this ultimately mean?

And I got to the point where I could sit in a chart for the day, and I'd figure out everything that was happening, and I would be like, Alright, this looks like anxiety. And then I would go and take art images and match that with the astrology, within social media.

Nobody knew what the hell I was doing.

All I was doing was feeling it out, mostly for myself, but then it caught on. And people started to share it a lot. And then, eventually it got to the point where people are going, Can you look at my chart? I was like, I'm not an astrologer. And then they kept saying it.

I had a friend of mine who said, Susan, I'm going to PayPal you, and you are going to open my chart and read it. And I said, Okay!

And then that's when it started.

I had a friend of mine who had me on one of her shows. The two other panelists, off mic, were saying, Are you an astrologer? And I said no. And they're like, I believe you are! They had an intervention with me.

And then it really got to where people wanted to hear what I had to say, not just my interpretation through art. The art fell away and now it's just me and my voice.

Slade:

Mmm... What do you think makes your astrological readings different from other astrologers?

Susan:

In my personal chart, I have a lot of water, water signs, which, in astrology, that means that I feel everything all the time. When I'm in a chart with someone, I walk them all the way through it. I've had readings with other astrologers and they give you basic, broad interpretations of your chart.

When I read a chart for someone, I read EVERYTHING in their chart to them. Every placement. Every aspect. Every transit. Where the planets are now. And the phases of life they're going to go through. I tell them everything. They should know as much as I do about their own chart.

And then I'm able to feel it too. I'm able to say, This looks like, for instance, something really rough happened when you were a kid and you've been trying to make up for it since then.

And they're like, YES.

And I'm like, Alright, well let's talk about it. And I get them all the way through feeling out who they are too. Not just book knowledge.

Slade:

So you use your intuition quite a bit then.

Susan:

Oh, yeah! And I did not even plan on this.

When I first started reading... I'm gonna go ahead and tell you the truth about this...

Slade:

Mmhmm!

Susan:

When I first started reading, the very first professional one I did, someone's deceased father came through from the other side and I had never experienced that before. I decided on the fly to be brave and be like, Listen, this is going to sound crazy, but this is the energy I feel right behind me. As if this person is here.

I described that they were in blue jeans wearing a t-shirt and they had a hammer in their hands. And they were like, tapping the hammer into their other hand, as if they're frustrated.

And she said, Ohmygod. That's my dad. He used to build fences. And I said, Well I don't think he likes your boyfriend. And she said, I don't think he does either!

So yeah, weird things like that have opened up, since I've become a professional reader. So it's a lot of intuition, it's a lot of messages from guides, it's a lot of outside energy saying things like, Tell them again! Tell them again! Tell them again! Tell them again!

Sometimes I have to say, Alright! Back up! I just said it. I will say it again. But back up a little bit.

It's that kind of stuff.

Slade:

Mmm... I have to tell you that, looking at someone's chart is my portal into reading for them and that was how I started doing intuitive readings was, if I know someone's sun, moon and rising sign, I can do an intuitive reading based on those three pieces of information. But for some reason, it's like...

I've heard of other psychics who use even playing card decks or they have a coin that they twirl in their hand or they have these weird ticks that they have that are kind of their little gateway ritual, or whatever. And mine has fallen away to be just intuitive. But for a long time, that was how I would tune in to someone. I would just go and I would cast their chart and I would look into their chart.

And I used to say, I wasn't even really reading their chart. It was more like the graphic became sort of the window. It was like a symbolic window. But if I looked through that window, it became representative of connection to that person.

So that's very interesting that you have this combined, intertwined experience with that as well. It makes total sense to me.

Because, same kind of thing. I was sort of drafted. Hey, can you read for me? Can you connect with my guides? ... I can try! That's sort of how it happens.

I always think about what happened to you, with your friends being an example of one of those... The Purpose that the Universe picks for you, as opposed to maybe the one that you would've picked for yourself. You know what I mean?

It's like, Nope. Here's your Purpose! You're drafted.

Susan:

Yeah. In my chart, I have placements around the galactic centre and when that happens, often the Purpose of your life, they come and get you. I could go hide under the bed. They were still gonna come get me somehow.

You know, if you go back to my 10 year old self, my 20 year old self, and said, What do you want to be when you grow up? I never would've said an astrologer online. Because there was no astrologers and there was no online! It didn't exist!

So that feeling of something coming to find you, I don't know, I'm noticing it happening more and more to people, no matter what placements they have in their chart. Because we're all kind of being called up right now. We're all needed in the world.

Slade:

Mmm... 2012. That was such a milestone year, expectantly. Like something was supposed to happen in 2012 and it did for you. For sure.

Susan:

So it happened for the world too. We just haven't seen it all play out just yet. You'll see. 2020 is the next marker and you're going to see it play out even more. Something DID happen in 2012.

Slade:

Mmm... Can you tell us?

Susan:

Sure!

Slade:

Well you're here! Go for it.

Susan:

If you've been following things like this, December 21, 2012 was the end of the Mayan calendar. People were saying it was the end of the world, and that's not true. It was the end of the world as we knew it.

And what happened in 2012 was our solar system, which orbits around our sister star Sirius, was coming out of the darkest part of its orbit from Sirius. When we're closest to Sirius, we're the most conscious. When we're the furthest from Sirius, we're the least. It takes 2000 years for our solar system to go through the darkest part of its orbit from Sirius. We came out of that in 2012.

Also in 2012, the same year, there's a planet called Regulus, very big planet that marks the leadership of the world. It takes 2000 years for Regulus to go through a sign. The exact same 2000 years, Regulus was in Leo.

When we were in darkness, or unconsciousness, we were king and kingdom led. 2012 the same year that we're coming back into consciousness, Regulus clicked in to Virgo. Now the leadership of the world for the next 2000 years is the healing goddess energy. And the healing goddess energy is coming for everyone.

Everyone is going to be healed one way or another.

Slade:

Mmm... So what happens in 2020?

Susan:

In 2020, Pluto is in Capricorn. Last time just Pluto was in Capricorn was when U.S. signed the Declaration of Independence. Saturn will cross Pluto in 2020. The last time Saturn and Pluto together were in Capricorn was the Renaissance. When Saturn crosses Pluto in 2020, Jupiter will be here too.

The last time those three were in Capricorn was the year 1284, in the middle of our darkness. So the control of the world is going to flip. That control mechanism, fear mechanism, suppression, oppression, all of those are going to collapse and we are going to replace it with what we truly find valuable.

It's Uranus going through Taurus. So it's going to be going back and healing the planet. It's going to be healing our own traumas from being suppressed and pushed down. It's going to be building new systems for education and for finding water for people, for healthcare systems, everything.

Everything is going to be rebuilt.

Slade:

This is good news.

Susan:

Yeah!

Slade:

Hallelujah.

Ohmygosh. That's really good to hear, Susan, because it's been a rough couple of years.

Susan:

it's been rough for all of us and people are exhausted. Exhausted! And if you don't understand... This is one of the reasons I will never ever put astrology down. If you don't understand where we are, what's been happening and where we're going, you could give up! And this is NOT the time to give up. I keep saying over and over and over. And I'm gonna keep saying it. We are going UP not down.

So if you're starting to witness collapse, what you need to pay attention to and what you need to participate in is what's replacing it. Because the collapse is going to happen with our without your participation. And you want it to happen.

But what comes next? Go there.

Slade:

I love it.

So, I have to ask you, just really quickly before we move on from your readings, do you record your sessions? Is that an option for people?

Susan:

Yes, I record sessions and then I send it. I do it face to face on Zoom so that I can share my screen with them and I can show them everything I'm talking about in their chart. And I record it and I send it to them through Dropbox.

Slade:

Okay, excellent. Because I was just thinking, I have the wonderful benefit of having recorded you saying all of that. And I also have a transcriptionist. So I have access to that information and I wanted to make sure, because something shifts when you start reading like that. Like you kind of become a channel, a little bit.

Susan:

Oh yeah. And I can tell whenever I'm channeling. My voice gets more forceful and I start talking faster. I become very emphatic. It's almost like my feminine water steps aside and the masculine comes forward and starts being like, Pay attention. I'm telling you something important.

Slade:

Right.

Susan:

And then it kind of fades off. And then the water in me comes back more.

Slade:

I love it though. It's so cool because I've been listening to a lot of your podcast with Aubrey. Most people will have listened to my interview with Aubrey Cara. She's

Aubrey Mast is an Intuitive, Health Coach, Herbalist, and Wellness Chef dedicated to helping people root into their bodies and into their sovereign self. She has helped thousands come back into their bodies with nutrition, self-care, and intuitive practices. Aubrey Mast and Susan Grace co-host the rapidly growing, internationally followed Be the Evidence podcast available now at http://betheevidencepodcast.com/ and all platforms where podcasts are streaming.

We’re talking about bringing astrology into your daily life, bringing it back down to earth, and, as is Aubrey’s expertise, bringing it into the body.

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Slade:

People will have heard you and I speak before on your podcast, Root Rising. But you have a new podcast with Susan Grace. Tell us about that podcast.

Aubrey:

Yeah, so we have a brand new podcast that's called Be the Evidence. We just pushed out our 20th episode this morning and it is a blend of my strengths with working with clairvoyance and clairsentience, clairaudience. I'm able to hear and see images come to me and they typically are in relationship to the body and a lot of times colours. And then I meet that with Susan Grace, who's an amazing astrologer.

The way that we look at it is, this is a beautiful way we blend the conversation about the mind and coming into the body. So it's very stars to root feeling.

The podcast is all centred around this theme of being that evidence. I think for us, that means walking the talk. Like, if we are all in this movement towards collective consciousness, and doing our work, and showing up more embodied and more as infinite as liberated individuals, not only for ourselves but for society. There's some level of evidence that we have to walk on our day to day being.

And so, this is a podcast where we explore those conversations in a very real talk way, like you just stumbled into our living room and Susan and I are having this really raw conversation of like, Oh, yeah, things have been really hard and this is how I'm moving through them.

So you'll get pieces of astrology that's real time, and you'll definitely get pieces of wellness information within it.

Slade:

Tell me a little bit about your background. You're working on a Ph.D. I kind of want everyone to know where you're coming from and how seriously you take this mind-body connection.

Aubrey:

Yeah, so my Ph.D is in mind-body medicine. So far, it looks as if I'm going to be focused on the gut microbiome and how it relates to psycho-neuroimmunology, which is really a beautiful way of saying how the bacteria that is found all over our bodies, and in our environment, impacts the energies that we're exposed to. And that plays a role in our consciousness but also in our thoughts that we have and our overall wellbeing.

But beyond that, my master's was in Public Health. I focused on nutrition. My undergrad was in health and wellness promotion. I'm an herbalist. I am also a chef. I'm a holistic health coach. The last 15 years of my career has really been focused on healing the body.

And it seems like within the last 2 or 3 years, especially since I was doing my work with you, that it's become more of this intuitive-based practice, where it's not just about physically healing the body. It's also about consciously healing the thoughts that we think, because they dictate how our cells react and respond in our bodies. They dictate how our genes respond.

So I'm really viewing it from a holistic level of healing from cells-forward, if that makes sense.

Slade:

How did you hook up with Susan?

Aubrey:

In the age of social media, this is like, the complete thing. You and I have had this conversation before too, I think. Of like, all of a sudden, somebody recommends somebody, or somebody shares somebody's post.

So, 3 years ago, somebody shared one of her posts and I had viewed it and I was like, Ohmygosh. This is really pertinent. Because she posts with a finger on the collective consciousness for the day. She does daily astrology readings that are specific to the collective consciousness. So I had followed her through Facebook, because every time I checked in to her posts, day by day, they were right on the mark with what was going on in my world.

And then I ended up scheduling a reading with her and sat with her for an intensive. And every time I saw with her, I would have this conversation of like, I think you and I are supposed to work together. I'm not quite sure how it pieces out but we're gonna work together. And there was that little awkward laugh of like, Haha... yeah, we'll see.........

And then this is how it panned out.

Slade:

I just want to say, like a quick shoutout to Susan by the way, because her ears are totally burning right now. We're talking about her, and, Susan, I've had recommendations to interview you, so now I feel like I need to immediately, as soon as this conversation is over, get in touch with Susan and have her come on and talk about astrology. Because astrology is definitely showing up as a theme this season for my interview guests.

So tell me how you guys blend this astrology information with the wellness and lifestyle choices and healing information that you're working with.

Aubrey:

Yeah, I think that's really such an important question, honestly, in a sense that, for anybody that's new to astrology, it is its own language.

I know you've experienced this in how you teach in Automatic Intuition. There's that section where you speak about astrology and how to make it more simplified. But it's its own language. And I remember coming out of my first reading with Susan and just being completely blown out of the water.

Not only was she poignant in what she was talking about, but I was automatically exposed to this language I had no idea what the hell any of it meant. Grand trines and retrogrades and things like that... I had heard these terms thrown around but I did not understand how that applied to my day to day world. I knew that it was part of a subset of language that I was trying to grasp at.

So Susan and I had had this conversation of, the information and where astrology is just so pertinent, because it's a visual element. It's a visual map of what is going on, moment by moment. The beautiful thing I think I found about it was that she was like, I don't know how to make it land.

Sorry Slade, I'm being interrupted by my son.

Slade:

That's ok!

Aubrey:

Thank goodness you can edit this out.

Slade:

Oh sure!

We could also just talk to him. He can be part of the interview if necessary.

Aubrey:

Honey, you want to say hello? You can say, Hi Mr. Slade!

Son:

Hi Mr. Slade!

Slade:

Hey!

Aubrey:

Sorry about that.

Slade:

No problem!

I often say, I didn't do a lot of the pre-show stuff because I've talked to you before. But one of the things I was gonna say is, if anything happens, we can always cut the show or if we get disconnected, or whatever, and it's fine!

I've had instances where my cat's beat the door down and I had to get up and be like, Excuse me for just one moment while I let the cat in.

At this point, I'm almost thinking that we should just leave that stuff in. I may not or I may. If something ever really funny and interesting happens, I will absolutely just leave it in.

Aubrey:

I love it.

Slade:

Yeah. Because, I mean, the point of this show is really to kind of eavesdrop on the cool conversations that I have with people, and I was listening to Be the Evidence podcast that you do with Susan and it felt like that. It felt like I was sitting at a table at the cafe, next to an astrologist and her girlfriend who is super knowledgeable about wellness stuff, and you guys were breaking it down. Sort of what you were observing in your, what was happening in your life and she was talking about it thematically using astrology as a language.

And I just want to say, this came up also in my recent interview with Dena DeCastro. We were really stressing that this is an archetypal vocabulary and it's very useful from that perspective. Even if you take out all the predictive stuff, and the forces in the sky and all that, I was even thinking about the fact that we can use the language of astrology just as any magazine does. You know?

Magazines always have this sort of seasonal lifestyle kind of focus, right? Like we shift gears during certain times of year because of the seasons and we tend to focus on different types of activities or different things in our body, depending on what's going on in the environment around us. And so I'm completely okay with saying, You know what? You can debunk everything there is about astrology, which, then I'd want you to go get a reading and then realize it's kind of hard to do that.

We could just take it out and say, This is an excuse or an intention for us to focus on this particular theme at this moment. And it would still be incredibly valuable just from that perspective.

So give me an example, like I was listening to your show a couple of weeks ago about Virgo energy and how that impacts your daily life, like you said. So give me some examples of how you guys use the themes of what's going on astrologically and then apply that to the 3rd dimensional world.

Aubrey:

Yeah... I think that's a whole piece of, How do we make it land? I think from being in this field where it's intuitive, right? And I like to be in my Ph.D where it's mind body medicine and a lot of the stuff is not tangible. We can't see it in a lot of ways.

How do you make it land and make it become tangible, is always the question of, how can you create a storyline so that people can see it resonating within their lives? So that I can see it resonating in my own life.

We just recorded last night and it was a... we're in a lot of Scorpio energy right now, which, thankfully, or not thankfully, I don't know what way you want to look at it, Susan and I are both very, very much in our Scorpio energy, so we can come off as very intense.

But for people that are not comfortable in that, it can come off as so intense that it's overwhelming. There's that deer in headlights look, like, I don't know what to do with this, this is a lot. It can look kind of chaotic. Right now the hurricane's hitting and it's sort of that feeling, right? The way that we explore this is to talk about, well, these are the ways that it's coming up in our world.

And how do you make it land?

So if we're dealing with lots of intensity and lots of chaos. And there's lots of transformation and liberation, that can feel like anxiety a lot of times, and stress a lot of times. So the way that I like to always take it back to the body is, how do we bring these bigger themes into our day to day lives?

If we're experiencing lots of anxiety and lots of stress because we're also experiencing lots of intensity in our day to day lives, then it's important to recalibrate our bodies. It's important to calm our systems down.

The other day I did a float tank and I got this download about how important it is to drink adaptogens right now, which help us manage stress. They help our body adapt to stressors. That's one of the ways that we explore... like, okay, if you're dealing with intensity and anxiety, this is one of the ways that we can calm our systems.

We can also go out into the woods. We can sit and drink a cup of tea. We can have a beautiful conversation like you and I are having. That's very intentional. And to focus on those tactics while we're aware of these bigger themes as a way to land the information into our systems, but without coming from a place of reactivity.

I think that's the bigger point for me with astrology. Astrology is almost shining a flashlight on what's happening, and then we get to choose, how do we respond to it?

Slade:

Mmm... yes. I love that.

I have tons of Scorpio in my chart, by the way.

Aubrey:

That makes sense, why we get along.

Slade:

Yeah. I'm a Leo with a moon in Scorpio and a rising sun in Scorpio. So I do attract Scorpio energy and I always say, Scary people don't scare me as much as they do other people. I can handle the darkness. Bring your darkness!

And you know what? It's crazy though, because I notice when things are really intense and kind of negative, I am much more likely to have good conversations with my Scorpio friends. They seem to have an ability to absorb that negativity, or to filter it in such a way that they don't hear it as like, Oh you're bitchin' and complainin'. You're bringing me down. You know what I mean? Like they almost settle in and resonate with it.

I find myself feeling more liberated in venting to someone with that kind of energy.

So I don't know if... it's like, it's an instinctive thing and one of the things that I think is kind of interesting about astrology is I often find myself reacting to some kind of vibe that's going on, trying to adjust, like you said, and make these changes that are intentional and healthy and all that kind of stuff.

And then I'll find out, while it's going on, or even after the fact sometimes, that there was this astrological phenomenon that I go, Oh, okay! Well that makes sense. That's what that was about.

One of the things I think is really fascinating is how little you have to pay attention to it to still kind of be in it, a little bit.

Aubrey:

I agree.

The other day I had that and a little bit of a tiff, was feeling really worked up and stunned. My words being very reactive. And then I had reacted,

I’m sharing some adventures from my trip to New Orleans. I had experiences I feel you can appreciate, with themes around — manifesting, synchronicity, serendipity, and practicing the art of surrender.

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*no transcript for this episode

Janelle Hardy is a dancer, artist, and writer who teaches the Art of Personal Mythmaking, a transformational memoir-writing program.

She loves weaving embodiment prompts together with creativity and ancient tales (like fairytales/ myths/ folklore/ etc) as a way of supporting growth and healing.

This interview features a 7-minute guided visualization to unblock creativity by tapping into the body.

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Janelle:

So this is a really round-about sort of story because I didn't really know when I started teaching the work that I do, that it was actually about memoir-writing.

I'll leave you with that statement and then circle back to it again.

Slade:

Okay.

Janelle:

I'm from the far north of Canada. The far north-west, which is the Yukon Territory, and for context for people that aren't Canadian (even some Canadians don't know where I'm from). It's beside Alaska and above British Columbia. It's beautiful. It's so wild. I'm not living there now, but I talk about it because I feel so connected to that place.

I'm also from a family... I think I have a common experience to a lot of people in North America and in colonized countries where my ancestry, you know, I'd be considered white, but my ancestry is varied and mostly unknown. There were some family secrets that were whispered as I was growing up.

That experience of growing up really attached to a landscape. And then learning that my roots in that landscape are only as deep as my grandparents having moved up there and met each other and settled down there, and wondering, Who am I? Where did I come from?

And then struggling with some health challenges that didn't feel like they belonged to me really kind of pitched me on this path of curiosity and inquiry and kind of roaming all over the place in terms of what I studied and where I lived.

So...

See, this is the trouble with collecting my thoughts around all of my offshoots of interest, which, for a long time, really mystified me.

I was really into painting. I was also really into writing. I was also really into dance. I wanted to be a dancer. I also wanted to live in other cultures, so I was an exchange student to Japan and to Russia and to another part of Canada, Ontario, which doesn't really sound like being an exchange student, but the Yukon is really different than southern Canada, in terms of lifestyle and how people think about themselves and their relation to the country that they're in.

For example, in the Yukon, we refer to 'going outside' as leaving the Yukon to the rest of Canada, or outsiders coming to the Yukon, right? So there's a real strong identity wrapped up in being a Yukoner. And then, the other part of my realization was, I feel this intense claim to being a Yukoner to being part of this world, and it actually doesn't belong to me. There's a history of First Nations people there that is thousands of years old and is being erased and denied.

So how can I reconcile my love and longing for this place with the understanding that my roots don't originate there and I don't get to claim it as only my own.

All of these curiosities and wonderings pushed me out to study and travel and do all sorts of things, including becoming a single mother at 23 and having chronic fatigue. Throughout all that time, the one thing that kept me steady was a creative practice. And it didn't matter what the creative practice was.

I'm a really big believer in creative energy and the life force, that kind of erotic creative life force that's in all of us. When it's in flow, we get to choose the medium that suits what we're trying to express best.

And for some people, they just latch on to the one medium and they're a writer and that's all they are. Entirely. For other people, it's kind of peripatetic and maybe a bit dilettantish. Sometimes I've labelled myself as not being able to commit to something, but I've let go of that label and realized that I have the ability and desire to use different mediums to explore different facets of my creative energy, depending on what it is that's wanting to come through.

So I might go through a phase of dance and choreography, which happened a lot in my mid-20s. That's a time when I earned a masters degree in dance. And then I really got into painting. And then I got a horrible creative block for years, where I had all the ideas and I actually couldn't write. I couldn't paint. I couldn't...

It was so painful. It was so painful, this state. But it also taught me a lot. So I felt the bubbling force of my creative desiring, creative energy, and I had all the ideas and I encountered my own resistance and procrastination, no matter where I went.

During that time, some of the jobs I was doing involved writing for a local coming events magazine and a couple of national magazines. What I noticed was, while I really enjoyed it, and for some reason was able to write about things when I was being paid, although the pay was terrible, but I was able to do the task when I set the intention outside of myself.

And then I also became really angry that I couldn't prioritize my own desire for creative expression enough that I could work on my own projects during that time. I was only able to do it if it had a functional function in society, which was making some money and being of service to an employer.

So all of that to say, most of my writing has always been creative non-fiction. It's almost never fiction or fantasy or imagined stories in that way. It's always been about finding a way to share an experience I've had in the world, either my own personal experience in order to understand myself, or, in the case of when I was writing these profiles on artists that were coming to perform in the Yukon, interviewing them and being able to describe their personality, physicality, art and the venue in a way that would invite people in.

Slade:

It's kind of freaking me out how much you're really speaking to me in this moment.

I've been working a lot with issues around the struggle that I have, writing fiction, versus all of the prolific amount of stuff that I put out into the world around my paranormal memoirs, and Shift Your Spirits, and these interviews. And I can write articles. I can write blog posts. I can write for this audience because, like you said, it's sort of my job and there's something very liberating, weirdly, about, it's an official thing and I have to do it every week.

I didn't even really think of it in terms of the blocks that I have around my novels as being particularly about something attached to, Oh it's just this thing that I'm making for myself that doesn't have this official, sanctioned place to be in the world. It's not being asked for by other people. It's something that I'm bringing through for myself.

And it was really interesting. I don't remember the exact words of how you said that, but I thought, Oh! I get that. I understand that. That's a piece of the puzzle for me.

So the wild synchronicity is that you and I are here, speaking for the very first time ever, and we're having this conversation. And I had just told you before we started recording that I have had an energy healing session, a clearing, around creative blocks. And I've also been to a chiropractor and a massage therapist yesterday, because there's a physical manifestation in my neck, like nerve impingement and my spine and neck.

You... Something I want to say really quick and then I want to bring you back to this idea of blocks and how they're related to the body, but I wanted to say, when you were talking about your journey and how hard it was for you to sort of justify the idea of committing to one form of creative expression, one of the things that was a real turning point for me in my life was when I accepted the fact that I couldn't choose and I didn't have to.

And that I would be all of those things together, and that's just what my path was. That, you know, I am an intuitive, and a novelist, and a interviewer voice talent. You know? Whatever! I am all of those things and I think most creative people are really eclectic. And sometimes the things that...

And this is something I've been talking about a lot with clearing creative blocks. There is a purpose that you choose for yourself and then there's sometimes a purpose that's chosen for you by the world. And I feel like, as creative people, sometimes it's that hit song, it's that one performance that you did. It's that one job that you landed that just was the right place at the right time. And maybe you become known for that one thing. And people ask that and expect that of you.

It becomes this identifying thing that YOU didn't necessarily choose as much as IT chose YOU.

So it makes perfect sense to me why you're all those things. And knowing that you work with creativity and writing and mythmaking, and that you talk to me about how you work through creative blocks through the body, makes complete sense to me. That you're a dancer.

It really is the intersection of all those things, right? It's you being a little bit of everything that you are. At least to me, in this moment, it's what you represent.

To get back to this idea of the creative block and how it's connected to the body, talk to me about, first of all, when you were really blocked, what you discovered set you free. And then how you've learned to guide other people through that.

Janelle:

Okay. That's a really good question.

My answer won't apply to everyone, but I think there's a lot of useful tools people listening can get out of my misery.

Slade:

Yeah! Absolutely.

Janelle:

Being creatively blocked as a creative person, number one, I think it actually makes us sick. Because it takes a lot of effort to shut the flow down. Being in the flow and having energetic as well as physical movement as a constant experience is actually our natural state.

But we live in cultures, and by saying 'we', I'm kind of speaking to the experience I grew up in, being in North America, in an English-speaking culture colonized originally by England, and Canada, still being governed by England, tenuously. So we have a cultural inheritance that is really damaging.

And the cultural inheritance is the idea of productivity being important in service of capitalism, of making money, of being an employee to someone else, having skills that someone else wants to pay to make money off of you for. We also have an inheritance of domination and we carry with us... And this is most intensely felt for people of European white ancestry, but anyone of colour growing up in a culture like this also receives these unspoken rules and values as well.

We grow up learning that self-control involves contraction, tightening and dominating. Ownership of our body and our emotions and our inner state. We grow up understanding that what is considered attractive and valuable and wonderful in our culture is really limited. And if we don't fit, we need to feel shame and try to improve ourselves.

Can you kind of get a sense that all of these non-verbal values that we grow up with involves tightening and shrinking and contracting and shutting down, in order to be okay, or be acceptable?

Slade:

Umhmm.

Janelle:

So with this kind of cultural inheritance, as well as a lack of deep grounding and roots, most of the cultures living in the Americas of all backgrounds no longer speak their indigenous languages. My ancestry's not English. It's quite a mix, but Scottish people never spoke English. Welsh people never spoke English. Arcadians never spoke English. There's a small bit of First Nations in my ancestry from Quebec and Canada. They were not English-speaking cultures.

When language is lost, we also lose a great deal. We lose music, we lose language. We lose a connection to our roots.

And then all we have to grasp onto, and we lose our stories. All we have to grasp onto is this very one-dimensional colonizer culture that really profits a lot off of teaching shame and shrinking us.

The way that that relates to creative blocks, I think, is that it's really hard to be in flow if you feel like you're not good enough in any way. What some people do is, they figure out compensations around the tightening and the contracting and the shrinking. But then what happens is the creative flow comes and goes in 'bursts of inspiration' and flashes of insight and really intense, forceful rush of creativity that people get, afraid of not jumping in and staying up all night, buzzing away with it, because if it goes away, when will it come back? It might be three more years, right?

We have all these ideas about our inherent creative flow that are warped by a constant experience of being taught to shut down and contract and deny that flow. In our bodies, we really feel it through tightening, through physical tension, even though most people in North America live very sedentary lives, there's actually no reason, if someone is doing a lot of sitting or desk work, to feel as tense as they do.

As a bodyworker, I've spent 12 years working on peoples' bodies hands-on, it's astonishing how much tension there is in people that actually don't use their bodies. Part of it is related to this idea that we need to make an effort. We have to be appearing to be working hard. We have to be tightening up just in case... It becomes internalized.

'If anyone looks at me, I'm clearly a hard worker because I appear that way because my brows are furrowed while I tense my shoulders and type.' Or whatever it is.

Slade:

Right. Look busy.

Janelle:

Yeah. Looking busy. Busy making... That's a whole other tangent of how much energy

A lot of listeners of this show are going through a spiritual awakening, or have recently experienced their intuition coming on line. I'm speaking very personally about what that experience was like for me, and sharing some advice about what to do if this is happening to you.

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*no transcript for this episode

Lisa Campion is a Psychic Counselor, Energy Healer and Spiritual Teacher who specializes in training emerging psychics, healers and empaths to fully step into their gifts and live their life purpose - because, as she says, the world needs all the healers it can get!

She’s been a professional psychic for decades and she also teaches Reiki. She talks about her brand new book which integrates psychic development and Reiki together.

The Art of Psychic Reiki: Developing Your Intuitive and Empathic Abilities for Energy Healing by Lisa Campion

Red Shoes with Psychic Lisa Campion - previous episode

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Lisa:

Well, it comes from a class that I've been teaching. I've been teaching reiki for about 20 years. And just in case you don't know what reiki is, reiki is a very gentle, hands-on energy healing technique from Japan.

It's pretty exciting these days because, out here on the east coast where I live, all of the big hospitals have reiki in their complementary and alternative medicine units. So you can go to a big Boston hospital and ask for a reiki person to come and do this energy healing on you while you're in the hospital while you're getting chemo, pre and post surgery. It's really used for pain management a lot these days. Works great for anxiety and depression.

It's getting to be more and more popular, more and more mainstream.

So I train a lot of people to do reiki. I've been teaching for 20 years. What I noticed about it and why psychic reiki is that studying particularly reiki, energy medicine in general, but particularly reiki, often opens people who are sensitive.

So if you're an empath, you might become more sensitive. If you have psychic tendencies or potential and you learn reiki, that can really open that channel for you. A lot of people didn't know what to do about that. It would be scary for them. It would be, I had one old lady tell me, 'I really love reiki but I stepped away from it because I felt like it opened me. I didn't know what to do and I got scared.'

That makes me sad because I feel like the world needs all the healers it can get. That's how I decided to teach both of them together and why I wrote a book about it.

Slade:

I'm just wondering, that question comes up for a lot of people that I interact with, this idea of being opened up and being afraid of that happening. And kind of like, resisting it and sort of backing up from that.

What do you say to somebody who's experiencing that, or on the verge of sort of feeling like they're opening up a little bit. What do you recommend that they do to sort of protect themselves but also move forward?

Lisa:

Yeah, it can be super overwhelming to people, so people who are sensitive and empathic, they feel, they're worried, they're afraid they're going to get flooded or overwhelmed or swamped by other people's feelings and emotions. That's hard for them.

The people that are psychically-inclined may have a lot of fear about what that means. Are they gonna see bad things? Are they gonna go crazy? Are people gonna think they're crazy? What are they gonna tell their friends and family they're seeing people, they're having these psychic experiences, and there's still a lot of stigma about this.

I know I'm preaching to the choir with you on this topic, Slade, but, you know, not too long ago, they would put people like us in the mental hospital for talking to angels.

Slade:

True.

Lisa:

Talking to angels and talking to their Uncle Fred would land you in the looney bin.

So people have to sort of unwind the fear around that.

And then, I think the best thing to do about it, I think everyone has to make a decision about whether they're going to accept or allow that part of themselves. Can we own it and what, if you do, then we have to sort of train.

So, the empaths need to train, learn how to manage their energy, which nobody ever knows. Because very few people get taught that. And psychic people need to learn basic... I think it's like being street-smart. Like, how do we, when we have enough information, it's less scary than if we just don't throw open the door and don't have any context for it.

Slade:

You know, you're right to talk about the preaching to the choir thing. Even I forget how many people who are going through this, it's new for them. It's sometimes hard to remember when you've been doing this for 20 years that there's somebody who's experiencing this for two weeks or whatever.

I keep being reminded, especially on social media and the Facebook groups, so many people posting about being in that part of the process. So I do want to be really sensitive to the fact that not everybody feels as bold and brave as we might.

So who is this book for, ideally?

Lisa:

It's for people that are new to the idea of reiki and wanting to learn. So it gives my version of reiki, which is pretty practical, pretty grounded, pretty technical in a way. And I think it would also quite benefit people who are already reiki practitioners.

You know, there's over a million reiki practitioners just in the United States alone and many more worldwide. Those people who have studied reiki, who want to learn more about it but also want to really incorporate the psychic, intuitive energy management piece because hardly anyone teaches that.

There are a lot of fabulous reiki teachers, but they don't teach energy management basics. They don't teach how to really open our intuition, how to really strongly connect with our guides, our reiki guides. There doesn't seem to be very much where that's all in the same package.

Slade:

There are photographs in your book. There are infographics. You've got hand positions for working on yourself, for working on other people. Can we learn to actually practice reiki from this book?

Lisa:

You could. Yeah. It was designed to be a manual, so you can use it like a manual with a lot of the psychic and energy management techniques. And even those techniques are very technical-oriented, so teaching you specifically how to ground, how to clear yourself after a session, how to connect with your guides, what to do when x, y and z happens.

Of course, when we're doing reiki, you do need to receive an attunment. The attunement can only be done by a reiki master.

So a lot of people say, 'Well I feel like I touch people and I move energy. Am I doing reiki?'

And the answer really is no unless you had a reiki attunement. So you could get everything you needed for reiki level one and two from the book except the attunement. You still need to find somebody near you who would do that for you.

Slade:

Well if there's that many people out there who are reiki practitioners, I guess that's a pretty realistic thing to be able to track down.

What do you suggest someone does who maybe doesn't live in a major city, if they want to do the attunement? How would they find someone?

Lisa:

Lots of people do long distance attunements, and I do too. So I'm happy to do long distance attunements for people that I teach. Actually for the first time ever this summer, I taught a virtual reiki class via livestream.

So I had a bunch of people in the room with me, and then I had a whole bunch of people on livestream. That was very cool. I loved it.

For those people that were taking the class virtually, I would attune them long distance. So you can get long distance attunements. You can get long distance reiki treatment sessions and long distance works just as well. Some people say even better than when you're in the room.

Slade:

Really? Why do you think that is?

Lisa:

They've done a lot of studies, and I read this really interesting study recently about this. Long distance healing sessions seem to be more effective because... I don't know if there's less interference, there's less personalization. We don't take things personally as much. There's not, maybe as much mingling of our personal stuff into a session when it's long distance.

Slade:

Like sensory distractions or something?

Lisa:

Yeah, or like our personal agenda. Like you really like that person and you really want to help them.

Slade:

Right.

Lisa:

Sort of where we get hooked as a person, not as a healer, with our clients. And doing long distance work takes that out.

Slade:

Interesting.

Well I prefer to not see people when I'm doing readings for them. I like to be kind of blind and only listening to them. And I prefer to do it from a distance. If somebody local asks me to do a reading, I'm like, 'You have to call me. I won't do it in the room with you.'

Lisa:

I know. I know that about you! I think that's so cool. But you're an auditory psychic, really, so...

Slade:

Yeah...

Lisa:

I know you got all the channels loaded up, but that's how you make your connection.

Slade:

It's kind of like when you listen to a piece of music and you really want to go in deep, you close your eyes and really focus in on it.

But I am a people watcher, so I'm reading the subtle clues of like, the jewellry choices that someone made or what they're wearing or why does she have that hairstyle? It's very distracting.

Lisa:

Right!

And I think the long distance takes that away. We get sort of a more neutral, more objective connection with long distance.

Slade:

You know what? I just have to say, I think technology's so amazing. And because I really think that technology is a friend to our... You know, we talk about the inner connectivity of human beings and collective consciousness and the zeitgeist and our ascendance as a species. I really believe that our technology, in particular our communications technology, amplifies our ability to do that. It really does have this opportunity to be hyper-connected.

And to hear that there is a study that shows, not only does it works, but it actually might even work better - that's exciting.

Lisa:

That was exciting.

And it was so exciting for me to do the livestream this summer. That was an incredible experience for me as a teacher, because I had a room full of 20 people, but I also had 10... One from... They were all over the world!

And that livestream technology put them in the room with me. So cool.

Slade:

Are you gonna keep doing those, do you think? Periodically?

Lisa:

Yeah!

Slade:

Okay!

Lisa:

I will.

Slade:

Cool, cool.

I've always wanted to ask a reiki practitioner this, and for some reason I haven't. Maybe because I don't want to show actually how little I know about it. But I'm just curious. What kind of things can we expect to experience if we are receiving reiki from someone? Should we feel something? What happens?

Lisa:

Yeah it's a great question.

Reiki is a very nurturing and filling kind of energy. We say it comes in at the frequency of unconditional love. Which, I think if you're going to be stuck on planet earth, stuck on a desert island with only one frequency, that's a really good one to have, you know?

Most people are really, sort of like turning on a faucet and standing under a waterfall where what you're receiving is this unconditional love.

People tell me that it's very relaxing. It's very warm. So the reiki practitioner's hands get warm. That's sort of a signature of reiki - it's a hot hand healing technique. And people will feel sort of this, sometimes if you're sensitive to the flow of energy, you might feel pulsing, tingling, heat, kind of the feelings of energy moving.

Other people don't feel that but they feel the results of the energy moving. So they'll feel relaxed, warm, peaceful, nurtured, energized.

It's good. It's a good feeling.

Slade:

I am really impressed.

I'm only becoming just aware, not only through you, but through another reiki practitioner that I work with, and I do mentoring with a lot of people around the intuitive stuff and the building of their practice who do have reiki and incorporate that into their practice.

I come from the other side of where you're coming from, which is, I came in through the intuitive. And so much of what I do is just, almost a talk therapy or talk coaching format, and I have seen that there is this real beauty in having a healing component to your practice.

Not only being able to tell someone, 'Oh, well your energy looks like crap. Here's why.' But to have the ability to actually do something about it, right then and there...

Lisa:

Absolutely.

For me, that's the coolest thing.

I do, about half of my sessions are in person in my office, and half are long-distance, phone or skype. The in-person sessions, because I'm a visual psychic and I'm looking at everyone's energy field, it's really painful for me to sit in a chair and see what's going on inside your energy field and not want to do something about it.

So you can see me look at my client, I'll be like, 'Let's get you up on the table.' Because I want to get my hands on you. I want to sort of smooth things out or get rid of some blocks or kind of patch you back up a little bit. It's so satisfying to me to be able to do that.

Slade:

Well that's interesting you talk about the fact that you are more of a visual psychic. I noticed, just for me personally, looking through the book, one of the sections that I was most attracted to was the level of detail that you go into about reading the aura of the client.

Talk to me a little bit about that. Is this stuff that you've observed through your practice? Did you learn it

Some psychics don’t believe spirit guides even have names. But in hundreds of readings, I've received names, and given them out to clients. Sometimes the names themselves are messages.

Because of the feedback, signs, and synchronicities that occur, I choose to continue sharing this information.

In this episode, I share ways in which you can experience these phenomena for yourself.

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I name everything.

Names are the way that I interact mentally, intellectually, psychically, emotionally, with things that even might not ordinarily have names. For instance, computers, my cars, certain trees that I see on a regular basis that I have an affinity for.

With something like computers, for example, someone posted about this in the group the other day, asking a question about why their relationship with technology was so terrible. There was a lot of cursing and a lot of hatred towards the computer. And it made me really aware of my own relationships with computers.

I adore my computers. I think of them as artificial intelligence versions of guides. Computers are the way that I live my life. It enables me to have the career that I do, to interact with people, to maintain my friendships.

A lot of my life is lived abstractly in a digital realm, as I'm sure yours is too.

To me, especially with it being such a huge part of my work, my computers are like trusty steeds must have been to people 200 years ago. Your horse was everything. Maybe that's more getting into the realm of what your car is.

But for me, my computers, they're not living things. They're not pets. They're not pet rocks. I don't think of them as being spirit entities or alive in any way. I do think that they're the first glimmer of an emerging artificial intelligence that we will probably interact with in our lifetimes. So I've already got a lot of practice interacting with them.

But I give different computers names, partly so that I can keep track of them in my file system. Especially on my back-up drives. I can tell where certain documents would have been in time, based on which computer I was using for those few years.

So there'll be almost a theme within my life and the computers' names sometimes represents that, from that time period.

I give my computers powerful names. The current computer that I'm working on right here as we speak has a very powerful guardian angel protector's name. And for some reason, I feel like I shouldn't say what that is. It's really personal and private and for psychic security reasons and physical security reasons, I'm not gonna tell you what my computers' names are.

But they do have names. You know, they're comparable to people's names or superhero names or angelic entities' names. I always imbue them with this powerful, wonderful personality, as if they're genies in bottles, or guardian angels. That type of vibe. That's how I see them.

So maybe that's one of the reasons why I have a good relationship with technology or maybe it's the other way around. My relationship with technology comes first, and then that allows me to have the warm fuzzies about technology. I can't really tell you.

So the idea of your spirit guides having individual names, it's something that's been around in my consciousness for about 15 years, as far as it being something out there that was talked about.

I remember years ago, as many of you may, watching Sylvia Browne on Montel Williams and answering questions from the audience. People would often stand up and ask her, 'What's my guide's name?' And she would just throw these names out there.

Also, when I first started blogging, it was one of the things that I blogged about most. Was this experience that I had of retrieving these names for these entities that were around me and how I kind of named them and interacted with them, the same way that I'm talking about my computers.

And I can remember at the time that there was a lot of argument in the blog comments of my blog and my peers. There's some people that are respected peers and colleagues of mine who do not believe in spirit guides having names.

Part of the philosophy is that they may exist in a realm in which the concept of human language is just completely not even there. Therefore their name might be some unintelligible, ungraspable concept that we don't even have the sensory ability to process.

And I think that's true. So I do think that the idea of spirit guide names down here in this realm is very much an imposed concept. The same way that we impose the concept of time on something that is really kind of impossible to understand fully, but we have a system of dividing up and naming time, and the passing of time, and our brains can wrap around that.

So there is something similar that's happening with spirit guide names I believe. So let me just take that for the record. It's something that we use down here in the physical world as people, specific to our language and culture and personality.

Out there, in the wider, multiple dimensions of the Universe, the concept may fall apart or become more complex or multi-faceted, in some way. It doesn't really impact our use of it here and now.

So that's the reason why I'm good with it.

I also always simply got names. If anybody asks me, 'Hey, you pick up a name from my spirit guide?' I pretty much always have something. Something comes through. I've just always gotten names. And I've always been hyperfocused on names and name origins and name meanings.

I think it has something to do with the fact that I have an unusual name. A not-common name. My name is more common in the UK as a last name. Growing up, the little license plates that you get for your bicycle, they never had Slade on them. Even baby name dictionaries.

When I was a kid, I would go and look to see if they had my name and wanting to know what it meant. And my name was never in those dictionaries.

I was 20 years old before I ever found a baby name dictionary with my name in it. And I was in the UK at the time that I ran across it. I bought it and I still have it. It is one of the only print books that I still use almost on a daily basis.

And if you've ever been on camera with me on Skype or Zoom or something like that, you have probably seen me twist around and reach for it and pull it out when we start talking about names. Names are always a component of the assessment that we do in the Automatic Intuition program.

So I started out doing readings really by doing spirit name readings. I was talking about my guides and who was who, and how I kind of interacted with them and writing about that. People started writing to me and asking me if I could pick up on a name for their spirit guide.

And this was an uncanny amount of emails that I got that were ALL the same question.

So I remembered Sylvia Browne passing out her spirit guide names and I thought, Well, if it's good enough for Sylvia, it's good enough for me. And so I started doing the spirit guide name readings.

That was really the first kind of psychic reading that I ever did for other people, if you don't count interpreting someone's chart, which, even though it was astrology, sometimes I think my intuition would play a part in how I would explain someone's chart to them.

Back to the spirit guide name readings.

They were email readings. They were really simple. And I remember thinking, Well, Sylvia, how do we really know that you're not just randomly pulling names out of a hat? Not that I necessarily thought that about her, but I can see how other people might think that.

And I thought, I've gotta put something else in these readings so that people understand that I'm really tuned in to them individually. So that it helps them to accept like, yeah, this is a name that I got for YOU. I didn't just flip a book open and cover my eyes and pick a name at random and email it to you.

I actually really tuned in and listened. In finding out what your spirit guide's name was, I would also pick up on impressions about you in your personality, and what you were like. I started to include this little personal identification section in all those readings to let people know, kind of like, 'Hey, this is you.'

And if you resonate with this as being true, then that helps you to accept the other pieces of information going along with this.

So that's really how my psychic readings grew. Because as I started to get feedback from the readings, the feedback started to be more and more about the other things that I was picking up about people and those details tended to grow.

Over time, some of the spirit guide name information took a backseat to much more pressing questions. If people are gonna spend the time and the money to talk to me, there are often things that they care about here in the real world that they want to talk about a lot more than something that's kind of ethereal and unable to be proven. And maybe neither here nor there.

So I saw that drop off a little bit over time.

It still surprises me though, that it's always kind of there for the asking if anybody wants to know. I don't make a big point of forcing that on anyone unless they express an interest in it.

Long story short, I get names. And I give them. And I continue to give them out because of the feedback that goes along with them. There's a LOT of different ways that specific names and words pop up for me.

As a clairaudient, as a claircognizant, intuitive, it often comes tumbling out in normal conversation. I'll try to give you some examples of different ways that this manifests for me. But more than anything, I would give people names and they would have some kind of association with them.

And weirdly, my names never produced associations with people who've passed away. I very rarely have experiences doing mediumship. But I have had some very interesting experiences with doing mediumship. So I'm trying not to say I don't do that. Because there is some indication that I can. It's just not something I'm presented with as often.

Here's a story I've never told anyone before.

So my nephew who is 18 months old at the time of this recording, his name is Hayden. And that name is a name that exists in my journals as far back as being a teenager. And you know how you have that kind of list of names, Oh, if I ever have a kid, I want to name him this, or I really like this name for a girl. You probably had that thought at some point. Some of you may have pretty elaborate lists around that.

I wonder how many of those names that you want to name your kid when you're 10 actually end up being the names that you name your kid. Or if you veer off in a completely different direction when there's another person involved in getting to choose a name.

So that name, I didn't really know that it was necessarily like, Ooo, if I have a son, I'm gonna name him this. Because I didn't really ever have a conception that I would have children. I just really like that name and for me.

I had names for characters in fiction. That was something that I was always kind of brainstorming, is cool ideas for names for characters. Sometimes the names would come first and I'd be like, That's a really cool name for a female ninja or whatever. Then I would elaborate and grow the character from the name.

So this name Hayden was really significant to me throughout my teen years. And when I was 19, I actually wrote a story about a real experience that I had with a spirit in my freshman dorm room. And for the purposes of the story, I needed to disguise what the real name was. So I wanted to give him another name.

So in that piece of fiction, I used the name Hayden for that spirit. And I worked on that story for many years. It grew and over time, it was something that I came back to maybe five or six years ago. I pulled it out and started looking at it again and thought, You know, there's something there. There's some bones of a good story.

One of the things though that I decided after working on it, and this was about five years ago. It's in the Cloud Busting universe, if you've read the novel Cloud Busting, it actually would be sort of a prequel to that story. It's a story leading up to that summer for that character.

The spirit, Hayden, was very much a spirit that was waiting to be born into flesh again. And was actively probably pursuing and trying to manipulate people in some way in order to inhabit flesh again and to come in.

So there was a little bit of darkness around it.

And I shelved that project even after working on it again, decades later. I was like, Okay, I like the story but that name is not creepy enough for me. It's not dark enough. I need to come up with another name for that spirit character.

In the meantime, set it aside and thought, you know, I'll come back to it if it wants to be come back to.

Then a couple of years ago, my brother and sister-in-law got pregnant. And they started talking about the names that they were going to choose for their child. And the first thing that they said, 'If it's a boy, his name's going to be Hayden.'

And I was like, Oh crap! That's a weird synchronicity.

I actually told her and my brother a little bit about it without getting too deep into what that character represented in my story. Because my brother's pretty sensitive and I think he's more psychic than I am. But he does not like to talk about these things and is a little bit more creeped out by it, whereas I'm like super into it. It makes him uncomfortable and I was worried that if I told him, like, 'Yeah, that was the name of an evil

Dena DeCastro is a professional astrologer, writer, and teacher. She offers individual astrology readings and mentors those who wish to take their astrological knowledge to the next level.

Dena teaches us what our north and south nodes can tell us about our karmic lessons and our life purpose.

Linda Goodman's Sun Signs

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Dena:

So, when I was young in the '70s, my parents were both kind of hippie, you know, Bohemian, interested in all of that stuff. My dad actually read tarot cards, not for a living, but just as a hobby. My mom had a close friend who was an astrologer and they would sit at the dining room table and look at charts and dish on men and I was just fascinated, always.

I would browse the books in the bookshelf. I was kind of an early reader, so I would just kind of nerd out on all the astrology books that my parents had. And so I just immediately, you know, I came from somewhere. I have a feeling I came from a past-life, probably. But this innate interest in astrology and the planets and even space and stars, was something that was just there when I was very little. I would say, starting at about 5.

So I went on, throughout my teenage years, read a lot of the usual books. You know, Linda Goodman's 'Sun Signs' was one of them. That was like my bible when I was in junior high and I grew to be able to read charts, more about late high school age, college age, and I would practice on my friends and family.

It just grew and it was always with me.

Interesting side note, during that time when I was about 8 or 9, my mom became a born-again Christian, so she eschewed all of that. You know, tarot, astrology, all of that was out. And it was looked at as, you know, she said it's the dark arts. I don't think she used that word. That's more of a Harry Potter term actually. The Dark Arts.

It was forbidden in our house and so I had to do it surreptitiously for awhile. But then she eventually switched back and became more open to, I would say, early New Age ideas or occult ideas. So there was a few years in there where it was like, on the sly, I had to do my astrology stuff.

And then when I got into my late 20s, I had a friend of mine that suggested, 'You COULD do this for a living!'

Could I? Could I really?

So I put out my shingle and started charging for readings when I was right at my Saturn return, which is 28, 29 years old. And have been doing that ever since!

Slade:

Wow.

So I have to ask you, you started way before we had computer software to do this stuff.

Dena:

Yeah.

Slade:

So at what point in your career did the technology come in and play a part? Or does it, at all?

Dena:

It did. Like, in the '90s, there were ways that you could order charts on, via the internet or mail order. That was kind of the way you did it. It's kind of funny.

I learned to cast charts by hand in the late '90s finally. I had always had charts given to me so that was how I did it in the early days, like in my teenage years. Like, somebody already had a chart and I'd look at it.

Slade:

Oh, okay!

Alright. So you're much more about the interpretation than the castings, even at that early age.

Dena:

Yes, right.

Slade:

Okay! I can relate to that. That would be true for me as well. I NEVER learned to cast a chart by hand, just for the record.

Dena:

It takes so long. It really is an onerous process. I know how to do it. If you had me do it today, gosh it's been maybe 18 years since I've actually cast a chart by hand. So it would be a tricky but it's good I think for astrologers to at least learn how to do. At least once. To get a sense of viscerally what's going on.

Because the thing with technology now is that it detaches us from what the actual mechanics are of the solar system and the planets in relation to the earth. And for some reason, when you learn to cast a chart, you get more of a sense of, okay, the ascendant, for example, the rising sign, is the rising sign. Because that's what's actually rising on the Eastern horizon. So there's an example of that. That it's rooted to the physical world.

With software, we can forget that sometimes and it just becomes a piece of paper in front of us. It's like, that's the glyph of Venus, but oh, there's a Venus in the sky as well. So that's a difference.

But I think for time and for efficiency, you can't beat technology, for sure.

Slade:

No, definitely not.

And I'm mostly just interested in, like if somebody can give me a list of what their planets are in and what houses everything's in, that's enough for me to work on.

Dena:

Yeah!

Slade:

I will say though, that I love the natal chart graphic - the cool geometric thing, and I think everybody's a little bit in love with that, right? There's a mystique about it.

Dena:

Yeah, certainly! The glyphs, the symbols, they're very beautiful. They're just aesthetically pleasing and it looks like something from the Renaissance, or it just has that kind of ancient feel and evokes that. So I do think there's the appeal of it.

And I can, like you, if I just know somebody's birthday and they don't even have a time, I can look in ephemeris and say, 'Here's where all your planets were.' Maybe excepting the moon because it moves very fast but everything else I can pretty much know, that's where it was. Even with that I can get so much information.

But having the visual of the chart works better for me. Just being able to see it laid out.

Slade:

That is so cool.

I was very fascinated by that as a child. I had an aunt in the '70s who was friends with Jean Dickson.

Dena:

Oh wow!

Slade:

Do you remember her?

Dena:

Yeah, I do!

Slade:

She had - It's so funny when you were talking about your childhood experience of kind of going through the books in your parents' library. I used to go through HER books when I would visit. She lived in Florida. And when we would go down to visit, she had this library of '70s new age, feminist everything. And some of her books were astrology books that were autographed by Jean Dickson. And I always thought that was the most glamourous thing in the whole world, right?

Dena:

Very glamourous, for sure.

She's probably one of THE most famous astrologers, at least from that era. She's a name that everybody knows.

Slade:

Right.

And Linda Goodman's books. I remember those as well.

So one of the things I'm really excited to talk to you about is kind of your niche of astrology, which is the connection between astrology and past lives. And also how the nodes play into that, and karmic patterns in the chart.

I just would love to open up the floor and hear you talk about these relationships.

Dena:

You know, I'll start by saying, when I started practicing astrology, which was the late 1998, 1999, I really was doing the typical descriptive astrology. For example, your sun is in Aries. You are fiery, spontaneous, brash and bold. You know, something like that.

That started to feel a little limiting to me.

So I was searching... A few years into doing it, around 2002, 2001, 2002, I started to search for what more can I learn? I just felt this impulse that I needed to find a different approach, or another layer to my system. And so I went to an astrology conference here in the Northwest called NORWAC. It's the Northwest Astrology Conference.

Steven Forrest was speaking there and he and Jeffrey Wolf Green are two astrologers that really founded this school of thought within astrology called Evolutionary Astrology. It's called 'evolutionary' because it is based on the premise that our souls do reincarnate and they move from lifetime to lifetime, learning lessons and evolving. The intention is evolution.

And with that, the nodes, the south node represents the past life or karmic patterns, and north node represents what we are here to learn to become or to embrace. And the whole point of it is evolution. The whole point of it is growth and change. And it made so much more sense to me than the idea that we're just static. That we're born with this chart and that's just who we are for the rest of our lives.

And the other main component, or the foundational belief in this type of astrology is the idea of free will. And that we make choices in our lifetimes that impact where we're going, the lessons we have to learn, and how we respond to those lessons with our free will really determines how we move along our path. How we move toward our Soul Purpose.

So this all resonated with me.

I had always believed in reincarnation. It's one of those beliefs that you can't really explain. It was a knowing. I just felt a knowing about it.

I will say that, it's not that there isn't proof for reincarnation. There's a lot of good case studies out there and proof for reincarnation. But it is one of those things that people take on faith, and some people have a strong reaction one way or the other to that idea.

But reincarnation is very much inherent in this niche of astrology that I practice. It's a foundational piece of it.

That all being said, I went to study with Steven Forrest at his apprenticeship program. I did that for a few years and embraced this path within astrology, because it really resonated with what I already had felt and believed for most of my life.

What it is that I think this kind of astrology offers that's a little different to some branches is the south node karmic patterns can point out: Here are the things in a past life that you experienced, and also that vexed you, or that upset you, or that's left unresolved at the time you left that life. And then when you came into this life as a soul, you carry some of that baggage with you. We call that 'karma', and that's a memory. An emotional memory of what went on. But we don't consciously remember that.

So in this life, our work is to learn to release those old patterns and not to get stuck in repeating those karmic situations. But we're inclined to want to do so because we tend, as humans, to want to repeat what we've done before and what's comfortable. Even if it's painful. It can feel comfortable because it's familiar.

So the north node points to, well what's the medicine for that? What can we do?

That's where free will comes in. What can we do in THIS life to pull ourselves out of those old stuck patterns of the past? And the north node offers the medicine, the way, for us to move away from staying stuck and stagnant.

So remember that the key point is growth. The key point is evolution. All of us, if we're born, we have karma. If we're born, we're also a living thing that needs to grow and evolve. If we stop doing that, if we stagnate on a soul level, we feel unfulfilled and bored and unhappy.

So when clients come to me, what they're often looking for is, I'm kind of stuck. Or I'm in a place in my life where I'm trying to make a transition and I feel like I'm scared and I can't. What's blocking me? Or they're just, they have that general malaise. I just don't have the joy for life. I'm feeling like I'm not on my path but I can't really figure out what to do to get on it, or to get back to it.

And so the nodes are very powerful to look at that and say, Okay, well here's what's in your way. Here's the karmic patterns of the past. Here is where you can get stuck very easily, repeating these patterns. And then here, the north node is what you're here to learn and to embrace. And the more you move TO that, even if it's scary, even if it feels challenging, which it will, the more you move toward that, the more you make choices in that direction, the more fulfillment and peace and joy for life you can gain back.

So that's the overview with how I see it.

Slade:

So if I tell you what my north node is, can you tell me... Since I'm the one that's here talking to you, we'll use my chart as an example.

Dena:

Absolutely!

Slade:

I have a north node in Pisces. What can you tell me about that?

Dena:

Yes!

Well I can speak to that because so do I!

Slade:

Oh, interesting!

Dena:

So let me just say about that too. The nodes go to a new sign about every year and a half. So you can know that if you're born within a close time frame to someone, that you very likely have the same nodes. They're are like these mini generations. 1.5 years of the same. And that pattern repeats every 18, 19 years. They will come back around to the same nodes.

So yeah. So we have the same ones. I think we're both born in '69, right?

Slade:

Yes! July 23rd.

Dena:

Oh, gosh! Same month! Ohmygoodness.

Slade:

Wow.

Dena:

I'm July 8th.

Slade:

Okay.

Dena:

So I can speak to this pretty well.

But just because we have the same nodes doesn't mean like I know everything about this, because I'm working with the same struggles, right?

Slade:

Okay.

Dena:

So if you have the north node in Pisces, that means you have the south node in Virgo. The nodes are always opposite signs to each other, always at 180 degrees. So once you know one, you can figure out the other.

Let's start with the past-life karmic pattern for you.

South node in Virgo is really attached in past lives to doing things perfectly because you may ha

How do you know which things in life happen because they were predetermined versus things you’re experiencing because of decisions you made that are not in alignment with your soul path and purpose?

And why do things happen to you? Is it karma?

Cloudbusting by Eric Slade

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A little disclaimer

Automatic Intuition is not a cult where everyone subscribes to my belief system, or assimilates to a shared philosophy.

The exact opposite.

The intention is to support YOU in discovering YOUR practice and bringing through YOUR wisdom.

Because I know there is audience for whatever you believe, even if it’s not what I believe.

All to say …

I might piss some people off with this segment. And disappoint a bunch of others.

You don’t have to believe what I believe.

I celebrate the Mystery. Not Knowing is normal.

I think anytime anybody tells you they KNOW something is true on the other side, in another dimension, about the Universe that cannot be tested or corroborated ... My alarms go off.

That’s fundamentalism.

If it’s a theory, if it’s a cool myth, if it’s an archetypal fable, or if it’s channeled wisdom … Then it’s all those things.

But it’s not necessarily fact.

It’s the kind of belief that requires faith.

And you’re entitled to your faith.

I’m entitled to my alternatives.

But most of you are here listening because you want to talk about personal development and spirituality without all the blind faith or the “It’s channeled. Therefore it’s fact.” That’s a leap. Even coming me, you should take it with a grain of salt.

I have a magical world view — in some areas, I’m a total space cadet and you might be inclined to think “I’m not buying that.” Where in others, even in more established subjects, I’m like “Nope. That’s a fairy tale. That doesn’t work for me in the real world.”

I know I’m putting out mixed messages. I know I’m full of contradictions. The jury is out on a lot of my beliefs, but … we are deliberating and accepting whatever redacted documents you want to share …

I’m making these disclaimers about myself, Automatic Intuition, and our beliefs because I want you to know that my own students disagree with me and my opinions do not necessarily represent the others.

I admittedly have a little bit of a bully pulpit here.

BUT I am encouraging all my mentoring clients to create their own.

We celebrate diversity of thought, and people having their own clients, their own audience, that resonates with their particular perspective. Just like you resonate with most of mine.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

How do you know which things in life happen because they were predetermined/contracted lessons, versus, things you’re experiencing because of decisions you made that are not in alignment with your soul path/purpose?

A lot of people chimed in with thoughts about Soul Contracts.

I actually know a lot of people both inside my mentoring community and in other groups who do work with soul contracts. I know a lot about the resources for that work and I know people I can put you in touch with.

If you want to deep dive on soul contracts, you can.

I talk about Spirit guides. And they can’t be proven. But I can implement the advice I perceive from them and see the results of that information in my actual world.

Here’s the part where I’m gonna piss some people off...

I don’t believe in Fate.

I don’t believe in soul contracts and predestination.

I don’t believe in a supreme being that micromanages our actions.

I don’t believe we choose our hardships from a menu of bad shit while sitting on a cloud in the bardo between lifetimes.

I get the question WHY in readings a lot.

For years I’ve gotten these questions.

I’ve had a lot of time to bring through those messages and practice how best to deal with feelings of “Why did this happen to me?"

I don’t believe asking WHY something happened ever gets you the answers you need.

Better questions to ask are:

Shit happens.

Now, when you make bad choices and you stray from the path and purpose you know in your heart you should be in, then you increase the chances of bad shit happening.

I don’t think it’s karma sometimes as much as it’s self-sabotage.

But none of this is to say I don’t believe we’re here for a reason

or that we don’t have a purpose

or that this isn’t a profound spiritual experience

Maybe we come in with general themes, not specific jobs to accomplish

Maybe we come in with a weakness in some aspects of our being and attract life lessons that allow us to master those issues

Maybe the issues get assigned through the process of living, being here.

There are a myriad of components:

family members, society, culture, time period

Incidental random circumstances

All combining and crashing and merging with WHO YOU ARE at soul level

Why does it have to be pre-scripted?

Does it make you feel better to think you came here with a list of challenges to deal with—

Please don’t say something like to someone living with cancer or HIV.

I think it’s offensive.

But I’m entirely okay with saying we chose to come participate in this big virtual reality free for all called the earth plane. And I’m okay with thinking or believing or telling stories about spiritual entities coming here to have a human experience.

I think we could just say Yes, knowing it’s going to be dangerous and treacherous and painful, as well as joyful and exciting.

I do believe, just to bottom line it, that we are here to learn how to transcend existential pain and choose love.

And if we didn’t set that up beforehand, it’s still the best way forward.

Because even the most old school Old Testament fundamentalist story telling tells us the thing that separates human kind from all the other entities swirling around our galactic center is our free will.

Having something be contracted before your lifetime — feels like a cop out to me.

It feels like the opposite of will.

It feels like something that is comfortable to the victim.

Listen, we are all victims at some points in our lives, and will continue to be, until we choose to transcend it.

That’s the only thing that separates a victim from a victor.

At some point you’ve got to put down that bag of rocks and learn how to throw them with precision.

Turn your burdens into gifts.

Your pain into tools.

The ingredients of a meaningful life are the same as a pointless one — it all gets shifted with perspective, gratitude, and an exercise of your free will.

I’m much more comfortable accepting some shit is random; and some of the shit we bring on ourselves through the choices we make; or a combination of the above.

In fiction storytelling, drama and empathy are created in the audience by giving our characters a set of Best Bad Choices to make.

At our very, very best, we’re just doing our best, maybe writing that contract on the fly.

Making it up as we go.

Even the best of us.

Now we have good intentions and we have free will.

And we have the choice to make something meaningful out of what is happening to us.

WHY it happened … that’s a shit show.

What you need to survive this world is not knowledge of a soul contract, but sheer courage.

A personal solo episode about losing the joy for my writing and a breakthrough I recently experienced healing issues around creativity, self-esteem, and perfectionism.

Akimbo Seth Godin's Podcast

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There are a lot of you listening to this who I personally really wanted to tell this story to.

Like, not as an episode but just in my life. It's actually easier just to make it a podcast episode and tell the story at once. I've texted a few people. I've called a few people over the last week. I've called Seth and made him listen to me talk about it for an hour and a half. And then I went to text my friend Jeff last night to catch him up on what had been going on with me and I thought, 'Oh god, this is just all too much for texting.'

For some reason, it feels more self-indulgent to keep calling people individually and gushing about my creative breakthroughs and my angst and all that kind of stuff. It just seems to be more appropriate to actually do a personal podcast episode which you can fast forward or choose not to listen to.

For those of you who are choosing to listen to this, you're my friends too and you have expressed interest in my personal episodes and me sharing things from my personal life. Actual issues that I'm dealing with. It humanizes the whole thing, right? And it reminds you that I am not a guru sitting up here with a bunch of wisdom about this stuff. I am someone who is playing with all these tools and all this language, and observing, and trying to share a part of my process as a way of motivating you and bringing you along with me.

So this all goes back to all that solar eclipse madness we had in 2017.

At the time that I'm recording this, it is towards the end of August 2018, if you're listening from the future and you need some time context there. But back to the big eclipse in 2017, at the end of the summer. It was about a year ago, and the bookends for all the eclipse stuff that was going on last year was about the sign of Leo, and the opposite sign of Leo, which is Aquarius.

There was this thematic dynamic and there were sort of two questions that the eclipses were bringing up for you. And the fact that I am a Leo and Jeff, incidentally, who I wanted to tell this story to, is Leo as well. And so, one of the reasons why I felt so exhausted in trying to catch him up on this in text messages, we've been having this conversation for well over a year about both of us, and how we've been going through this. Not to mention all the clients and people I do readings for, where we've had conversations about this.

So this is just my personal experience with all this stuff.

But for all of us, there was a theme. There IS a theme with the solar eclipses that we've been through and all this retrograde stuff with an eclipse is kind of like, 'Oh, by the way, here's a bonus lesson for you. Just to make sure you got that all worked out.

The Leo is really asking us: How are you a star? What's your light? What do you have to give the world?

The Aquarius is about: Who's receiving that light? Who's observing it? Who can see it? Who is impacted by it?

I didn't make this up, by the way.

I heard something Seth Godin talking about it on his podcast Akimbo. I'll try to find the exact episode and link to it. But if you want to check out Akimbo, I think it was one of the first three episodes that he did for that whole podcast. But he had an episode about Making Things for the Weirdos. So this is the thing I didn't make up. For the edge, not the middle.

The idea of what makes something super popular, what makes something mainstream. Things were not created for the mainstream. They aren't created for the middle. If you create something that's gonna appeal to everyone, you're going to re-invent the colour beige. You're going to reconstitute oatmeal.

The way in which things become popular and mainstream is that they are picked up by the weirdos. By the fringes. By the tastemakers and the hipsters and the people who are on the edge. The Lantern-bearers who are out in the woods guiding the lost back to the light. Back to civilization. It's found on the edge in the margins.

And so, people who are early adopter of things that end up being very popular and cool are very proud of themselves for discovering something, and appreciate something that is new and difficult and hard to categorize and that not everyone gets. If you've ever had those friends who always want to be the one who finds the new band before anyone else and who always wants to listen to something that everyone else finds off-putting or reads something that's really difficult.

It's part of their ego-pride that they are able to go places the rest of us can't go. Or go there FIRST. They discover things and then they pass it to us.

The way that that life cycle works for things that become popular, that are loved by a lot of people, they start with the weirdos. So if you're trying to make something cool, according to Seth Godin's concept or theory, you start out by making things for the weirdos. Go for the fringe! Be weird, because that's where it gets picked up and that's where you're going to create something original.

With that in mind, it's been on my mind and it's a theme that plays into this episode and this personal story.

So I have two author friends, Kim and Brandon.

Brandon and I talk about a lot more than on the show because he's a science-fiction author. He does a lot of research on the topics that we're interested in. You know, the ascension of humanity, psychic information from the collective, ancient civilizations. He works a lot of this stuff into his books, and so he ends up coming up on the show sometimes because our conversations overlap.

Kim is someone who also listens to this show. Incidentally, it's really kind of cool because I went to this writer's conference. It was called the Best-Seller Summit, I think, two years ago, in Nashville. I first gravitated, the very first night, to Brandon and before I left there, I had met Kim and discovered that she was another one of these people that I'd gone on to college with, but didn't know while I was AT college. Susan Hyatt's one of those people as well.

I feel like they're special because we were just destined to find each other at some point.

It's interesting that those are the two people that I brought away from that experience. Usually when I go to any conference, I pick up one major soul family member at least. And that's one of the things that I look forward to whenever I travel. Especially if it's work-related or has a project at its centre.

Kim and Brandon, incidentally, I was telling people about my idea for this podcast as a content marketing strategy at that conference. And I was talking about this basic concept for it. And it's interesting that the two people that I connected with and became friends with there, are also very much listeners of this show. Like, they genuinely listen to this show the way all of you do, who are fans of this content, this topic.

So that's how we met.

And I have an ongoing relationship with both of them. Brandon is very much a sort-of coach to me and someone that I look up to and admire for his productivity and his work ethic. Kim is my, I call her my Author Therapist. She's the person who talks me off the ledge and who I call when I really need to be vulnerable about being a fiction author.

Listen, guys. Fiction authors - we are a neurotic bunch of cats, okay? We are tortured. And I know that sounds really ridiculous to say, but you just have to assume that I'm telling you about some part of my life that you don't see as much as this part. There's this other place where I'm this angsty artist and I'm not the only one. We're all that way for some reason. Anyway.

We do require a lot of emotional support and it's a little bit crazy because we get really, really worked up and really sometimes depressed and neurotic and all kinds of negative energy that we have to work through. And dealing with things that are entirely imaginary. So if you were to be a fly on the wall listening to us talk, and you weren't an author, I always think, 'Gawd, people would think we are NUTS!'

But anyway. There you have it.

It's a little bit of a curse and a calling. We do not feel that it's necessarily something that we chose. We feel that it's something that we have to do. It was ordained by the creative life force and intelligence in the Universe. So it's a struggle.

Something that really happened for me this year that came to a head was, you may have seen me before posting word counts on my projects as I'm working on them. I do NaNoWriMo sometimes in November every year - National Novel Writing Month. That's something that we do is we post our word counts daily to motivate each other or to hold ourselves accountable. It's something that author friends, especially on social media, do in a lot of groups and communities.

My friend Brandon was posting about how he was raising his word counts. Brandon has been on a trajectory for a couple of years of producing a lot of work really quickly. He's writing serialized science fiction and releasing a lot of books per year. There's an entire community of authors who work this way, and he's trying to learn some of those skills and apply them to increase his own productivity.

So he's posting about how he's getting higher and higher in his daily word counts. I remember a point at which he posted something about being up to 5,000 words a day. And I was comparing myself to that on a day when I literally had a word count on my novel of like, 400 words. It took me like an hour and a half to produce those 400 words. And just to give you an idea, I usually write for a two hour session, and I like to get somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 words.

So my fiction goal per day really is a lowball 1,000 words a day.

So here's Brandon, writing about 5,000 words a day, which of course he's comparing himself to people who are writing 10, and 12,000. But I compared myself to that and I just really got down in the dumps about it. And felt like I was just crawling towards my goals and got really in my head about it.

First red flag here is comparing yourself to others, right?

I love the quote, 'Comparison is the thief of joy.' I think that is mostly attributed to Theodore Roosevelt. It's one of my mantras. At this time, unfortunately, wasn't enough to get me out of this ditch that I got into with my writing over the course of the last year or so.

So I was telling my other author friend, Kim, about this. I was talking about, 'Ohmygod, Brandon's doing so great. I'm so happy for him. But I am comparing myself to him and feeling like, just such a loser.' I was telling her, 'I'm just slowing down more and more. I'm barely getting 500 words of fiction written per day...'

Kim's listening to me and she's such a wonderful, sweet soul. She holds space so well for these hair-pulling sessions of mine. And she just asked me a really simple question. She said, 'Well, what about your non-fiction?'

I was stumped for a moment. And I thought, 'Ohmygod, I don't even COUNT non-fiction anymore.'

I've been writing non-fiction professionally every day for over a decade. For like, 13 years or something like that, if we get really technical. I do email-readings, notes for phone readings, channelling, automatic writing sessions for the readings that I do, I do posts in my Automatic Intuition community. I answer email questions. I answer questions on Quora and Facebook. I write scripts for guided meditations.

I write scripts for these podcasts. I write show notes before the shows as an outline, and then I write show notes after the shows to create the blog posts and the metadata for this podcast. I write the introductions segments pretty much word for word, the way that I perform them. The outros and the channelled messages, the Oracle segment.

I write blog posts. I've written thousands of blog posts at this point. I don't even really know exactly how big my archive is. I write email newsletters. I've been doing that for, you know, 15 years. I write transcripts sometimes. Tutorials.

I write classes on the various topics that I speak about. Intuition, connecting with your guides, the Money Shift, all that kinds of stuff. I wrote a workbook for my mentoring clients, for the Automatic Intuition professional community and that's basically like a textbook.

Every day I write morning pages. And then sometimes I write afternoon morning pages. But they're not morning pages anymore. They're associative writing exercises. They're brainstorming.

So as I'm going, all of that stuff flashed through my head when she asked, 'What about your non-fiction? What's your word count for that?'

And I thought, 'Ohmygod, I can't even put a number on that.' But as we were conversing, I just sort of grabbing handfuls of those things in my mind and I was thinking, 'Wow. Yeah. I write 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10,000 words a day sometimes. There's probably very few days of the week where I don't at least write 1,000 or 2. Whether I'm working on my novels or not.

So it was so crazy. I was like, 'Hold on a minute! THAT’S ALL THE WRITING I’M NOT COUNTING. I'm not counting it! I'm not giving myself credit for it. I don't write it down. I don't log it. I don't track it. I don't beat myself up about it. I also don't lift myself up with it. Or give myself any credit for it whatsoever.

That's really messed up, y'all!

That's crazy that I'm doing that. I'm sitting here almost in tears because I wrote a piddly 400 words on my novel, and completely discounting the other 5, 6, 7,000 words that I wrote that day. And I'm walking around telling myself, 'I'm not prolific. I'm not productive. I'm such a loser. I'm crawling. I produce hardly any work. I'm only working 2 hours a day.'

NONE of that is accurate.

It's such a loud ego-programmed radio sta