Rooted Source Podcast

About Rooted Source Podcast

Ponderings on the intersection of trauma healing, shifting consciousness, and moving to global coherence. rootedsource.substack.com (https://rootedsource.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Ionsul Ferrin

Category

health & fitness · religion & spirituality

Language

en

Explicit

Yes

First episode

6 Feb 2026

Latest episode

5 Nov 2026

Latest episodes

10 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   5 Nov 2026

   Ep11: Healing Is Awakening

   Welcome back, friends. Today I want to talk about something that’s really close to my heart. It’s been moving through me for a long time, actually. Many years at this point. And it’s overdue for me to come clean about it. You may have noticed that the podcast intro changed. For a long time, I framed what I do mostly in terms of healing: healing codependency, healing old wounds, healing the patterns that keep us stuck. And that’s still true. But I’ve finally admitted to myself that I was leaving out a big piece of the puzzle. Maybe the biggest piece of all. I was playing it safe because I didn’t want to reveal just how big of a spiritual weirdo I really am. But I know I’m not alone. There are plenty of you other spiritual weirdos out there and I hope this episode will speak to a lot of you. Basically, I realized that what was missing from past episodes is that I was leaving out a big part of what I actually consider the end purpose of healing to be. I really don’t see healing as just fixing what’s broken. I see it as the whole reason that we’re having this human experience. I see it as a journey of transforming our consciousness so that we become closer to the consciousness of the Creator / Creatress, Him / Herself. Yes, I think Source consciousness does not have a gender, but our gendered language carries weight and I like to put in female pronouns for Divinity where I can. Feels like it’s balancing out the last 6,000 years of patriarchy, ya know? Anyway, here’s my big admission: for a very long time now, I’ve considered healing and awakening two words for the same thing. They’re really both talking about the journey of self-discovery, of re-membering who and what we really are. So that’s what I’m going to riff on today: Why healing is awakening, and vice versa. And what it might mean to stop dividing these two concepts in our minds. Spoiler: it means we just might stop judging ourselves and embrace our fabulous human chaos. One Journey So let’s start by talking about why healing and awakening are two words that really point down the same path. In most spaces, healing and awakening tend to get treated as two separate tracks. Talk therapy is a great example of this. Having gone through the first year of a master’s program to become a counselor, I understand the importance of not imposing spiritual beliefs on a client, that’s really important. But the fact that we have generally, as a culture separated mental health and healing from spirituality is very telling. Yes, there are amazing practitioners out there who make space for an invite spiritual discussion in those spaces. But that’s generally seen as either kind of fringe, or something that requires special training in something like Transpersonal Psychology. It’s not something that most talk therapists get training in beyond, don’t evaluate your clients according to your own beliefs. Again, valid. But also incomplete, if you consider that we are all fundamentally spiritual beings. And I’m not even going to touch the idea that allopathic healthcare could be radically transformed by bringing in more spiritual perspectives. Okay, I guess I did just touch it. But can you just imagine how different healthcare would be if the doctors and healthcare workers genuinely saw their patients as Divine sparks of Source on their journey of waking up to the truth of their beings? Can you imagine how different our whole culture would be if that were the shared reality?? I certainly think rates of war, violence, and inequality would dramatically decrease, don’t you? But I digress. Point is, I think it’s often — not always, but often — a disservice to put “healing” in one box over here, and “spirituality” in another, way over there. Culturally, we tend to see healing is the therapy side: working through trauma, managing anxiety, fixing what’s broken. And we see awakening is the spiritual side: meditation, transcending suffering, seeking enlightenment, rising above it all. I don’t know if you can feel that split in your body, but I certainly can. It feels like there’s a kind of hierarchy. As if healing is for people who are broken and struggling, while awakening is for people who’ve already got their shit together and are ready for the “advanced” stuff. But over the past 7 years, seeing clients as a Niasziih healer, and facilitating group connection spaces that welcome people with diverse trauma backgrounds, I’ve definitely seen that supposed hierarchy is totally bogus. I’ve done Niasziih sessions on people who their community saw as a spiritual leader, but who were secretly suffering. And I’ve been in groups with people who were culturally outcast due to trauma and addiction, but who were living deep spiritual truths. Honestly, what I’ve seen is that those people who think that their healing is “done” are always fooling themselves. There’s always more work to do. Because consciousness is infinite. So how ridiculous would it be to think we could ever be done exploring something that has no end? I think this misconception may be one reason why many so-called gurus have been so harmful to those around them. Someone prone to grandiose thinking could assume that because they’ve got spiritual insight, they’re above being human somehow. They stop looking at themselves, avoid doing any kind of shadow work, and before you know it there’s a Netflix documentary about them. They genuinely hate it when I toot their horns, but that’s why I knew that my Niasziih healing teachers – Karl Direske and Pat Miller – were the right teachers for me. It’s not just that I’ve experienced them literally creating miracles of healing for countless people, including myself. It’s that they never, ever, even a tiny bit try to elevate themselves over anyone. They are constantly working to take themselves off of people’s pedestals. In Karl’s case, that might be too effective sometimes. But that’s what makes a real spiritual teacher to me. Someone who says, “I have perspectives that might help. But you are your own authority.” This lack of hierarchy makes sense to me because it reflects the deepest truth that we are all Divinity incarnate. And that makes us all equal. Yes, sometimes we need functional hierarchies to get things accomplished in 3-D reality, but that’s an episode for another day. Drop a note in the comments if that’s a topic that particularly interests you cuz I love to nerd out about that particular nuanced topic, but let’s stay focused! The Real Work The point is that whether you’re on a “healing” journey, or on a “spiritual awakening” journey, the work is essentially the same. It’s raising your self-awareness so you have more choice over your thoughts, emotions, and actions, and really taking ownership over how you affect those around you. Raising self-awareness also takes me ever closer to realizing that I am very much the creator of my own reality. Not that I can control or dictate everything that happens to me. But I do get to decide my inner state, regardless of outer circumstances. And of course that radically influences the people and situations that I attract. When I was stuck in anxiety, depression, and self-loathing, I largely attracted relationships and situations that reflected back my lack of self-worth. But as I’ve healed those thought-behavior loops I’ve dramatically improved everything in my life to the point that I pretty much have the life of my dreams now. Of course I still have aspirations for the future, but I also wake up everyday feeling positive, resilient, and Divinely supported and guided. It’s really like the difference between heaven and hell. And helping people get out of their own hell loops is really the purpose of everything I do now. Because I needed those real, live in-person mirrors of people who not only cared enough about me to tell me the truth, but who could offer me the care and compassion that I couldn’t muster for myself. Plus there is honestly something energetic and frankly magic about Niasziih healing that I still don’t … This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rootedsource.substack.com/subscribe (https://rootedsource.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

2. 

   15 Oct 2026

   Caring Without Carrying Other People's Burdens

   You know how when you decide to teach a thing, the Universe often goes, “Oh great! You must want mastery over that thing! Let me give you an opportunity or twelve to show you all the ways you can upgrade your skills on that!” Last week I started drafting a free online training called, “Not Yours to Carry: 3 Tools to Set Down Other People’s Energy and Come Home to Yourself.” And then, as I maybe should have expected, life hit me with a surprise. A dear community member and coworker unexpectedly died last week. And while it hasn’t been publicly confirmed, many who knew him well knows he struggled with suicidal ideation for a long time. While a part of me fears that writing about my process publicly will seem opportunistic, anyone who’s followed me for a while knows that sharing about my inner life is often the way I simultaneously heal from a thing, and also try to be of service to others. Because there are many who are grieving his death, and because I can only speak to my own experience, I’m going to stick to the lessons I’m personally learning in all this. My disclaimer here is that in no way am I suggesting that the way I’m dealing is the “right” way, or that there is such a thing in general as a “right” way to do anything — let alone grieve. Turning towards the personal lessons I’m re-learning now are part of how I cultivate resilience in the face of loss. So, dear reader / listener, I encourage you to take what resonates for you here and leave the rest. However you deal with grief is the absolute right way for you, and I deeply appreciate y’all for bearing witness to me in this. If you’re new here, hi. I’m ionsul ferrin and this is the Rooted Source Podcast where I share perspectives on personal and collective healing. I’m a Niasziih healing practitioner, and a group connection facilitator with a non-profit called SeekHealing. This podcast is for the sensitive souls out there who deeply want to heal the world, but who also want to enjoy life along the way. In this episode I want to reveal what I’m currently learning about walking the fine line between caring — and carrying other’s burdens in a way that doesn’t actually serve me, or serve the collective. Seems to me pretty much everyone could all use some amount of help with this. In the current polycrisis where we could literally find a new thing to be upset about every minute we spend on the internet, protecting our energy is more important than ever. And I know there’s a paradox here. We’re all One, so to say, “That’s someone else’s burden, that’s not mine to bear,” might feel selfish or even wrong to those of us who feel our interconnection so strongly. Yet letting ourselves be drained by chronic anxiety and overwhelming grief at the state of the world does nothing really helpful. It just makes us less likely to be resourced enough to show up for the other people in our lives. So, the balance we need to strike is between allowing ourselves to care — fully — and yet to somehow not be bogged down by that care. To not let it make us feel defeated or hopeless, or cause us to leak energy to oppressive systems. In this episode, I want to share what helps me to keep that balance. The Backstory My personal healing journey kick-started in 2019 when two organizations entered my life. The first was SeekHealing, a revolutionary non-profit that’s working to end the loneliness epidemic and deaths of despair by creating safer spaces for genuine human connection. The other was wildernessFusion, the Niasziih healing school. I normally focus this podcast on the latter, and how Niasziih changed my life. But today I want to put the spotlight on SeekHealing. Partly because my friend who passed was a colleague at SeekHealing where we co-facilitated groups together several times — but also because it represents the crux of what I think really keeps us in balance, which is mutually supportive human connection. To start off with, I’ll explain a little more about the organization. SeekHealing was founded by someone who has become a close friend. Jenesis moved to Asheville in 2018 after going on their own healing journey in which they saw that one of the biggest gaps in the recovery industry is a lack of consistent social support once someone is done with treatment. People often go into recovery centers or other treatment facilities, just to be spit back out into a world where they have little to no genuinely healthy personal relationships. So Jenesis started SeekHealing with the intention of creating safer, authentic spaces for anyone on a healing journey to come and experience the life-changing medicine of judgment-free compassionate connection. And it has been radically successful for a tiny little bootstrap organization, even despite consistent funding challenges. Since 2018, SeekHealing has served thousands of people from all walks of life, not just those who consider themselves in recovery. I’ve been facilitating groups and trainings with them since 2019, and I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard things like: “These groups saved my life.” “I wouldn’t still be here if I hadn’t found this community.” And — “This has helped me more than anything else I’ve tried.” There are neurochemical reasons for this. The short story is that we are wired for connection as social beings and when those connection needs aren’t met, that’s when we reach for other behaviors and substances to soothe the immense pain of loneliness. But that’s a deep dive for another episode. Because there’s also a paradox that’s relevant here. I’ve also seen people find SeekHealing like they’ve finally found water in a desert, which makes them put the community on a pedestal of sorts. But before too long they realize that people are people everywhere you go and you’re not always going to immediately like everyone you come in contact with, even in a radically accepting community like SeekHealing. So then people often go one of two ways. They either leave SeekHealing feeling disillusioned, or they choose to do the inner work to grow and evolve within the context of community. And that’s the deeper lesson I want to name here: While we absolutely need close relationships in our lives, relationships also take hard work. And part of that essential work is recognizing and maintaining our own personal boundaries. Without healthy boundaries, dysfunction is quick to follow. Because the reality is that absolutely everyone is carrying their own burdens of pain and trauma. And while it’s so beautiful to help relieve that burden by showing care for others, it’s also impossible to carry it for anyone else. And that’s where I see a whole lot of empathic, compassionate people struggle. It’s ridiculously common for those of us who care deeply about others to be some degree of chronically burned out, stressed out, and fearing about the state of the world. But living with that degree of stress and exhaustion genuinely doesn’t help anyone. I want the heart-centered empaths of the world to come into their power — personally and politically — so I’m currently centering my work on doing what I can to help make that happen. If you’re interested in that, stay with me, I have some tools to offer in a minute. But first, I’m going to share a bit about what made me an empath in the first place. I think you might see yourself in some of my story. A Healthy Measure of Empathy Since my friend passed last week, I’ve had all the common reactions that we tend to have when someone we know takes their life. “What else could I have done? Could we have done? We should have taken his depression and cries for help more seriously. Maybe then he wouldn’t have done it.” These were the flavor of my initial thoughts. But a dear friend who lost one of her sisters to suicide assured me, “There’s nothing anyone could have done.” And another beloved reminded me that, “We often think that ‘It shouldn’t have been this way.’ That it wasn’t his time. But we don’t know the Universe’s plan. Maybe it was the exact right time.” Which I have to accept as truth if I don’t want to argue with reality. So why do I feel like it would make me a bad person if I stopped imagining his pain? Why does it feel like a betrayal of his memory to allow myself to be at peace about his decision to leave? For that matter, how can I let myself center my own peace when the whole world is suffering so intensely?? Another ICE murder. The genocide in Palestine. The looming threats of AI and mass surveillance and nuclear war and environmental collapse. Holy Goddess do we have a lot of collective fear and pain to manage right now. It could literally drown us if we’re not careful. So how do we choose when to care, and when to detach? Do we really have a choice about detaching? And if we choose detachment, does that say something bad about us? Would that make us a selfish, evil person? Personally, I know I can’t help but care. I was a big fan of Buddhism for a while and logically agreed with the idea that “attachment creates suffering.” But I was never able to get anywhere close to achieving a state of true detachment. Intently caring is just how I’m wired. I remember wondering before I was even out of grade school, “Why is the world this way? And how can we fix it?” I like the idea that some souls came into this lifetime with the mission of assisting in the positive evolution of humanity. But on a more grounded level, I think the simple reality is that most humans are just wired to care. I mean all kinds of science confirms that we evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to be distinctly “prosocial” animals. According to explorepsychology.com (http://explorepsychology.com): Prosocial behavior involves actions that are designed to help other people or to benefit society as a whole. Examples of prosocial behaviors include being kind, comforting, generous, or helpful. When people engage in prosocial behaviors, they often do so because they are concerned, compassionate, and empathetic. They want to ensure others have what they need, including support and protection. Now I know some of you are already thinking this, so let me clarify — yes, there is a small percentage of the population that genetically lacks the wiring for empathy. I released a previous episode about psychopathy and how we are globally in a situation where removing psychopathy from positions of power is the solution to saving humanity, but let’s stay on topic. The point is, the vast majority of us are hardwired to care about each other. The only reason most people would not care is because their own suffering and self-protection mechanisms are too great. And yet there are also certainly those of us who swing in the opposite direction of caring possibly too much. It’s hard to say what’s nature and what’s nurture when it comes to any personality trait, and I think that’s particularly true for those of us who are highly empathic. To start with, I definitely believe that I was born an empath, and that many people are. Studies have been done that show that in most mammal populations, a certain percentage of any group’s members are born highly sensitive. And that’s beneficial for the whole. It’s a life-saving alarm bell if one antelope can sense the tiger over the ridge before any of its pack-mates have caught wind of it. We humans might not live in survival packs here in the modern world, but that doesn’t mean that our genetic wiring has caught up yet. Some of us are literally born more sensitive. Yet I also recognize that the environment I grew up in dramatically shaped me as well. Both of my parents were emotionally immature and suffered from their own mental health struggles. So I learned very early that if I could predict and interpret their moods, and change my behavior accordingly, I was much more likely to get my needs met. That started a long arc of being highly codependent and ignoring my own needs in order to center the needs of everyone else around me. It also set up a pattern of taking on way more of other people’s emotional burdens than was really safe or sane. I often had friends that made me feel like the invisible side-kick. And romantic partners who treated me more like a mother figure to use and disregard, than someone who deserved mutual support. But that wasn’t really the fault of those friends and partners. It was what I was energetically calling in at the time. Erasure and neglect felt like a safe, familiar zone to me. Even more than that, actually being seen — letting my own needs and desires be visible — felt incredibly dangerous. Every part of my nervous system would anxiously go on high alert when there was an opportunity for that. So I avoided revealing my needs and desires like the plague. It was so much easier to gravitate towards those who were happy to let me be the invisible helper. But then, of course, I would always inevitably end up burned out. The resentment would slowly, steadily grow until I was suddenly at a breaking point and would abruptly leave those relationships. I’m not proud of it. I know I hurt many people with that behavior pattern. But I also understand that I was just doing the best I knew how to do at the time. I’ll never forget the shadowwork workshop where I realized that I was a runner. Yes, it would take me a long time to run in most cases. But when I decided to, there was no looking back. And it wasn’t actually very kind to those I claimed to care about. Not only that, though, I was also SOUL DEEP TIRED of not being seen. Of not feeling met or reciprocated, or like I really mattered to anyone. So, I knew I had to make a change. And it’s really primarily because of my Niasziih healing training that I was able to make that shift. But SeekHealing also played a massive role for me. 7 years on, I’m indescribably grateful to say that now I have close friendships that are not only mutually supportive, they often call me into the spotlight on purpose. I have chosen sisterhood with at least 8 women who I know deeply care about me getting my needs met, and who support me anytime, just as I support them. It makes life better in a way that I can’t even really put words to. Eventually I’m going to make T-shirts that say, “Behind every woman is a circle of great women.” Not only that, I also recently started seeing someone who’s showing up for me in ways I previously feared a man never would. He has physically and energetically held me while I cried, brought me medicine when I was sick, and receives my most vulnerable heart shares with utmost care and compassion. My point being — I never could have called in this changed relationship landscape if I hadn’t allowed myself to care about myself equal to the amount I was caring about everyone else. And that requires putting down what’s not mine to carry. Caring vs. Carrying Again, it’s often a fine line between caring, and carrying other people’s burdens. And there’s no one right formula. I’m still figuring it out on a daily basis myself. But there are three things that I find help me most when it comes to striking a healthy balance. Those things are self-care, energetic hygiene, and living my purpose. Self-care centers around tracking my own well-being as my primary point of discernment. Where I used to come from the core belief that, “I have to make everyone around me happy in order to be safe,” I now understand that I have literally no control over anyone else’s happiness. And that in order to feel safe, I have to prioritize my own happiness. Besides, the reality is, I’m not actually that powerful. Yes, I have influence. I can often make someone’s day better by offering them care. I can even support someone to make deeper shifts when I’m providing a Niasziih healing session. But everyone’s path is their own. I don’t control any of it. I can’t make anyone happy. Not long-term. I’ve come to see spiritual beliefs as those we adopt in order to comfort ourselves in the face of the unknown, and this as a form of self-care as well. One belief that really comforts me is that this lifetime is just one in a nearly infinite number of lifetimes, and that even if I don’t see the point of someone’s suffering in this lifetime, there are forces at play that are far bigger and wiser than me. I once heard it put: “Who am I to presume to know what this soul needs?” In the case of my friend who just left this life, I could assume that something went terribly wrong for him to have been suffering so much. Or I can assume that was something he just needed to experience in this lifetime. And it offers me a lot of comfort to think that his suffering is now over. I believe “spirituality” is only meaningful in so far as it empowers us to be more unconditionally loving towards others. If what I choose to believe makes me a more resilient person, I see that as net-positive. Which is also why I see centering self-care as a spiritual practice. When I thought having zero self-care made me a better person, I was actually more prone to hurting others. More prone to dipping out on the relationship, yes. But also more prone to resentment and subtle ghosting, like being flakey and inconsistent. I was also more prone to having angry outbursts towards my kids, because I was so internally pressurized around rarely getting my own needs met. I learned early in my parenting journey that to be the parent I wanted to be, I needed to care for myself enough to stay regulated and grounded in my nervous system. That was literally the foundation for every other way that I wanted to show up. It helped me see that caring for myself isn’t selfish. It’s what allows me to have a full cup so that I can be a resource for others. And it also doesn’t mean that I always have to be a resource for others, either. Which brings me to my second tool of energetic hygiene. Now, I admit I don’t love the word “hygiene.” For me it evokes sterile hospital rooms and, for some reason, diapers. But when I looked up the definition it really is the best fit. According to dictionary.com (http://dictionary.com), the meanings for “hygiene” include: 1. the science that deals with the preservation of health; and 2. a beneficial or recommended practice or set of practices. And this fits. Because there are so many things we can and should do to maintain our energetic hygiene. The thing is — it takes consistency, even when we think we don’t need it. My beloved recently used this metaphor, and I thought it was pretty apt: If someone got dirt on us, we would see it. We’d be able to wash the dirt off and that would be that. But when it comes to taking on other people’s energy, we can’t see it. That doesn’t mean that it’s not real or it’s not happening. It very much is. But because we don’t have a visual cue as a reminder, we need to remember to do our energetic hygiene practices whether we think we need them or not. Honestly, this is the purpose of the free training I’m putting together, and that’s going to be an hour long. So I can’t get in depth here the way I know many of you would like, but let me just offer some quick tricks that have worked well for me in the past: * Running cold water on my wrists and hands and feeling any energetic residue being pulled out and drained away with the water. * Putting bare feet on the earth and letting the energy be drawn out of my feet. * Expanding my own energy field and imagining pushing out energy that’s not mine. And one more that I’ve been doing most often lately — I imagine other people’s energy like spiderwebs sticking to me. This is a sensation that’s easy for me to recall since I walk in the woods and get spiderwebs in my face fairly frequently. Then I just imagine slash feel myself energetically picking off the webs and letting them fly in the wind. The reality is that energy is held in the subconscious, and the subconscious does not know the difference between what’s real and what’s imagined. So as long as you have a mental picture or felt sensation that signals to your subconscious that you are clearing other people’s energy, it usually works. It’s so simple, but you do have to take the time to actually do it. The last point that I think really helps me find the balance between my native impulse to care so much, and not carrying other people’s stuff around is that I’m finally living my purpose as a healer empath. Part of the reason I used to attract personal relationships with those who needed healing is that the natural healer in me craved an outlet. I desired to feel purpose and like I was giving my soul gifts of being a healer. Using my skills in a professional setting is what gave me the clarity to separate “client” from “friend” or “partner.” Now I try to only heal people who’ve asked for it, and who are giving some sort of energy exchange for my healing services. Now that’s not to say that I don’t still offer my loved ones a healing presence or a listening ear when they ask for it. But I no longer feel compelled to try to heal, fix, or change everyone I see because I have a container for that which is now clear and separate from the rest of my life. If you notice you struggle with wanting to fix or change the people around you, it’s pretty likely that you’re a healer with unrealized gifts. You may want to consider finding a modality that calls to you, and studying it to the point that you feel comfortable having your own clients. Even if you don’t charge money for it, having a dedicated space to live your purpose will help you feel like you’ve “done enough,” and can put down your healing impulses in those relationships where you’d really rather have mutuality rather than always being the one in the support role. Conclusion I hope all that helps. I know that, for many of us, caring is something we just can’t change, nor do we want to change it most of the time. I think caring about other people, places, plants, animals, and ecosystems is what brings out the very best in all of us. I would never want people to feel like they should shut down their ability to care. But at the same time, we need to keep ourselves resourced. As the world gets more and more crazy and demanding of our concern, there’s a way in which staying grounded and resilient really is a revolutionary act. As Audre Lorde said so powerfully, ““Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” In this age of mass propaganda, manufactured division, and extreme fear peddling by the media, it really is an act of radical resistance to center our own peace. Even when loved ones around us are literally dying from the mental health crises this modern world produces, it’s up to us to choose our own resourcing — to return to what Internal Family Systems calls the 8 C’s of Self: Curiosity, Compassion, Calm, Clarity, Courage, Confidence, Creativity, and Connectedness. We can’t do that if we’re letting ourselves be constantly pulled around by the personal and political emergencies that pop up around us everyday. So, I’m grateful to my friend. Because grief reminds me what really matters. Death gives life significance. And while I feel sure he’s in a better place now, I also want the loss of him to create something positive here on earth. I’m absolutely sure that’s what he would have wanted, and so it’s a good way to honor his life. I really hope that on some ethereal level he feels all the hearts he cracked open with his passing. And I hope that all of us can have the courage to keep opening our hearts, even in the face of so much continued tragedy. I’m dedicating this episode to SeekHealing, which honestly could really use your help right now. Due to the budget cuts and shifting winds of the current political climate, we’re greatly in need of individual donor support. If you need the power of human connection to heal your lonely heart, I hope you’ll join a meeting which are in-person in western NC, and online. You can find the calendar of events at SeekHealing.org/calendar (http://seekhealing.org/calendar). And if you have any amount of money to invest in a more connected world, please consider donating at SeekHealing.org/donate (http://seekhealing.org/donate). Finally, if you want to continue this conversation, feel free to drop a note for me in the comments, or find me at ionsul ferrin on all the socials. Thanks so much for being here friends. Be sweet to yourselves, tell the people you love how much they mean to you, and I’ll see you next week. Get full access to Rooted Source at rootedsource.substack.com/subscribe (https://rootedsource.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

3. 

   5 Oct 2026

   Ep8: Repairing Holes in Your Energy Field

   Have you ever noticed that you seem to attract the same relationship pattern, over and over, with different people? Or that a particular part of your body seems to be the place stress is held — the same shoulder, stomach, or lower back pain? Or that in some situations you feel literally invisible? What if all of that isn’t random? What if it’s actually revealing something about your energy field? And what if understanding and uncovering the way your field is attracting your reality, is the ultimate key to personal empowerment? Welcome back. I’m ionsul ferrin, and if this is your first time here — this podcast lives at the intersection of healing, embodiment, and ancestral knowing. It’s for the empaths and intuitives who know that they can create their own reality, if they could just find the tools that actually work. We started this particular series in episode 6 by asking what energy actually is. Then last week we went into emotional literacy and why so many of us are trained out of feeling our own emotions. Today, I’m going to connect the dots and explain how energy, emotions, and the ways we manifest are all connected. As I said in episode 6, “energy” is the catch-all term our culture has given everything that’s non-visible about us. We can also call it our biofield, the subtle body, pranic body, meridians, chi, the light body, life force, or aura. Call it whatever resonates for you, but today I’m going to use the term energy field. And I’m going to be using a model that gives me a clearer way to understand my own patterns and distortions — what my NIASZIIH teacher calls “a simple sphere,” and what several other modalities refer to as the tube torus. You may have seen an image of a grid or energy lines in a kind of donut shape around a person. This is what’s referred to as the tube torus. For the sake of argument, let’s say that when we’re born, that spherical, tube torus shape is smooth and uninterrupted. It’s a coherent field where energy is flowing evenly in all directions. In this episode, we’re going to talk about what happens to that shape over the course of a life that includes stress, injury, and trauma. We’re going to touch on the reality that none of us have an energy field that’s a perfect sphere or tube torus, because we’ve all had traumatic experiences great and small. This is one of those frameworks that, once you see it, you can’t un-see it. So by the end of this episode, I’m hoping you’ll have a new lens for understanding why you do the things you do, and how to start healing your energy field so that you’re set free from the same old patterns of disruption and distortion that are causing you to suffer. This is a super exciting topic for me, so let’s get into it. A Simple Sphere Let’s start with what your energetic system theoretically looks like before anything happens to it. Picture a perfect sphere. Symmetrical, whole, energy flowing evenly in every direction — in through the top, down through the center, out through the bottom, and back around again, like a doughnut-shaped current wrapping the whole form. That circulating, self-contained shape is called a tube torus, and it shows up as a model of the way energy flows in a lot of different disciplines from physics to biology, for example — the shape of the magnetic field around the earth. For our purposes, think of the tube torus as your original blueprint. Before conditioning. Before trauma. Before anyone told you who or how to be. Energy moving smoothly, in a complete, unbroken sphere that surrounds your physical body. Now, here’s the challenge, though. That sphere doesn’t stay in tact. Ever. For anyone. Life happens. And the impact is not abstract. It’s precise, and we can track it. How Trauma Reshapes the Energy Body Every difficult experience — a wound that didn’t get to heal fully, a relationship rupture, a moment where you weren’t safe, seen, or supported — doesn’t just pass through you and disappear. It leaves a mark. The founder of Somatic Experiencing, Peter Levine has my favorite quote about trauma. He says that trauma is not what happens to us, it’s “what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.” Let me say that again. Trauma is not what happens to us. It’s what we hold inside as a result of what happened to us. And what we’re holding actually changes the shape of our energy field. We could think of it as dents, holes, ruptures, or weak spots where the energy doesn’t flow freely. Sometimes those patterns cause our energy field to be shrunken down inside our physical bodies. Sometimes they cause us to be so diffuse and expanded that we have trouble having a sense of self and boundaries at all. In a way, these are all metaphors. I personally can’t see physical energy fields. If you can, I’d love to hear about your experience in the comments. But I can sense the way energy is or isn’t moving in myself, and in clients, and I think these are accurate ways of pointing to what many energy healers can sense. There’s also two very broad ways I would say most empaths and intuitives in particular tend to distort their own energy field. The first is collapse. This is when the field pulls inward — shrinking, contracting, making itself smaller or even attempting to be invisible. You’ve felt this if you’ve ever noticed yourself being quiet in a group, physically curling inward, going along with something because objecting felt too confrontational, or feeling like you generally have a hard time taking up space. The other broad pattern is to overexert. This is kind of the equal and opposite move — your energy field diffuses outward in over-giving, overcompensating, or overfunctioning for others’ benefit. You’ve felt this if you’ve ever been so burned out that you just needed to isolate yourself for a while in order to recover and feel like you can be around people again. Most empaths and intuitives that I’ve witnessed tend to do both, depending on the situation. And I include myself in that. But I hope you understand that neither of these tendencies is a “flaw.” Both of them are intelligent adaptations. Any unconscious pattern, painful though it might be, is your system doing exactly what it’s supposed to do — protecting yourself the best way it knows how. The problem isn’t that you have a distortion to your energy field. The problem is that, like a lot of survival strategies, what used to keep you safe, is now making you suffer unnecessarily. Reading the Distortion So — how can you actually read the distortions in your own energy field and start to work with them? Well, first of all, it’s important that we don’t take on any shame about the fact that the distortions exist. Because we ALL have them. We all have energy fields that are distorted in some way. You, me, the most self-proclaimed enlightened guru. Anyone who claims to be without any distortion is probably the most distorted of all! (I can think of a cult leader or two who fits that bill, can’t you?) But getting a read on our specific distortions is my favorite part, because the answers are everywhere. And once we know how to read them, we can start making more conscious choices so they’re no longer running our lives, or ruining our health. Here are some things to look at. And as I list these, I really invite you to put on your witness hat. Try to see how these may apply to you, but don’t feel bad about it. One of the primary ways we uphold negative patterns in ourselves is through self-judgment. So there’s an important line to walk between raising self-awareness, and not using that awareness to condemn or shame ourselves. Ok, I’m giving you a moment to put your witness hat on. Ready? Here’s what to consider: * Physical disease and injury. The body often holds distortion in a very literal, physically locatable way. That spot in your back that aches when you feel unsupported. The stomach that knots every time you judge yourself. Chronic pain or tension or especially numbness in a specific place can be a direct clue to where a distortion lives, as is chronic illness. * Relationship patterns. If you keep encountering the same dynamic with different people — the same kind of unavailable partner, the same kind of conflict, the same feeling of being unseen or unmet — that’s never a coincidence. It’s your field attracting situations it’s a match to. * Mental health struggles. Anxiety, depression, and other patterns of mental-emotional distress are a sort of fingerprint of your energy field. For example, depression usually points to a deeply collapsed, inward drawn energy field that lacks enough self-expression. While anxiety usually indicates energy being stuck in the head, without equal balance of energy flowing down and in. * Alignment and posture. The literal way you hold your body — rounded shoulders, a caved chest, a tight pelvis — these can all be a physical readout of energetic patterns that have been running so long they’ve become structural. Now, obviously, I’m just barely touching the surface of all of these. Getting into detail is way beyond the purview of one podcast episode, but if you’re hungry for a much deeper dive, you can check out my online course called SOVEREIGN: Energetic Mastery (and Radical Intimacy) for Empaths and Intuitives. But for now, please know that none of this is meant to diagnose you or tell you something is wrong with you. It’s meant to encourage your curiosity. Every one of us is so unique. We say over and over in NIASZIIH that “there is no one-to-one.” Meaning, what one distortion might indicate for one person can be totally different for someone else. Maybe I have a tense right shoulder because of bracing from abuse in childhood. But maybe you have a tense right shoulder because of a sports injury. All our distortions, and what they indicate, is specific to each of us. That’s why we need to be our own trackers, our own investigators. As a NIASZIIH healer, I can help you get in touch with things that you may not have previously been aware of, and I can help you ask questions around it. But I can’t tell you exactly what caused what and precisely how to “fix” your energy field. That’s something only you can do. And you can only do it with patient, dedicated self-awareness, and the willingness to change. And, honestly, that’s where I know I’m going to lose most people here. Because we’ve all been trained to seek someone else to do the fixing for us. The hardest part about being a NIASZIIH healer is getting people to engage in their own healing process. People say they want their lives to change, their health to change, their relationships to change, and yet they don’t want to do the hard, uncomfortable work of actually changing the way they’re used to doing things. Of course it can be extremely helpful to see a trained professional (and, yes I do see clients if you’re interested). I know I never could have made the massive leaps in healing and self-awareness that I have in the last 7 years without my NIASZIIH training. But you can also make significant strides just by tracking yourself and your own patterns consistently. Consciousness and the Field Now, here’s where this ties in with manifestation and creating our reality. Our energy field doesn’t just hold our patterns, it broadcasts them. Each dent, hole, or weak spot works kind of like a tuning fork, drawing in experiences that resonate with that shape, so-to-speak, and quietly repelling the ones that don’t. Say you learned early on that your needs were a burden to others. That was one of my primary wounds / distortions for a long time. So my field would collapse around that wound, which meant I was pretty constantly surrounded by people who were happy to let me do all the giving, especially in romantic relationships. But the other half of that equation was that the friends and partners who genuinely wanted to show up for me felt uncomfortable. Having people around who cared about my needs and didn’t see them as a burden wasn’t a match to that distortion, so I filtered them out, ignored them, or ran away from them. Another distortion that many empaths grew up with is feeling like you had to track everyone else’s moods to stay safe. It’s pretty common for an empath’s field to stay overextended, scanning for others needs, and rushing in to be the support person almost without conscious volition. Even in cases where you don’t need to be the emotional rescue, you take on that role as a compulsive fulfillment of the distortion. None of this means you’re to blame for what’s happened to you, or for what distortion patterns you’re creating from. It just means your energy field has been keeping you in familiar territory, because familiar has felt safer than unknown. And this is why I say we’re manifesting our reality all the time, whether we’re aware of it or not. The good news is that the same mechanism works in the other direction. As your field becomes more whole, and the energy is allowed to move dynamically, in response to reality rather than reacting to your fixed distortions — different people, opportunities, and experiences start showing up, often in ways that feel distinctly magical. Of course, this all connects back to something foundational which I mentioned in episode 6: all is consciousness. Which means shifting your energy field and shifting your consciousness are fundamentally linked. But here’s the really cool part — you can do that through any in-road. For example, just changing your physical posture and the way you hold yourself will start changing the way you fundamentally feel about yourself — your self-confidence and sense of self-connection. There’s actual science behind this, too. Studies on “power posing,” where people spent a minute or two in open, expansive postures, standing tall with shoulders back and their arms wide, or hands on hips, consistently reported feeling more confident and powerful than those who sat in closed, contracted positions. It’s really true that, “when you change one thing, you change everything.” Every meaningful change, no matter how small, affects the whole system. One moment of grounding out in nature. One kind thing you say to yourself and really mean it. One instance of speaking your truth even when your voice shakes. These are all examples of immediate, no-cost ways that you can start healing any negative distortions in your energy field. And here’s what honestly might be the most important sentence in this episode, which is a repeat from earlier, but I don’t think any of us can hear it often enough: you cannot change what you don’t first embrace without judgment. Judgment creates distortion! You can’t un-distort something from a place of self-judgment and self-rejection. There’s a famous Carl Rogers quote that you may have heard. It says, “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.” But sadly, most of us have a wildly over-developed inner judge. The moment we notice a distortion, the very next thing that happens for most of us is that we criticize ourselves for having it: “Why do I always do this? What’s wrong with me? I should be past this by now.” That judgment doesn’t help. And judging the judge doesn’t help either! Shifting into a compassionate, witnessing place is the best way to start healing and repairing your energy field — now and forever. Meeting the pattern, even the pattern of inner judgment, with curiosity and kindness is a radically empowering move. Not because the pattern doesn’t matter, but because judgment has never once been the thing that resulted in healing. Loving awareness does. Compassion does. Simply and honestly seeing what’s there — that’s the actual foundation of change. Closing Reflections So here’s what I want to leave you with. You are not broken. You have an energy field, and life has left some marks on it, the way life leaves marks on everyone. If you want something concrete, here’s a practice you can try out this week. Notice one place — it could be a physical tension pattern, a relationship dynamic, or a moment where you either shrank or overfunctioned — and instead of judging it, just get curious about it. Ask: “What was I trying to protect?” You don’t need an answer right away. You just need to meet it without the inner judge taking over the conversation. Next episode, we’re going to build on this directly — we’re talking about how other people act as mirrors, and how the patterns we just named today show up most clearly in our closest relationships. Thank you for spending time with me today. If this episode gave you a new way to understand a pattern you’ve been carrying, please share it with someone who might also benefit. You can find me on all the socials and if you’re interested in a NIASZIIH healing session with me, you can check out my website: ionsulferrin.com (http://ionsulferrin.com) This episode is dedicated to The Center for Native Health, whose mission is to support balanced wellbeing of southeastern Native communities through the preservation and respectful application of Native knowledge to empower the people, Land, and culture. Find them at www.centerfornativehealth.org. Until next time, may you accept yourself completely — dents, distortions, and all. Get full access to Rooted Source at rootedsource.substack.com/subscribe (https://rootedsource.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

4. 

   28 Sept 2026

   Ep7: Embodied Emotions are Embodied Power

   When someone asks you how you are, what do you typically say as the default? “Fine.” “Good.” “Busy.” Maybe, on a hard day, “Okay.” But how much is actually happening inside of you at any given moment? What’s happening right now, as you’re listening to this? Is there tightness in your shoulders? A subtle knot of tension in your gut? A low hum of sadness you haven’t had time to look at? Maybe even a little spark of hope about something? We’re all feeling so much at any given moment, and yet western culture doesn’t generally leave room for discussing our feelings beyond: fine. “I’m fine. Nothing to see here folks. Let’s just all keep pretending that everything is fine, even when my inner world is like an emotional dumpster fire.” And we’re trained to be this way. In the Social Health nonprofit I facilitate for, called SeekHealing, we talk a lot about how “positive” emotions are the only ones that are generally accepted in most social spaces. We are trained from a very young age to ignore what we’re actually feeling and keep a metaphorical mask on at all times. And I believe this is on purpose. I’ve come to believe that training the majority of us to disown and flatten our emotions is a control tactic. Somewhere along the lines, those who wanted to amass power realized that if they turned people against the very thing that made them human — their own emotions — they were much more easy to manipulate and turn against each other. I was just listening to Jefferson Fisher, a communication expert, being interviewed on Diary of a CEO podcast. He was explaining why mastering communication is the #1 skill set for creating success in all areas of your life. Which I completely agree with. And when the interviewer asked him what is the main way most people fail at effective communication, he summed it up in 4 words: “lack of emotional awareness.” He explained that without having emotional literacy and self-control, we are subject to being dragged around by our most base impulses — usually in ways that don’t ultimately serve us. You may have heard the famous quote by Viktor Frankl: “Between stimulus and response there is space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” What Fisher was pointing to in that interview moment is that most people don’t leave a space between stimulus and response. We tend to just react. And not just in moments of conflict, but I would say 24/7/365. I can’t tell you the number of people I’ve worked with in SeekHealing, and in my own NIASZIIH healing practice, who literally walk around with a nervous system that’s permanently on high alert. And when you’re already primed to snap, of course it’s hard to carve out a space for greater choice and empowerment. And, again, this isn’t just in regards to interpersonal interactions. Our emotional awareness, or lack thereof, is what literally creates everything in our lives. We’ve all heard by now that we create our own reality. And one way we do that is through our emotional patterns of addiction. And, yes, we do all suffer from emotional addictions. You’ve probably heard that “neurons that fire together, wire together.” Every time you feel and react a certain way, that particular pathway in your brain gets a little stronger, like a trail through the woods that gets clearer every time you walk it. Eventually, that trail becomes the path of least resistance. On top of that, the brain loves predictability. It likes to assume it knows what’s going to happen next, not only to save mental energy, but also in the pursuit of self-protection. So even when an old emotional pattern is painful, and it could be excruciating, your brain prefers it simply for the fact that it’s familiar. And your nervous system agrees that familiar feels safe. That familiarity and sense of safety is then reinforced by relief, because at least you know what’s going to happen next. You’re going to be rejected, you’re going to fail, you’re going to have to suffer in that old familiar way again. Which may or may not be actually true. But we tend to make it true through the power of our belief and expectation. So when you shut down, people-please, or pull away from someone, you get a quick hit of relief from the discomfort, and that relief teaches your brain to do it again next time. That’s the same kind of learning loop that drives all our unconscious habits. So it’s not that you’re weak or broken. Your brain is doing exactly what it was designed to do, which is conserve energy and keep you safe. The trouble is that what kept us safe as small, defenseless children, is often what’s killing us as adults. The isolation that used to keep you out of the way of abuse as a child is now keeping you desperately lonely as an adult. The anger that meant people didn’t fuck with you as a kid is now keeping everyone at arm’s length. So much of the neural pathways we laid in old circumstances don’t fit the updated models of what’s present and available. And when we keep creating from those old stories, we suffer. The good news is, though, that the same process works in reverse. Every time you choose a new response, you’re clearing a new trail. Even it feels brutally awkward and uncomfortable. At first the new pathway is overgrown and hard to walk. But with practice, it becomes the new path towards what you’re actually wanting to create. So, in this episode, we’re going bushwack some new trails together. Welcome back to the Rooted Source Podcast. I’m ionsul ferrin, your pleasure-positive resident mystic, and if you’re new here, this podcast is for empaths and intuitives who are ready to embrace all their sensitivity, and embody it as their greatest super power and gift to the world. I’m gonna be honest, today’s episode is a big one. It’s really the core and foundation of everything. When I started my NIASZIIH training 7 years ago, I had no idea how much of my own sensitivity I had shut down because of chronic emotional overwhelm. And that’s not uncommon. The entire first year of my training was primarily dedicated to simultaneously waking that sensitivity back up, and also learning how to manage it. We can only get into so much in one podcast episode, so today I’m going to cover with you: Why emotional awareness is a skill you can and must learn. And how to use this knowledge for your own benefit, and create the life you really want to be living. You in? Cool. Let’s start with something that would have been WAY more worthwhile to learn in school than algebraic equations. That’s Emotional Literacy. Emotional Literacy Is Self-Empowerment I want to start with a concept that was instilled in me as part of my NIASZIIH healing training. That’s: Awareness creates choice, and choice creates freedom. Come to think of it, it’s really kind of another way of stating the Viktor Frankl quote. I love it when different wisdom streams affirm each other, don’t you? Anyway, to unpack the concept, let’s come at it from the opposite direction. Because when you’re not really aware of what you’re feeling, the feeling runs you. It shows up as things like snapping at your partner, impulsively reaching for your phone when you don’t really need to, or lying awake with racing thoughts at 2 a.m. Pretty much all of us are chronically reacting, often without even knowing what we’re reacting to. But, again, it’s not our fault! Lack of emotional awareness is literally trained into us in this culture. Boys don’t cry. Girls aren’t aggressive. Real men tough it out. A feminine woman isn’t demanding. There are practically millions of subtle messages we get from day one that say, “Your emotions are not valid. They are dangerous. They are something to contain, minimize, and ignore if you can. And anything else is a sign of your personal dysfunction.” It’s really no wonder at all that we have such systemic mental health crises in modern culture. How can we effectively work with what we’re feeling if we’re chronically trained to suppress it, even from our own awareness? The good news here is that emotional awareness is recoverable. It is a skillset that almost anyone can learn. The potentially bad news, depending on how you look at it, is that, like acquiring any new skill, it takes dedicated personal effort. It’s not a pill you can take. And it’s not a change that comes from simple intellectual understanding. You have to make the conscious effort to DO things differently. And, honestly, this is why most people fail at it. Along with disowning our emotions, we’ve been so trained to give our authority away. To expect quick fixes. And especially to see ourselves as passive victims with no real agency. However, for the rare few who are eager and willing to do the work, there is so much reward on the other side. I call awareness and the ability to choose our state “Sovereignty.” It’s the opposite of a victim mentality. It’s being in ownership of your inner world, instead of feeling pushed around by it. And this is especially important for those of us who tend to pick up on energies and information that most people miss. Why This Matters More for Sensitive People If you’re an empath or intuitive, emotional awareness matters even more, because you’re not only feeling your own emotions — you’re likely picking up on everyone else’s too. So if you don’t have a clear picture of what’s happening inside you, if you can’t tell where your emotions end and other people’s begin, it all blurs together in one big wave of chronic overwhelm. I know many of you can relate. And having a vocabulary to describe our inner experience is the first step. Because when we’re able to cognitively label an experience, we instantly become much more aware of its presence and nuance. Let me give you an example. There are cultures that exist in the world, like the Himba people of Namibia, that don’t have separate words for blue and green. They call both colors by the same name. Now, their eyes work just like everyone else’s. But researchers have found that when a language has separate words for blue and green, the people of that culture notice the difference between the two colors faster and more easily. The words don’t change what’s objectively there. They change what we notice. And that’s everything. Because the way we perceive is how we create our reality. Having separate words for different colors changes our experience. And it’s exactly the same with emotions. If all you have is “good,” “bad,” and “fine,” to describe your emotional landscape, imagine what you’re missing out on! All the other feelings are still there — resentment, grief, tenderness, longing, joy, connection. But without having words at the ready for each of them, they are easily missed. Thankfully though, when you learn the words, you start to see what was there all along. Even more than that — researchers have found that simply naming a feeling out loud helps it to be less intense. In a series of studies at UCLA, researchers found that when people labeled the emotion they were having, activity in the amygdala, which is the brain’s alarm system, went down considerably. In other words, just to say, “I feel afraid,” made people less fearful. Saying, “I feel lonely,” made them feel less alone. Have you ever heard, “You have to name it to tame it”? Well there’s actual neuroscience to back that up. Isn’t that awesome? You don’t have to fix the feeling. You don’t have to understand where it came from. Just naming it begins to soften it. There’s also a related idea from neuroanatomist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. She describes what she calls the 90-second rule which is that when an emotion is triggered, the natural neurochemical surge that moves through the body rises and falls in about 90 seconds. If the feeling lasts longer than 90 seconds, she says it’s most likely because we keep re-triggering it with our thoughts, re-stimulating the emotions through the stories we’re telling ourselves. I’ve also noticed that if an emotion lasts longer than 90 seconds, it’s because we keep interrupting the cycle, instead of letting it move to completion. Think of a wave naturally rising and falling, how smooth that is. Rather than if a wave crashes against a wall and kind of erupts in violence. We’re often doing the latter by rejecting our emotions, rather than embracing them so they can rise and fall naturally. Part of our trained emotional repression is that — an emotion will start to arise, and we immediately move to squash it, talk ourselves out of it, or distract ourselves from just being with it. In fact, substance and behavior addictions of all kinds are really just constant, chronic attempts to not be with the reality of our feelings. But, again, for most of us — no one modeled how to feel a feeling all the way through. No one showed us how to hold big emotions with self-compassion instead of self-judgment. That’s why these are learned skills most of us need to gain as adults. That may be why, as Brene Brown says in her book, Atlas of the Heart, most people can only name 3 emotions. Yeah, see, I’m not making it up. We live in an emotionally illiterate culture. In preparation of the book, Brown’s team surveyed over 7,000 people and asked them to name the emotions they could recognize in themselves. On average, people named three: happy, sad, and angry. Again, this is a travesty, because we have dozens of words in the English language to describe our emotional experience. She lists 87 in the book, and I highly recommend reading or listening to it, especially if you know you could use help expanding your emotional vocabulary. In fact, let’s expand your vocabulary a little right now! In addition to “sad,” or”angry” you might be feeling: Disappointed. Disconnected. Resentful. Ashamed. Overwhelmed. Grieving. Or hurt. And “Happy,” could also mean: Peaceful. Proud. Calm. Playful. Relieved. Grateful. Connected. Alive. Notice that, as I said them, some of those words probably landed more than others. Maybe “resentful” made something in you perk up. Or “alive” gave you a little flicker of recognition? That’s your body saying, yes, that one, that’s what I’m feeling. So here’s the invitation: if you can turn toward a feeling and give it your full attention, without getting attached to a story about it (which, I’ll admit, sounds simple but can be shockingly difficult), it will move through much faster than you’d expect. The feelings we resist just go underground and run us like a hum in the background. The feelings we’re willing to feel are able to move and inform us. And with that clarity of information, there’s literally nothing we can’t do. So let’s talk about how to use that guidance for our own benefit. Your Internal Guidance System Most of us were all taught in school that we have five senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. But it turns out that’s extraordinarily incorrect. The most modern research suggests that we actually have anywhere from 22 to 33 senses, depending on how you count them. That includes your sense of balance. Your sense of where your body is in space, which is called proprioception. Your sense of temperature. And obviously many others. Also, that’s not even counting the subtler forms of perception I’m sure many of you might know intimately, like: Clairvoyance, clairsentience, or claircognizance. Not to mention an empath’s ability to feel and sense what others are feeling. So I’m going to pause there and just invite you to think about that for a moment. First, we have our own emotional experiences to contend with. Then, there are other people’s emotions that we may not be able to help ourselves from absorbing. And as if that’s not enough, we’re also taking in an ENORMOUS amount of sensory information at all times. We’re often given this false picture of humans with a computer in our heads that’s being carried around by an unsophisticated “meat suit.” What a horribly incomplete picture! The reality is that our emotions and senses are meant to work together to make us highly refined, receptive, and skillfully responsive to our environments. We can just look to more indigenous, ancestral cultures to get a sense of what that makes possible. For example, think about Pacific Island wayfinders, who used to navigate thousands of miles of open ocean without instruments. They would feel the ocean swells with their whole body, sometimes lying down in the canoe to read the subtle rhythms of waves bouncing off islands they can’t yet see. Can you imagine being that finely tuned in your senses? Or consider speakers of Guugu Yimithirr, an Aboriginal Australian language that uses the directions as reference points. So, to speak it, you have to know which direction you’re facing at all times. Or there are the Moken sea nomads of southeast Asia, who can see clearly underwater without any kind of equipment or goggles. And here’s the really cool part: when researchers taught European children the same technique, they learned it too. These aren’t superpowers. They’re what the human body is capable of when we’re raised to trust it, practice with it, and stay in close relationship with it and the natural world. Most of us in this culture just weren’t taught how. The point is not that we should strive to be more like indigenous cultures, but that we be inspired by what these kinds of examples show us is possible. Why do you think evolution would have created us to be so sensitive if we weren’t meant to use that sensitivity for our own advantage? Here’s the sum-up: your emotions, your senses, and your capacity to step back and see things from many angles all work together to give you choice and empowerment. When used with awareness, they form an internal guidance system that can help you navigate life in ways that best serve you, and serve those around you. So let’s bring it to some concrete examples… The sinking feeling in your stomach when something’s off. The lightness in your chest when you’re around someone who’s good for you. The tension in your shoulders that tells you you’ve said yes to something you should have said “no” to. These are all examples of your internal guidance system giving you directions. But you have to be willing to hear it, to feel it, to tune into it, in order to potentially hear what it’s trying to tell you. And here’s the paradox that’s really going to frustrate you: your feelings aren’t facts. They’re important communication that you should always be open to receiving. But what you feel is often based in old stories that don’t serve you, as we talked about at the beginning. It frankly takes a ton of practice to receive what your feelings and sensations are telling you, and then ask enough questions to discern what’s real, and what’s trauma-based misperceptions. We have to work to be aware, not only of our emotions, but also of the stories they inspire within us. Because the stories you believe shape your choices, which shape your entire life. Now, I know that after everything we’ve talked about today, raising your emotional awareness might sound like a lot of work. Maybe even kind of intimidating, especially if you feel like you have a deep well of pain to work through. So I want to offer you a radically different way of thinking about it. In order to start reconnecting with your body — with your sensations and emotions — it doesn’t necessarily serve you to try to tackle your biggest pain points right out the gate. It’s actually a much better idea to start with focusing on what feels good. Your body isn’t only where pain lives. It’s also where pleasure lives. Even if you’ve felt disconnected from feeling pleasure for a very long time, it’s not hard to recover. It’s just a perspective shift. Go outside and feel the warmth of the sun on your face. Appreciate the taste of really good coffee. Put your feet in wet mud or cool grass. Or notice the way your whole body softens when you get a sincere hug. When you start reconnecting to your body through pleasure, your nervous system learns that it’s safe to come back home, to recover a felt sense of yourself. And from that place of greater inner safety and resourcing, the more challenging emotions become much more manageable. Remember: pleasure isn’t a distraction from healing. Pleasure is a crucial part of how we heal. Maybe even the most important part. So this week, instead of trying to force yourself to feel the hard stuff, try this: notice one thing each day that feels good in your body. Really let yourself take it in. Stay with it for 90 seconds or more. Let it land and start to carve new pathways inside you. Closing So let’s do a quick review. Naming your emotions gives you choice, and choice gives you empowered freedom — a.k.a. Sovereignty. The ways you disconnected from your feelings were brilliant survival strategies. You can honor them. And you can update them at the same time. The reward for your efforts is a level of self-trust, self-worth, and self-empowerment that makes you absolutely ungovernable. And wouldn’t the negative powers of top-down control just hate that?? I don’t know about you, but that sure motivates me. If this episode resonated with you, this is exactly the work we dive much deeper into in my course, SOVEREIGN: Energetic Self-Mastery for Empaths and Intuitives. In that space, we’ll be getting much more detailed on how to love and honor all of our experiences, how to separate our feelings from everyone else’s, and how to use our sensitivity for our highest good. Doors open this Nov 2026, and I’d love to see you there. If you want to get on the early bird waitlist for a pretty massive discount, you can email me at rootedsourcepodcast@gmail.com (mailto:rootedsourcepodcast@gmail.com) or find me, ionsul ferrin, on all the socials, and shoot me a DM. Lastly, I’m dedicating this episode to Resources for Resilience, an Asheville based non-profit that offers a variety of evidence-informed and resiliency-focused programming to help individuals, families, organizations, and teams navigate hard times. You can find them at ResourcesforResilience.org Get full access to Rooted Source at rootedsource.substack.com/subscribe (https://rootedsource.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

5. 

   20 Sept 2026

   Ep6: What Is Energy, Anyway?

   Have you ever walked into a room and just... felt something? Like tension in the air? Or maybe a heaviness you couldn’t logically explain? Have you ever felt someone staring at you? Or sensed someone’s presence before you turned around and saw them standing there? Or have you ever had the experience where you met someone new and your whole body just said no. Or, conversely, met someone and immediately “liked their energy”? In modern culture, we use the term “energy,” particularly in regards to “energy healing,” as a catch-all term to refer to any non-visible phenomenon that we can sense, but not see or measure. In my NIASZIIH healing training, we learn that energy, or force, is just one aspect of the non-visible realities happening in and around us at all times. Energy is part of the physical / primal aspect of being. But there’s also the spiritual / relational, void / potential, personal vision, and Creator’s Vision. Without taking the extensive time it takes to explain all of that, suffice it to say that to call NIASZIIH an “energy work” modality is dramatically insufficient. Nevertheless, when I tell people what a session looks like, they almost always go, “Oh, like Reiki”? And I don’t fault them for it. Reiki is certainly the most well-known of the so-called energy work modalities. And I have received some extremely powerful Reiki healing sessions myself. But even though NIASZIIH may look similar in practice, the 7 year training it takes to be a NIASZIIH healer is vastly different than the weekend workshops that someone might take to call themselves a Reiki master. That’s one of the reasons I’ve been so curious throughout the course of my schooling to better understand what “energy” really is, and how it plays into healing. So in this episode, I’m going to address a question that I had for a long time: What is energy, actually? Is it real? Is it measurable? And if it is — what does that mean for those of us who feel like we’re picking up on it constantly? Hey there, I’m Ionsul Ferrin, and if this is your first time here, these are conversations that live at the intersection of healing, embodiment, and ancestral knowing. It’s particularly for the empaths and intuitives who know in their bones that there is so much more to reality than what we can see with the naked eye. Today’s episode is the first in a series, and it’s foundational, because before we can talk about mastering our energetic sovereignty — which is where we’re headed here — we first have to know: what are we even talking about when we say “energy”? Again, in terms of energy healing, most people think of Reiki first, because it’s relatively widespread these days. But acupuncture is also technically a form of energy work. Cranio-sacral is another kind you may have heard of. Reflexology, Pranic Healing, Theta Healing, Qigong — the list of energy-based modalities is extensive! And even though ancestral ways of knowing have almost always incorporated the non-visible aspects of who we are, it’s obviously something that’s still fighting for validation in mainstream scientific materialism. Granted, these modalities are rapidly getting more widely accepted, especially with podcasts like The Telepathy Tapes and Phenomenon taking the research seriously. But let’s be honest. Most people roll their eyes when they hear about “energy work.” And I get it. I used to be skeptical myself. Like so many people, it took a personal experience to change my mind. I was 21 when I had my first experience with Reiki and it was very convincing to me. I had just had my wisdom teeth out and a friend invited me to a Reiki circle he was holding. As people worked on me, I could feel things moving and especially feel a comforting heat where my teeth had been removed. The following week, I went back to the dentist for a check up and he was visibly shocked when he looked in my mouth. He literally had to double check my records because he couldn’t believe that the extraction sites were only a week old. He said he had never seen anyone heal so quickly. That made me convinced that the Reiki had significantly sped up my healing process. Jump to 13 years later when I found NIASZIIH, and I can honestly tell you that nothing — and I mean absolutely nothing — healed my mental health struggles 1/10th as effectively. I had tried nearly everything you can think of, from meditation to psychedelics to talk therapy, in an effort to overcome my chronic depression and anxiety, but nothing was all that effective. Until I started receiving and learning NIASZIIH myself, and it completely changed my life from the inside out. And, again, because the worlds we’re working with in NIASZIIH are mainly non-visible, it got me seriously curious about how this actually works. How does energy impact our ability to heal? So today, we’re going to look at this from a few different angles — including culture, science, and lived experience — and by the end, I’m hoping you might have a new framework for understanding these ancient ways of healing that are being given a new, modern language. Let’s start with the word itself. Naming the Thing We Can’t See In the modern English dictionary, there are 9 definitions under “energy,” some of which include: * the capacity for vigorous activity; available power * potency, force, vigor * the capacity to do work Obviously, these don’t fully cover what we mean when we use the word in terms of energy as it relates to extrasensory perception and various healing modalities, but they do give us an interesting place to start. What stands out to me is that phrase in the first definition: available power. In my experience with NIASZIIH and seeing people heal from conditions and diseases that were deemed incurable by modern medicine, I see a clear correlation between someone’s access to their personal power — or sense of empowerment, if you like — and their ability to create miraculous healing results for themselves. Yet almost no one seems to think of it that way. I’m laying a seed here for a future episode, but for now, let’s go back to the way the term “energy” is colloquially used in regards to healing. For our context today, I’m going to define energy as: invisible forces that affect physical reality, yet that do not have clearly measurable mechanisms of delivery. I’ll say that again… Energy — particularly in regards to psi-abilities, including energy healing — refers to that which transforms physical reality, but that we don’t have a material explanation for how it works. It frankly reminds me of Aleister Crowley’s definition of magick, which is “the art and science of causing change to occur in conformity with the will.” In his book Real Magic, researcher Dean Radin uses the terms magic and psi phenomena interchangeably. He uses both terms to refer to the non-visible, intentional influencing of events and people; as well as the ability to intuitively gather information that lies beyond the physical senses. So — energy healing, magic, psi phenomenon — these are all slightly different ways of talking about the fact that we can, indeed, influence material reality with immaterial things like consciousness and intention. Many of us already understand that we are always influencing our reality with non-visible things like thoughts and emotions, and that these might be carriers of energy. Wit that understanding, we could also deduce that energetic health — or the opposite of energetic dysfunction — is something we are actually co-creating with reality all the time, whether we’re consciously aware of it or not. And let’s be real, for most people, there is little to no conscious awareness about how we’re doing this. But it’s so important that we learn. Especially for intuitive empaths that might often feel victimized by the overwhelm of energetic information coming at them all the time. Like I pointed to at the beginning of this episode — I’d bet almost everyone listening has already experienced “energy,” even if they didn’t call it that. Think about walking into a room where a couple just had a huge fight. Nobody might say a word to you, but you can feel it the second you walk through the door. Or think about a friend who walks into a party and the whole room seems to brighten — versus someone else who walks in and the temperature seems to drop. Or there’s that gut-level, pit-of-your-stomach no to a decision that you can’t quite back up with logic in the moment, but that ultimately turns out to have been the right choice. You don’t have to believe in anything mystical to have experienced something like this. You’ve likely been reading energy your whole life, even if you didn’t have the conceptual framework to fit it in. So the question isn’t whether it’s real. The question is what’s actually happening when we notice these things. To answer that, let’s start by looking at some of what material science can — and can’t — tell us. What the Science Says I want to be careful in this section, because this is exactly where a lot of assumptions and overpromises have been made in the past. So let’s slow down and be precise about what’s established, what’s emerging, and what’s genuinely unknown. * The Double-Slit Experiment If you’ve dabbled in quantum physics, you’ve probably heard of this one. In simplified terms: when photons are fired through two slits and not observed by anyone, they behave like a wave of probabilities, creating an interference pattern. But when they are observed — when a measurement is taken — they behave like individual particles instead. This is what’s often cited to support the notion that the presence of an observer changes the outcome — a.k.a: We create our reality through the influence of conscious observation. Now, I want to be honest with you, physicists debate endlessly about what the double-slit experiment actually means. So I’m not going to tell you that it definitely proves that where you put your attention creates your reality. That’s a leap that science doesn’t fully support — yet. However, we can say for sure that this experiment suggests that the presence of an observer at least matters. It does impact things. That alone is enough to make the question “Is consciousness involved in shaping reality?” a legitimate scientific question, not just a spiritual one. * The Heart’s Electromagnetic Field This one is more directly measurable. The human heart generates the strongest electromagnetic field in the body — much stronger than the brain’s. And research has found that the field can extend up to eight feet from the physical body in all directions. Sit with that for a second. Your heart’s energy field isn’t contained by your skin. It interacts with the space — and the people — around you even when you’re not trying. Does that explain everything an empath experiences when it comes to picking up other people’s emotions? No. But it gives us a physical mechanism worth taking seriously when we talk about “reading a room,” or sensing someone’s emotional state before they’ve spoken, or feeling a shift in a relationship before anything’s been said out loud. * Meridians and Fascia Fascia is the connective tissue that wraps around every muscle, organ, and structure in your body. It’s like the fiber-optic network of communication running through everything, and it sends signals to the brain even more quickly than your nerves do. If you’ve heard of acupuncture meridians, you may have also heard them dismissed as unscientific. But it turns out, there is scientific evidence after all. There’s emerging research successfully mapping traditional meridian lines onto the body’s fascial planes. Not only that, there’s also a growing body of research around the role of the interstitium and how that plays into the way energy moves in the body. The interstitium is a fluid-filled network that supports and connects cells and tissues in the body. It plays a role in the movement of nutrients and waste. But it’s almost entirely made up of water. And we know that water is a conductor of electricity, and that it holds memory. So there’s a growing theory that the interstitium and fascia likely work together to carry energy through the body. All this means that what many ancestral traditions have described in their own language as things like prana, chi, pneuma, or life force is starting to have anatomical correlates in modern science. That’s worth paying attention to. Obviously, this is an emerging field and nobody should be telling you it’s fully settled science — in either direction. We’re simply looking at a real, active place where hard science and lived human experiences are starting to meet on friendly terms. And that’s exactly the space I want this podcast to hold — curious, grounded, and willing to dance with mystery. I’ll also just say that I think it’s highly likely that materialist science may never have an adequate explanation for why energy healing works, or how psi abilities are actually possible. There’s a reason that these things have been considered occult — or unknowable — for so long. It’s very probable that these lived experiences will never have materially measurable correlates. That doesn’t mean scientific investigation is pointless, far from it. I’m just wanting us all to keep in mind that often the most beautiful and precious parts of life are those we can’t quantify and measure. Finally, there’s a language aspect of this, as well. English, in its present state at least, is woefully inadequate to describe many of these concepts. Ancestral and indigenous cultures often have words for non-visible phenomena that we don’t have any equivalent for in modern English. And when we, as humans, don’t have clear language for something, it’s much harder to grasp or have a cognitive understanding about. But maybe this is a good thing. Because as soon as we put a label on something, and explain it with words, we tend to throw it in the box of, “Oh I know what that is,” and we stop experiencing the thing directly. Think about it this way — you see a crow out in nature. You think, “Oh that’s a crow,” and probably quickly dismiss it and go about your day. You’re not having a direct experience of getting to know that particular crow in that particular moment. There’s no space for wonder or curiosity in that dismissal. So who knows how much you might be missing out on by not taking the time to investigate rather than categorize and file it away in the box of, “I already know what that is.” If we replace “crow” with “energy,” it’s really the same thing. We do ourselves a huge disservice by thinking it can be put in a neat little box. Hopefully we are always questing to learn more. In NIASZIIH, the body of teachings I’ve studied, the definition of awareness is “the space between two questions.” And awareness is the key to choice. Choice is the key to freedom and empowerment. So instead of seeking to know so much and define things, it actually serves us much more to always assume that we don’t know, and continue to ask more questions. Why This Matters for Empaths & Intuitives So let’s bring this back to you — especially if you’ve ever felt like your innate sensitivity was a liability or a hindrance, or you’ve wanted to dabble in or know more about energy work. If energy is real — the observer changes the outcome, the heart has an electromagnetic field, and the body carries information in ways we’re only beginning to map — then the first thing to highlight is that empaths and intuitives aren’t broken, aren’t overreacting, and aren’t making things up when they sense things they can’t explain. Many of us are literally sensing things that most people either can’t naturally sense, or have been culturally trained to ignore. That reframe really matters. Because so many sensitive people spend years being told to toughen up, stop overthinking, or stop being “dramatic” — when what’s actually happening is they’re picking up real energetic information, and nobody ever gave them a framework to trust it or sort through it, let alone work with it skillfully. So here’s a preview of where we’re going in future episodes… Your energetic system isn’t just something abstract. It’s real and it’s affecting you. And if you’re an empath, other people’s systems are affecting you all the time as well. Not only that, all this is most often happening without your conscious awareness, which makes it feel confusing at best, and debilitating at worst. But it doesn’t have to be that way. And the first step is to give yourself credit that you are picking up on things that you can’t see and probably can’t explain. Validate yourself. Notice what’s really happening and have compassion for your experience. In future episodes, I’ll be giving more practices you can do to raise your awareness and hone and refine your energetic sensitivity. But for today, here’s what I want you to take away: Energy is real. And you don’t need to have all the answers about what it is to start working with it more consciously and intentionally. Here’s a practice for you to start with. As much as you can, as you go about normal daily life, notice moments where you “felt” something before you could explain it. Write it down in a journal, or notes app on your phone. If you want, you can also send this episode to a friend who might want to try this out so you can compare notes and talk about your experiences together. Just remember, the point is not to decide whether or not what you notice is “real.” Just start building the muscle of noticing. You may be shocked at the information you’re actually picking up on, especially related to other people’s emotions. On that note, in the next episode, we’re going much deeper into how emotions affect your energy, or bio-field, and how to work with them skillfully. If you found this valuable, you don’t want to miss that one so be sure to give me a follow wherever you listen to your podcasts. If you have any questions or comments, you can email me at rootedsourcepodcast@gmail.com (mailto:rootedsourcepodcast@gmail.com) or you can find me on all the socials at Ionsul Ferrin. And if you’re interested in a NIASZIIH healing session with me, you can check out my website: ionsulferrin.com (http://ionsulferrin.com) Last thing is I’m dedicating this episode to Conserving Carolina, a local non-profit here in Western North Carolina that is working to protect and restore our natural world. I give them a monthly donation and I hope you’ll consider doing the same. You can find them at conservingcarolina.org (http://conservingcarolina.org) Thanks so much for joining me today. And until next time friends, have a great week! Get full access to Rooted Source at rootedsource.substack.com/subscribe (https://rootedsource.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

6. 

   29 Apr 2026

   Why I Quit Grad School for Mental Health Counseling

   I kind of always knew the academic track wasn’t for me, but I had to find out for sure. Here’s why I decided NOT to become a Clinical Mental Health Counselor.To book a session with me, visit www.ionsulferrin.com (http://www.ionsulferrin.com) >>> ARTICLES and other LINKS <<< Medication-Induced Suicides are Adverse Drug Events, Not Deaths of Despair (https://www.einpresswire.com/article/624086335/medication-induced-suicides-are-adverse-drug-events-not-deaths-of-despair).”: FourthCause.org (http://FourthCause.org) The Medication-Induced Suicide Prevention and Education Foundation in Memory of Stewart Dolin  - MISSD (https://www.missd.co/) Dark Origins of Big Pharma (https://youtu.be/flp4UufZALI?si=6b8exz1c0ONZCUCw) Confronting the Pharmaceutical Shadow in Psychiatry: Ethical Imperatives and the Integrity of Mental Health Practice (https://www.bmj.com/content/384/bmj-2023-076902/rr-4) Against Their Will: Locked away in a mental hospital after voluntarily seeking help (https://youtu.be/zSbTBtInUso?si=N43XWMrrt0vHaUSi) Citizen’s Commission on Human Rights in St. Louis (https://www.cchrstl.org/wordpress/2025/01/27/end-the-fraud-and-abuse-of-involuntary-psychiatric-detentions/) Insane Consequences: How the Mental Health Industry Fails the Mentally Ill by DJ Jaffe (https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/insane-consequences-dj-jaffe/1124115958) Rosenhan experiments (https://www.simplypsychology.org/rosenhan_experiment.html) CulturalSurvival.org/mem (http://culturalsurvival.org/mem) This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rootedsource.substack.com (https://rootedsource.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&#38;utm_campaign=CTA_1)

7. 

   20 Mar 2026

   #4 Creating Immunity from Control and Division

   How can we assure our liberation in these times of increasing control and surveillance? In the battle for our hearts and minds, here's some thoughts on how we remain free. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rootedsource.substack.com (https://rootedsource.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&#38;utm_campaign=CTA_1)

8. 

   2 Mar 2026

   The Opportunity of the Epstein Files

   This episode is in the vein of how we can become good ancestors, given the multi-layered crises we're facing. Evidence of psychopathy is rampant in our global power structures. So what are we going to do about it?For further reading, check out this article: https://open.substack.com/pub/charleseisenstein/p/reality-is-breaking?r=3r0itd&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web (https://open.substack.com/pub/charleseisenstein/p/reality-is-breaking?r=3r0itd&#38;utm_campaign=post&#38;utm_medium=web) This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rootedsource.substack.com (https://rootedsource.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&#38;utm_campaign=CTA_1)

9. 

   13 Feb 2026

   Souldump#1 - Healing Unwell Ancestors

   Have you ever judged your ancestors? In this experimental episode, I ramble by a creek with some thoughts stirred up by The Evolutionary Revolutionary podcast. Note: I mention sexual assault in this episode, so listen with discretion. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rootedsource.substack.com (https://rootedsource.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&#38;utm_campaign=CTA_1)

10. 

    6 Feb 2026

    Because the Ancestors Said So

    Hello and welcome to the Rooted Source podcast.My name is Ionsul Ferrin, and I’m speaking to you from the unceded ancestral lands of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. In this inaugural episode, I wanted to introduce myself and where I’m coming from, as well as my big why for starting this podcast. Please keep in mind that this podcast is not a substitute for professional care of any kind, and any spiritual experiences I describe are my own personal stories, and not intended to suggest what anyone else’s path should look like. I also want to warn you that this episode includes some discussion about medical discrimination and violence, so please listen at the pace that feels right for you. So, let’s dive in. First thing I want to disclose here is that I’ve had a pretty good amount of imposter syndrome that’s come up around starting this podcast, mainly because I don’t come from an ethnic background that’s directly connected to ancient healing pathways. I was raised white, middle class, and somewhat agnostic, somewhat Christian in the suburbs of northern VA. But I’ve always felt a strong connection to my Celtic Pagan ancestry that was indigenous to Northern Europe long before Roman Catholic colonization. So even though I grew up in a middle class, white suburban neighborhood, and even though I was conditioned in that environment to have a pretty strictly materialist perspective, I’ve always had an innately spiritual curiosity. I was / am an HSP, or highly sensitive person, and had a lot of philosophical quandaries from a young age. I remember wondering, by the time I was old enough to realize how messed up the world is – “Why is the world like this? How did it get this way?” and, “What can we do to fix things?” In a very real way, these are still the big motivating questions of my life. And I feel like I do have some answers. When I cross-reference history, sociology, and psychology – which are all related – it seems pretty clear what the answer is. Generational trauma. That’s why the systems are so messed up. That’s why there’s so much suffering on a personal and collective level. Hurt people hurt people. And after 6,000 years (at least) of increasing war, violence, and extraction, we’re reaching a tipping point. We have to heal – as individual people, and as a unified people – if we’re not going to burn out all our systems and self-implode. In a future episode, I look forward to nerding out on some of the theories that exist about what started the cycles of trauma 6,000 years ago. But for the most part I think it’s much more important that we talk about solutions. That’s what this podcast aims to address. But I’m coming at it from a pretty subversive angle. One consequence of having parents who suffered with acute mental health conditions throughout my childhood was that I never really trusted authority. Because I had to rely on my own discernment from a young age, I’ve tended to naturally reject systems that rely on power hierarchies and strict adherence to tradition. In other words, I’ve explored many “alternative” modalities and practices throughout my life. After I became a single mother 10 years ago, I especially got serious about my own healing journey. It wasn’t just about me anymore. It was about my kids’ future as well. They were 3 and 6 at the time, and had already lived through far too much with all the drama of their dad having substance use disorder, and me being his codependent enabler. So I had to take a sober look at myself and realize that it was my responsibility to transform my unhealthy patterns and low self-worth that had led me to such a dysfunctional relationship in the first place. By that time I was already living in Asheville, where I still am currently, and luckily there’s a smorgasbord of alternative modalities on offer here. So I tried all kinds of things – women’s retreats, breathwork, yoga, psychedelics, life coaching, even talk therapy – which honestly, I found the most disappointing of all at the time. But still, I couldn’t seem to find lasting solutions to my chronic anxiety, depression, and low self-worth. Eventually, in the midst of all this seeking, I was at a potluck with friends, when a sister friend of mine (shout out to ML!) started telling me about this amazing shamanic healing school she was attending. Like me, she had tried basically countless modalities over many years, and she was very excited and enthusiastic in telling me that this school, called wildernessFusion, was the “real deal.” She told me that people who attend the school, or see the healers trained there, often have truly miraculous results. One of the women in her class was in Hospice, literally dying from heart failure, when she started seeing NIASZIIH practitioners (NIASZIIH is the modality taught at wildernessFusion). She had such a dramatic turn around that she not only came out of Hospice – she started working again! Another woman in her class had been diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, and went into full remission after attending clinics at the school. And a third was going blind from Graves Disease. The doctors told her there was nothing they could do, that she would have to adjust to living without sight for the rest of her life. She started seeing NIASZIIH practitioners and fully got her sight back. Obviously, I was intrigued. So I went to a free intro class and was immediately hooked. I signed up then and there and have attended the school ever since. I’m currently in year 6 of the 7 year program, and I’ve already completed the 3 year bodywork training. I can affirm, just like ML said, it truly is the most real, effective thing I’ve ever done. I count it as the reason I have the courage and self-worth to even start this podcast in the first place. Now, I want to just pause and say that, even after years at wildernessFusion, I wrestle with using the word “shamanic.” It’s a term that was coined by a white guy, and it’s often used as a Western umbrella term that unfairly flattens many distinct traditions. But just like all words are symbols for more complex ideas, “shamanic” is simply the best word I know of in English to denote healing modalities that bridge physical and non-physical dimensions. If you know of a better term, please leave it in the comments! I also just want to be clear here that while the wildernessFusion curriculum is based in Lipan Apache philosophy and spirituality, I am not by any means claiming to be an authority on that – or any other – indigenous tradition. I am not speaking on behalf of cultures or lineages that are not mine. In wildernessFusion, we don’t engage in any specific cultural practices that people often think of related to the term “shamanic” – things like drumming, chanting, or taking psychedelic medicine. Those are beautiful and valuable practices. They’re just not ones that we engage in. Honestly, what classtime mainly looks like is uncovering the hardest and most painful parts of ourselves so that we can stay in contact with our authenticity, with the Earth, and with each other. NIASZIIH – again, the name of the healing approach taught at wildernessFusion – is an Apache word that means “Place or Vessel of Healing.” And, in a way, to call it a “modality” is even kind of a misnomer. Because it’s really more about a consciousness shift, about embodying a state of being, than it is about learning a set of distinct practices. It’s something I’m really passionate about, so I’ve offered NIASZIIH healing sessions professionally for years now. But it’s been challenging to make a living at it for a number of reasons. For one thing, if you throw a stone in Asheville, you’ll likely hit an alternative healer of some sort. There are so many amazing healers here, so there’s a good amount of competition. I also can’t stand marketing and self-promotion, which are kind of essential if you’re going to make it as a solopreneur. Plus, almost no one has heard of NIASZIIH, and most people won’t pay for something they haven’t even heard of and don’t understand. So, in order to create more financial stability for myself and my kids, I started grad school for mental health counseling last year. My goal is to do a version of NIASZIIH that fits with counseling, and be able to take insurance, particularly so I can see people from underserved communities. Admittedly, before I started grad school, I was pretty skeptical that I would like it. For so long, I was resistant to becoming part of an industry that has some pretty dubious origins (which is something we’ll get into in a future episode). Plus, as I mentioned earlier, I’ve had my own disappointing experiences with talk therapy. But I’m grateful and relieved to report that I’ve been very pleasantly surprised by my experience in grad school so far. My professors have been humble and wonderful, and I’m finding it’s actually quite fun to study a topic I’m passionate about alongside other people who are nerds about the same things. I also started seeing a talk therapist that I really enjoy, and who feels like a great compliment and support to the inner work I’m doing through wildernessFusion. Nonetheless, I still see that both conventional talk therapy and allopathic medicine practices are often inadequate to helping people meaningfully transform suffering. Practitioners of both are mainly taught to treat symptoms, rather than the root causes of dis-ease, and so long-term results are often disappointing. To explain a bit more, let me give some historical context. The reality is that modern mental health and allopathic medicine industries, such as we know them today, developed amidst colonialist, capitalist mindsets. And medicalized frameworks were often used to justify oppression. I’ll give just a couple of examples. Did you know that in the 1800’s America, enslaved people who wanted their freedom were pathologized as having a mental disorder? I’m not joking. There was even a clinical name for it: drapetomania. It was defined as a “disease” that compelled enslaved Black people to seek freedom. The desire for liberation was literally medicalized and pathologized. How insane is that?Or, let’s briefly touch on the vast topic of medical misogyny. “Hysteria,” based on the Greek word for uterus, was a medical diagnostic term that was used for centuries to pathologize women who had natural reactions to their own oppression and challenged social norms. In the 18th and 19th centuries, hysteria was a catch-all diagnosis for any woman who showed anxiety, depression, was sexually assertive, or resistant to marriage. Both of these instances show how pathologizing normal human responses functioned as a tool of social control, rather than as something that was actually meant to help patients. Now, you might be thinking, “Well, that’s the past. Our systems are much better these days.” Which is true to some extent. They certainly are better, and improving all the time. But there is still ample evidence of inequity, especially when it comes to marginalized communities. For example: Nearly 20% of Indgenous American and Alaska Native adults report serious psychological distress, and 8.5% admit to seriously considering suicide in the past year. That rate is about twice what’s seen in the overall U.S. population. Not surprisingly, they also have the highest rates of suicide of any ethnic group in the U.S. And all racialized groups in the US are all significantly less likely than white adults to have access to mental health services. Even for those who do receive support, Black, Hispanic, Indigenous, and Asian adults all report higher levels of unfair treatment or disrespect from providers than white adults. To be clear — mental health care has helped many people. It has been lifesaving for some. But it has also failed many, and continues to particularly fail those from economically disadvantaged and racially marginalized communities. But even for white folks, our healthcare systems are often inadequate. Of course capitalism, and privatizing the human right to health care is a big part of that, but accessibility isn’t even what I’m talking about. What I am pointing to is the fact that, even when care is received, it’s often not effective, and sometimes it even makes things worse. According to some estimates, mistakes made by medical practitioners is the third leading cause of accidental death in the US. And while mental health drugs can make things better for people, they can also make things worse, even leading to suicide in some cases. According to some estimates, as many as half of all people who seek mental health support quit treatment before seeing their desired results. Meaning that talk therapy is only reliably effective about roughly half the time. And yet – there are some amazing practitioners operating within these systems. I have several friends who are amazing therapists, and obviously I’m aiming to be one myself one day. And I believe most people who get into healthcare of any kind do it because they genuinely care about helping people. So this is not at all about whole-sale rejecting modern systems. This is about expanding what we imagine healing can be. And that’s what compelled me to start this podcast. That, and – when I sat at my altar and asked for guidance – the ancestors told me to. Now, this is where my personal self-disclosure starts to feel particularly edgy. Something we get conditioned to believe in western culture is that any extrasensory perceptions one might experience are basically delusional, and often dangerous. There’s generally an unspoken cultural agreement that scientific materialism is the one and only correct way to view the world. I guess it’s better than the time of the witch burnings. Only now, instead of calling it “consorting with the devil,” terms like “psychosis” or “fantasy” are often used instead. Thankfully, it’s not true 100% of the time. Depending on the practitioner, spiritual experiences can be seen as valid. But this is one of the places where modern science and ancient ways of knowing generally diverge. Humans have connected with unseen beings forever. It’s unfair, and I’d argue even unrealistic, to dismiss these kinds of experiences out of hand. And yet it happens all the time in the western medical model. Of course, it’s not black and white. Sometimes mental health interventions can really help those experiencing genuine psychosis. But those same interventions can also harm people, depending on the patient. Professional support can be lifesaving. And it can be destructive. There’s a ton of grey area here. My intention is not to disparage clinical care, but to widen the conversation about what we consider “normal,” or sane, and how to best serve the unique individuals that are seeking care and guidance. Because there are also those of us who aren’t experiencing anything like psychosis, we’re just spiritually intuitive. I know there are so many of us secret spiritual weirdos who seem “normal,” yet secretly hold beliefs and practices that we might hide from colleagues – especially within western healthcare industries. The culture is shifting rapidly, but generally there’s still so much stigma on this topic. I’m taking the risk of talking about it here, maybe even at the cost of future job opportunities, because I know I’m not alone. There are so many of us who are recovering ancient practices like conversing with ancestors, holding community rituals, and healing with psychedelics, among many other fun things we’ll be talking about in future episodes on this show. To sum up – at its heart, this podcast will be advocating for a few simple, yet radical, ideas: I want modern healthcare systems to be effective, equitable, and spiritually inclusive. I want racialized communities to see their ancestral healing pathways validated rather than sidelined. I want healing to be understood as relational and collective, not just individual symptom management. And I want all of us to be able to access the ancient human wisdom that will help us heal from thousands of years of hierarchy and oppression. And at the same time, I hope we’ll have fun along the way! One of my favorite factoids is from psychologist researcher Karyn Purvis who said: “It takes about 400 repetitions to create a new neural pathway — unless it’s done through play, in which case it takes about 40 repetitions.” So even though we’re covering hard topics at times here, I hope we’ll also enjoy the journey. Pleasure, gratitude, experiences of awe, celebration, and connection – these are all healing technologies that our ancestors knew, too. So, what do you think? Did this podcast challenge or validate you? What are some topics you’d love to see covered? Let’s keep this conversation going! You can comment here, or the best way to make sure I see it is to email me at rootedsourcepodcast@gmail.com (mailto:rootedsourcepodcast@gmail.com) As we part ways for now, please remember that healing doesn’t happen in isolation. Let’s stay connected to ourselves, to the earth, and to each other. Thank you for being here. I’m glad you found your way. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rootedsource.substack.com (https://rootedsource.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&#38;utm_campaign=CTA_1)

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