[00:00:00] Speaker A: If we are constantly reacting to the discomfort by telling ourselves that there's something wrong, that we have to fix it, that it needs to be better, and where we just cannot allow the process to unfold, then what we're going to be doing is we're constantly going to be pushing towards a solution, but we're also going to have a very strong agenda.
[00:01:14] Speaker B: Welcome to super normalized, the podcast where we challenge the conventional break boundaries and normalize the seemingly supernatural. Join me, CJ, as we explore less uncharted realms of existence and unravel the mysteries of life. Experience. My treasured listeners, if you have a life story or healing modality or unique knowledge that you'd love to share, reach out to me at supernormalized. That's supernormalized with a z at Proton me. Let's together embrace acceptance of the supernatural and unusual as what it really is. Completely normal. On today's episode of Supernormalized, I'm joined by Jennifer Moore, a former emotional hot mess and world class awfulizer. In her own words, Jennifer is dedicated to supporting highly sensitive, intuitive women in releasing empathic overwhelm and distress so they can tap into their inner wisdom and power. With over 30 years of experience, she combines practicality, intuition and skill to provide insight, guidance, and emotional freedom. Jennifer holds a master's degree in psychology and religion and is an accredited master trainer for EFT International. That's that tapping thing.
She is the founder of the Empathic Mastery Academy, author of the Amazon bestseller Empathic Mastery, and a host of the Empathic mastery show. Jennifer's expertise has earned her recognition as a mentor and healer, and she is impassionate about helping intuitives, light workers, and creatives utilize their abilities for good.
Enjoy this show and conversation today.
Welcome to Supernormalized Jennifer Moore. Jennifer, you've had a lot of experiences with empathy, and then also, I don't know if it's a hazard to say this, but it's like empathy pretty much overruled your life in some ways until you got a handle on it. Is that.
[00:03:04] Speaker A: Love to and thank you so much for having me here, CJ. I'm really excited to be here.
[00:03:09] Speaker B: Excellent.
[00:03:09] Speaker A: So let's just dive in. What I'd love to start with is talking about the distinction between what is empathy versus what is being highly sensitive and empathic, and especially what does it mean to be an empath? Because I think that I find a lot of people sort of throw all of those words in together. And the thing is that empathy is something that we all need a lot more of in this culture and in this world, like the ability to put ourselves in another person's shoes, the ability to imagine what somebody else is going through and not necessarily and realize that just because this is your personal experience doesn't mean that that's somebody else's personal experience.
And so my definition or understanding of empathy is empathy is that ability to understand that somebody is going through or the lived, realized, understood experience of other beings. We have the capacity to grasp, we have the capacity to imagine ourselves in that situation and to sort of feel it, but not necessarily become completely submerged in it. Whereas when somebody is highly sensitive and empathic, but especially when they are what I call and our sort of pop culture calls an empath, the thing about being an empath is that an empath is a person or a being. Animals can be this way, too, who pick up the thoughts, the feelings, the energy, the sensations, and all of the stuff that is coming from the world around them. But unlike somebody who might be very sensitive to psychic or a medium, very intuitive and can understand, they're picking things up. Empaths process the information as if it is their own. And so, ironically, a lot of times when somebody is an empath, they become so bogged down by the emotional intensity of the world around them that there isn't a whole lot of room for empathy, because they're drowning in all of the emotional craziness that's happening. And so the paradox is that a lot of times when somebody is really struggling with being highly sensitive and empathic and being sort of a classic empath, what can happen is that ability to have empathy is compromised by the fact that there is an inability to distinguish what's mine, what's not mine.
[00:05:53] Speaker B: So it sounds like you get overrun by the fact that you're a very good antenna.
[00:06:01] Speaker A: Yes, exactly.
Yes. That psychic sponge might be one of the words that people would use for people who are empaths.
A lot of times, words like people pleaser, codependent, these are all words that tend to come with the category or with the territory because of that extreme sensitivity. And when I was working on my book, Empathic Mastery, and I was doing some research on it, I happened upon information about mirror neurons, which are an aspect of our brains which have a capacity to perceive something outside of ourselves. And essentially, it's like that old saying, monkey see, monkey do, that. Our brains, there's a mirroring that happens. And one of the theories that I buy that I think makes a lot of sense, is that empaths are people who have a larger amount of mirror neurons, or at least greater access to their mirror neurons than the average person does, and simultaneously, they don't have the same level of filters, shields, kind of just protective insulation between themselves and the world that allows them to feel contained. And so instead, they're just kind of like that. As you were saying, open receptor. I also think of it as being like, you're like a house that only has screens and no glass, and so everything just keeps blowing in and blowing through.
[00:07:44] Speaker B: Well, that would speak also to the importance of psychic cleansing in the way of keeping away from any social media or movies or any forms of entertainment, which pretty much can give you trauma just by watching it.
[00:08:01] Speaker A: Yes.
And I am a big fan of being mindful and curating what we expose ourselves to.
[00:08:11] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:08:11] Speaker A: However, the thing about, depending on my experience in my own personal life and personal experience as an empath, but also in having worked with hundreds and hundreds of people around this and interviewed lots of people for my podcast empathic mastery show and just having all these conversations about it, is that one thing is that those of us who are super sensitive will often be picking up things that are not just happening in our immediate vicinity. It's not just, oh, my boss was having a bad day and I ended up feeling really lousy. It can be there is an event that is going to be happening in the next month or year or sometimes even longer, but a lot of times or in the next week or so.
And people who are really sensitive will start to feel the distress before it even happens.
And it's not like if you were watching, you just need to avoid the news or you just need to like, a lot of us who are really sensitive will be picking things up and feeling the rumble underneath our feet before it even happens. So while curating content, being mindful of the way we engage with social media, being really mindful of the things we do for, quote, entertainment, unquote, as well as being mindful of our diet, being mindful of everything that we put into our body that we are exposing ourselves to, that is absolutely important part of it. And it goes beyond that in that when we are really sensitive, we will often sense things and feel things that are coming from the greater world. And depending on how sensitive somebody is, they can be picking things up from across the planet. They can be picking things up from beyond the planet. They can be picking things up from outside of time and space. They could be picking things up from way back in the past or from forward in the future.
Some people are sensitive just to people, just to the energy of, like, they're the people who are like, oh, my boss was having a really bad day and I could really feel it. But then there are people who are picking up on the geopathic stress. They are picking up on the animals and the plants and the things that are like everything that's going on in the world. And so in my experience, it's a spectrum of sensitivity. And there are degrees of sensitivity.
[00:10:59] Speaker B: Can you tell us about your personal journey from being an emotional hot mess to becoming an empathic fairy godmother? What are the key turning points in your experiences that led to this transformation?
[00:11:10] Speaker A: Have you got, like a week?
What I will say is that there have been many moments of pivot throughout my life that have allowed me to recognize this.
As a child, I was always being called too sensitive, over emotional, over imaginative, making things up, taking things too seriously, and that I just needed to get over it and develop a tougher skin. And what was so hard about this was that it put all of the responsibility for why or what I was absorbing and picking up on me. And I often felt like, what's wrong with me? Why am I so broken?
Why am I so different than all of these other kids? Why can't I just be like the other kids? I mean, if you ever saw the old Christmas classic, Rudolph the Red nosed reindeer, I was Rudolph, and I belonged with the misfit toys. I definitely did not get to play in the reindeer games all the time. And I knew that I was a different person.
I'd owned all of the emotions and felt like it was mine. And so inevitably, I started to try to find solutions for this. And because nobody was talking to me about the fact that even just the simplest idea of what's mine, what's not mine, maybe I'm feeling things that are coming from outside of me. Maybe what I need to do is detach from this and let go and just sort of send it all back to where to send her that. Because I didn't have any of that information, I turned to food first. I turned to sugar, chocolate. And then as I got older, I added things like cigarettes and alcohol and ill fated relationships with emotionally unavailable people. But I kept looking for, I just wanted relief. But the problem was that all of the, quote, solutions that I was seeking did not bring me relief. What it did is it exacerbated the problem over and over again. So by the time I reached my early twenty s, I was a total hot mess. I had no idea what I was going to be. When I grew up, I wanted to be an artist. I wanted to be a creative person.
I wanted to be a psychic, but I didn't really know how to go about doing any of these things. And also as a psychic, I was picking up all kinds of energy, all kinds of thoughts, all kinds of stuff, and I wasn't necessarily letting it go. And it wasn't actually until I made the decision to stop smoking, gained 40 pounds within four months because I quit smoking, and I didn't have any replacement for what it was doing for me. And so I just turned to food.
And it wasn't until I really started to address this addiction to sugar, this addiction to cigarettes, and started to look at my own journey and do some recovery work that I started to realize that there was something else going on. But one of the most significant, pivotal moments in my life was when I found a remarkable therapist who happened to be very intuitive and very psychic. And I would say in hindsight, an empath. But we're talking like the early ninety s at this point, and nobody was having this conversation. And so she and I started working together, and I would talk about my distress, I would talk about how worried and anxious I was feeling, and she was helping me to parse out and tease out the truth. And nine times out of ten, what would come out of the session with her would be the revelation that I had been fine until I had an encounter with somebody who was not fine. And then all of a sudden, I was just carrying this energy around and had just absorbed all of their pain and suffering and worrying like a psychic sponge. And I then was just kind of in this state of distress for days, if not weeks afterwards. And so she was the first person who started to help me recognize what was mine. What?
And start to do the work of detaching from other people's stuff. But what I didn't know how to do as I worked with her, and this was where the hot mess remained, was that I didn't know how to release the emotional distress and the empathic overwhelm that I had already absorbed, that I was carrying in my energy body, and that I was already being affected by. So it took a number of years more before I happened to be at a festival, at a gathering, a spiritual gathering, where I basically, for a number of different reasons that I won't necessarily go into, but I will just say, don't drink mugwart and damyana tea for three days straight and expect to not be blasted open like a psychic sponge.
[00:16:46] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure.
[00:16:48] Speaker A: And so I was, like, three, four days into drinking this psychic opening tea when I didn't just feel like a house with screen windows with the wind blowing through, I felt like the windows had been blasted out. There was no walls, there was nothing. I was just standing there, just getting bombarded by all the energy. And I went to a friend and said, I'm losing it. I am in such bad shape. I really need help. And she was like, I think I know somebody who can help you. And she led me to this other woman who eventually, her name is Sylvia Bralier. And Sylvia or Bralier, depending on who is saying her last name. And Sylvia did this energy work with me where she did extraction work, like shamanic extraction work with me, and she pulled a whole bunch of stuff that was inside of my body that I had been carrying around forever.
And it was life changing.
Honestly, as I think about it, and I say this, if there is one moment in my life that is potentially the pivotal moment, it was when I completely surrendered.
I lay down on the grassy earth on the grassy earth and surrendered to the help. And that was part of it, was the willingness to accept help, to not try to do anything, to not try to look good, to not try to curate myself, to not try to be like, I've got it together because I'm a Capricorn sun with Virgo rising, looking good, and seeming like I've got control of this is know an and. But in this case, I was so desperate that I was just willing to be like. I was like butter. I was like, go for it. Just do this. And for the very first time in my life, I experienced energy in a way that I'd never had before. I experienced this sensation of feeling like I was plugged into an electric socket. I experienced the sensation of her reaching in and drawing energy out. And I felt it. I felt plugged in. I felt electrified. I felt on fire.
And I had known since I was a tiny little girl that this was possible. I'd been seeking it. I'd been craving it. I'd been wanting to find it. But I grew up in a family of atheists who all were like, that's just total pooey. That's just your imagination. That's not real. That's not quantifiable. That doesn't happen. And when I had that experience with Sylvia, it was this process of going, oh, my God, this is this what I've been suspecting all along is real. I can feel it. And that's when I went, and I have to do this work too. I have to learn how to access this. And so that moment was what set me on my path. That was the moment where I went from being a tarot reader and doing psychic work with people and definitely being sensitive to being like, I am here to clear my own energy body and to do the work that I need to do to be as pure, as healthy, as emotionally present as I can possibly be for myself. But I'm also here to empower others to find their truth and to experience the miracle of healing that I experienced. So I've actually never articulated this before in a podcast interview where I was like, wait a second, here is the one pivotal moment where everything changed for me. So thank you for helping me to draw that out.
[00:21:06] Speaker B: Thanks for sharing.
[00:21:07] Speaker A: Oh, my God, there it is.
[00:21:10] Speaker B: Look, I've drunk damiana tea myself and also mugwart. And mugwart itself actually does hammer the liver a lot, so it can be quite strong if you have it too strong. But it gives you those dreams. Dreams so extreme.
[00:21:26] Speaker A: Yeah, it's also in a menagog for women, and so it impacts. So I would imagine that mugwart probably also has deep hormone.
And if anybody's listening and doesn't know what an amenagogue is, an amenagogue is something that will basically promote menstruation. And so if you take that into consideration, anything that's going to cause you to have your period is probably impacting your hormones. And so I'm imagining that mugwart not only does it affect us psychically in our dreams, but I think it also really deeply affects our hormonal balance. And so I'm very careful with mugwart. It is not something that I'll use it. I appreciate it mostly in the form of Moxa used for acupuncture. And I'm much less likely to ingest it at this point in my life than I was at that age.
[00:22:19] Speaker B: Yeah, it does sound like you went through a bit of an initiation sort of process there. And it was also a self initiation at the time. And maybe all of the universe conspired to put you in the right place, the right time, and.
[00:22:31] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:22:32] Speaker B: Put that into your system, and then put you in the right hands of the right person to make it all better, too, at the same time.
[00:22:37] Speaker A: Exactly.
I have been so blessed in that there's an old saying in twelve step programs, God protects drunk fools and children.
And my joke is, I was definitely all three at that point in time. But I look at so many of the miracles that have happened in my life where I took the wrong turn and hit a wall, and the angels came to save me. And things that really were very difficult, I was trying to find a different word than a swear word for that, but things that were very difficult for me, so often I can see how, in hindsight, they were the gift, they were the blessing, they were the initiation.
And often the things that I struggled with, that I suffered with, that I really railed against. In hindsight, I can see over and over again how these were the things that tempered me, that forged me, that allowed me to really find my path and be stronger.
[00:23:46] Speaker B: Brilliant. Yeah.
So you've gone through this experience, and you started to support other people. How do you now support highly sensitive women in releasing empathic overwhelm and help them also to access their inner wisdom and power? Can you share some of your specific techniques or practices that you find super effective?
[00:24:05] Speaker A: Absolutely.
So the first thing that comes to my mind is to just say that I think know there are a lot of really great modalities in the world. I am a master trainer for EFT International. I am a very strong proponent of tapping eFT emotional freedom techniques. I think it is a spectacular tool for healing. I'm also a big fan of hypnosis, a big fan of emotion code, a big fan of shamanic techniques. There are a lot of techniques that I absolutely love.
What I would say, though, is that understanding the philosophy of holding space as well as being agendaless, are, I think, the two most important things that we can bring to our work for ourself first, and then when we start to expand and support other people, for other people, that, especially as a highly sensitive, empathic person, one of the things that I started to learn about myself and other people is that many empaths are very vulnerable to wanting to rush into rescue, to wanting to jump in and fix the problem for other people.
And we often feel an incredible sense of urgency about this when we sense another person's distress.
What I realized for myself, and I've seen and witnessed with many of my students and my clients, is that we feel better when other people feel better if we do not know how to be present with discomfort. And the first place that we have to learn to be present with discomfort is ourselves. That we have to learn how to sit with the times when stuff is getting stirred up, that we have to learn how to sit with the wave. Because life does not just stay static. It flows, it moves. And there is often a lot of. There's just that whole experience of being, living as a human being and moving through the messiness, the complication of life.
If we are constantly reacting to the discomfort by telling ourselves that there's something wrong, that we have to fix it, that it needs to be better, and where we just cannot allow the process to unfold, then what we're going to be doing is we're constantly going to be pushing towards a solution, but we're also going to have a very strong agenda. And so what I have personally found is that the ability to hold space for the truth of what simply is in the moment, bear witness to what is happening, and allow it to simply be is one of the most important things. And I probably will be the thing I will keep learning for the rest of this life. And to not have an egoic agenda about what it is supposed to look like.
I'm thinking about, I've got a situation where a person I know is very sick, and their desire is to.
They want to find a miracle. They're looking for a miracle. The doctors think they're a goner. The doctors believe that their time is nigh, but they don't. And the thing is, I could come to work with this person with an agenda. I could come to this, work with this person with either the agenda of finding a miracle for them and fixing things and feeling like, oh, my God, I have to keep them alive. Or I could come to it with, oh, this person is clueless and needs to get over themselves and needs to surrender to the fact that the universe is, they got their marching orders and it's time to go. But instead, the best thing I can do is release any idea of what is right for them and show up and be present with them and allow them to find their truth, allow them to find their answers and trust that the wisdom is contained within each of us, instead of some big foo foo guru healer who's like, I know what's right for you. I don't agree with that. I honestly believe that any healer or spiritual teacher who says, I know better than you do what you know than what's going on within you.
I personally believe that while they may have great insight, they may be able to see things, there is a hubris in that and an ego in that that is disallowing them to simply show up with love and compassion and trust that that other human being knows what is truly right and truly true for them. So the modalities are great, but the philosophy of being present and meeting somebody exactly where they are without trying to fix it and just honoring where they are is the key. And you and I are recording this right now at the beginning of 2024. And there's all of the social media, there's all the ads everywhere. Fix your life, make it better. Lose weight. Like, lose ten pounds in three days. All of these ten x your business in a month. All of these ideas of, like, make it better so quickly. And I will just say that, ironically, the energy of that, the urgency of that, is completely like a total buzzkill. It actually will often cause the exact opposite of what we are seeking. Because the word want is such a fascinating word.
When we talk about what we, quote, want, unquote, the word want literally means to lack. We want for things.
When we say I want, we are literally saying, I don't have this yet.
Anytime we start talking about what we want, what we desire, ten x your month, do this, do that. What is happening is we are placing the goal outside of ourself, and we are imagining it as a future possibility, but not being in the vibration of it right here, right now. And so one thing I personally learned is eliminating the word want from my vocabulary, except in very precise uses of it, when I am literally using it in terms of the lack, not the desire, and change the word to desire for myself and for my clients and for my students. Because in my experience, it's about the presence and being present with the energy of it in the moment, here and now. But the other thing I'll say is that in my experience, what we resist persists. What we fixate on, if we fixate on. I've got this problem and I need to fix it. If we fixate on, my business needs to be, I need to grow my business like I need to ten x my business.
When we get into that kind of energy, the irony is that so frequently it's that clutching energy that actually inhibits our ability to go there. Whereas when we sit with it, when we just show up and allow ourselves to, quote Mary Oliver, to let the soft animal of our flesh love what it loves, to just let ourselves be, miracles happen. Because in my experience, the body is the doorway, the body is the portal to the miracle. The body is the portal to the energy. Our resistance to the idea that the body is the portal is often the thing that disconnects us from the holiness of the energy that this illusion of physical form actually is.
So just that willingness to bear witness to ourselves and to others and to hold that space, that's where the gold is.
[00:33:15] Speaker B: By making space the absolute necessary, manifests. Rather than that clutching, like he describes that lust for result, pushes it all.
[00:33:24] Speaker A: Away, pushes it all away. And then you're like, why isn't this working? What's going on here? Oh, my goodness. I tried the thing. I tried the thing. I've been working on the thing for the last three months. Why is it not? And it's infuriating. It's incredibly frustrating. It generates, depending on where you are in human design, it's going to generate frustration or bitterness or disappointment.
I don't know if you're a human design person, but I'm sort of getting more interested in it and dabbling in it a little bit. By no means would I consider myself an expert, but that clutching energy, it inevitably brings up all of that.
[00:34:09] Speaker B: Just the pain, definitely, yes. It's good to move away from that into a better understanding of ourselves in the world, for sure. Now, you've mentioned that you're the author of the bestseller empathic mastery. Could you share some insights into the key principles or concepts covered in your.
[00:34:26] Speaker A: Book and what I would love to.
[00:34:28] Speaker B: What motivated you to write this and how's it been received by your readers?
[00:34:34] Speaker A: Thankfully received really well at this point in time. Amazingly, it is a five time book award winner, one of the last book awards. It won the Ian Book Award, which is independent author network. It won first prize in nonfiction, and amazingly, it won a cash prize. It was so awesome. I was like, oh, my. For the book. Nice.
So I wrote this book.
I was guided. So this journey started with me when I started talking with a lot of clients, and I started to realize how many people were struggling with what people were deeming as anxiety or mental health issues, and I would start having a longer conversation with them. And I realized that so often what was happening was that they were super sensitive people who were picking up the distress from the world around them. And so probably about ten years ago now, I got this flash that I wanted to write a book called the care and feeding of your psychic self. When living in a muggle world, that was where I started to go with it. And it was as I kept on teasing it out and working with it, I was really lucky to receive basically what a former old coach of mine would call a divine download.
I think I was literally walking from a mastermind down a hallway into the bathroom and sat down in the bathroom stall, which is one of the places where sitting on the toilet, I get a lot of information. I don't know about you, but showers and toilets and the driver's seat in a car, that's almost like there's a portal to the divine that just comes in there.
And so I got the format. I got the structure of the book. I got the whole thing. But before I go into the format, I will say I wrote this book for myself. I wrote this book for the struggling 19 year old who had no idea why she was so miserable, had no idea why she couldn't stop eating eminems, who had no idea why she just kept on being attracted to one emotionally unavailable person after another.
I wrote it for her, and I actually wrote it for my future incarnation self. I really hope that the person I become in the next life when I reincarnate, that this book is still available. And I really hope that she finds she or he or they find this book in the future. Because I wrote it as a manual. I wrote it as an operating manual for highly sensitive, empathic people. But I also wrote it for two other people who inspired me, and they're in the dedication.
One of them was a woman who was experiencing incredible amounts of misery and was literally going to unalive herself. And she made the decision to make a phone call to her uncle and say how miserable she was. And he heard her and he helped her and he saved her life. And she is living unparalleled life now. She is thriving. She has a beautiful, beautiful toddler boy. She is a coach. She is a community leader. She is a community facilitator. She just is doing amazing work. She is fulfilling her destiny because she didn't jump off a bridge, and instead she asked for help. The other person that I wrote this book for is somebody who, sadly, I had seen as a client and back in the days when I was a tattooer, and I literally tattooed words on her upper back that essentially said, like, kindness is born of a sensitive heart.
And this person was so incredibly sensitive to the point where they were suffering from agonizing physical pain all the time. They did surgeries to try to eliminate it. It was not going away.
They were a total hot mess. And they reached the point where they were so despairing and so physically in agony that they stepped off that they chose to stop passing the open windows. And I have always wondered whether or not if they had had the tools that I had learned on how to navigate being highly sensitive and empathic, if they would have made a different choice, if they could have stayed here. And so I wrote this book for the 19 year old hot mess that I was and the 19 year old hot mess, or the hopefully, like, 13 year old questioning future incarnation who's trying to avoid becoming the hot mess I was in this lifetime. I wrote it. And I wrote it for all of the other empaths who struggle, who suffer, who wonder how the hell they're going to get through another day, how are they just going to keep passing me open windows? So that's why I wrote it. That's what I wrote it for. I wanted other people to be able to get relief a lot faster than I did. I didn't want them to have to suffer for three decades before they started to find solutions and answers. So the format of the book is, it's divided into two parts. The first part is basically, what's an empath? Why are we this way? How does this impact us and influence the way we experience the world around us? What does it really mean? And then the second part is, okay, so now what? What are you going to do about it? Because there are a lot of books out there, spiritual books out there, that are either all about, this is what you are, but don't offer any solutions or have all kinds of tools and solutions, but don't really explain the why. And so I was like, the first part is the why. The second part is the how. And the how is basically where the sitting on the toilet. I got the download, which is that it is a five step system to come to understand who we are, what we are, and to learn how to navigate it. So the first step is recognize. And recognize has many different layers. Recognize is first, recognizing ourselves as highly sensitive empaths, recognizing that we are picking up the thoughts, feelings, energy, and sensations from the worlds around us, and then starting to learn to recognize what is our own energy, what is our own baseline, and when are we feeling off. So this ability to understand, oh, I'm feeling out of sorts what's going on here? And ultimately, what's mine to be able to ask the question is this. Mine is the first question. And then the second question is, what's mine? What's not mine? The second step then comes after that, which is release, releasing the energy that is not serving us. Releasing the energy we've absorbed a frequency from outside of ourselves that has triggered the frequency within us and turning down that frequency, transmuting that frequency, releasing the energy that we've taken on for other people and being like, not my circus, not my monkeys.
Then, after recognizing and releasing, comes protect. Now, a lot of people tell you to put up a bubble of light first. The problem with putting up a bubble of light before you do recognize and release is that basically, if you've been taking a bath for a while, and that bathwater is really dirty. Putting a bubble of light up around without draining the bathtub is like pulling the shower curtain around a stinky bathtub. You're just going to have a lot of bath water. That's gross.
And a filter protecting it. And so bubbling up without doing the preliminary work of clearing and purifying is like a pressure cooker for an empath. And so a lot of times, people who are like, but I've tried all the things I've carried around the crystals, I've put up the bubble of light. Why am I still feeling this? And it's like, because you are carrying a whole bunch of congested energy that you have carried frequencies that got activated within you before you put up the bubble of light. And so in order to protect, we have to first recognize and release, and then we can start to do the work of protecting, both energetically and strategically. Because not only do we need to have more robust filters and shields and sort of have a more protective aura, because in my experience, most empaths have depleted filters and shields, but we also have to have strategic boundaries. Like you were saying when we started this whole conversation about being mindful of what are you watching on television? Are you watching some gory, ghastly thing that's going to trigger you and traumatize you? Are you chasing the news? Or are you getting a drunk text from your best friend, or from your family member, or from a client at like, 1130 at night, and you're responding to it. There's a lot of the strategy of how do we protect our energy and how do we claim space for ourselves? And a lot of this does also come down to in the strategy, knowing that we are worthy of boundaries, knowing that even if somebody else is having an emergency, that it is not our responsibility to fix it. So I live by two mottos, two things that really help me. One is the old polish proverb, namasirkis, not my monkeys. I will say that, thankfully, I've not had to say it for a couple of days at least. But it is something that I need to remind myself of. Nama circus, not my monkeys. And sort of, instead of getting into the fray of something, if it's not mine, I grab my popcorn and go up to the like, I go up to the third balcony and just sit back and watch the whole thing unfold. Because it's not my monkey. It's not my circus. The other thing that I live by is your poor planning does not constitute my emergency.
I love this.
[00:45:13] Speaker B: That's a good one.
[00:45:14] Speaker A: Isn't that the best?
[00:45:16] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:45:17] Speaker A: Because so often people come to you with their urgency and their problems, and it's like, you know, you knew that you didn't have the money for your rent two weeks ago. Now you're two weeks overdue on your rent, or you're one week overdue on your rent. If you had checked in with me a couple of weeks ago and asked me if I could help you, that would probably have been a lot more effective than pushing these things. And so one of the things I've noticed is that often that urgency that happens with people very frequently comes out of the fact that they are not advocating for themselves, they are not doing what they need to do to take care of themselves. And so just remembering that I don't have to buy into their urgency, I'm also allowed to determine, is this mine? Is this my job? Is this my responsibility? Is this person, I am somebody that I am entrusted to help and support and care for? Or is this like, wow, sucks to be you, kid. I'm so sorry that you're going through this awfully difficult life lesson. Not my circus, not my monkeys.
The strategy of protect is a really important part of this. Then once we have created this self protection we've developed, we've recognized, we've released, and we've protected, we're in this energetically aligned place. The universe abhors a vacuum, and so we must connect with a power greater than ourselves. So the fourth step of empathic mastery is connect. And it's all about welcoming in positive energy, divine energy, letting ourselves fill up with the good stuff. Because the thing is, and I'm imagining you're very aware of law, of attraction and the idea of where we focus our energy, where we focus our mind, is what we will attract more of. If we focus on bringing positivity into our energy system, we enhance, that's what it gets amplified, but it also blocks out the stuff that is not serving us and prevents the negative energy from returning. It's like if you've ever been a gardener, the best way to prevent and eliminate weeds is not necessarily simply by weeding, although you have to do that first. But once the garden is weeded, the way to keep the weeds from coming back is by having favorable flora and beautiful plants that take up the space that the weeds might try to get in. And so that's where. But what I will say is, just like a garden, you have to be vigilant about this. You have to do the things to continuously nourish the good plants and basically discourage the bad. And so connect is all about that daily, sometimes minute to minute, second to second practice of connecting with the divine and becoming so full of the blessings and the light and the love and the compassion and the kindness and the hope and the passion that comes when we're in alignment with the divine, that there is very little room for the fear mongering, the propaganda, the stuff that is being thrown around on our planet in the lower vibration of the illusion of the void, the illusion of scarcity. So connect is the fourth step, and then the fifth step is act, because words without works is dead. If we do not take all of this and go out into the world and do what we are here on the planet to do, again, we leave room for doubt. We leave room for the negativity to start creeping back in. Because if we, as humans, we were born on this planet, not to simply sit and gaze at our navel and watch the rest of the world. Yes, there are some souls, that. That's their job. But most of us were born with a mission and a purpose. And so the work is about embracing our purpose and acting from our purpose and learning to take those steps, which in my experience, what I was talking about earlier, the acting from the place of holding space, of being agendaless, of meeting people exactly where they are, with loving compassion, surrendering judgment, and becoming curious when we start noticing narratives coming up for ourself, all that, that is what I'm talking about with act. It's like acting from a place of good and clean, acting from a place of the willingness to be willing to just keep showing up, to keep connecting with the divine, to keep recognizing, releasing, and protecting every single day. So those are the five steps of empathic mastery, and that is the system, the modalities, obviously, eft emotional freedom techniques, I'm a massive fan of. It has been life changing for me, but your mileage may vary. If there's anything I've discovered over the years is that just because it works for me doesn't necessarily mean it works for you. I actually, the other day, was about to review a book for a book that a younger empath had written about being an empath. And I started reading it, and they wrote in such generalities, and they had one section on diet where they were like, everybody should take Maca. And I was saying to my husband last night, I was like, maca makes me. Can I swear on this? Is that okay?
Maca makes me batshit crazy. It makes me completely nuts. If I take even the smallest amount of Maca, I am in a state of absolute spun out distress for days.
And so I was struck by about this book, and I decided not to write the review for it because I could not write a positive review. I was like, that's one thing we have to understand, is that just because something works for us, it does not mean it's going to work for you. And if there's anything I've also discovered, because I'm 61 at this point, if there's anything else I've discovered, it's that just because it worked for me at a certain point in my life does not necessarily mean that it's going to work for me at another point in my life. I have to be constantly testing and experimenting and course correcting in the same way that the Internet is constantly adjusting and shifting. And if you are running an online business, you have to be willing to constantly adapt or you're going to be stuck in 19.
Let's say you're going to be stuck in like 2013 trying to hack an algorithm that does not even exist anymore. The same is true with our body. We have to be willing to adapt and course correct within ourselves and have the willingness to listen when our body says, okay, you're good, you're good.
Stop taking this supplement, stop engaging with this thing, stop trying to. This relationship is over. Now it's time to move along. So that willingness to course correct is such an important part of this.
[00:53:01] Speaker B: Brilliant. Brilliant. So as a part of your work too, you've also created an oracle deck and the photographic healing tarot. Can you explain the inspiration behind those? Because, I mean, be interesting to know. Like, I'm really curious about the photographic healing tarot. What is that and how does it work?
[00:53:19] Speaker A: So the healing tarot is a labor of love that started back in the early ninety s.
I was invited to be. Basically, I designed masks for a ballet performance called a fool's fable. And this performance, it was an entire dance suite that did a whole bunch of dances based on the major Arcana. And they had gotten this vision about doing tarot masks for it. And interestingly, I at the same time had gotten the download that I was supposed to create a series of masks that represented all of the tarot cards. And so I had already gotten the download when I was showing my masks at this gathering called the pumpkin Ladies Ball, when the choreographers approached me and said, you know, and the producer, who later became a good friend of mine, said, we're doing this dance performance and we've been thinking about this and it's going to be all about the tarot. And we were thinking, and I'm hearing in my head, we need tarot masks. And I was like, I'm there. So that's where it started was with creating masks for this dance performance in Cambridge, Massachusetts, back in the early bachelor. Actually in 1989 was like Halloween of 88 that I learned about it. And then the performance happened in the spring of like April Fool's day, a fool's fable on April Fool's day of 1989.
And that's what started me then. I basically spent the next, from 1989 until 1994 creating these images for this deck. Now, at that point in time, there's no such thing as AI. Photoshop was in its early stages. You had to do everything in camera. And so my deck is a deck that I basically created. This is the death card, where all of the special effects were done in camera.
This is the star card. So you see there's all those stars shining around her. She's in a pool. This is all in camera, there no Photoshop. And so I was just guided to create this deck. It took five years to do the art. Then I went to seminary, and so it took me another two years to find a Heidelberg printing press and to hire printers in the next state over and self publish a run of a thousand decks. It's completely different now. Back then, you had to produce, you had to come up with the capital to produce the decks, and you had to do all these things. Now there's print on demand with everything, including decks and oracle decks.
And the reason I called it the healing tarot and the reason that I was motivated to do it, was that what I discovered, because I'd already been reading tarot at that point for probably about ten years, maybe longer, because I started reading tarot, I guess, in like 81, 82. So, yeah, we're talking over ten years I'd been doing it.
What I discovered is that the tarot is every single card represents a soul's process. Every single card represents a journey into self awareness and a journey into wholeness, and a journey into integration.
And what I wanted to do was create a deck where we lived it as the creators of it, and where we also really understood the healing process that every card in the deck is ultimately about coming to understand. And you can see it as either every card can be seen either as a pattern of imbalance or the non self that they talk about in human design, or can be in alignment with the energy and can be in, like we can lean into even the most difficult cards, the tower, the devil, the nine of swords, the ten of swords that we can lean into it and we can use it as the catalyst and the fuel for the crucible, for our transformation.
So that's what motivated the deck, the oracle decks.
At this point, I've got two, but spirit's been telling me about other ones, and I am a huge fan of AI. I believe you may be, too.
And so I love AI. I love its intelligence, and I believe those of us who are light workers need to be engaging with it because it's learning, and it's learning from who's giving it information. And who better to give it information than those of us who are actually seeding the world with love than people who are seeding the world with desperation and greed?
I've got some new ideas about some new decks coming in, but the next two decks that I created, one is called the empathic mastery oracle. And this one was created entirely from session work and the affirmations that would get distilled down at the end of a session when somebody had fully integrated things. And what I found personally is that affirmations only work if you believe them. Affirmations only work if you can buy them, if you can embrace them, if you can accept them. If you are saying an affirmation that is, like, so foreign that it causes cognitive dissonance, it actually causes more harm than good. So this is a deck where. So this is a card. I am a being of light. I love and approve of myself just as I am. And this was something that one of my clients, we got there, they got to the place where they could say unequivocally, like, with no doubt, not unwaveringly, I am a being of light. I love and approve of myself exactly as I am another one. I am in the right place, and great things are lining up for me. When we can say that and truly believe it, miracles happen. So that is one of the other oracle decks that I've created. And then the last deck I've created is called the Sacred Empath Deck. And that actually was using a lot of illustration and artwork that I've done because I have a background as a visual artist, and it's a very simple, sweet little deck with just pictures and single words. So, like, for example, here is the forgiveness card.
This is a very fluid deck because it really is kind of like, okay, let's just throw out these cards. Look at the words. What do they mean to you? What do you need to learn from this? What is this all about? So I'm a strong believer in using tools to access our inner truth. I don't necessarily think that pieces of cardboard are magical and are inherently contain the wisdom of the ages within them without our engagement with them. And so what I love is using them as mirrors for what's going on within ourselves and allowing us to discover what's making us tick. What's happening.
[01:01:19] Speaker B: Nice.
[01:01:20] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:01:21] Speaker B: So, Jennifer, we've come to the end of the show.
[01:01:23] Speaker A: I know.
[01:01:24] Speaker B: I know it by, didn't it?
And yeah, I appreciate the information that you've shared here today and your understanding and that deep sharing on your growth cycle and how that all happened and unfolded for you. I'm certain that a lot of people here would love to connect with you that are listening to the show. So can you give us some details on how they can find you?
[01:01:46] Speaker A: Absolutely. So I've tried to make it as simple as possible and that is the main thing. All of my social media at Empathicmastery, like you can find me there. My main website is empathicmastery.com. If you want to listen to my podcast, which if you guys like this kind of stuff, come on over to our podcast. It's a podcast. We're in our third season and it's basically a podcast for empaths, by empaths talking to what it means to be highly sensitive and empathic. I interview amazing people every single week, and that is empathicmasteryshow.com. And you might guess there's a theme here if you're interested in getting access to my books, empathicmasterybook.com. Because at this point, not only is there empathic mastery, I am the author in four multi author books. I've created a companion journal called the Empathic Mastery Diary to go with the book. And I've got another book that is going to be coming out in the fall of 2024. That is a channeled book from my guides, the council of we, that is talking all about why are so many people waking up to being empaths? What is going on on our planet? How do we navigate this dire, scary time if we're looking at the illusion, if we're looking at the scarcity, if we're in the void? And how do we come to that place of possibility and promise and the birth of the new beings that we are? Like birthing the new world, birthing the new earth, and allowing our promise to be realized. So that's what's coming. The title is still kind of in the work, so I'm not going to share the working title because it could easily change, but keep your eyes. Empathic mastery book is where you'll be able to find it come this October or not. Oh my goodness. That was a freudian slip. I was planning to launch it in September, but it just fell out of my mouth that it was going to happen in October.
[01:03:44] Speaker B: Isn't that interesting?
[01:03:46] Speaker A: I guess it's going to be October later October, because my friend Nikki and I are hosting an ancestral healing and writing retreat in Maine at the beginning of yeah. Which you can find out all about
[email protected] excellent.
[01:04:03] Speaker B: Thank you so much for your time. Jennifer. I appreciate your sharing and all power to you and you're helping others to embrace and understand and work with their empathic abilities.
[01:04:15] Speaker A: CJ, thank you so much for having me. This has been such a delightful conversation.
I feel like being in your presence. I have just been lit up.
I can tell you are bringing so much light to the world. Thank you for everything you do and thank you for your podcast. And thank you for spreading the beauty. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
[01:04:40] Speaker B: All right, thank you and bye to the listeners for now.
I hope you enjoyed the first video podcast and I'm realizing I'm going to have to clean up my background. As you can see our tv, my wife's cat, sculpture and speaker and fan and chair.
I'll do that for the next show. Hopefully.
I should say within the next week because I've already recorded the other show, but I wanted to say thank you for listening today and enjoying supernormalized and my discussion with Jennifer. It was really in depth and I'm finding this thing happening that when I'm talking with people again that things come out they didn't expect to come out. And I'm really enjoying that because that used to happen to me all the time at parties. I'd sit and talk with somebody and suddenly it's like a dam has broken open for them and then they have to tell me everything. And I like that because it gets to know the depth of what happened to them and where they've been and the stories they're going through and how their life's unfolding. So I hope you enjoyed that today. I really did enjoy talking with Jennifer again, saying that and yeah, come back and listen to the next show. Thanks very much for listening. Bye for now.
[01:06:40] Speaker A: It.
[01:06:44] Speaker B: Matter.
That matter.
That's.
