In This Body
In This Body is a podcast that explores the hidden impact of the unconscious on our lives. Through conversations with global experts, we reveal the silent stories shaping our experiences, paving the way for genuine change and deeper authenticity. In This Body asks the important questions: How does connecting to your body change your life? How will connecting to your body allow you to love better and live more authentically? And how does connecting to your body change the trajectory of our shared world?
In This Body
When Life Has Milestones but No Rituals with Carissa Schumacher
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What helps us move through life's biggest transitions without losing ourselves?
In this episode, Ailey sits down with Carissa Schumacher, a neuroscience trained forensic psychic medium and sacred ceremony facilitator, to explore what it means to navigate change with the body, rather than simply endure it. Together, they reflect on why major life transitions can leave a lasting imprint and how healing becomes possible when we are witnessed through them.
Carissa shares how her own experiences with illness, sensitivity, and trauma shaped her understanding of embodiment. The conversation explores the relationship between the physical and the spiritual, offering a grounded perspective on what it means to care for both without losing sight of either.
At the heart of the episode is the role of ritual and community. Ailey and Carissa consider what happens when life's thresholds go unnamed, and why grief, loss, and transformation are often easier to carry when they are acknowledged rather than endured alone.
If you are moving through change or searching for a deeper way to understand life's transitions, this conversation offers a thoughtful place to begin.
In this episode:
- 2:26 Meet Carissa Schumacher
- 5:44 A Gentle Content Note
- 6:20 Hope, Essence, And Stewardship
- 17:11 Childhood Sight Of Spirit
- 23:07 Building Boundaries With Intuition
- 27:49 First Period Without A Rite
- 36:11 Why Rites Of Passage Heal
- 41:53 Everyday Thresholds You Might Miss
- 51:12 Purification, Grief, And Channel Work
- 1:01:08 Liminality, Language, And Listener Next Steps
You can read the full transcript here.
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Welcome to In This Body a podcast where we dive deep into the pulp power of embodiment. I'm your host, Aile Shalee, a psychotherapist deeply passionate about living life free from the wisdom within your very own body. The podcast In This Body is a love letter to embodiment, a podcast dedicated to asking important questions like how does connecting to your body change your life? How does connecting to your body enhance your capacity to love more deeply and live more authentically? And helping collective embodiment all through the course of our share role. Join me for more consciously curated conversations with leading experts. Each episode is intended to support you in reconnecting to your very own body. This podcast will be available for free wherever you get your podcast, making it easy for you to stay connected to In This Body, the podcast with me, Alais Julie. Welcome to How to Be in This Body. My guest today is Carissa Schumacher. Chris has studied neuroscience at Brown University and has spent nearly two decades in service as a forensic psychic medium, empathic, intuitive, and sacred ceremony facilitator. Her work has been featured in places like The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. In late 2019, her life changed entirely when she began serving as a full-body channel for Yeshua. The transmissions that move through her became her first book, The Freedom Transmissions, published with Harper One. Her second book, The Alchemy Transitions, arrives this fall. This conversation was so generous and soulful that we made it into two episodes. In the first part, Krissa
Meet Carissa Schumacher
Ailey Jolieshares what being in her body means to her. She takes us into her earliest memories of perceiving spirit, a childhood shaped by autoimmune illness, and the year she spent trying to shut her gifts down entirely. She speaks about the moment a doctor named her experience as post-traumatic stress and how that naming changed her relationship with her body. She also offers what I believe is the heart of the episode: the understanding of rites of passages, the thresholds our ancestors marked with ceremony and community, and what it costs us when so many of them have been replaced or don't happen at all. This episode is personal for me, and my invitation to have Carissa here was one that was also deeply personal too. I have engaged in Carissa's work for a few years now, originally attending a retreat that she offered in Arizona, but then developing more of a mentor relationship later. I'm very grateful to now call friends, and I can confirm with lived experience that this human absolutely has a gift. And being in her presence fundamentally changed what I believed was possible, could be possible. My understanding of how intelligent the human body is. If you've been privileged to have conversations with therapists who've been practicing for years, they often speak of developing an extra sense. Some of them call this pattern recognition, some of them call this body-based intuition, some of them call it clinical, clinical experience. But all of this oftentimes leads practitioners who've been in the field for a while to be able to sense or intuit or read or pick up what their client is going to share next or predict what their client is going to do when they're outside of the room. That doesn't mean that they're accurate and that doesn't mean we act on that information in any way. It just means that sitting in that space with someone for such a long time can lead you to have an extra sense inside yourself because that's genuinely been your job to sense and support and be present for people. Which leads me to Krissa. Her abilities to know things, see things, intuit things, and also channel things is like nothing else, which is why I wanted to bring her into the podcast because she has such a different perspective on how all of that ties into the body. I hope that you enjoy this two-part episode as much as I enjoyed it recording it with Carissa. This is part one of my conversation with Carissa Schumer on how to be in this body with me, Ailey Shalee. Before we begin, a small but important note. In this conversation, we talk about chronic illness, trauma, and grief, and this podcast is an offering of reflection, and it's not meant to substitute care from a doctor or mental health care practitioner. If anything here touches something tender in you, please let that be information and reach for the support you deserve.
Carissa SchumacherSuch a simple question. My goodness. Being in my body means
A Gentle Content Note
Carissa Schumacherthat I am hope. My body, as is all of our bodies. My body is the space in which my spirit has chosen to reside within this life for all of the experiences and evolutions that I need. And it's taken me or it took me a very, very long time to come to that space
Hope, Essence, And Stewardship
Carissa Schumacherof feeling at home within my body, or feeling the meaning of the body being home. And I actually I had a huge breakthrough in my relationship with my physical body. Of course, there's the mental body and emotional body, the spirit body, and they're they're all one to a certain extent. But having grown grown up um with autoimmune issues at a very, very young age, as I imagine some of your listeners that have struggled with autoimmune issues know it's very difficult to establish a loving or peaceful or nurturing relationship with your body when your body is literally feels like it's trying to kill you. And in my case, it was asthma, and I was an eczema and all of these, you know, inflammation uh-related autoimmune. It's like I was born, I couldn't eat the food, I couldn't breathe the air on this planet. Like, and so it was like my body was trying to kill me or suffocate me. And I was trying to make friends with it or make peace with it. And as I went along in my life, I actually stopped asking the question, what does my body mean to me in the sense of like ownership of it? And I started asking, what do I mean to my body? Am I its loving caretaker? Am I a steward of my brain, my organs, my skin, my hair, my bones? Or am I an abuser? And of course, when we're abusing our bodies, we sometimes we feel like our body is abusing us, but when we're when we internalize that and then come to that self-loathing or that abuse towards our body, even just when we look in the mirror and just look at all the flaws instead of the beauty and the symmetry and the grace, no matter what one looks like, that is abuse. And just even that concept of, I mean, I would I I rescue snails and spiders, all I'm like the gentlest creature on this planet. But that realization of, oh my gosh, I am abusing myself, I am abusing my body, or I'm allowing uh forms of external abuse, like programming and conditioning and media and comparisons, and I'm drinking in that poison, and it's poisoning not only my body, but also as a result, my spirit. Because this is my spirit's home. So when I started asking the question, what do I mean to my body? That's when I started to feel a shift. And one of the greatest, one of the greatest things that I realized about the body, women's body, being men's body, but especially as women, is that the joy of our spirit, our consciousness being in a body, in this life, at this time in humanity is that our bodies are not just an I or a me. Our bodies are an entire collective motherlines, father lines, all of our different lineages of the light, our stellium. There is a story within every cell, within every atom, within every molecule of our body, and the more that you understand the story of your body as you so beautifully articulate, the more it speaks to you. For me, as a forensic uh psychic medium and channel, I first had to learn how to communicate with spirit because I was able to communicate with spirit from the very beginning of my life. But it's just so interesting that the harder thing for me in this life was learning how to communicate with my body. I mean, it's such a dichotomy. Most people can communicate with their body, but communicating with spirit is a little bit harder. And for me, it was the opposite. And so, uh, like really my practice in this life is learning these forms of communication between mind, emotion, physical body, and how that tessellates into spirit. But just that ability to say, we, this body is a we. Like kidney, lungs, heart, brain, we're going into battle today. Let's, let's, let's, let's regroup, let's meditate, let's get synchronized, and let's go out there carrying the mother lines, the father lines, the stories of all of the lineages that are truly the lesson and the moral of why it is that we're here. And so within my practice, I always call spirit the the vertical. Consciousness is more the vertical and body, human life, that's more of the horizontal. And one of the things that I love about some of Yeshua's teachings, that you know, uh the Christ is what I'm a full-body channel for, is that unlike some traditions, he's not all about just only be vertical, completely detach from the horizontal or body or physical form. But he's also like, don't just also be horizontal and forget about the power of your light and consciousness and spirit. And so, in some of the alchemy practices, all of the sediment that is covering our essence, all of those traumas, all of those, all of that unprocessed grief, it basically needs to die. And trans, and as we as that sediment dies, which can be very, very painful, and we shed some of what is no longer serving us, we begin to transform, we begin to heal, and then we resurrect. And what do we resurrect into? That balance between the vertical and the horizontal, and that is the truest essence of embodiment or embodiment, and what we discover when we live from that presence, from that fusion between our spirit consciousness and our body is our essence, and our essence, it's basically our gold. Just like nobody has ever had your DNA, and nobody ever will have exactly your DNA, nobody on this earth has ever had or will ever have your essence. So we all have these completely original essences, physically, emotionally, mentally, and within our spirit and consciousness. And once you liberate yourself, transform, resurrect, step into that essence, all of a sudden your soul force starts to move. Grace emanates from your essence, your service becomes more joyful as opposed to the suffering that it once was. And so I'm simply expressing this rather long-winded answer to possibly one of the most important questions that has ever been asked on planet Earth. Because we are a we. And especially as women supporting one another, uplifting one another, holding things with one another, because it can be backbreaking to hold health issues or traumas all alone. But when we just hold it all with one another and exalt and support one another for all of our different essences, there's a sisterhood that emerges through that. And that is very much the feminine lineages of the earth and light that are rising during this time of this new era.
Ailey JolieI adored your answer for many reasons. And one of them being that you touched on so many elements that I write about in the book. And you also, if my memory is serving me correctly, are the first person who has answered that question by honoring the we and the shared and the the body and the deeply spiritual aspect of it, and how being in the body actually does allow you to live from that essence, which is kind of been like my sneaky way of trying to like inspire spirituality through psychology of like if I can use this conversation around somatics, which I agree with to get more people here, like yay. So I just really wanted to thank you for sharing the pieces that you did and really naming that aspect of essence because I think it oftentimes gets lost, and bodies mean so many things to different people, and there's so many different systems acting upon them. And so I loved your answer for that reason. And I would love to maybe even rewind a little bit back to learn a little bit more about your body, just so that the listener knows a little bit more about you. You from a very young age were able to perceive things around you, and you even named it there being able to hear and be in conversation more with spirit than body. And I would love to hear a little bit more around your personal experience. This is something that I don't talk about often, but definitely sitting across from clients, start to pick up those things. And I was like, whoa, what's what's going on here? I'm gonna go online to kind of stop this. So I would love to hear how you started to transition through that and what that process has been
Childhood Sight Of Spirit
Ailey Jolielike for you.
Carissa SchumacherSo I'm going to attempt to make this as relatable as possible and as simple as possible. My very first memory in this life, I was in a crib, and I was looking out of the window. I have no idea how old I was, maybe three, I don't know. And I remember not seeing rain. It was raining, but I didn't see rain. I saw all of these uh golden beings, like angels moving and weaving and playing within the rain. So it's almost like I could see more of the in in Tibetan Buddhism, it's called the realm of luminosity. And the only reason that many people are not able to access the realm of luminosity is because of obscurities, and obscurities can be traumas or a conditioning, or just it's just not in alignment with their conscious evolution to be able to access that realm, or it's not important for whatever their soul's journey is in a given life. And I didn't even know the wording for that until actually very recently, the realm of luminosity. I'm like, oh, so that's what it's been the whole time. But um my second memory, and this really speaks so deeply to your work and your essence and the magic and healing that you've created for so many of us. My second memory, I remember looking up at the sun in the trees and hugging my body, even though I had as hugging my body and saying, God. The name like God or spirit had never been mentioned in my household, by the way. But just I I it wasn't even a word, it was just to some higher energy or light or being, I just remember saying, I am so grateful to get to be here again. I'm so grateful. And after that, and when you're not normal, you you like you don't know anything but what you are. So it wasn't until I was about maybe six or seven years old that I started realizing that people couldn't see what I saw. I had some very scary experiences as a result of it. Um a lot of ostracism. There was one experience at um a graveyard when I was very young. And actually, graveyards, people think graveyards are so scary. They're some of the most peaceful places on earth. They're not there anymore. Like that and so graveyards, I'm like, this is where I come to get peace. Like I go on an airplane and everyone's spirit energy and are absolutely everywhere. But there was this one graveyard that specifically was for you know, people in the colonial period, um, a lot of women that had died in childbirth. And I just, I was so terrified because I could like see the names of the graves before our class would walk by them, and my teacher had to carry me to the bus, and I just had to sit alone, like crying, not knowing what was going on or what was happening. So, over time, as can happen, you know, many, many children have these types of experiences and abilities, but it's kind of like conditioned out of them, or they suppress it along the way. I did have a neighbor that understood. She didn't have the ability to see or connect to the other side, but she was she was this kind of cool bohemian artist in this farmhouse, and she had lost her daughter, and her daughter was my imaginary friend as a little girl. And I started describing this my imaginary friend to her one day, and she starts crying, and she says, That's my Sophie. And so she would do my portrait, or she would paint me for her paintings, and I would tell her what spirit was telling me, and that was the beginning, like through art and artistic expression of my development of what I call my psychic library. So, my psychic library is basically all of these different symbols, colors, frequencies that help me to more deeply like download, but also accurately translate what spirit is trying to communicate. So, for example. This is one of the so stupid, but I'm gonna bring it up anyways. Um I know if if somebody has had like a lot of plastic surgery because I see the symbol of um a rhinoceros, and I don't know if that's because it's like rhinoplasty or something like that. But like before I even
Building Boundaries With Intuition
Carissa Schumacherknew what rhinoplastic was always a rhinoceros, and if the rhinoceros is like gray or sick, it means that somebody is having a health complication due to a plastic surgery. So this is only one of like a ton of, and so during my youth, thank God I was an only child and had tons of time on my hands, but I would just sit and I would meditate. And that's when I started learning how to set boundaries with spirit as well, which is something so incredibly important because one of the reasons that a lot of people actually do shy away from spirit or even understanding their own intuitive gifts is because fear. And some of that is programmed or conditioned, conditioned fear. A lot of it even has to do with religions, like you're gonna get attacked by a you know a lower spirit or like something like that, and a lot of that is just total, complete bullshit. But one of the so sometimes when somebody is opening up to some of their gifts, they can receive something that maybe looks scary and then they become afraid and they want to shut it down. So, for example, sometimes some of our guardian spirits can actually look frightening. I remember at my first um, what was it, my first Lakota and Nippy ceremony, uh what about Dane Fireware Firewolf was water pouring, and I'm sitting there in all of these terrifying wolves, and like this decrepit bear start like coming and trying to check me out. And like I know how to deal with that kind of stuff. Afterwards, I was like, Dane, what is up with the wolves? And he's like, Oh, did you see the bear too? I'm like, Yeah, I saw the bear. And he's like, Oh yeah, those those are my guardians, those are my berserkers. So Dane is a blood relation of Crazy Horse, the Lakota Warrior. And so those are all the guardians. So he calls in the guardians before he does the water pouring to keep this the sacred space pure and everyone that is in the Aneepia and the ceremony safe. And so, nevertheless, so sometimes it's that fear response that can cause people to like shut down or doubt. And so, what I learned very early on was to take agency with spirit, meaning communicate what it is that my boundaries are. So, what I would do is I would meditate on one side of the stream, and on the other side of the stream, I would welcome spirit to come forward. But they weren't allowed to cross that boundary unless I invited them to. And that for me was life-changing because then all of a sudden I wasn't overwhelmed by it anymore. And of course, I was also a kid, like I've like a normal kid with normal things and teenager stuff, and I think that the hardest point for me was actually like spirit has always been easy. Like I like spirit is safe, spirit is easy, like the divine is like it's the human that is has always been more of the struggle for me, and like going to dinner parties and normal human things is like actually very draining and kind of a struggle for me. I need a lot of time and space alone and meditation just to be able to process things. But um I wanted to share this because I think that this is something that is really relatable and important to mention, especially during these times on earth, and especially to those that may be listening that are parents. So, one of the things I loved the earth and nature growing up. The body, the earth, running, jumping in leaves, touching things, the ability to touch and taste and just be held in this womb of nature, whether she's storming or whether she's singing in light, that was like heaven. And um one of the things that I loved was ceremony. Ceremony, and ceremony and rituals were such a huge part of our ancestors' experience,
First Period Without A Rite
Carissa Schumacherceremonies, rituals, community got them through everything, and of course, a lot of that has been lost uh during these times. But we always did rituals, and so if a hamster would die, we would do this like elaborate ritual and like bring it up to like the pet cemetery and say prayers. And then I remember the day that I got my period was the day that everything changed. I got my period very young. And I remember going to my mom, and I had I have an amazing mom, but I said to my mom, you know, I I didn't know what it was at the time because I was very young, so I was like freaking out. And my mom was like, Oh, you've you're you're becoming a woman now. And I took that, and then I walked back into my room, and all of my dolls were on the floor. And I remember bursting out crying, being like, I'm not ready. I'm not ready to be a woman. Do all of my do I have to give away all do I not get to play with my dolls anymore? Do I need to stop making my little potions and altars to like on the rocks outside of my house? And so it was in some ways it was it was kind of like a crisis moment. And then it it was, it was that there was no next point in it. So there was no rite of passage that I officially got to have, to have that support to do lum me into my adolescence. And so those years were very difficult. I mean, adolescent years are, but for me, I hated my body. My body had destroyed my youth, it had destroyed my happiness because of the stupid blood, and I was just so angry. And this is something I'm speaking, and then of course, then I went on, you know, conformity attempt life. I just want to be normal. I don't want, I just want normal life. I tried to shut down my channel. I was so traumatized. I was so sick. This was about 18 years ago. I felt so separate from spirit that I was basically dying. And I went to the doctor and he's like, Carissa, do you know what PTSD is? And I'm like, that doesn't happen to me. That happens to other people, like people that go to war. That doesn't happen to me. And he's like, let me sit you down a minute, and he's explaining one thing after hypervigilance, dissociation, digestive. He's going through this list, and my eyes turned into like Disney Bambi eyes the more, and it was like the most unburdening moment in my life that I'm like, all of this hurt, this depression, this all of this stuff that's happening in my body and in my spirit, it actually isn't me. I mean, it is my, but it's brain trauma. And that's what enabled me. I just remember one night looking in the mirror and just being like, Carissa, because I was so sick. Like I had, I had been written, like there was a whole, it was awful. I remember looking in the mirror and saying, either you're gonna die, either you're this is gonna kill you, and then the external wins, then the masculine wins, then the oppressors win. Either this is you're gonna let this take you out, or you're gonna summon that last remaining flicker of faith and strength and self-love, and you're gonna transform and resurrect from this. And you're gonna let all the traumas die, and you're gonna take accountability, and you're gonna serve. And I committed, I committed to that. I did the physical work, the mental work, the emotional work. And what happened as a byproduct of that, it was an entire rite of passage. The rite of passage that I never received in my youth. The entire rite of passage, and everything reopened. My ability to communicate, spirit reopened, and that's when I received the vision to go to Sedona. That's where I received the vision for creation of journeys and all of the things that I am that I still serve through. And of course, now I've become a channel. I I know, I'll shut up in a minute. But now I've also become a channel, a full-body channel as of 2019 for Yeshua. And that's a very physical process for me. Living from your essence means creating a greater indwelling for more light, for more presence. And that does not mean ex it's external light that is entering it. It's there's a co-creative relationship that is shared between the light or consciousness, and that is held within the physical body in the in the essence of embodiment. And so when it comes to Yeshua, it's a very physical process for me because basically I lose consciousness and his energy emerges through me. So I'm not conscious when a transmission is coming through. Um I can hear him now. I couldn't hear when he was speaking in the beginning. Now I can hear him. But like my eyes are not the same, my body movements are completely different. You've obviously been to a journey and witnessed this. But what comes through is just this unbelievable love. Just this unbelievable love, wisdom, transmissions, teachings, and so that has been my journey. And um, the final thing that I wanted to say before I shut up. I've never I've never told any of this story before, but um, you can obviously edit it. You can edit this down for for sure. But um one of the things that I see over and over in my work with private sessions, families, children, young adults, elders, doesn't even matter. Is that one of the things that has created such a massive burden, almost crisis level, mental health crisis, physical health crisis within our youth, within our children, is the stripping away of the different rites of passage within almost every ancient tribal society, there were built in rites of passage for all sorts of different things, but especially with regards to the child a child's development. So, for example, when a young girl would get her period, it wasn't just oh, chuck some tampons over to her, and now you're a woman. There were elaborate rituals, and the women and the elders would support her and pray with her. And so it's interesting that one of the right, the first rites of passage for women is actually physical, it happens within the physical body. So, what do we do with men? Because they don't have that defining moment. Well, in some traditions, like Lakota, they would send them their rite of passage, because they needed a rite of passage
Why Rites Of Passage Heal
Carissa Schumachertoo. Otherwise, they're just gonna be boy children for the rest of their lives. So they would send them out to uh for a humble or a vision quest where they would need to be away from mommy and daddy. They would need to commune in nature with spirit, with the gods. They would need to learn how to take accountability and be self-reliant. And now a lot of these rites of passage have just been replaced with milestones, commercial milestones, achievement-based milestones. You know, graduation, you know, good job on your learning so that you can get, you know, get a job and go to a good college, or just, you know, sweet sixty, like just these milestones that have become commercial. And the whole point of the rites of passage of yesteryear is that they were physical, mental, emotional, but these were also spiritual practices that aided in the evolution of what it means to embody divine masculine, divine feminine, what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman. And so without some of these various rites of passage, which Yeshua speaks about in the upcoming book, we're fragmented because we have no root. We just become, as that in Hajjkah, hungry ghosts, just wandering around, feed me, feed me, like ravenous but never full. The rites of passage and community and these evolutions, these deaths, transformations, resurrections that we experience are part of the reason that we're here to evolve within our consciousness and to evolve within our service, within the collective. And so the resurrection, and what happens when we don't have our rites of passage, we stay stuck in the trauma. We stay stuck in the Friday, we stay stuck in the illness, and we have no way of getting out of it. So there needs to be that acceptance, that surrender anytime that you're one is in a space of hardship or void, because it can feel so dense and dark, but just having that ability to summon the vertical, to summon your ancestors, that we that exists within you, because that is what gives you the power and the agency to transform and resurrect from anything. So I guess I'm mentioning this as a major public service announcement because one of the things about journeys is that ceremonies, rituals, journeys aren't woo-woo experiences, believe it or not. We're on the earth, we're on the ground, we're putting mud on our faces and all of these communing, nature, connective experiences that resynchronize us mentally, emotionally, physically, and within our consciousness so that we're not just well, but we're whole. And I look at you and your journey and how you have been like beating people over the head with like a water bottle for like 19 years about all of these things. But now the shift is that there's just people are more ready. There is just more collective receptivity. So, amen to you, sister, and thank you on behalf of all of us.
Ailey JolieI love that you named it so perfectly because it genuinely has been 19 years since I had my own very embodied experience, but also I can see rite of passage of losing my daughter and what that was like to feel in my body and feel that grief. And if I hadn't had that rite of passage, I definitely wouldn't be the person I am today. And I wouldn't be the person walking around with a water bottle, as you uh so kindly kind of put it, maybe sometimes a little bit spicier than a water bottle. But I'm really grateful that you shared pieces of your story that was so generous. There are so many things I didn't know that also I'll say a little bit selfishly clicked in as to why so clearly there was a moment. This is before I got sick and had my diagnosis that I was that, you know, spirit was like, you need to go see Carissa. Like this is the moment you'd been in my ethers for a while. And now hearing parts of your story, but also being on this side of it, where I have gone through the rites of passage in many ways. I've heard that voice that it's like, you gotta stop doing this thing. Like you get you got you got it. Like you're gonna do this, and then we're gonna stop. And you have to trust that I've got you. So I was really grateful for you to share some of those pieces of your story. And I would love if we even just spent a little bit more time here, because I know that you've spent a lot of time in spaces with people, maybe just even pulling apart some moments that we wouldn't define in our mind as rites of passages, but that are deeply rights of passages. Like I, you know, pulled at that experience of having a pregnancy loss like such a young tender age of being 16. That was a deep rites of passage. Probably common language wouldn't put it as that, even though I know in my body, like that was it. That was my moment of going back into spirit and trusting something completely different. And really, also just if I'm quite honest, I'm just guided by
Everyday Thresholds You Might Miss
Ailey Jolieher spirit most of the time. I just step back and I'm like, you honey, you go for it. So if we could maybe just bring in some other examples or moments that come to your mind so maybe the listener can can maybe start to see some rites of passages in their lived experience that maybe they weren't holding that way before.
Carissa SchumacherI'm going to couple these with um a transmission that was about the different initiations, but I don't want to get stuck. If we go into that, we'll be here for a long time. So we'll save that for another time. But um the varying rites of passage that we call to us, there are spirits' mechanism of helping us to consciously evolve beyond something. So there's the rite of passage between childhood and adolescence. There are in all of the experiences that that can bring forth. You know, the there can be certain rites of passage, even with regards to first heartbreak and transforming and resurrecting from that huge rite of passage, losing one's virginity. That is something that, you know, it's just kind of there are so few rites of passage surrounding that. In certain uh ancient societies, the ones that have mirrors, because most didn't, women were not looking in the mirror. Women did other women's makeup. Women adorned other women, which is so special. But there is, I forget whether it's uh, I believe it was, may have been Chinese, but when a woman, and this is obviously for people that were wealthier, was given her first mirror or a mirror because the mirror needed to be consecrated. Otherwise, when she looks in it, all she sees is flaws, and that's something that I tell everyone women, consecrate your mirrors, consecrate your mirrors in the name of love, truth, peace, joy, beauty. Keep your eyes closed until every inch of that mirror is illuminated with your light, and then open your eyes and look within it. And I promise you, you are not gonna see as many flaws as you used to because then it's empowered with your essence. Not letting it because what I find sometimes is that like as women, we do need to look at the air, we can't just call out, you know, like imbalance masculine or patriarchal, you know. We have to look at where it exists within us. And when we look into the mirror and see nothing but self-loathing and fat and flaws and this, that, or the other, that's where you're that's where you're still hooked. That's where the conscious immaturity that it's still hooking you. So you need to unhook from that, consecrate your mirror and shine all of that light into the mirror. It's an extraordinary service to do so, not only for you, but really everyone around you as well. But nevertheless, I digress. Obviously, marriage, huge rite of passage. Moving, moving from one space to the next. That was a rite of passage in a lot of different traditions. Major one. We don't leave, we don't just pick up the can the campsite, you know, live leaving, you know, all sorts of crap behind. We purify the land, we bless the land, we grieve and mourn the leaving of the land, we journey, and we find the new space of land. So a move is actually a very major rite of passage. Rites of passage are basically anything that is deeply mentally, emotionally, physically, or even spiritually of great meaning to someone. So rites of passage, children, huge rite of passage, loss of a child. The movement from conscious adolescence to adulthood is a rite of passage. This one brings me so much grief. Children get out of college, and there's, you know, graduation ceremony, and everyone gets drunk, and then they're just kind of dumped in the real world, feeling like I have to figure it all out. And I it's very distorting that the rite of passage from conscious adolescence, because then the childhood cycles are completing, and you're entering the adult and the elderhood. That is one of the most difficult and most painful rites of passage of them all. Because that rite of passage, and this this doesn't matter how old a person is. As a matter of fact, I see a lot of people in adolescent consciousness that are like 80-year-old world leaders, right now. They're, you know, like, but I mean this more on maybe like an ad uh allegorical type of level. Shifting from conscious adolescence to conscious, conscious adulthood, it requires and necessitates taking accountability. And the ego and the mind and that doesn't want to take accountability for anything, but it's not until it's able to take accountability for what it's done in the past, to take accountability that it can move through and transform and resurrect into the embodiment of conscious adulthood. You know, and then of course there are the rites of passage of movement into elderhood. So menopause, huge rituals and ceremonies for menopause, you know, also a child leaving the house. That was a big rite of passage, like completion, going to the university. You raised a functional human in this world. But for men, what a lot of people don't, poor men, they just go from adult, and there's no defining physical event to elder. So without that rite of passage, we have a giant recipe for men in midlife crises. Leaving their wives, cheating, getting a sports car, and you know, dating a 23-year-old. Like, problem. Red flag, society. And so for men that were entering elderhood, there were entire ceremonies and rites of passage in which they were declared the elders. And the elders were the teachers. The elders, the men and women, they were considered to have the most spiritual power and the wisdom, and thus it was the elders that would bring forth the teachings. So I hope that some of these help to illustrate any birth, any death, any loss, any major transition. That is your spirit saying, okay, you've evolved beyond to this structure, even job miserable in your job, evolve beyond a job that you once loved, or a business that you once loved, or a practice that you once loved. That is your spirit's way of saying, okay, time to evolve beyond this. Time to transform and resurrect beyond this so that you can serve with a deeper capacity for light and balance.
Ailey JolieDoes that help? It does. It does. And I would love to hear a little bit more about your rite of passage and kind of in moving into a full body channel because I know as you've spoken about it, it requires such a level of surrender for something to really move through the body. And you've said in the past pieces around how grief or loss can deepen or have deepened that experience. And I would love to hear about maybe the rite of passage of being a full body channel and maybe how having those experiences of loss or pain actually maybe deepened that experience for you, if if that's true.
Carissa SchumacherOh my gosh, what a question. Extremely original questions. Thank you. Wow. I listened to
Purification, Grief, And Channel Work
Carissa Schumacherall of your podcasts. Yes, you do. So 18 years ago, when I went through my central alchemy pathway, like death of everything in my life, transformation, resurrection, stepping into the service, that I did on journeys that I had all every single journey, year after year, month after month, every session, I worked into greater capacity to be able, like a greater capacity to hold I would say more vast light frequencies within my physical body. So about nine months before Yeshua came through my channel, six months before Yeshua came through my channel for the first time, I noticed that something really weird was happening in my body. And the first thing that I noticed was that I was getting, I was starting to become really resentful towards my own abilities. Like medium shit. I started to feel like a prostitute. I I know that that sounds horrible when I'm connecting people with their loved ones, and it's so special, and it's something that I love to do, but it's like I just felt like people only cared about me for my gifts and not for me. And I was starting to feel like all of these different spirit energies, and they're coming through my channel and my body, and I just started to feel like like violating. And then I was meditating one day and I hear a voice say, prepare your body to receive the host. And I'm like, what the F does that mean? I'm like, you're gonna have to clarify a little bit of that, like radio silence. But after that, immediately I started becoming allergic to like I I couldn't do sugar anymore, like any caffeine whatsoever had to go. It was like I went through this extremely intense and actually almost physically painful process of purification. And then I went to a retreat with Danielle Gibbons, who channels uh Divine Mother. So at this point, I still don't know that Yeshua, like I don't know anything about this, but it was about a month before, and I go to a retreat, and all I can say is that it was like the greatest moment of soul death, grief, void. I just sobbed on a mountaintop in Georgia for three days. It was like every and it didn't just feel like my source wounds or separation wounds or betrayal wounds, it almost felt like all of humanity's like it was a level of intensity of grief and pain. But how great. It was like just everything. I just needed something to die, and I needed to mourn. And by the third day, everything had been emptied out like just crystal, crystal, crystal clear. And I go back, and the journey was a few weeks later. And that's when Yeshua, I just go into a meditation on the last day and I lose consciousness. And when I came back too, people were like, um, we need to talk, Carissa. Like something has just happened. Let's let's discuss. Um but then over the course of the next nine months, like just just the unbelievable humility. Working as a channel for an avatar is the most humbling high-in-your face thing every day. Everybody's like, oh, it's so special that I'm like, I am not special. I do not get special treatment. I like, don't don't do that to me. Don't pedestal me. Do not do that. Because if you pedestal me in that way, I either have to be at the center of the circle or I'm outside of the circle. And we are all in this circle. I need to be right here in this circle with you. I'm like, not special at all. Every single day is some kind of like some kind of an evolution. How could I not have known that moment? But it's so fun. It's so fun because now I just get to be me with my gifts and you know, but all but all of me, like my humor and my humanness. And so now I've like I've really fallen back in love with journeys because Yeshua gives the transmission. And then I just get to be me and cry and laugh and be in the circle. So him coming through really unburdened me. But man, that first nine months, oh, that first nine months was wild physically, just to learn like how to hold the energy, and everything was getting like configured in my channel. You know, it's like a new Wi-Fi being set up, like there's all these different, like electric and everything needs to get configured. And then after nine months, that was complete, and that's when he said, Go to the mother tree. I need you to channel the freedom transmissions. And in between the fifth and the sixth of the freedom transmissions, because there were nine of the different freedom transmissions, and I did one day after day after day. But in between the fifth and the sixth, our dog died. Pierce. And um so obviously I had to stop doing the transmissions because it was just so much grief. There's just something about animals and a creature of just such unconditional love. And even though I feel Pierce, like it's the physical presence that is not there, and it just feels so empty. But that I know that the divine and Pierce um needed me to experience uh that level of depth of loss and grief to be able to bring through the next transmission called on life loss in the lamb, which is about death and grief. And that is in the freedom transmissions. But seriously, so talk about a rite of passage. I went through a major, extremely painful rite of passage in uh early to mid-2025. I was I found out that my mother has like a terminal uh illness, and I learned that my childhood best friend uh was dying, and I couldn't say goodbye. And it just it was all of these, like the most sacred women in my life were all like getting sick or dying or moving through these extreme, like end-of-life rites of passage. And um that processing that and coming to peace and acceptance of that is what allowed me to have the depth last year to bring through the rite of passage transmissions, which is the final transmissions in the Alchemy Transmissions, which um is the next book coming out in September. So I hope that I know I sound so batshit to so many of your listeners, but I kind of hope they're they appreciate this and love it and kind of feel a little bit of it within themselves or a lot of it within themselves, because everyone has these abilities. Everyone has. Maybe not like talking to the dead more than you talk to the living, but everyone, whether you're a seer or a hearer or a feeler, feelers feel the emotional, or whether you're a knower and just know things without explanation, where people are like, How did you know that? Those are all equally powerful intuitive abilities and ways that your spirit and consciousness is communicating to and through you. So that's my answer.
Ailey JolieAs I sat with this first part of my conversation with Carissa, what kept returning to me was her language on rites of passage, because there's a whole body of thought behind that phrase that I think is important to share with you. Over a century ago, an anthropologist observed that cultures across the world move their people through change in three specific movements: a separation from what was, a threshold time in between, and a return with a new place in the community. In that middle territory, what Victor Turner called liminality, that's what Carissa kept speaking about today. The time between who you were and who you're becoming. Our nervous systems were never designed to cross that threshold alone. Ritual, ceremony, and community
Liminality, Language, And Listener Next Steps
Ailey Jolieare not decoration around change, they are co-regulation through change. During those times, there's meant to be other bodies telling your body that the ground will hold you while everything else around you seems to be moving. So when Carissa says milestones have replaced rites of passage, what I hear clinically is that we've kept the achievement and lost the accompaniment. And a nervous system that crosses a threshold unaccompanied often stores that crossing as overwhelm rather than as growth. That is one of the ways that trauma occurs, not only by what happens to us, but by what doesn't happen to us as well. Which is why the moment the doctor named Carissa living with post-traumatic stress is so important. The word to her felt like an unburdening. That is something we see again and again in trauma work. Research on affect labeling shows that putting accurate language to inner experience genuinely settles the body's alarm systems. A name is not the healing itself, but it turns suffering that felt like a personal feeling into a physiology that makes sense. And shame does not survive that kind of sense making very well. If you've ever wept with relief when someone finally gave words to what you were caring, your body was doing exactly what Chris's did. In part two, Chris and I go deeper into the intuitive capacity she believes live in all of us, the real cost of a life given to service, and the new era she believes we're entering. If this conversation is stirring something in your own body, this is precisely what we explore inside Embody, my embodiment program. And you can find the details at embodymethod.com. You can find more of my writing and other episodes on Substack, which is available at alijalee.substack.com. Again, thank you for listening and thank you for your being in the tender, ongoing process of coming home to your body. If you found value in this episode, it would mean so much to me for you to share the podcast with friends, a loved one, or on your social platform. If you have the time, please find the podcast. Thank you for being here.