Welcome to Ghost of a Podcast. I'm your host, Jessica Lanyadoo. I'm an astrologer, psychic medium, and animal communicator, and I'm going to give you your weekly horoscope and no-bullshit mystical advice for living your very best life.

Hey there, Ghosties. In this episode, I'll be doing a live reading with one of my beloved listeners. Every Wednesday, listen in on an intimate conversation and get inspired as we explore perspectives on life, love, and the human condition. Along the way, we'll uncover valuable insights and practical lessons that you can apply to your own life. And don't forget to hit Subscribe or, at the very least, mark your calendars because every Sunday I'll be back with your weekly horoscope. And that you don't want to miss. Let's get started.

Jessica:            Okay, Morgan. Welcome to Ghost of a Podcast. What would you like a reading about?

Morgan:          So my question has to do with embodiment. You recently talked a little bit about what embodiment is, and in response, I wanted to know more about what that's supposed to feel like. I specifically have so much trouble getting into my body and feel generally pretty disconnected from my physicality. So, more specifically, I'm wondering, how will I know that I've successfully embodied a certain emotion? In what scenarios am I supposed to be practicing embodiment? And are there specific rituals or exercises to practice embodiment that can support everything that I have going on in my chart, like all of the fire, air, and the lack of earth?

Jessica:            Okay. Great. That's good. And to clarify, I was talking about embodiment on Patreon, where I've been dropping lots of videos about embodiment, alignment, that kind of stuff. Let's get into it because there's a lot of questions within your question. The first question is, how do you know when you're embodied? Was that the first question?

Morgan:          Yes. What is it supposed to feel like? What am I looking for in my body?

Jessica:            That's a great question. Okay. So I will answer your question with a couple of questions. The first one is, do you love what you do for a living?

Morgan:          No. I would not say that.

Jessica:            Okay. Great. Okay. Great. Good. No. That's great. I'm rooting around to get to a yes. So it doesn't really matter what the yes is about, just to give you a heads-up. I've got a plan.

Morgan:          Cool.

Jessica:            Do you have a bestie or a romantic partner that you really know you love and like?

Morgan:          Yes, I do.

Jessica:            Okay. Which one?

Morgan:          I have a romantic partner that I really love and like.

Jessica:            Okay. Great. So what's the pronoun for them?

Morgan:          He/him.

Jessica:            Okay. So how do you know that you like and love him?

Morgan:          I get a sense of just peace around them, or him. And I know that I love them just based, I guess, on how I feel⁠—

Jessica:            How you feel.

Morgan:          ⁠—when I'm in their presence. Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. And how long have you been with him?

Morgan:          We've been together about three years.

Jessica:            Okay.

Morgan:          A little longer.

Jessica:            So can you remember at the very beginning, when you were nervous and you didn't know if he liked you back and you didn't know what was going to happen, when it probably wasn't as peaceful, did you still know that you liked him and loved him, even when it wasn't as peaceful?

Morgan:          Yes, I did.

Jessica:            Okay. The reason why I asked this is not because we're getting into your love life. It's because you know what embodied emotion is when you feel it.

Morgan:          Yeah.

Jessica:            Does that make sense? Yeah?

Morgan:          Yeah. Yeah, I do know what you're talking about.

Jessica:            So there's this just⁠—it's not like, "Oh, I think I like him." It's not, "I want him," although those two things are a part of it. But that's not the whole of it. The whole of it is just your gut and your body, so your spirit gut and your body and your head are all⁠—and your heart⁠—they're all kind of saying the same thing. So one part of you might be super peaceful. Another part might be super anxious. And another part⁠—it doesn't mean that there's not contrast within the emotion, because sometimes⁠—I mean, if you've been with your boyfriend for three years, you know sometimes you're like, "I love him. I like him. I could murder him this afternoon." Right?

Morgan:          Absolutely. Yeah.

Jessica:            It's not like we're a fiction. We're complex, messy humans. But it's still⁠—at the center in your body, you know, "Oh, I like him and I love him, and I want to murder him because he's annoying and not because I don't like him and love him."

Morgan:          Right. Absolutely.

Jessica:            Okay. So this is where I think it's really important to start, and it's because when we talk about these kind of foundational concepts like embodiment, alignment⁠—when we talk about these foundational concepts⁠—I think values is another one that I talk about a lot that a lot of people are like, "I think I know what you mean, but what the fuck do you mean?" I think people get in their heads⁠—and please tell me if this feels right to you⁠—about, "Okay. If I'm embodied, then is it the voice of Morgan Freeman telling me I'm embodied; I'm super certain?" Are you kind of waiting for a blue light kind of thing?

Morgan:          Yeah, definitely.

Jessica:            Mm-hmm. So I always like to go straight to clear evidence that you've experienced embodied emotion in an ongoing way.

Morgan:          For sure.

Jessica:            So, now, that said, we're not sharing your birth data, but I can say you have a bazillion planets in Sagittarius. You're the Pluto in Sagittarius generation, which makes you gen Z. In particular, you have Mercury conjunct Pluto and Pluto conjunct the Sun. This means your emotions and your thoughts come on heavy and deep and sometimes like a freight train going forward or backwards or left or right. Nobody knows. Does that feel like a good description?

Morgan:          Absolutely. Yeah. It does.

Jessica:            Okay. With a ton of fire in your chart⁠—and, true story, you do not have a lot of water. I mean, you've got Jupiter in Pisces, which is a very lovely placement. But other than that, you're fire and air. You don't even have earth. You got no earth. Where's your earth? You got no⁠—well, you got a Taurus Rising. Taurus Rising.

Morgan:          That's it. Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. That's it. So, in terms of your nature, accessing the body is going to be really tricky because the way you know how to experience your body is through action as opposed to reception. So it makes sense that you're like, "Wait a minute. What is embodiment? How do I know it?" and not only, "How do I know it?" but you had a fucking scroll list of questions about it, which I really respect.

Morgan:          Yeah.

Jessica:            You're just like, "But wait a minute."

Morgan:          Tell me more about it.

Jessica:            "I need an exact practice." Exactly. So give me an example of a situation where you are not embodied and it's super mysterious to you, if you have one.

Morgan:          You kind of brought it up with your first question, is my job, like career area. I am so⁠—confused is not the word I want to use, but there are so many options, and I'm sitting here creating more options for myself. I'm unhappy in my current situation, and I'm sitting here essentially pros-and-conning every single thing I could think of that might be better, but can't actually make a decision because I'm not sure what feels right to me.

Jessica:            Okay. This is good. This is good. I'm going to have you say your full name out loud.

Morgan:          [redacted]

Jessica:            I'm missing something. Hold on. Do you have a nickname that everyone calls you?

Morgan:          My friends call me [redacted].

Jessica:            Okay. That's it. That's it. I got it. When I look at this psychically, what I see is that you start the point of inquiry⁠—"What should I do with my life? What should I do with my career?"⁠—from a disembodied place. You feel that this is so important, and you feel a sense of, "I should know this already." So you're already impatient with yourself and judging yourself before you even articulate the question to yourself.

And you're out of your body. You are so fucking out of your body that it inevitably⁠—and this is true for you; this is true for everyone. When you're this out of your body, you're starting off from a place of anxiety because you're like a balloon that's untethered to the ground. So, if you're in the balloon, how the fuck are you supposed to find a path? Right?

Morgan:          That's exactly how I feel.

Jessica:            Yeah.

Morgan:          Like I float above, and I'm not tied to the earth whatsoever.

Jessica:            At all. And to be really clear, the reason why you do this is it's like a maladjusted survival mechanism. You're so scared that you're not going to find the answer. You're scared that there's something inherently wrong with you. You're scared about a million things that⁠—honestly, we could name them all, but in a way, we could spend the fucking day naming them all.

Morgan:          Yeah. We could.

Jessica:            It's anxiety. It is anxiety. So it's not like good common sense fears, like, "I'm scared of crossing the street without looking both ways." That's a great fear. That's a good one. Once you have⁠—some of them are good, but really, it's just you're anxious. And so, straight out the gate, you're so far out of your body that finding an answer that will put you in your body⁠—uh-uh. It's not realistic. So say your full name out loud, and include your nickname.

Morgan:          [redacted]

Jessica:            I am seeing all these prompts that I could give you. So just going to walk you through my process for a second here.

Morgan:          Okay.

Jessica:            I'm seeing all these prompts that I could give you. Do you have a therapist?

Morgan:          I do.

Jessica:            Yeah. Therapists love you. You're great. You're a perfect candidate for therapy because you're really willing to talk through your ideas. But the problem with all these prompts that I'm seeing is they're more cerebral prompts. So this is the thing I call the great and powerful Oz. You're really good at being a big, disembodied head. But that's not the problem. Cognitive understanding and analysis is not your problem.

                        Your problem is you're so scared of the truth⁠—you're scared that the truth is going to be worse than you think, or you're scared of finding something that you don't know what to do with or that you're going to fail around⁠—that there's no amount of cognitive prompts that are going to fix this problem because the problem isn't in your mind. It's in your body. It's in your heart.

So the first thing I'm going to say⁠—you don't need a career.  You need money. You don't need a career.

Morgan:     Okay.

Jessica:            And you get to make that decision. It is actually your decision to make. And that both spikes your anxiety and soothes your anxiety.

Morgan:          Yeah.

Jessica:            The problem is you have so many kinds of anxiety that it's impossible to satiate all of it because it's like you want a career and you don't.

Morgan:          Yeah. I do. I want⁠—well, I want a career if I like it. Does that make sense?

Jessica:            Yeah.

Morgan:          I'm not trying to be some sort of girl boss, like corporate baddie situation. I am not interested in that. The job is a means to live. It would be really nice to feel excited about what I'm doing when I wake up in the morning. And so I want something that I like enough. I'm not under a delusion that my job is going to fulfill me, but I would like to be able to be creative and social and do something that I feel good about and that puts good out in the world in some way.

Jessica:            Okay. So I love what you said. Very, very good. Here's the problem with what you said: you have no delusions that you will get fulfillment from your work. That's a problem, I would say. And I would say listen. I am on TikTok enough to understand that I think people in general, but especially⁠, I think, online⁠—it's not just that you have this idea, like it's delusional to love what you do. I think that you're hearing people your age echo it back to you, whereas my generation, gen X, had the exact same feelings and thoughts and similar realities, very different but very similar realities. But we didn't have the echo chamber of the internet. It's not the internet; it's social media kind of echoing it back.

                        So I just want to ground you into there is a part of you⁠—not all of you, but there is a part of you that thinks it's delusional to expect fulfillment from what you do with 40 hours of your fucking week every week for the rest of your life. And the truth is maybe it is delusional, but maybe it isn't delusional. And I want to hold this messiness. So, basically, what I'm doing right now is I have both of my hands open. And on the one hand, I want to hold space for late-stage capitalism, a bunch of bullshit. Who are we fucking kidding?

Morgan:          Yeah. Absolutely.

Jessica:            That's real. That is real.

Morgan:          Yeah.

Jessica:            In the other hand, I want to hold space for literally anything's possible. Not everything's probable. Nothing's guaranteed. But it is possible. And if you omit or kind of diminish the possibility of fulfillment, then you've made a decision that the system wants you to make, which is don't fucking bother trying; just suck it up and eat whatever shit you're given.

So⁠ this is what's hard. When we're in a state of anxiety, we clench. Now, both my hands are in fists, right? We clench. And the challenge is to stay open. And this is all before we get to your body. No embodiment yet, right? We're just dealing with some of the meaningful motivations that keep you out of your body and motivated to stay the fuck out.

Take a deep breath, if you will. You watch yourself breathing. Wow. Okay. I promise we're going to come back to the work thing, but I want to say you are allowed to make mistakes, and you are allowed to fail. And the only true failure in life⁠—it's a misstep or a failure that you don't learn from, because we all fuck up and we all fail. But some people are just like, "Well, fuck it. If I failed, I'm never going to try it again. If I failed once, I'm going to fail again. There's no point."

But the work is to be like, "Oh fuck. I failed. I'm suffering. I'm sad. I'm mad," whatever emotions are, and then at a certain point, be like, "Okay. I have to fucking lick my wounds and say, what can I actually learn about myself or the world so that I can apply that knowledge whenever I try again, whatever I try again?" What comes up around that?

Morgan:          It's definitely something that I feel like I know in my head but don't believe in my heart.

Jessica:      Yeah. That's right. That makes sense.

Morgan:     So that's kind of how I feel about it. Yeah.

Jessica:      Yeah. It makes sense.

Morgan:          Yeah. Well, I wouldn't impress thoughts of, "Oh, just because you failed, that means you are a failure," onto others. But I think I believe that to be true about myself.

Jessica:            Listen. I could point to the things in your birth chart that reiterate that, but that's not what we're doing right now. I just want to say this is why you can't even begin to access your body when you seek this question. When it comes to love, I'm assuming you've dated other guys, and it went nowhere or it was a colossal error, right?

Morgan:          Yeah. Definitely.

Jessica:            And whatever insecurities or heartbreak you had, there was a part of you that felt a greater sense of resiliency around, "Well, if it is not this stupid guy, it'll be another stupid guy."

Morgan:          Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            This is because most of us⁠—not all of us, but most of us have certain things that we're more willing to fail at and other parts of our lives that we're less willing to fail at, like things that really spark our survival mechanisms and other things that don't as much. And so let me come back to this. You're super smart. You'd make a great therapist. Have you ever thought about it?

Morgan:          I have thought about it. I wonder if I have the capacity to hold other people's emotions and trauma in a way that doesn't disrupt my health severely. I'm a very empathetic person.

Jessica:            Yeah.

Morgan:          And I have a hard time separating.

Jessica:            I mean, just as a hot aside, I mean, the reason why you go to school is to learn those skills. I would like to disavow you and anyone listening of the idea that people are natural-born therapists who don't need education.

Morgan:          Absolutely.

Jessica:            I think a lot of therapy education is just listening to white men's wanking off about fucking psychology or whatever. It's stupid. But a lot of it is meant to teach you how to have those boundaries and everything. I'm not trying to tell you to be a therapist.

Morgan:          That's a very good point. That's something I thought about before.

Jessica:            Right. It makes sense because you have the mind for it. You have the nature for it. You're very comfortable with trauma because you're very acquainted with trauma. And so it's something that you absolutely could do, and it would give you a sense of meaning and purpose.

Morgan:          Definitely.

Jessica:            Maybe you'd fucking hate it, though. That's a real risk. So I'm not trying to answer the question for you. I'm trying to stick with⁠—

Morgan:          No, I like your suggestions, though.

Jessica:            Okay.

Morgan:          I like to know what you see my abilities are.

Jessica:            I know you do. I know that's what you want. This is why I'm really pausing. I'm having a hard time coming to the answer because you're so smart that you have these well-constructed ideas. They're in a structure, like a building, or it could be like an IKEA shelving unit, whatever works better for your brain metaphorically. And they're all floating on their own clouds, in their own ways, but there's no firmament here.

                        So I'm having a hard time tracking this issue because of how successful you are at protecting yourself from feeling the great grief and pain and anxiety that you have around the question. And if I give you the answer, "What should I be when I grow up?" or whatever the fuck the question is⁠—if I give you that answer, I'm not helping you with your question, which is around embodiment.

Morgan:          For sure.

Jessica:            And the reason why⁠—I mean, obviously, you're talking to me. You want the fucking answer. Respect. Okay? But the reason why we're here is to talk about embodiment. And one of the many foundational wounds you have is the belief that there's a right answer and a wrong answer, and your willingness to embody the wrong answer is zero percent. It's zero percent.

You are unwilling to embody something that's wrong. That keeps you out of your body, and it keeps you away from sitting with different potentials in order to figure out where there's resonance and where there isn't, where there's alignment and where there isn't, because you're so scared of not recognizing that you're out of alignment. You're so scared of fucking up.

Morgan:          Yeah. Yeah. Definitely.

Jessica:            Yeah.

Morgan:          Yeah. For sure.

Jessica:            What do you do for a living currently?

Morgan:          I'm a communications specialist, and I work for a large public university. And so I do things like write emails to prospective students and families and manage webpage content and things like that. So I like some things about my work-from-home situation, but I struggle with that because of⁠—I just struggle with, I think, having a body in general. And so things like routine are very difficult for me. Just the maintenance of a body, especially when I have nothing externally pushing me to go out into the world is⁠—it's hard for me.

Jessica:            Yeah. That's real. That's real. Also, I'll say you have Mars in your very large sixth house. And what this means is that you know how to rush. If you've got 20 things to do in 15 minutes, you get them done.

Morgan:          Yep.

Jessica:            If you have four things to do in eight hours, chances are you'll only hit two.

Morgan:          Yeah. That's exactly it.

Jessica:            Yeah. I mean, it's a fire thing. It's a Mars thing. And it is like one of those things that⁠—for you, creating your own pinches will really help. So this is one of those "Work with your nature to overcome your nature" situations. It's like if you know you have eight hours to do four things, then you need to make the decision that before lunch, you have to get two of them done; otherwise, there's a consequence. You have to create a real consequence for yourself. Otherwise, you're not going to do it.

                        So, for you, it's money. You don't want to lose money. You're very weird about money, and I don't mean any disrespect about that. I'm not saying you're good with money or bad with money. I'm not saying you're selfish or not selfish. It's nothing like that. You just got emotions about money. And so, if you have to put an amount of money that is realistic but also you don't like⁠—could be $5⁠—into a jar that you're not allowed to touch, you're going to be more motivated to get that two things done by noon.

Morgan:          Yeah. I need an actual physical consequence because⁠—

Jessica:            Has to be physical.

Morgan:          Yeah. If I can't enforce it, then I'm not going to enforce it.

Jessica:            Correct. Correct. And then that many⁠—you have to decide everything that's in that jar goes to something that you don't like spending money on. So it can't be like, "I'm going to donate it," because donating it would make you feel really good. I would recommend starting this off with, like, this money has to go to paying for your next dentist appointment, if you hate dentist appointments or something.

Morgan:          I hate⁠—that's so funny you say that because that's like my worst fear [crosstalk].

Jessica:            Okay. Great. So that's the move. So that's the move. It's like this is an investment in going to the dentist, and when you have enough money to pay for a dentist appointment, that's what you have to do. So there's your motivation to not owe yourself that much money. Okay. Bada-bing.

Morgan:          For sure.

Jessica:            Okay. Good.

Morgan:          Perfect.

Jessica:            But here's something else. You've got Uranus and Neptune hugging your Midheaven. It is written that you would have anxiety about your career. And so I want to say you are not meant to have a single career in this life. That's not it for you. Multiples. So that means kind of moving into something and then maybe expanding it or retracting it or shifting it. So let's say you decided in the end to become a shrink. You might become a family therapist and then eventually focus on couples and then do groups. You know what I mean?

                        So, within the one path, there are many embodiments of the path. And I think that, for you, when you seek to commit monogamously, it's not your thing. Uranus is nonmonogamous. Neptune is polyamorous. We're applying it to career. You're allowed to have many loves, and you're allowed to have many hookups, lots of different things you do and you try out and that you experience at different levels of intimacy. So I'm giving you that kind of hot tip.

Morgan:          Cool.

Jessica:            But coming back to embodiment, I want to say to your central question⁠—okay. I'm going to give you a ritual. I was going to tell you there are no rituals, but then I saw a ritual for you. So I was like, "Okay. I'm a liar." Okay. So here's the ritual. It's to slow down and get really present. I was going to say grounded, but you got no earth in your goddamn chart, so you're not going to get grounded. That's unrealistic. You're going to get present.

                        For people who have a lot of fire or air, grounded isn't realistic, but centered is. So the center of your body, no matter what your body is⁠—it's your abdominals. It's your core. It's your solar plexus. Those are all the same place. So it's getting really present. So that might mean literally sitting on the fucking floor. So present present. And what I like to do is say my full name out loud⁠—I recommend you include your nickname⁠—three times. And you can say it in your head. You can say it with your words. Doesn't matter.

                        But the intention with saying your name is to bring your energy back to you, simply to bring your energy back. Call it back from all the four corners of the universe, and bring it into your sphere. It can be into your physical body or your energy body if it's not realistic for it to be in your physical body. And a lot of things, like for instance this topic⁠—it's not realistic for it to enter into your physical body because it's too triggering for you.

                        So just bring it into the room. Doesn't have to be your body. It can be the room. And then all you do is breathe. And every time you seek to⁠—because I can feel it right now in your solar plexus. There's this, "I want to be here, but I want to run." Are you feeling that?

Morgan:          Yeah. Yeah. Kind of my natural state of being.

Jessica:            So that's what you would breathe into. So you breathe into that part of you, and as you do it, can you feel your shoulders release a little bit?

Morgan:          Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            This is the practice of being in a state of reception. You're receiving your own energy. When you're in that state of tension⁠—again, I'm showing you a closed fist⁠—you're blocking your energy as a way to protect yourself from your fears. Okay. So you're doing it again. So now you're going to take a deep breath. Breathe into that solar plexus, and then release the breath. Okay. So now that I'm watching you and you know it, you're not releasing tension in your shoulders as much. But okay. But now we have a little embodied and a little not embodied. Okay.

                        So, if you want a ritual, this is the ritual. Make it a practice. If you can do it once a day, do it once a day.

Morgan:          Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you.

Jessica:            You're welcome. And this is not around becoming embodied around a particular thing. This is about practicing noticing your body and not doing anything about it, not cerebralizing it. This practice, if you do it for several months, will change you.

Morgan:          Okay.

Jessica:            And it won't make you magically able to embody things that terrify you, obvi. And again, I want to reiterate nobody is embodied about everything. That's unrealistic. There are many things I absolutely do not have the skill set to be embodied around because they're too triggering, or sometimes I do and other times, when I'm activated, I do not. That is just part of being a human.

                        So you don't want to be perfectionistic about this. As the saying goes, perfect is the enemy of good. What you want to do is just practice receiving. It's interesting because even as I say this, your anxiety comes back. Do you know why?

Morgan:          I don't know. I feel like, with a lot of things, I could theorize, but I don't really know if it's accurate or not. But I think that I just get nervous that I'm not going to be able to do it right.

Jessica:            You won't. Don't do it right. This is not a thing about doing it right. It's a thing about practicing.

Morgan:          Okay.

Jessica:            So do you exercise? Do you go to the gym? Do you take any exercise classes?

Morgan:          Yeah, I do, indoor cycling.

Jessica:            Cycling. Do you know how to ride the bicycle and your butt's off the seat?

Morgan:          Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jessica:            Were you born knowing how to do that?

Morgan:          No.

Jessica:            You had to try and then fall on your ass multiple times.

Morgan:          Right.

Jessica:            Do you wear special clothes?

Morgan:          Just workout⁠—I have special shoes that clip into the bike.

Jessica:            Did you know how to clip them in and clip them out just magically?

Morgan:          No. I literally had to have somebody else shove my foot on the clips for the first several times that I was going.

Jessica:            And then, when you couldn't get your feet out/your shoes out of the clips, did you stop trying?

Morgan:          No.

Jessica:            Okay. You figure out what I'm doing here, right?

Morgan:          Yeah.

Jessica:            Okay. This is the thing. It's like you get triggered around failure in some places, and in other places, you're like, "It's a learning curve. It's not a failure. This is normal."

Morgan:          Yeah. Definitely.

Jessica:            You already know how to do this. It's just a part of you that knows how to do this because a part of you has decided it's okay to fail. Personally, me, I fucking hate exercising. I put my feet in those stupid shoes, and you know what? I was like, "I'll never do this again. This is stupid," because I was much quicker to give up than you are on that topic. It's really just about recognizing you have the skill; you just haven't figured out how to give yourself the grace to cultivate it in other places.

This is a practice of just that⁠—it's just a practice. It's a practice of building up a skill set. And you're not supposed to be good at it. You're supposed to not know how to do it. That's literally the point. I would never give you this homework if I thought you already knew how to do it. What would be the literal point of that? There would be no point.

When your anxiety activation intensifies, what happens is you get both more panicky/tensy and more clenched.

Morgan:     Yeah.

Jessica:            The next time this happens, I want you to⁠—this is another ritual⁠—notice it. That's number one. On a scale from 1 to 10, 10 being the worst, notice how clenched you are. And on a scale from 1 to 10, 10 being the worst, notice how anxious you are. Those are three steps. And they're very important because I want you to be able to understand that the clenching and the anxiety are related, but they're actually not the same thing.

Morgan:          Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I honestly don't know that I realized how anxious I was until this conversation. I don't think that I knew that was⁠—I've had periods of my life where I've been just overall really struggling with anxiety. I've been medicated for it in the past. I'm not currently, but honestly had no idea that I do just live in a state of anxiety. I really thought that I struggled more with depression in general.

Jessica:            That makes sense. I mean, it makes sense, and I would say we can change the word "anxiety" for "activation" because that's what it is. It's an anxious activation. And whatever word works for you better, use. Personally, me, for my personal self, I generally prefer "activation" unless I'm having a panic attack and I'm like, "That shit's anxiety. It's not just activation." From my perspective, you run anxious and you run depressed. Both. I mean, who amongst us doesn't? My God. Right?

Morgan:          Right.

Jessica:            But also, you very much do. And the reason why, as an adult, you identify more with the depression is because you have this really effective coping mechanism for not feeling your anxiety. You're not in your fucking body. You're in your head. You're great-and-powerful-Oz-ing. And so what happens is, over time, the constriction and the disembodiment makes you feel empty and lonely and sad. I'm describing depression.

Morgan:          Wow.

Jessica:            What is needed is⁠—I don't think you need a medication, but of course, if you and your doctor decide to medicate, go for it. The issue is⁠—and this is very normal. I just want you to know this is wildly normal for a human, but especially a human in their 20s⁠—is that you have effective coping mechanisms that help you to keep your head above water. And what they are is maladjusted because they are a response to your survival mechanisms because you're not yet experienced enough with yourself and the world to have been like, "Oh, these are my survival mechanisms," and then, "This is triggering my survival mechanisms, but it's actually not triggering my survival. So I need additional tools." Nobody's born with that. Nobody is born with that. Nobody's born with that. I cannot repeat it enough. Nobody's born with that.

                        That is why therapy and self-help is a bazillion-dollar industry, because everybody wants fucking help. Nobody has an easy time⁠ of it. And again, back to my ritual here, being able to acknowledge the activation⁠—we'll call it activation instead of anxiety. On a scale from 1 to 10, you might be like, "Oh, my activation is at an 8," and then the clenching, the rigidity, the tightness⁠—whatever we want to call it, the constriction⁠—that might be at a 10.

                        And so acknowledging those things⁠—it's just about being like, "Okay." First of all, what you're doing when you're acknowledging them is you're just bringing awareness. You're just bringing awareness, presence. Presence is closer to embodiment, right? So you're bringing awareness. The other thing you're doing is you're understanding that it is separate from you. These are parts of you. They're not your core, central all. They're your parts. And they're two separate parts from you.

                        And when we are able to psychologically understand, "Oh, these are different parts, and they actually function usually in tandem, but one can be a little less or more than the other," it gives your psyche a little bit more spaciousness because now you're thinking about it objectively. This is why, when someone's having a really severe panic attack, they're like, "What's your name? What date is it?" It's to ground you into this shared material reality.

                        So I would say start with doing that ritual, and breathe. You might only be able to do that for a while. Only do that. But then, eventually, what the move becomes is⁠—so you've identified it's happening. Scale of 1 to 10 both of those things. Then it's asking yourself where are you feeling the activation, and where are you feeling the constriction in your body, and breathing into it. So it's acknowledging it's there and bringing breath to it. That's the move.

                        These practices will empower you to cultivate presence. And from a place of presence, you can start to build the skill set of embodiment. But without presence, how the hell are you going to get in your body? Where is⁠—there's no there there. Right? There's no here. There's no place to be. So it's really about starting with presence.

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Jessica:            I feel that it is important to repeat in general, but specifically to you, it's important for me to repeat your progress is going to be slow. This is not supposed to happen fast. You have so much fire and air in your chart. I mean, think about it. If you light a fire and then there's wind, it just spreads instantly. So, for your nature, you're like, "If it doesn't happen quickly," there is this part of you that's like, "Well, then that means it's wrong or it's not going to happen."

Morgan:          It's not working. Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. And emotional development is inherently slow. And that is why some of the smartest people in the world are emotional idiots, because emotional development is not the same as mental development. You can see this when you think about people who are significantly older than you who⁠—you're like, "They know so much, but how come their lives just⁠—it doesn't reflect that knowledge?" Because embodied self-awareness is inclusive of emotional self-awareness, an emotional application of that self-awareness. That's what embodiment is. It's being able to apply what you emotionally know.

                        So, when we come back to your boyfriend, yeah, you're imperfect. You fuck up. whatever. But you learn and you grow, and there's an arc that we can see of your development as a partner and a friend and a lover and all the things.

Morgan:          Yeah, definitely. Definitely.

Jessica:            And that's because you give yourself the grace of making mistakes and having bad days, and you don't expect perfection from yourself. You expect yourself to be a person in their 20s and in a long-term relationship, and there's going to be good days and bad days and all the things. This skill is one you want to remember you have because the inhibitions that you have around career⁠—it's not just career. It's like, "What am I doing with my life?" Right?

Morgan:          Yeah. I just kind of feel like I'm⁠—like I just don't know what I'm supposed to be doing here. Like, why am I here? It's not that fun always, most of the time.

Jessica:            Yeah. I get that question a lot for the podcast: "Why am I here? What am I supposed to be doing?"

Morgan:          Yeah. It's not a great question because there's not really a great answer. I know.

Jessica:            I mean, it's one I think that comes to spiritual belief, in a way. For me, I decided in my 20s that the reason why humans are here⁠—I really landed on this⁠—is to learn how to embody love. And I made the decision that that's what I was going to focus my self-care on. And you can imagine as a triple Capricorn⁠—Sun, Moon, and Rising Capricorn⁠—I am not naturally good at that, like at all.

                        But I personally am of the mind that there's fear and love. Every single thing, every thing⁠—petty, every small thing, every big thing, every societal thing, every personal thing⁠—there's fear and there's love. And when we train our attention and choices on love, then we're doing what we're meant to be doing. That is my spiritual answer to that question, but it's not the same spiritual answer for everyone. People who believe in heaven and hell would probably say getting into heaven is the thing and not what I just said.

There's not a single answer. And part of the human condition is having to wrestle with the fact that we do not know. There may be no fucking point. This may be a prank show. We do not know. And it's hard, and it's painful, and there may be no point. And it may be a spectacular gift that we are meant to make the very most of  and embrace and show up for in the most intentional ways. I don't fucking know. Nobody knows. Nobody knows.

Morgan:     Right. Exactly.

Jessica:            So we have to make a call. That can be a million different calls, but we have to make a call because when we're not driven by any form of belief and when we're not driven by any set of values, we experience internal chaos and suffering.

Morgan:          Yeah. Definitely. I think that I'm very much struggling with that right now because I, at one point, had a very good understanding of a set of values in my life, and then have abandoned them. And so now I'm trying to reconstruct what can I put my faith in, and why should I want to be here? So trying to figure that out still.

Jessica:            I think a lot of people come to astrology because of exactly what you've described. And again, nobody has the answer. Anyone who tells you they have the answer—they just really believe it, or they're trying to convince themselves. I don't know. But I can tell you what I believe. I believe, personally, life is fucking terrible and stressful and hard, and all these people who are like, "I want to live till I'm 130"⁠—I'm like, "You're fucking crazy." I like to leave a party while I'm having a good time, personally.

Morgan:          Yes. I do, too.

Jessica:            Yeah. Yeah. I like to leave a party when it's still fun.

Morgan:          Yes. Absolutely.

Jessica:            So I want to die at that age when all the people are like, "Oh my God. She was so young. She had so much more to live for." I want to be that person.

Morgan:          Yes. Absolutely.

Jessica:            I'm with you.

Morgan:          I'm not trying to⁠—yeah. Don't try to prolong it, where I'm hobbling around. Absolutely not.

Jessica:            No. No. Life is hard enough with all of the advantages.

Morgan:          Absolutely.

Jessica:            That said, personally, me, I believe that the human condition is a classroom. It's a set of lessons. Now, I'm a triple Capricorn; of course I fucking believe that, but I do believe that. And one of the lessons is how to be in a body. We wouldn't have come here in a body if we weren't supposed to learn how to be in a body. And so many people use religion and New Age spirituality as a way to get out of the body, and that shit doesn't work because the one thing every human has is an alive body. And the one thing every human can count on is the body will die. That's it. Those are the only fucking things that we're guaranteed in this fucking life.

Morgan:          Yeah.

Jessica:            So, for me, it's⁠—okay. If I thought there was a surefire, easy-peasy way out, bitch, I'd take it and I would share it with everyone that was interested. But the reality is this is our reality. So, if this is our reality, how do you make the best of it? That's a great motive to start from for me, and it's built and built and built. If I'm stuck here, I'm going to do the most good. I'm going to evolve the most I can.

                        So, for me, it's not a super airy-fairy motivation structure, but it feels very realistic. It encompasses and embraces suffering within it. For my spiritual value system, I am allowed to suffer. I do not have to be high vibration all the fucking time. No, sir. Not me. I like my vibrations to be on the ground sometimes. That's how I am. And I'm okay with that because I don't think we all have to be one particular way.

                        And I will share that for me personally, that acknowledgment and embracing of my humanness makes it easier for me to experience the emotions that I would naturally do what you do with, which is be like, "I'm not going to fucking feel those. Those are nopes." You know?

Morgan:          Yeah.

Jessica:            From that place, I want to just kind of come back to, well, what is the point of being here? You get to decide that. Were you raised with religion?

Morgan:          I was. Yeah.

Jessica:            And religion says, "I'm going to tell you why you're here, and I'm going to tell you what you're supposed to do." And that's why a lot of people leave it, and it's also why a lot of people flounder after leaving it, because how do you learn to think for yourself and answer questions that are literally unanswerable?

Morgan:          Yeah.

Jessica:            You do it with your values. This is a huge part of why, in my work as a humanistic astrologer⁠—so I'm really focused on the human condition, the messiness of it, the inherent fucked-upness of it, the pain of it. Within all of that, I come back to values. Values are Venus. Neptune is ideals. And the difference between these two things, for me, is ideals⁠, which a lot of times is⁠—a lot of religions give us a lot of ideals. They're like stars. They light up the night sky. They are inspiring. They guide us. And you will never reach the stars. I don't give a fuck who you are. I don't care how many spaceships you go into. That's not a thing. You don't go to stars.

                        Stars are unattainable, but they give us so much guidance. That's our ideals system. Our values are lampposts. They also light up the night sky. They also guide us. But lampposts have light bulbs in them, and light bulbs burn out with time. And a human person climbs a ladder and takes the old light bulb out and sticks in a new light bulb. In other words, they're attainable. It takes effort. It's not easy. They're high. You need tools. But you can attain your values.

                        To me, the difference between these two things is viability, realism. So you can actually live in accordance with your values. You can have proof. You can have evidence. You can have receipts. With your ideals, you can claim it, but there's no proving it, really. And that there is, of course, overlap between our values and our ideals for some of us, not for all of us.

                        For me, if you decide, "One of my values is"⁠—I'm trying to actually look at your values. Sorry. So it's going to take me a second. So you're so scared that I'm going to see that you don't have values or that you have bad values, that you're hiding your values from me on an energy level⁠—

Morgan:          I'm sorry.

Jessica:            No, don't be sorry. But does that make sense?

Morgan:          Yeah. That sounds like me.

Jessica:            Yeah. Okay. So I just want to acknowledge that, because you're not just hiding it from me; you're hiding it from you because you want to know what your values are.

Morgan:          Yeah. I would love to. Well, and I think I know what they are. But I don't know⁠—yeah.

Jessica:            You're just scared of being wrong.

Morgan:          Is that just my main problem⁠—

Jessica:            Yes.

Morgan:          ⁠—the whole way around?

Jessica:            Yes. Yes, it is. So we cannot accept, or let alone embody, something we are not present with. And if you listen to the readings I give on the podcast, you may notice that certain things come up a fuck of a lot. And every time they come up, the person I'm talking to is like, "Oh my God. You're right. I'm surprised." And it's because concepts⁠—we listen with our brains, and it's really different than experiencing with the heart and the body.

Morgan:          Yeah. Yeah. Definitely.

Jessica:            So, first of all, you're scared around your values. One of your values is kindness, you damn weirdo, but you're scared that that's the wrong one. You're scared that you don't⁠—you're somehow scared of that. But it is kindness. Am I seeing that correctly?

Morgan:          Yeah, definitely. That is definitely one of my values.

Jessica:            It's like the lowest-hanging fruit. It's the lowest-hanging fruit.

Morgan:          Yeah.

Jessica:            But as I was about to say it before, on an energy level, you saw me see it, and you were like, "What if I'm not really kind? What if it's not really true? What if it's the wrong one?"

Morgan:          That's what I'm scared of. I'm scared that I have values that I'm not always correctly embodying.

Jessica:            Of course you do. Of course you do.

Morgan:          And so I'm scared to claim them as my own if I don't embody them all the time.

Jessica:            I see. I see. So I can tell you this. One of my core values is kindness. And I am an asshole to the person I love the most frequently. I love my partner. We're about to have our 12-year anniversary.

Morgan:          Congratulations.

Jessica:            Thank you very much.

Morgan:          That's huge.

Jessica:            Thank you very much. I was an asshole to him in the last 48 hours, I promise you. I can't remember what I did, but I promise you I was an asshole. Our values don't mean that we're perfect. The human experience is a practice. You practice being a kid until you become a fucking tween, and then you practice being a tween, and fuck this shit; now you're a teen. And then you practice being a teen, and now you're 19, so you're kind of an adult.

It's just a practice. And you keep on practicing, and then you evolve. Whether you're ready or not, you evolve. We can track this through time, with aging like I just did, through astrology, through transits. We can track this through⁠—a physician would have a different modality. There's different ways we can track it. It's all fucking practice. And everything we practice at we fail at.

Anyone who practices and never fails is chronically bored and, in my experience, has a really hard time not turning to drugs and other deeply dissociative things, because what's the fucking point? If you are perfect at everything and there's no learning curve⁠—everything is just handed to you⁠—where is the happiness and the meaning in that? It doesn't exist.

So you are allowed to value kindness and not always be kind, but to consistently reorient your attention and your efforts to kindness. That's what the value is.

Morgan:     Okay. Yeah, I definitely see what you mean.

Jessica:      Yeah.

Morgan:     That gives me a better understanding of what I'm allowed to claim as my values.

Jessica:            Yes. Yes. And for instance, being anti-racist doesn't mean not having any racism inside of you. To be anti-racist is to say, "I am actively working with and against my own internalized racism and in society, etc." That's a concept you're aware of, right?

Morgan:          Absolutely. Yes. Absolutely.

Jessica:            This is another place where I say you understand the concepts. You understand. You have accepted that it is okay to have learned things from a society, internalized them, and now need to work through them. And you know why? Because it's cerebral, because it's analytic.

You haven't figured out how to give yourself permission to be in the messiness of your emotions because you're so scared of your emotions. And just because you value kindness doesn't mean you don't have petty bullshit in your thoughts and feelings. Were you raised in Christianity or something?

Morgan:     I was. Yeah.

Jessica:            Okay. I feel like it's a very⁠—and this is a bit of an outsider's perspective. I haven't studied Christianity or anything. I just live in the world. But I have noticed that it is a Christian value that you're not supposed to have negative thoughts and you're not supposed to have negative feelings. I was not raised religiously Jewish, but I was raised very culturally Jewish. And it is a very normal thing in Jewish culture. You're allowed to have negative thoughts, and you're allowed to have negative feelings. You're not supposed to do negative actions.

Oddly, with Christianity, your negative actions are quickly and easily forgivable if you ask Jesus or God or whatever. But you're not supposed to have the thoughts or feelings to begin with, and that's the sin, is the thought or the feeling.

Morgan:     Yeah. Definitely.

Jessica:            The thing to work through here is, whether or not you're willing to take the risk to fully reject the religion you were raised with⁠—and you are in behavior, but when it comes to your negative thoughts and feelings, you still feel like a terrible, terrible sinner that will be punished. Catholic? Baptist?

Morgan:          No. Yeah, just a very evangelical⁠—

Jessica:            Evangelical.

Morgan:          Yeah, like one of those contemporary megachurch vibes.

Jessica:            Yeah. When I look at it energetically, it does look very fiery/brimstoney, like real consequencey stuff.

Morgan:          Oh yes. Really, really scary things that were just ingrained into my brain from a really young age. And I was fully, fully bought into it. So it's been a lot to separate from it.

Jessica:            That makes sense. What I want to validate⁠—and I'm glad we got to this place. In an intellectual way, you have disavowed it. You have separated yourself from it. And in a deeply emotional way, you have not, partially out of terror that you're wrong and the consequence is nothing less than the fucking worst things imaginable. But it's not just that, because you don't really believe that.

Morgan:          No, I don't.

Jessica:            You don't.

Morgan:          I don't believe those things, but I'm scared⁠—I had a very, very strong and supportive community while I was very tied to the church. And since then, since leaving, I have lost pretty much every connection that I've had to that group of people, which⁠—for the most part, for the best. But I don't know what to do with myself now because that's kind of where I found my purpose.

Jessica:            So I'll say a couple things to that. The first one is⁠—and this is controversial, but okay, she says it anyways. I think the evangelical church is a cult.

Morgan:          I think it's a cult, too.

Jessica:            Yeah. I think it's a cult. Yeah.

Morgan:          I do. I firmly believe that, so thank you for saying that out loud.

Jessica:            You're welcome. Yes. And one of the ways that you can tell it's a cult is because you lose your whole community when you leave it. So you can't just leave the church and still be friends with people in an evangelical, devout community, because that's how all cults work. And that's one of the ways you know you're in a cult, is if the consequence is everything when you leave the church. And recovering from cults is really, really, really hard. And people spend their whole entire lives recovering.

                        And so, again, I would encourage you⁠—there's podcasts out there, and there's books, and there's a lot of things for people who are recovering from cults. And I think that would be a better match for you than recovering evangelicals because recovering evangelicals, for you in this moment, would be too evangelical of a group to be a part of. So that's one thing.

The other thing⁠—in your birth chart, you've got Jupiter in the eleventh house in Pisces. So the group of friends that you have affiliated with spirituality is a big, fat yes. Of course it is. You probably were kind of a powerful figure in your friend group when you were in that cult.

Morgan:          I was very highly involved. It was my entire day, morning to night, every single day. My education was based in this place. All of my extracurriculars, everybody that I knew, everything that I did was tied to this [crosstalk].

Jessica:            Yeah. That makes sense. That makes sense. So you've lost a lot. And also, you've lost spiritual certainty. And that spiritual certainty meant that you never had to question anything, and you never had to feel these feelings we've been talking about because God has got it for you. Either you burn in hell, or you are given all the gifts of heaven, right? Either/or, one or the other.

Morgan:          Yep.

Jessica:            And that is a great way to not tap into your feelings, to not acknowledge your own agency in this life, never figure out what your ideals are. That's what cults offer you. Cults are so appealing to so many people because they offer you moral certainty, community. It's like a one-stop shop for literally everything you could possibly want.

Morgan:          Yes. It is. It is. And so now I'm like, "Oh no. The rest of the world doesn't operate like this, and I don't know where I fit in."

Jessica:            I think community is really important to you, and I think that there are ways of being involved in community outside of religion. And also, are you still Christian?

Morgan:          I would not call myself Christian, necessarily. I'm just spiritual in the sense⁠—I would not tell somebody that Christianity is wrong if that's the way that they need to connect with God. But I'm open to any religion, any ideology that feels right, I guess. Right now, I would consider myself⁠—I'm just spiritual. But there's confusion around that because I don't know how to pray. I don't know if I'm supposed to pray. I just don't know. I don't know how to connect with my spirituality that well outside of it. I know that it's possible. I've always been a very spiritual person, and it's something that's really important to me. So I feel really lost without it.

Jessica:            Yeah. Okay. So this is where I'm going to point to you. You want to do step 4, 5, 6, and I'm going to tell you to do step 1. So step 1 would be learning more about cults⁠—and so, if you're a podcast listener, listening to more podcasts about it, about recovering from cults, about what cults are, about what people get out of them. There are ex-evangelical podcasts out there. You might vibe with that. But I feel like go straight to cults because that one-stop shop⁠—you miss it desperately.

                        And before you can go to step 3 or 4 of what I'm going to advise you towards, I think you first need to cultivate more self-awareness about, what is the difference between a group and a cult? What is the difference between purpose and giving away all of your agency? Right now, it's so emotionally tender that it's hard for you to identify. So the first thing is to practice, to practice unlearning, more education and more unlearning.

                        The second thing I would recommend is⁠—I don't know⁠—experiment with different things. You're experimenting with astrology, obviously. I mean, you're in. You're in, right?

Morgan:          Yes. I love it.

Jessica:            You're in astrology. I would encourage you to experiment with⁠—are there⁠—I don't know. Is there a Unitarian church you could pop into?

Morgan:          I literally have one in another tab open on my computer right now in my area that is very spiritual and much more aligned with what I would believe now. And so I've just been thinking about going.

Jessica:            Yeah. It makes sense because they're kind of like humanistic Christians, right?

Morgan:          Yeah. Yeah. They are.

Jessica:            They're still Christians, but they're⁠—

Morgan:          Yeah. They use the Bible, but they're like, "You don't have to use the Bible, and you can connect in whatever way feels right."

Jessica:            Yep.

Morgan:          And yeah. They're much more socially liberal. And a lot of those reasons were the reasons that I could no longer be a part of the church that I was.

Jessica:            Yep. That makes sense. I mean, I have taken meditation classes taught by Buddhist monks in a Unitarian church. I have spoken at an astrology conference in a Unitarian church. Granted, it was in the Bay Area. It was in San Francisco, but still, Unitarian church⁠—super progressive.

Morgan:          Yeah.

Jessica:            I might say fuck with that. But here's the thing. A lot of churches have online services these days. I'm going to encourage you to be nonmonogamous or, dare I say, polyamorous with your experience of Unitarian churches. See if you can attend services outside of your area online. And also, if there's a place that you want to check out in person, do that. But I'm encouraging you to intentionally not become monogamous to any particular church because it'll be too triggering for you. You don't yet have the skill set to moderate because you want to give away⁠—you're like, "I want to find my place so that I can be in my place."

Morgan:          Yeah. I want community so bad that I think, yeah, it would be really easy for me to go all in on something before I knew anything about it.

Jessica:            Yes. Yeah. You haven't unlearned the cult part of where you're from yet, which is why I'm like, "Step 1 is step 1."

Morgan:          Yeah.

Jessica:            Then there's step 2, which is exploring. But I would also say there are things that you can do that potentially, depending on your experience of evangelical churches, you were doing with the church, which is you may be able to engage in mutual aid, like community-based mutual aid. The evangelical church is more about charity, right? Like giving to people as a way to minister to them.

Morgan:          Yes. Yeah.

Jessica:            But there are communities that get together around creating mutual aid and supporting each other. And that you would fucking love. You would love it because you love being of service. You love people coming together with a spiritual purpose. And it would give you a sense of meaning while you're figuring out what you're doing with your life and while you're navigating the world, but it doesn't have to have a religious backbone. So I would encourage you to explore that. And that's harder to find than a Unitarian church.

Morgan:          It is harder to find, for sure.

Jessica:            It's much harder to find. But you're really good at finding things. So it's really just about giving yourself that as, like, on a very long-term to-do list because, again, when we come back to⁠—step 1 has to be addressing the part of yourself that wasn't a cult, understanding that you were raised in a cult. And so it's inner child work as much as it's learning about cults and unlearning whatever else. It's not like you found a cult in your 20s. It's⁠—you were raised in it.

                        Coming full circle here, your energy is⁠—and how you're like this balloon that is not tethered to this earth, your body, when it comes to things that frighten you. This is a very young part of you. It's a very young part of you. It is, like⁠—I'm seeing three, four years old. How old were you when your family got into the church?

Morgan:          Well, my family was never actually involved. So I was sent to this Christian school⁠—it was a private school in my area⁠—because the school district that I was in was just not supporting my needs. So my parents were looking for a different option. This megachurch has a school attached to it. So I started attending in fifth grade and stayed with it until I graduated high school. But I was very much involved with the church and all of the ideology, completely of my own volition. And my parents were very⁠—always encouraging me to be skeptical and to be careful.

Jessica:            But you just went⁠—you went all in.

Morgan:          Yeah, because I felt more accepted there than in my own home. So I don't know. I found purpose.

Jessica:            Yeah. You found purpose. And that's really important, right?

Morgan:          Yeah.

Jessica:            There's a couple things here. The first one is, whether or not⁠—we're not talking about your family of origin right now. All people who are in cults feel more accepted in the cult than they do anywhere else. That's, again, one of the ways you know you're in a cult.

Morgan:          Part of the cult? Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. It's a part of it. But the other thing is that certainty and that purpose, that promise piece⁠—I'm seeing that you started seeking that when you were really little. So one of your parents must have this as a trauma pattern in themselves as well. So maybe your mother gave up all her power to your father or something like that.

Morgan:          Yeah. I would definitely need to think about which parent and what it could be about, but for sure.

Jessica:            Yeah. But yeah.

Morgan:          I felt out of place in my home since a very young age, or just unsure, like, "What am I supposed to be doing?" or, "Am I just a burden? Should I be here?" That kind of [crosstalk].

Jessica:            Oh. That really sucks. I'm sorry. I don't think your parents know how to adult any more than you do. And I think that when you found the answer and the word, when you found a path that was proven and promised, you were like, "Okay. All my anxieties are gone." They actually didn't go fucking anywhere. They just became constriction. It is something that you are still very much seeking.

And let's come back to astrology. You have a stellium in Sagittarius. Yeah, you want there to be a singular truth. And you want that singular truth to be the light of God, right? Of course you do. Again, it's like we are our charts. You know what I mean? It is what it is. As you start to cultivate the skill set of being present with your own messy, chaotic emotions, you're going to experience thoughts and feelings that are prepubescent young; they're not as mature and reasonable as you.

And your task is to be kind to those emotions in the way that may be your parents weren't able to be, to be tolerant, to be interested, to be present, to not run away, to not condemn. That's all your work is. It's the absence of doing shitty things to yourself. It's staying present, breathing, being interested, being kind. That's it. That's all you gotta do. And this is not going to make you embodied. It's going to empower you to be present. And after you practice presence, embodiment starts to just happen.

And again, it's like I can feel you're like, "Ugh," about how long this is going to take.

Morgan:     Yeah.

Jessica:      I can really feel it.

Morgan:          I just heard back in my head⁠—I was like, "And this is going to take months, remember [crosstalk]."

Jessica:            Yeah. Years. It's going to take years. No, no, no, no. Years.

Morgan:          Years.

Jessica:            Oh my God. Years.

Morgan:          Okay. Perfect.

Jessica:            It's a life path. It's something you're going to work on your whole entire life because you're a human.

Morgan:          Yeah.

Jessica:            Not because there's something wrong with you. Because you're a human. The path is the answer. And I know this because of what I do for a living but also because I'm an older lady. People keep on asking for the answer. There's no fucking answer. There's only paths. Paths have consequences. Consequences may redirect your path. But the path is the answer. There's no answer. Again, the church you were raised in promised an answer.

Morgan:          Yeah, only one.

Jessica:            Yeah. Only one. For me, there are actions and consequences. There are choices. And there is no person who's perfect. There's no path that's perfect. The path is all you need to choose because, as you choose the path⁠—which you've already fucking done. You've left the church. You've chosen to ask hard questions. You've chosen to explore different ways of being. You've chosen to expand your worldview and your understanding of yourself. You've already made the choices. They just haven't given you answers yet. What I'm here to say is stay with the path. The path is going to bring you the answer because the answer is the path. There is no real answer.

I have to wrap up in a second here, but I want to just come back to career. The reason why you haven't figured out your career, I now see so clearly, is because you're scared of falling into another cult. You're scared of making another choice that will cost you everything when you realize it's the wrong one.

Morgan:     Yeah. Definitely.

Jessica:            That's fair, girl. That's fair. That's fair. Again, don't make the choice yet. You're not ready to make the choice; don't make the choice. If you give yourself permission to be a messy, complicated human and to be where you're at, if you give yourself permission to just be here now⁠—again, the step I want to point you towards is presence, not embodiment. It's presence. If you allow yourself to be present in this moment, then you recognize, yeah, you're not ready to commit to a life path.

Morgan:          No. No.

Jessica:            It's too soon. It's too soon.

Morgan:          Definitely. I agree and understand, for sure.

Jessica:            Yeah. And so, if you can give yourself permission every time⁠—and it'll come up several times a day, every single day. "What am I doing with my life? What am I doing with my life? What should I be doing with my life?" Then you can be like, "Oh. Right now, I'm choosing to stay where I'm at so I can work on myself so the answer clarifies itself." Don't force a square peg into a round hole. Allow yourself to say, "Oh shit. I have a square peg in a round hole. I'm not ready to put them together yet."

                        The truth is you're not running out of time. And that's a whole other can of worms for you. I'm sorry. But you're not running out of time. So we've gone in lots of directions, but hopefully we've come home to answering this really big question around embodiment, which is don't try to be embodied; try to be present. Yeah?

Morgan:          Yeah. That feels like a much more attainable goal to me at this point in time.

Jessica:            Okay. Great. Good. And from there, it won't be so confusing what embodiment is. It'll just be the next step.

Morgan:          Thank you so much. This was amazing.

Jessica:            It is my pleasure. Yay. I'm so glad we did it.

Morgan:          Yes. Me, too.