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Hosted by Dr. Val Civelli, White Coat Black Sheep explores physiology, functional medicine, and the medical questions most people are told not to ask.
This is where evidence meets curiosity, where dogma gets uncomfortable, and where real world medicine takes priority over headlines.
From understanding your lab work to debunking hormone myths, medication misconceptions, and optimization strategies, this podcast helps you understand what is actually happening inside your body.
If you care about health and think there might be a better way to practice medicine, you’re in the right place.
Welcome to "White Coat, Black Sheep," where science gets curious and dogma gets
uncomfortable. I'm Dr. Civelli, and today we're talking physiology,
evidence, and real-world medicine, plus the questions you're not supposed to ask
but probably should. If you care about health and think there's a better way,
welcome to our show.
Thank you so much, Dr. Nichols. Susan Nichols, thank you so much
for joining me today. Do you mind telling us who you are and what
you do? And I know that's a big question because you do so
much.
Yeah. Likewise. Well, thank you so much, Valerie.
It is such a pleasure to be here with you today.
So yeah, so as you know, I was much like
you. I started my career in medicine.
I trained as a surgeon and then a cardiothoracic surgeon,
and then I had a very profound spiritual awakening, and it kind of leads
me to what I do today as a private wealth manager.
But yeah, it's been quite a journey to figuring out that
this was what I'm meant to do in life, but I did start out
in medicine, even before that as a chemist.
I worked for a pharmaceutical company.
But yeah, I did the entire rigmarole to becoming a doctor
before I realized I had to make a significant change in my life.
Wow. Is there any
point that you were willing and open to sharing
the spiritual awakening? I didn't want to over-ask, but
I am interested if you're comfortable sharing.
I am.
Because that's a huge change, so I know it must have been
profound and people--
If in any way it could help somebody identify what is
your signal to pivot,
you did a major pivot, so that was your signal.
So what would be helpful, I guess, would be the tie-in for that?
Okay. So what I have come to understand is that
there are two paths that we can go down in life.
One, I believe, is our chosen path,
and one I think is our rightful path.
Ooh.
And when I say a chosen path, I mean often that is driven
by society, like what we should be doing or what we
think is going to earn us money or what makes us feel good about
ourselves or honor about ourselves, maybe following in family footsteps and so
on and so forth.
And then the other part, I believe, is spiritual in nature.
That
just like we are more than a physical person, that
we're energetic in nature. I believe some people call it the
spirit or the soul or the life force, whatever you want to call
it.
Mm-hmm.
I think there's a duality of us as a human being, and I believe there's also
a duality in our purpose or our paths in life.
So I did like most people. I went down kind of
what I would say was my chosen path, and I
believed it for a very long time that it was my purpose.
I felt so strongly about being a doctor.
I declared it when I was 10 years old, and so it was.
I literally did everything that I needed to do to be successful in that.
So I did it. I went to medical school,
I went to residency, and I went to fellowship, only to have what I call a dark
night of the soul.
And what that was,
I could really follow a thread all the way back to my
childhood
on what triggered the dark night of the soul or the spiritual
awakening during my fellowship.
And it was really,
Valerie, like this
deep,
visceral sadness that I carried,
and I'll put it this way, I'd carried it for so long that I didn't
know what it was to be without it.
No matter what the
kind of achievement was or the excitement or the thrill, I
would always kind of come back to this very basal, this
very low-energy feeling of sadness.
And I believed that it was linked to my circumstances, like the
circumstances that I was born into, that I had grown up with.
I never felt really happy as a child.
I felt like, yeah, there are moments, but
I would say I would never want to repeat my childhood.
It was challenging in many, many ways.
And so I believed that once I grew up and once I kind of
did what was my purpose and I got a job and I made money
and I had titles and degrees, then all of that would kind of somehow
dissolve and I would be free.
Mm.
Like I would be spiritually free, I would be happy, I would feel
actualized. I kept remembering this
Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and I was like, "Oh, I'm going to get there.
I'm going to get to the top of this thing, and then it'll feel like it was all
worth it."
Yeah.
Well, when I got to what I thought was that zenith,
like that high point of being a clinical fellow in cardiac surgery, I was like,
"All I need to do is just stay with this, then I will be off to the
races. No problems. I will be completely free-
Mm-hmm
... actualized, and happy," only to feel like
if I didn't change something at that time, then I
didn't want to go on living. That's how deep the sorrow in my
spirit was.
Oh my goodness. I resonate with that.
I think a lot of people do. I think the lion's share of humanity is on
the treadmill of life, working to pay bills.
So my spiritual awakening, it
had a lot of legs to it, a lot of, I would say,
roots to it, and I would literally
drive down the road to my job and I would Look at
people in their cars, and I had this
aha moment. I was like,
"Nobody seems like they're happy.
Not really."
No one's happy.
Yeah.
They're not.
And I was like, "Wait a second." I was like, "What are we doing?"
No one is happy.
And I just, "I see it. Okay, so now what?"
Yeah. And that was it. Neither was I.
I could put on
all the
accoutrements. At one point, I
had the kid, I had the family, I had the Mercedes-Benz in the
garage, I had the remodeled kitchen, I had the clothes-
The job
... the house, the vacations, and still, there it was,
this sadness. And I was like, "I don't know what this
is," but
I literally got to the point, Valerie, where I was like, "I have done everything,"
everything humanly that I could possibly think of to
do to become free of this
sadness, and I couldn't. I
believed that there was nothing else I could do. I had tried everything.
And that's when things just got kind of scary.
Yeah.
In church.
The things that you did try, were there any windows where you felt a
lift or some sort of freedom that gave you a moment
of peace, or it went away for a little bit?
Was there anything?
Again, I believe that there were
some high points. There were times of joy.
There were times of excitement.
I remember at times looking forward to it.
I was so excited for medical school, and I was so excited.
Yeah.
I think the shine kind of wore off by the end
of medical school. I was like, "Man, this is hard."
The shine does wear off.
It does.
Valerie is like, "Oh my God, what have I
done?"
And so I was like, "Oh, no." And I
noticed that
just the medical school part, not even the residency part, the
hardest part, started changing people.
Yeah.
It's almost like the light started going out. You know what I mean?
Yeah.
You're like, "Ah,"
excited, happy, and then it's like you got drained and drained and drained and
drained.
Yeah.
And
I remember
this. I was doing my CT fellowship, and it was
not common or often, but sometimes we'd have students
or other residents that would rotate on our service. It was very infrequent.
Only if someone really wanted to go into CT surgery or something like that.
And I remember this young girl came on, and she's like, "Oh, well, I think I want
to do heart surgery." She's all bubbly and whatever.
And I looked at her, and I was like, "I remember being like you."
She was happy, and like I said, she still had the light.
But then she's still a medical student.
I was like, "Oh, it's going to go."
"She's going to get the beat down."
You're like, "Well, it's just a matter of time.
We're just going to give her a few more minutes, put her back into the
hospital oven, the whole process of it, just let it cook, and then
she'll be like-
Yeah
... 'Oh my God, why do I feel so heavy?'" It's freaking
heavy.
It is.
Oh, and cardiothoracic surgery is no joke.
Seven years?
Yeah. I was on the 10-year track. So I
did
my CT surgery fellowship at Stanford, and part of the
journey was doing research. And so some people were in research for
two, three years.
I did two years in research.
And I did a two-year research fellowship.
But my senior fellow
came out of fellowship at age 40.
Talk about delayed
gratification and being in training for 11
years.
That's basically one of the reasons.
It's a long and windy tracks. And so there is a
lot about it. There's no doubt about
that. But yeah, it's like we're
full-on grown-up people coming out of training.
Sort of.
Sort of.
I don't feel grown up. I even have pigtails today.
I literally do not identify as grown up.
I'm still figuring it out.
Exactly.
But I think what happens is
when we do very protracted training programs in
medicine, we feel like we're really behind.
I agree.
This is going to tie in, I believe, to what I'm doing now.
We believe we're really behind financially
because there have been all these years where, let's say
from the early 20s to 40s, that your
peers have been working and climbing the corporate ladder and
earning more and more and having kids and families and cars and houses.
And for so long, you can't afford it.
You're just kind of almost in this protracted
adolescence.
But you're performing at a very, very high level. You know what I mean?
You're
executing at a super high level, but you're
poor and broke, and got student loans up to your
eyebrows, and you just can't
literally figure out a way out of the debt.
Yeah.
And so that's how it was, and I really
feel like
it almost
This is going to sound so strange,
but I feel like I had to do that entire journey, that
whole journey into being a heart surgeon
because of some childhood, and I would say even generational
wounds that I was trying to overcompensate for.
And a lot of it was, I was born into poverty, and I was born into a
pretty desperate circumstance.
And I always believed that that was the root of what ailed my soul and
the sadness. I couldn't really put my finger on the sorrow.
I just knew that it was there, but that was the only memory or thing that was
tangible that I could say, "Oh, yeah, that situation sucked,"
blah, blah, blah, blah. But what I really think is this
was a pattern that was occurring in my family for
generations. So I was, I believe, carrying a
generational wound around security,
around finances, around work, around
women. As far as being a woman
and earning money,
there was a lot of wounds in there. And I
believe I was on this journey to really
accentuate what that was so I could finally bring
awareness to it to change it. I believe that
we
can recognize a pattern,
but until we bring awareness to it, something's not right, or
whatever this is, this feeling doesn't match.
It didn't match my resume. It didn't match my outside
life.
I had no reason to feel this way on
paper.
Yeah.
But my spirit was saying something else,
and I think that happens with a lot of people that you see
that reach the heights of their worldly success.
It could be in athletics, it can be in whatever, education, it
could be in Hollywood or whatever their
art or craft is. And then they're whacked out
on drugs or they're very depressive and sad,
or even suicidal. And literally you're scratching your head,
you're like, "You've got all these things." So on paper, it looks
good. You're like, "Well, what do you have to complain about?" Or, "What are you
upset about?"
But I believe that's when we have to look back at
what I think is generational trauma.
Yeah.
That connection that you made, I don't know at what point
you recognized it, but that's pivotal.
I never would've thought of it like that.
I
do resonate with all of the things that you describe and that you're feeling.
And my family on my dad's side, they're from Malta.
So my dad's first generation here,
and my grandfather, so his dad
was illiterate, came over as a stowaway on a boat, and
then later got his green card because
my dad went into the CIA, and they discovered, including my dad,
that he didn't have that.
Mm-hmm.
So, he had to learn to read and write, and there's
so much there, and I feel the compensating,
the need to compensate or to overachieve, and it's
not in my conscious daily awareness,
but I never feel accomplished, like that feeling.
Mm-hmm.
I feel emotional about it, just the way that you connected it,
because it is a real thing, and I don't know what it is or
why it's there,
or what to do with it.
You know?
Well, let me break this down a little bit.
Mm.
Okay.
So I feel this, and I tell you, I was hitting my
head against the wall for most of my life because I couldn't get it either.
It's like a nut I could not crack
because, like I said, it didn't make sense.
It didn't make logical sense-
Yeah
... but I was experiencing it nonetheless.
And so it's almost like, Valerie, the
feeling of love, right? Where it might not make sense, but you just
feel that way.
Yeah.
You're like, "Man, this is so inconvenient," or, "I don't know." You
can't, but you just do.
Yeah.
And so now, just apply that to the other
end of the spectrum of sadness or sorrow. You just do.
You just have this feeling about you, or this way
about you. And so I believe that this is what it is.
So
at the very core of us as human beings, we are energy.
And I believe the energy of us, again, some people call it the soul
or the spirit or the life force or chi, whatever you want to call it.
At the core of it, it's energy. It's a feeling.
It's a vibration.
And as human beings, we have the capacity
to hold or to feel every
feeling imaginable or vibrational state available.
Literally-
Mm-hmm
... we have the capacity to feel love, just like we can feel
hate. We can be enlightened, and we can be sorrowful.
Mm-hmm.
And everything in between. We have the capacity to feel, and
I think that's a part of our experience in life.
It's maybe the wonderful part of it, because I also believe life is about
contrast. We do not know what it is to love until we know what it
is to not be loved, and vice versa. To be-
Yeah
... hot, but we don't know what it is to be cold, and so on and so forth.
Dark or the light, it's just a contrast.
And so I do think life is just about contrast, and I believe that's maybe part of
the reason we have the capacity to feel all of it.
But I think what we don't recognize is that sometimes there can
be a dominant
frequency or
almost like our set point of
frequency that we come into this life with.
And I believe many people have different beliefs or non-beliefs
about past lives and past existence, but many of us
can at least adopt the generational stuff, stuff that we can
maybe put our head around. So let's just say it's generational.
Let's not go back to your other lives.
And so you say, okay, and if I look at the generational
energies, the patterns, the stories that I come
from, you could understand maybe some of your issues.
You could say, oh, yeah. See, people will say it.
It's like, yeah, we have people in our family that have always had a
talent or been very good singers or very good this or very good that, or people
that have had
suicide. That runs in our family. Or there are a lot of murderers in
our family, whatever it is.
Absolutely. Yeah.
So you're like, "Man, really?"
Yeah.
And it's like generations of this stuff.
And so you can see there's tendencies that come through
generationally. And so I believe just like we can
inherit, if you can grab onto this, if I can inherit a
trait from a past generation, could I not
also inherit an
essence, an ability,
a sound of my voice, a
manner of being, a talent, something that's intangible?
Could I not also bring trauma with me?
If I can get to that like, oh, we have generations of
singers in our family, and that's a talent-
Mm-hmm
... could I also bring generational trauma
along with me? And I believe we all do.
I say nobody comes to Earth for free. Nobody.
I know that.
Yeah. We're born into a little baby body, but I believe,
Valerie, that our souls are ancient,
and that we bring with us all of that energy from
generations past, maybe eons past, maybe lifetimes
past.
And perhaps there was a time when the coping skills that
we have now were useful. Or maybe that's all that
we could muster or do, but didn't make
it done. It didn't
make it maybe even good. It just made it like that's all.
Sometimes we just die
in states of terror and horror and
fear and prejudice and whatever. We die like that.
And so then we come back, and then what do you got to do?
To me, you've got to transform that energy.
You got to resolve it or dissolve it.
And so the idea is that
if you can believe that at the very core of us, we are energy,
and we know the very first law of thermodynamics is the
conservation of energy, and that energy cannot be created or destroyed.
It can't be forgotten, can't be numbed, it can't be ignored.
It has to be transformed.
That's right. And it can only change.
Right.
So we can only go from, let's say, sadness into
acceptance or something, whatever we want to call those feelings.
Wow, transformation.
But it's got to be transformed. And this
belief that I've had or what I've come to understand through my spiritual awakening
was also borne out by Dr. David Hawkins, a
physician just like us, who wrote the book "The Map of Consciousness."
And he measured all these human, the frequencies that are in
us just using muscle kind of contractions
and vibrations, almost like the train of four when you're waking somebody up from
an anesthetic.
Okay.
And so he measured all these frequencies, and then
we can name them. So let's say I feel joy or
happiness, and you measure what that is.
Oh, nice.
And it's, oh, that's happiness. What if I'm sad or depressive? You measure that.
What if I feel ashamed of myself? Measure that. That's what we call shame.
Okay? I'm in love. You measure me, that's what the love
frequency. Okay?
Wow.
And so all of this has been measured and documented, this map of
consciousness. And so it is
measured on a logarithmic scale from 20 being the
lowest resonant frequency in humanity
to 1,000, which is the highest or
these fleeting feelings of enlightenment.
So we can be anywhere between 20 and...
That's a big range. This is a logarithmic scale of
vibrational frequencies that we can experience, not just in a lifetime, but in a
single day. We're all over the place.
We can be all over the place.
Yeah.
I feel that.
So,
Valerie, guess where I was living for most of my life?
I was living at the lowest resonant frequency measured in humanity.
Oh my God.
I was resonating low of shame,
and I had a lot of shame around
money,
financial shame.
And so that is the nut that I couldn't crack
because no matter how much money I made or how
many titles or degrees, I always felt that there
was never enough, and I never felt like I was enough.
I never felt good enough. I always felt like I had to fight just
to get the same recognition or the same
value as somebody else because at a very
elementary, at a very core level, and I believe this was, again,
generationally, I didn't feel worthy.
I didn't feel like a worthy person.
And so what happens when you resonate
... shame or when you resonate love, or when you resonate curiosity,
more of those things come into your sphere.
I believe that's how the universe works.
We resonate our frequency out to what I call this
universal substrate of creation.
We're always putting out signals,
and then we're always, if you notice, getting back exactly what we
feel, because I believe that's what the universe does.
It's like, "Okay, you say you're afraid?
I'm going to show you more things to validate your fear."
Every week.
Oh, my God. It's messed up.
Yeah. So this is what I think we don't understand what
we're doing. I think we're-
Yeah
... literally unconscious, not understanding that we are
powerful and that we are-
Yes
... beings of energy, and that we are resonating out these forces all
the time, and then we're surprised or angry or frustrated on what comes
back.
Yeah.
It's like, well, if I resonate out there lack,
then there are more and more evidence of things lacking around me.
If you've ever noticed, if you ever resonate like, "I got this,"
you're like confidence. More and more things to show your
confidence, to validate-
Yes
... your confidence will come back to you. More things will come to you.
The belief of abundance.
People will ask you questions. Yeah. It comes back.
Yeah.
If I resonate fear, more things, more frightening things-
It will come true
... will show up in my reality.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And so this goes back to this existentialist thought, this
belief that we create our own lives.
We just are unconscious of what we're creating.
Which is the hardest part. It's almost like-
Exactly.
It sounds easy, but it's the hardest part.
The hardest.
Hey, figuring out this energy thing
has been harder than being a heart surgeon.
Or whatever you could be up to in life.
I swear to you.
I
believe it.
I can do that over and over again. But you
ask me to
figure out this pattern and this energy, I'm just like, "What the f**k?"
Yeah.
It's not like... You know what I mean?
A highly accomplished person like you, for me to
hear you say that is
wild, because you've done so much, yet you still didn't
change how that feeling of trying to make it and be enough.
And I struggle with that exact same thing.
It will never be enough. I don't care if I
built a whole city and it's sparkling,
shiny, it solves all the world's problems, I'll still be like, well,
I
know myself.
There'll be something that it isn't. Yeah.
Yeah. So, man, this definitely, at
whatever you're resonating with me, it hits target.
That hits target.
Yes. And
I feel like
now that I understand it,
well, at the level that I can understand the universe, right, and how
we are a part of it, or how the universe is a part of us,
and how we're interacting with this invisible force.
From the way that I can, in my corporal brain, understand it,
I believe that this is part of the reason that we are here,
and it's not designed to be easy.
No.
Because when we are challenged like this, even
with kind of esoteric understandings, like the
universe itself-
Mm-hmm
... we have to grow a little bit.
And I think that that's the game that we're up to.
Yes, we physically grow in our bodies and age and get older and
mature and all that, but then I believe there's a
spiritual growth that we must also embark upon.
Mm-hmm.
Now, we don't all do it in one lifetime. I don't believe any of us do.
I think probably we've all been here dozens and dozens of times trying to get
ourselves figured out.
Wow.
But then I believe that there can be a
lifetime when you do crack the nut,
and I believe that's the time-
I hope that this one
... to ascend. Yeah.
Wow.
Okay, so
I do believe that we're energy. Nothing else makes
sense, and like you said, when you put a thought
here,
that makes you move and speak, and you're
really radiating this energy to other people, and your
body and your molecules are interacting with your
environment.
So that being said, we do-
That's right
... have control over our thoughts.
So even whenever something negative comes in,
switching that is powerful.
Now, you froze a little bit. I don't know if
I am too.
Well, the bottom line of what I basically was just thinking, we have control of
this. So the good news in all of this is that
if A is true, then B is also true, that we
can really do so much, and it starts with a thought.
So
I love that. I love that because I believe that
thoughts are things,
just like our feelings are. I know especially in a
very masculine, patriarchal society, we try to pretend like our feelings don't
matter-
You froze
... or they don't bother us,
but they do.
And it's just that we're, I would say
particularly the males,
that they are conditioned not to show
this, and I think that's very damaging Because we can't help it.
We are emotional beings. We are energy.
Mm-hmm.
And it's coursing through all of us all of the time.
So what I've really learned how to do, so I didn't talk to you about
the awakening part. What happened
was I started having literally out-of-body experiences, like leaving my body,
feeling my energy leave out of myself and be fully conscious,
fully aware that I had left my body and that my body was somewhere, and I felt like
I was in what we call space or some other
dimensional place.
Is this while sleeping-
But so I had full awareness of that
... or random times throughout the day?
It's always when I am sleeping, and I believe that there's a
window.
There's a small window
between our wakefulness to this reality and our dream
state.
And that's when we can, I would say, leave out and have
very conscious experiences where that's not confusing.
It's
as I am speaking to you now. It
feels that real.
There's no confusion. In fact-
Mm-hmm
... you come back as sober as you've ever been, and you're like: "Hold
on a second. There's more to this life.
There's more to this dream than what I'm experiencing."
Did you find yourself looking down on yourself, having
thoughts
that would counter your natural thoughts during your awake
time?
Yes.
I think that goes without saying.
So to me, I'm going to put it this way, Valerie,
having those out-of-body experiences I
considered a gift,
because it helped me to see that I was more than my
circumstances, that I was infinitely more,
that we are all infinitely more,
and that truly, we're energy beings having a human
experience.
And so you've probably heard many people that have had near-death experiences.
When they come back, they perceive life differently.
They perceive-
Yeah
... themselves differently. It was the same thing.
I began seeing everything differently.
Obviously, it started with myself.
I
lost those whole thoughts that I wasn't worthy anymore.
I was like: "Are you kidding me?" I'm a completely, like
all of us, we are-
You just shed it like-
... beings that shed all that crap.
Wow.
Some people call it your mental garbage.
Yeah.
All the stuff that, the lies that you tell yourself, the
insidious lies that you're not good enough in some way.
All that began to dissolve.
I
did
begin to get to the root of what was ailing my soul, and I
began, I believe, again, only with awareness could I begin to
change it, and so I began to change it.
I
was very avoidant of my
life, my early life. I would never want to go
back to where I was born. I never wanted to talk about it.
I had a lot of shame
in my family. There was, I call it an unspeakableness in my family around
women and money because there was prostitution in my
family.
My mother's mom was a prostitute that had a brothel.
And my mother had a, oh, she had just the most
difficult life escaping that. And then
when I was born, I was forbidden to have a relationship with my
grandmother.
But nobody told me why. I just was not allowed to have a
relationship with her.
And as I got older, I began to understand the unspeakableness,
and it's because in my family, it might not be true for all families, but
in my family,
having someone in the oldest profession was shameful.
And so there was a lot of shame around money, and women, and
sexuality, and I embodied all of that.
Even though I
couldn't even have a relationship with it, spiritually, I embodied all of it
because that's part of me. If I can inherit
a physical thing from my grandmother or my mother-
Yeah
... could I not inherit that, that energy?
We have mannerisms like our parents.
Mm-hmm. That's right.
My mom and I stand the same.
Yeah.
Probably not the best posture, but like this.
And I'm like, "Oh my God, I need..." I try.
I fight it, but we stand the same. We have the same
gestures.
Exactly. And how intangible is that?
Just like the same manners of being, or the same gait, or the same
voice, or the same comic timing, or all those things that are,
you know they're not taught. Or kids that come and they're three years
old playing "The Flight of the Butterflies" on the violin, and you're like, "Whoa."
Their little fingers can't even move that fast. They're like...
And they're right.
So you know they weren't taught. They came in with that.
Yeah.
You know? And so I'm like, okay. Or kids that can play the
piano or people that are mathematical savants or
whatever. They didn't learn that, not in this lifetime anyway.
I think they're probably coming back to complete something, and that, I call it a
carryover.
Wow.
So we all have carryovers.
Oh my gosh. It gives me chills.
Yeah. I
started moving energy.
So I got my healing attunements to move energy to do Reiki healing.
In 2013,
2015 timeframe, I did a couple of years of training with a Reiki master,
and I've been doing energy healings ever since then.
And one of the things that I learned in my practice of energy healing
was that, again, I believed that
if you had good parents, you had enough, you
had friends, you had resources, that you had no problems.
Yeah.
Only to learn that my
My primary clients were moms like me.
It's like the soccer mom kind of
avatar. So the moms would come, I'd do the energy healing, and
then they would start to bring me their children.
I'm talking like kindergarten, first graders,
into the healing practice, and I kind of got an aha.
I said, "Wait a second. These kids have two parents who love them.
They're at private school. They got friends. They're well-fed.
They're taken care of. They're loved, and they have
issues in their energy field?" And I was like-
It is so weird
... "Now I get it. Now I get it."
We all-
Yeah. You think it's some infraction in the physical
world that creates that, but it isn't.
Not always.
Wow.
Especially when you have babies and young
kids,
that there's no other evidence of depravity or
abuse or anything like that, and they still-
Yeah. Mm-hmm
... have a soulful kind of
pain or experience. And so I've seen it in
animals. I've done energy healing with animals, horses and dogs,
primarily. Same thing. They can be traumatized,
too. And so, we all have this energetic
part of us.
Yes.
I think all living things, and then it's a matter of being in
tune with it, being able to recognize it, and for me, having the ability
to what I call transform it. So I know how to transform energy.
So I can do it in other people, and then I've been able to do it in myself.
And so I think it's a part of our
lives that we're never taught. It's like we almost have to have a
midlife crisis or some sort of traumatic
experience to start-
I'm familiar with those
... this journey. Yeah.
Because it's hyper-focused on the physical
experience and getting a job to pay your bills.
But yeah, I had lots of money trauma,
and that's what I did a lot of work in my spiritual work for 10 years.
I did
a show for three years called "The Money Consciousness Show." I did a podcast for
five years called "The Be Conscious Podcast." I did a TED Talk on money
consciousness, overcoming poverty.
I've done many speaking engagements, wrote six books, and
all that stuff, there's always a thread that for many of my
clients, no matter what they came to me for or what was
going on, a lot of them asked for me to do a healing around money.
So I've done meditations on it. I've created meditations about it.
And then that's what I do in my work now.
I come back to the world of finance from this
very deeply spiritual place, understanding that many people
have wounds regarding their self-worth,
value,
shame around how money's earned and spent.
Mm-hmm.
There's fears surrounding money, a lot of feelings of
lack and scarcity. And you think that you can
shake it with a big paycheck or some sort of big
contract, but you can't.
You
see lottery winners, athletes, they've got these
meteoric rises to wealth only to come back down again
into bankruptcy and poverty.
And it happens over and over. And I think what we do as a society is we
want to shame people for that.
Mm-hmm.
And I say, nope. To me, there's no
place for shame. There's no shame, no judgment.
This is something deeper.
Mm-hmm.
And then once it can be recognized, I believe it can
be healed, if you're open to that. But it can be transformed.
That energy can be transformed.
And so
I know that we're coming at time, but I would like to share an exercise.
Yes, please. Any tips. I am ready.
Okay. So this is what I believe happens.
I believe that we find ourselves in repeating patterns
in life. You'll notice it in relationships.
We'll notice it in jobs. We'll notice it around money, maybe with our
health, our bodies. But we notice
there's an underlying theme, and people will say, "Oh,"
people even recognize you for the
theme or the pattern.
And so
there's a point when I believe each of us has to ask
ourselves,
"What is this?"
Because what I think happens in the beginning
is you're kind of new to the pattern, at least you're new to the awareness, and
so you think it's outside of you. It's the economy.
It's my family. It's because I'm not tall enough.
It's because I'm not smart enough. It's always outside of you, some other force.
And so then you don't have to take responsibility for it.
Mm-hmm.
So then we get to a point where some of
those things are
solved. You're not a kid anymore. You have
a job, or you have education, or you have this, or you have these resources, and
you still see the pattern.
That's when I believe some of us say,
"What the f**k?"
That's the moment.
What's happening? Why is this happening?
And I say that
because
sometimes the patterns are so painful
that they're damaging.
They damage us.
We can feel defeated. Okay? And so I
know it kind of sounds funny, but
to me, I'm dead serious about it
because that's exactly the kind of- The awareness
that I came to, I was like, "This doesn't make any
sense. What is this?" And then I believe you
begin recognizing that it's a pattern,
and that you recognize that you have awareness that
something is up. Well, guess what?
That means that something can be
changed about it.
Absolutely.
It's not about somebody else. It's within you.
Empowering, actually.
How do I transform the energy within me?
Mm-hmm.
How do I do that?
So if you're really playing this game,
there's a process of energy transformation that I want to take you through.
Okay.
So okay, let's say you're in the pattern, let's call it the boom and bust
cycle.
Got money, then you don't have money. You got money, and you don't have money.
And it doesn't matter the job, your education, how good you are, how
talented, how smart, nothing. It's still doing this, right?
Yeah.
And so you're like, "Okay, WTF, here we go. What is this?
What is this about?"
Okay.
I should have everything that I need.
I shouldn't be going through this every month, every two
years, every whatever cycle.
Yeah.
Whatever the altitude of that cycle is.
And so there's a point where when we recognize it, we can
begin asking higher questions of it, like what
is it showing me?
What is it about me,
about this existence, about me in this time and space
that needs to be transformed? What game am I playing?
And so then we can go about the transformation of it.
So normally when we're experiencing a pattern that's
painful, we have a feeling in our body. It doesn't feel right.
Yes. Right.
I would have literally
gut--
When I would have these financial
downs,
I literally would have a pain in my gut.
I would lose my appetite. I would feel-
Yeah
... sick to my stomach. Sometimes I feel like I have a punch in the gut.
Yeah.
I feel like that's mine. So I like, "Okay."
Yeah, I used to think I was growing a ulcer.
I was like, "Oh, God."
Because I would have so much pain in my gut.
And so then I started to say, "Okay,
how can I transform this?" I knew enough
from my energy practice that I could do it with other people, so I began doing
it with me. So normally I place my hands on other people,
kind of go into this meditative state.
I started placing it on me and going into that meditative state. Yeah.
I was like, "Wait a second. I can
literally feel this energy emanating from me like cheat." And
so again, it was always outward for other people. And I was like, "Wait a second.
I got to turn this in on myself because
just by the fact that I am living tells me I'm in a pattern."
Yeah.
There's something I can transform.
There's something I'm here to do, and it's not just to get more titles and
degrees and money.
And so like-
Sure.
Yeah. Again, if that's all it took, many of us could do that.
We could learn skills, and we could figure out how to do that part, but
whatever's ailing the soul, there's no amount of
money, things, titles, degrees that will heal what ails the
soul. No amount of stuff.
And so I began to learn how to
recognize that I could also heal myself.
And thus, I believe everybody can.
We all have the-
That's the good news
... we all have the capacity. Yeah.
Yes.
But it's not, it's like how do I-
You can have a whole other hand. So that is-
Yeah
... helpful to even hear.
So here's three steps.
Okay.
Pattern, I don't feel good in my body, so I like to
just instead of calling it pain or
illness or whatever, I just say I have a sensation.
I try to make it as kind of nondescript as
possible because, of course, every word has meaning for us,
and then that creates another pattern and cycle.
Yep.
So, okay, I feel this sensation in my gut.
Doesn't feel good, okay? But I have this sensation, and so I would
literally begin, put my hand on this place that's
not feeling great. I got the pressure.
I got the heat, cold sensation, whatever, feeling of doom
. I got the feeling of doom.
Yeah.
And so I have this feeling in my gut.
And then I would literally start
breathing through it. So I would almost
imagine that I was taking a breath in, and it
was coming out through the area that was not feeling well.
So in by my mouth, and I just imagine this breath coming out of
my gut.
Just use my mind to imagine that there's almost like a cleansing
of that-
Bring through the organ and then out of the body
... out. Yeah. And I would notice that as I
was doing that, I would kind of
to narrow my thoughts, I'd say one, two, or in, out,
just so I wouldn't be thinking about everything else, all my grievances and pains
and issues and all the rhetoric,
the dialogue that would go through my-
Right. Eliminations
... during this financial thing.
Yeah.
And so I would just say in, out, one, two,
until I noticed that sick
feeling begin to dissipate.
Wow.
So it would start to, it would be less intense and less intense and
less intense. And I'd have to really focus on this at
first because
I was just new at it, and so I was very
serious. I was like, "I've got to figure this thing out because it's harming me.
It's harming-"
And so in out that I noticed that. And so then I
had so much to transform. I had so many grievances, so many issues
that I got good at it because I would do it with everything.
It could be the in-laws or whatever
is bugging you, and it's like, okay, why is this
irritating? And I do it. I do it again.
Why does this person bother me so much?
Yes.
And so I would recognize, I was like, wait a
second.
It's almost this idea that someone's pushing your buttons.
Mm-hmm.
But if you notice, no one can push a button that's not already within you.
Right? So
you can't push something that's not there.
Yeah.
So wherever that grievance, it's within me.
Oh, man.
They're just like a mirror showing me that this grievance is there,
right?
Oh my gosh.
So it's like all your relationships, I believe, are mirrors to what needs
to be transformed within you because they're going to push those buttons.
They're almost there to do that, to say, "Yeah, we know this is something that gets
you here."
Progress.
And then it's up to you to say, "Okay, it's not you.
This is with me."
Mm-hmm.
There's something in me.
Okay?
Yeah.
And then if it's not serving me, I'm going to let it go.
I'm going to let it go. Okay?
Parts.
So I started doing that with everything, everybody, everything,
until I call myself getting spiritually clean, until I could
be clean. It's not that life that doesn't happen, and I don't get upset,
and things don't bother me, but now I know what to do.
I'm like, okay, let me go into this.
I do breathing, and I do deep meditations.
I go walk into nature. You figure out what your things are that can help
you to transform the energy.
Absolutely.
I've worked with other healers. Sometimes I had a
fear that I couldn't--
I would notice it would come back no matter how much work
I did, and so I worked with other healers. I was like, I still have this thing.
I know what it is. How can I be free?
And so I sought help because I recognize that this is
just a frequency, energy, a vibration that's within me, and it's no longer
serving
me. And so then I learned how to transform energy within myself and
feel well again.
So yeah, it changed your entire perspective on life.
I
figure, if you got to live this life, you may as well live the best life.
Yes, please.
If fear, yeah, anxiety, pain,
shame, and all that, guilt, if you can
live without that,
you won the battle.
Yeah.
Nothing. The world's got to keep turning.
It is.
But what changes is you.
Yes.
You have to change. And then everything else is just like it
begins to be water off your back. You're like, okay. You see things.
And then even just the other day at work, I noticed something.
I was like, why did this-- Somebody did something, and it really bugged
me. And I was like, what is that? And it came back down
to this old energy where I didn't feel like I was
valued.
Wow.
So then I had to say, "Okay, Susan, what's this about?"
Yeah.
You know that this isn't true.
Yeah.
Why did this little thing
bug the s**t out of me?
Yeah.
And I said, is it worth it? All the mind garbage, all
the internal chatter, all the feelings, was it worth
it? And ultimately I said, no, it wasn't.
But there's something, I do that with every person, everything
that bothers me and triggers me, I'm like, oh, they can't push a
button that's not already within me.
So there was something, there's an act that happened that
triggered an old
energy.
Yeah. Well, it definitely, you're at the expert level,
so I'm going to try this and take
those moments as I experience
the trigger or somebody just bugging me, or
that inadequate feeling, which I exist with
most of the time. So
yeah, I think I'll check in with you because I'm
at the rookie level.
But you're a great resource to guide on that, and so you'll be
hearing from me for sure.
Absolutely.
It looks like Justin wants us to wrap up.
Is there any
last words before we wrap up for today? It was such a pleasure.
I learned a lot. It feels emotional too.
It is. I don't know. Something about it, and it's not my norm.
So I
hear you loud and clear.
Well, absolutely. I'm sure you'll have in the show notes ways to contact me, but
you can always contact me through this beautiful lady, Valerie, and it has been a
great pleasure being with you today.
Thank you so much, Dr. Nichols. I'll talk to you soon.
Have the best rest of your day.
Thank you.
Bye.