In my latest episode sans guest: What I learned from a new Yeshua journey with medium Carissa Schumacher. Why it’s difficult for many of us to actually listen. Why I prefer the concept of contribution over purpose. One of my favorite stories recounted by Michael Meade about the old woman at the end of the world. A reflection on what’s your thread to add. A framework for understanding power and different energies. How I’m currently thinking about AI. And a request for your feedback on a new project, and the possibility of gathering together in a few cohorts.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
ELISE:
All right. So a few weeks ago, I went to a Carissa Schumacher journey, a Yeshua journey. All of you who listen to these monthly solos probably need no extra context, but if any of you have wandered in and are new, Carissa Schumacher is an incredible forensic medium who also is a full body channel for Yeshua, which is Christ consciousness or the man known as Jesus. And yes, this sounds totally wild, I know. And yet the content, what she brings through is so exceptionally wise and helpful and deeply non-religious. Sometimes Yeshua talks about history or stories from the New Testament and the Old Testament actually, the Hebrew Bible and clarifies. This is a big theme actually in the next book Carissa wrote with Yeshua, The Freedom Transmissions, which came out in 2022 or 2023. And there’s a new book coming called The Alchemy Transitions. I’ve read a draft and it’s great and very moving.
And in it, he tells stories and clarifies. He talks about divorce, abortion, homosexuality, and all sorts of political crises of today. And yeah, so you can pre-order The Alchemy Transmissions is coming from Harper Collins later this year. Anyway, I met Carissa in January of 2020, right after she started channeling Yeshua. In fact, in the first email where we were introduced, actually we weren’t even introduced. A friend who put us in contact said, “I want to connect you to my friends, Elise and Jennifer with no additional context.” And she sent me and Jennifer wild emails. I’ve written about this before. I can include it in the show notes, but it wasn’t a message for me. It was a message for a girl I went to high school with for a year. It was her father Vin and it was a wild, incredibly detailed, very moving message that it took me ... I had to be a sleuth to figure out who this was for.
And then every detail connected. It was about Games of Uno and Lake Oswego and a very specific rosary. I mean, it was a crazy email. And what’s fun about the journeys is that Carissa, before we dig in, she does a little bit of mediumship and it’s one of my favorite parts to watch people get readings of just the wildest, most specific stuff. A sister who used to do hair and a specific type of hairspray in the mall that they used to go to and where they would stand by the fountain and crushes and just way beyond anything that is known or Google-able or recorded. And the energy of whoever is being channeled is always present as well. I know Tyler Henry does live readings like this. Laura Lynn Jackson does it occasionally, but if you ever have a chance to go with a really exceptional medium, it is the most healing, beautiful, faith, enforcing experience.
And it just grounds you in, this is not something that you can make up. So this particular journey and journeys are rare. This one was in Santa Barbara. I think that Carissa is doing maybe one or two a year. I’ve been to a fair number over the years, but I usually go only when I feel called. And there’s much about everything that happens around the journey, the friends that I’m with and whatever we’re processing as they are about what’s shared in the rooms. It’s an emotional experience. It’s its own experience in its own right. So everyone is having their own process, even as we’re listening to some of the same things. And that was the theme actually of this month’s journey was listening, which sounds obviously like, “I know how to listen. Don’t we all know how to listen?” And the point was no, most of us don’t.
He gave a really handy list about why we’re such poor listeners. And I’m going to offer it to you here. I think that you’ll be able to resonate with some of these elements. Complacency and laziness is number one. Number two, arrogance. Number three, self-absorption. Number four, not taught how to listen. Number five, too much noise. We’re going to talk a bit about that today. It’s very cacophonous right now and it feels like the volume is only going up and I don’t think it’s going to get much better for a minute. And I’ll talk about why. I think it’s beyond the chaos around us, what I think is also going on. Number six, biases. We just don’t want to listen. This is partially what my next book is about, how not cognitively lazy we are, but how hard it is to change your mind. Seven, it’s easier to tune out than to tune in, right?
I resonate with that deeply. And so that was the meta theme of this journey was essentially saying that we have a cultural fascination with channeling and being psychic, everything that that entails. We all, in some ways, want to rightfully claim it, but what does it actually mean? And how do you actually do that? And his point is you listen. It is a process of getting quiet, listening, pausing, gestating, pausing, expressing. And we each have our own unique expression, and that’s a work of life, to figure out what that is. And I think many of us, most of us are confused, in part because it’s often not one thing. Carissa talks about how the problem with this idea of purpose, which is marketed and sold to us so rigorously, is that you have a purpose or finding your purpose or doing it on purpose. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with that except that it suggests that there’s some sort of outcome or single desired result rather than an understanding that life is a process and it’s unfolding and it changes and you change.
We all change and we all have different gifts to offer at different points in time. So she talks about, instead of purpose, this is about contribution, which I love. It’s an active, ongoing engagement that shifts. And Yeshua defines expression as a uniquely designed way of giving grace, which I think is so beautiful. Grace is one of those words that is underused. He defines grace as an echo of spirit on the web of life. So it is what you are putting out there and what you are in turn getting back. So that in a nutshell was what we were doing was listening. And again, the emanation for each of us is very different. And I find it really hard to do this, even though I theoretically understand. And often you get info that you don’t like or that you don’t want or that feels dissonant. This is also why the whole idea of intuition, channeling is in past, he has broken it down as these dual pedals that you have to work throughout your life of inspiration and discernment.
It’s a break and an accelerant. Intuition is inspiration and discernment, and both of those need to be developed and respected. So I’m offering that here because I think it’s just important at this moment in time when many of us are wondering what is going on and what am I supposed to do? And this is all very scary and very messy and very chaotic. And I’m trying to discern and distill and understand, one, how to keep myself safe, and two, how to respond in a way that is effective and productive and life generating rather than life deprecating, right? And joyful, because God, it feels awfully hard to find the joy right now. So first we’re going to start with that. Listening, pausing, gestating, pausing, expressing, pausing. That in a nutshell is what it means to channel and we’re all going to each do it in our own way.
And part of that is learning how to express from love or from the heart rather than from fear. He told this amazing story about King Solomon and how King Solomon, all he wanted was a listening heart. That was his request, a listening heart. And so let that be an image that we all carry. What does it look like to have a listening heart and to respond from a listening heart? Okay. So that’s the end of part one.
All right. Part two. The other, obviously when you go to a retreat like that in the middle of unfolding polycrisis world, right? We all wanted to know what is happening and is everything going to be okay? And it doesn’t really work like that as you can imagine, although I always feel assured. And Yeshua, Chrissa, you can hear actually Yeshua on pulling the thread. We did a channeled episode, which was wild. It was weeks after October 7th, actually, and it was all about the ugly truth and beautiful lies. And it’s worth going back and listening to because in some ways it was a setup or a preamble for this particular chaotic phase of history and how difficult it is to discern the truth and to really understand what’s happening. Richard Rohr makes this comment where he’s essentially saying what Jesus is suggesting that in every story there are three people, the good person, the bad person and Jesus, and you might be surprised about which is which, which I find really helpful just to hold in the back of my head because I want to rush to judgment about everything that’s happening.
And then it’s like, okay, now pause. We don’t know. I don’t know. Can I hold what’s unfolding in a larger context and can I find a little bit of faith or peace in that, even if it’s just a way of anchoring myself to a higher vibration energy so that I can respond, listen, and echo with a little bit more grace rather than being completely held captive by fear, which is definitely highly probable and possible at moments like this. So anyway, without being hyper specific, Yeshua essentially was like, “I am pulling on the threads.” Yes, he gave pulling the thread a nice shout out. He called it his podcast, guys, which makes me laugh. So everything we do is co-creation in some way, but he essentially said he’s pulling threads, things that need to be pulled, he’s pulling and we will reweave those parts, those patches of the garment.
And when he talked about that, it reminded me of one of my favorite at the core, one of the cores of Michael Mead’s book, When The World Doesn’t End, where he tells the story of the old woman of the world. And apparently this is an archetypal figure that shows up in many different cultural myths, that there is this idea of this old woman who sits in the cave of knowledge and she weaves the garment of history, and she holds an image, a vision in her mind of what it is, and in that cave with her, a black dog sleeps, keeps her company. And in the very back of the cave over a fire, which cooks this fire is I think the oldest or most eternal element, and in this cauldron, there is a soup of roots and seeds and grains, and every once in a while, the soup has to be stirred, otherwise it goes bad or it boils over or it burns.
And as she comes to the end of weaving this beautiful garment and is finishing the edge, she has to put the garment down to go and tend to the soup so that it doesn’t burn. And she stirs it. She gives it a vigorous stir. And while she’s away in the back of the cave, the black dog wakes up, wanders over to the garment and pulls on the thread, leaving it completely at ends at her feet. And she returns and she picks up the threads and she creates a new vision and she begins weaving again. And I think that’s such a powerful story. He writes a lot about the words like end and remnant and last and lasting and how even the words that we have for the end always signal the beginning of something new, that the remnants become something else, that the end of the story is actually the beginning of a different story always.
There’s something that’s emergent that will be carried forward. There is no real ending. What comes last might be the most lasting, and we can experience some real sorrow as our status quo comes to a close while failing to recognize that something new is emergent, right? I mean, this is the cycle of life. This is what it is to plant a garden and watch it bloom and flower and then die. And then what do you know there’s a new sprout, right? It’s just very difficult for us to accept this. We do not like it. It’s uncomfortable and yet this is what happens. This is time. This is reality and eventuality and so on and so forth. So I love that story just to hold in my mind, the old woman in the cave of knowledge. What I think is also so beautiful about that story and why I chose Pulling the Thread as the name of this podcast is because it works on many levels, right?
We’re each a thread, our lives have many threads, but when you think about this massive metatapestry of our lives, the world is incomplete without everyone’s contribution, regardless of the size of that contribution. And so just because the garment is unraveled doesn’t mean that we are inherently unraveled and we have a role to play in the assembling of the next garment, period, end of story. And we retain our integrity even if the design or the vision is different than what it’s been. So I think it’s beautiful. What is that thread? And that’s obviously what each and every one of our lives is about, right? Is what is my thread? What am I here to add to this tapestry? What am I contributing? What’s my color here? What’s my vibe? What part of the picture am I in? Hopefully it gives you a little bit of solace or a little bit of comfort or an image just to hold.
And to know that this is something that’s been referenced and written about and thought about throughout time. We are at the end of a cycle and I hate it too and it’s reality. And that’s why I think about our current administration and as extreme and polarized and terrifying as they are. It’s really interesting, actually. I don’t want to take you on a total into a parking lot, but I’m reading a short book by Cass Sunstein about some of the work that he did with Kahneman. I think the book is called Going to Extremes. It’s around extreme and polarized behavior and how people get that way. And our current administration is a textbook example of this, particularly as people who buck against it, pushed for moderation or expelled or are exiting or leaving. It just creates even more polarization. So we’re witnessing that. We’re having an experience of it in real time and we’re not imagining it.
And this is a well-studied phenomenon, if that gives you any comfort. So when I try and hold Trump as a trickster or as a destroyer or as any archetypal figure, and I lean on my faith to feel like there’s some larger pattern or wisdom unfolding here, even if we would never choose it. And so that’s how I choose to hold him, is that he is holding the bag for the end of a cycle, which needed to happen, even though it is painful, disruptive, and terrifying. But he is a very specific type of person who seems to have no problem destroying things that we hold dear. And there are things that are being destroyed, obviously, that we care about and are devastating. And I think about programs like USAID, right? Or I mean, there are a lot. I worry, desperately worried about the NIH and funding for medicine and science, et cetera, and what he’s doing to the green energy ecosystem.
But I will come to that in a second. But I feel like there is a chance that we will look back at him and be like, “Well, we would not have had the temerity, the will to do that. We would’ve tried to iterate our way to something else and he is a wrecking ball.” And so maybe that is his function, as painful as it is. Well, someone, he just did it in a much faster and more expedited way, and he’s going to hold the bag for our understandable rage. That’s how I’m holding him. If it’s helpful, use it. If not, let it go. But I think about, for example, and I was just very pleased to read Rebecca Solnitz, I think it was her newsletter last week, her site is called Meditations on an Emergency. Anyway, she wrote about this too, and I was like, okay, I’m not crazy.
I’m sure I’m not the only one thinking this, but as I watch what’s happening, as I’m watching oil refineries get blown up, which is terrible for those citizens and for people to have to inhale this and for what it’s doing to the global economy, et cetera, I’m not suggesting that it’s not. And I’m watching literally fossil fuels being exploded and it feels like it’s a real mother nature hold my beer moment of if you guys are not going to innovate out of this energy crisis that’s looming, if you are not willing to let go of your reliance on fossil fuels, which are holding everyone by the throat, then I will do it for you. And that’s what this moment feels like, is an expedited, extreme version of shifting us onto a new power grid because guess what? Clean energy is plentiful and it’s cheap and there’s no good reason why we are still being held hostage by big oil, except for obviously the people who benefit from our dependence on big oil.
But this goes to the BP lie, the great lie that pushed the onus for global warming on us, that we just need to limit our consumption and recycle and worry about offsetting our carbon. It’s not on us, friends. It is on big oil and corporate greed. And so watching this all explode real time, as much as it’s again, horrible, I do not want war, none of us want war, feels like it is pushing us past the point of certainly Americans being like, “This is ridiculous.” And if the geopolitics are beyond my comprehension in terms of the way that big oil is then subsidizing AI and holding up the economy, and we’re going to talk about AI in a second, but this is not supportable and none of us, I don’t want to say none, but I’m going to say very few of us want it.
When you look at actual coherence around concern, around global warming, et cetera, there’s actually a huge amount of coherence amongst Americans, particularly when you pull it out of a political framework. This is one of those issues like common sense gun laws where a vast majority, like 80, 90% of Americans want this, are worried about the environment, do not want to be dependent on big oil in Iran for our power grid.
So anyway, I feel like something’s happening. There’s a forcing function here that’s going to speed us toward a different power grid, one that is much cleaner, much cheaper, renewable, and available to us with investment. I don’t know if you guys read abundance. It’s a really short read. I will caveat that my brother is the editor of that book, so I have a vested interest, but it’s great. It’s like 190 pages and it’s so clarifying about what needs to happen in order for us to meet the energy demands of the future, which are far, far, far, far outpacing what’s available through fossil fuels. And in order to keep AI and to feed these intense energy needs, we need a different power grid and we needed it yesterday. So I think that all of this is happening in some perverse way on our behalf, on behalf of the planet to push us out of what we’ve been relying on for so long.
It’s not how I think any of us wanted to see it. And again, I think so much of what’s happening today, I remember having a conversation with Luellen Von Lee, and he was saying that sort of as a mystic in his visions, that we as a collective have had many opportunities to transition into a new era at a much higher level, at a much more conscious, much more loving, much less painful level, and we have not done it. And so we are taking the hard path, right? We are taking the hard path, and so it is. That’s what’s happened. That’s what we have collectively chosen. It’s unfortunate. There were up-leveled ways of doing this that would’ve caused a lot less pain, and we didn’t do it, and we’re choosing to go through the valley, right? So that’s also helpful for me sometimes, and I’m like, why is it this bad?
We’ve chose it to be this bad. We just couldn’t get off the highway. We did not want to get off the highway, and we are paying for it now, and it’s going to be extra painful and extra hard, but it’s happening. So yeah, I want to talk a little bit about power. I mean, this is something I’m super interested in, not just the power that generates the energy that drives our days, but power as a concept, an idea, and a word that is not well understood and has been done dirty, I think. I just read David Hawkins Power Versus Force. It’s the first book that he ever wrote, which includes his map of consciousness. I kind of want to teach it. I’ll come to this in a minute. I’m sure many of you have read it. I’ve owned it for years and I just haven’t been able to read it.
Sometimes I’m blocked on books, but I pretty much underlined the whole thing. It just felt like it spoke specifically to this moment of time where essentially on the map of consciousness, those energies that are very low vibration, shame, guilt, fear, anger, desire, there are others, those are some of the predominant ones, have been dominant and those are forcing energies. And I think 200 is the breakeven point. It might be courage is at 200. I can’t remember exactly which one. And then you get into things like neutrality and acceptance and peace and love. Those are very high vibration achieved by very few people. This is where sort of your center of gravity sits, but those are the realms of power. And his point is that force is powerless against real power, right? When we think about someone like Gandhi or MLK Jr. Or these moments of power where force hasn’t been able to have its way and we are in a period of forcing or maybe the end of forcing.
I think about even things like the Epstein files and what they reveal about forcing and these powers of manipulation and the way that they’re being revealed and exposed, even if we’re really unhappy with the lack of litigation, the lap of perp walk. I think we’re going to have to hold a long timeframe on this, but I do think it will happen just not with the speed with which we deserve and the victims deserve, but it’s all being exposed. I think part of what we’re also feeling is that these sort of old world power grids, whether we’re talking about fossil fuels or we’re talking about the Epsteins and the people who wish that they were in the Epstein files, that’s a whole class of people in my mind, of people who just would do anything to have access to powerful people. And again, power isn’t the right word here, but it’s not working anymore.
And I think more and more and more, we’re at the very beginning of a new era. It’s just going to work less and less well, and it’s going to create a bit of a crisis and a kickback and people who are used to manipulating and being highly transactional and having their way and using fear and desire and anger and guilt and shame to bend people to their will, it’s not going to work and that’s going to inspire a lot of vile and a lot of violence, a lot of kickback, backlash. We’ve been experiencing this for years and we’re not through it, but I think that that’s what it is and we’re going to start to see something totally different. We are definitely in the messy middle right now and it’s really scary and unwarring and all I can say is that I think after this transition, and it will take a minute, I think we’ll have a lot more clarity and a lot more context for exactly what we’ve been through and it’s just really hard when you’re in it to figure out where are the banks of this river.
It’s like being tumbled by rapids, right? You just don’t know which way is up, you don’t know where safety is, you don’t know what’s going to happen, you don’t know where you’re going to end up. For anyone who’s fallen out of a boat in the middle of a bunch of rapids and it’s scary, I think that’s the moment that we’re in and it will be protracted and yet I have a lot of faith in the river, in the wisdom of the river and that it will get us where we need to go, even if we’re just choosing to do it in an inner tube with a beer rather than a proper raft. And it feels like we’re running that river like we’re in the movie Deliverance. All right. I want to talk a bit about AI because I think that’s also, in my world, kicking up a lot of dust and that’s where I’m thinking.
And this is where I need your help actually. And if I were really organized, I would have a link for you guys. But if you’re interested in this, sign up for my newsletter. It’s also called Pulling the Thread because I will be hopefully co-planning and sharing with you all as I figure out what the next iteration of this project is. Let’s call it a project. I feel like I’m at a pivot point, partly it’s because of AI and what that enables in both positive and negative ways, but within the content world, and I’ve been through every iteration of this except for film, I’ve never worked in film and AI is its own different beast, but I worked in magazines before the advent of the blog. I’ve worked in online newsletter sourced online businesses and seen all the various social media platforms and algorithmic changes and implications of SEO and whatnot.
I was very early into podcasting, both as like a podcast advertiser and two previous lives ago and then as a podcaster, not the earliest, earliest, but very early on to Substack. And now with AI, and I’m seeing Substackers who I like and respect, but I’m like, “You’re writing this with AI.” It’s clear from the formatting, from the sentence structure. That’s a little terrifying for me to be fair because MDash’s three clause sentences, Susan Kane wrote something about this recently, but because AI, so many MLMs were trained on writers that are out of copyright. So it’s like C.S. Lewis and that’s how I learned how to write too. And so M Dashes and three clause sentences are my love language. For Susan, she was expressing the same thing, so it’s a little, whoa. But yeah, they’re trained on writers like C.S. Lewis. I did not know that, so that was fascinating to learn.
But anyway, now that everyone can theoretically write, I think of a lot of AI as chum still. I’m sure it will improve and improve quite drastically. I do use AI for very specific things, and I recognize I really need to understand it better, but don’t worry, I’m not training in the least AI. I do not write newsletters with AI. I use it for my transcript generation. I use it to help me code a survey. What else do I use it for? I obviously use it as a glorified search engine. I use it to source quotes. If I need to know specific which collected work from Carl Jung is this in Gemini, which is the Google AI, it has access to Google Books. If you are sourcing quotes, that’s the one to use. Do not use ChatGPT. And then I use Claude, mostly for can you analyze the differences between these three platforms, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So it’s powerful and it has its use. And open evidence, which is the medical AI, has been incredibly helpful. It’s free for healthcare providers. For pleabs like us, we get limited access, but it’s pretty incredible resource if you are navigating anything in the healthcare world. Anyway, all to say that now that everyone can generate an endless amount of content, I’m already seeing it across Substack. We’re already seeing it within the podcast space, AI generated podcasts, there are AI influencers, et cetera. So this has already kicked up and then it’s kicking up a lot of anxiety, I think, from everyone else who’s like, now I really need to start my thing, both because there’s a franticness or a fever in the air. And I think people are like, “I can do it with AI. So now I really need to start getting on my LinkedIn AI content about being a leader.” And anyway, I’ve been through this cycle before, but it also leads me in this, going back to the listening that we started with, there’s just a lot of noise out there and it’s quite cacophonous.
And my instinct, of course, is to sort of shut down or to go back to books or ... I don’t know. I don’t know. And I also don’t want to be an ostrich in the sand, but in the context of this community, this podcast, my newsletter, I am no longer calling it my Substack because at some point I’m moving and many of you have emailed me to ask me about this and to flag concerns about Substack, which I have shared all of those concerns. And as I, you will know and you will come with me if you’re on my list, as long as you’re a subscriber and not just a follower or have signed up not through the app, but through eliselund.substack.com, you will come with me and you will probably not really experience any disruption. But I also want to just think about what is useful, particularly for the people who are paying members.
You all ... Thank you. You make this project possible because it would not be financially supportable without your support. And I’m curious about what you all would want. I’m loath to create more unless it feels substantive. One of the things that I’m thinking about doing, because I think it would actually be really fun, is to run a handful of cohorts, like two, three cohorts a year where we go deep on different books and I could bring in some guest teachers, but we could meet and convene and go deep on something like spiral dynamics or just other systems and ways of understanding the world. As mentioned, I kind of want to teach this book Power Versus Force. Unfortunately, David Hawkins died in the ‘90s, but it’s so rich. And I think that there is a lot to grapple with there. So those are things that I think instead of trying to be everything and expand, I want to go deep.
And I feel like some of you would be interested in doing that with me. So I do want to hear from you about what is compelling. I think people obviously want community, they want spaces in which to convene, they want to go deeper, they want to understand themselves more, they want to understand their relationships more and each other. So watch this space and I would love your feedback as well. All right. So here’s to a new power grid. I know it is really a pain and we all have to replumb our architecture in some way for something different, but that’s where we’re going and it will feel so much more supportable and sustainable. I just don’t think there’s any other option, right? And may we hold each other’s hands as we go through this because it’s scary in the rapids and it is disorienting and to know that one, you’re not alone, but two, that we can get to the shore and grab onto each other, create a ... What do you call those?
A rope line of humans? It helps. It helps. All right, friends. I see you next time. If you got something out of today’s episode, I would so appreciate your help spreading the word. Please rate and review the episode, follow pulling the thread on your preferred podcast platform, and share this episode with a friend who would also enjoy it. That’s how we grow this thing. It’s so helpful. Thank you.