Conversations on Healing

Welcome to the Conversations on Healing Podcast, where host Shay Beider speaks with renowned healthcare leaders, practitioners, and thought leaders to explore the world of wellness, the incredible powers of self-care, and what it truly means to heal today. Join us on this journey to become more whole, healed and connected.

Shay Beider Welcome to the Conversations on Healing Podcast. I’m your host, Shay Beider, and I’m so grateful to have you joining me for this special episode. Today, I’m speaking with Aycee Brown, a psychic medium, astrologer, spiritual guide, and author whose work invites people to live from their core rather than their conditioning. Aycee is the host of the podcast Is My Aura on Straight and the author of the book Embody Your Magic, which offers a blueprint for breaking free from conditioning and stepping fully into one’s true self. In today’s discussion, we explore the practice of knowing your story and the many tools Aycee uses to guide people toward wholeness, including astrology, numerology, human design, mediumship, and shadow work. She shares personal stories from her own healing journey, speaks very candidly about ancestral healing and offers her wisdom on where healing truly begins. This particular episode is jam packed with resources and takeaway tools for healing, so you can see some of those in the show notes and also just get ready to take a few notes along the way.
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o let’s enjoy this conversation and have a listen. Well, good morning Aycee. It’s wonderful to have you on the Conversations on Healing Podcast. Thanks so much for joining us.

Aycee Brown Thank you for having me.

Shay So we’re going to focus the conversation today on your book, Embody Your Magic. It is really a fun read. And what’s cool about it is you’ve taken all of these different kind of techniques. I’m trying to think of modalities. We need a really broad category because you weave in all of these different things. And so I wanted to start by actually going through some of the various things that you bring together in your book. The subtitle of your book is Create the Life of Your Dreams Through Astrology, Numerology, Mediumship, Metaphysics, and Human Design. And a lot of people that are listening might be like, “Wait, what are all of those things?” Because maybe they’ve heard of some of them but not others. So I thought a fun way to approach it is kind of how you’ve organized the book itself, which is into sections where each one has its own kind of chapter and concentration area.

So I want to start with what you consider one of the central chapters in the book. And you’d mentioned to me previously, that probably one of the most important chapters is chapter one, which is about knowing your story. So I’d like for you to share a little bit about what it means to know your story and how people that are listening can start to develop that skill in their own life.

Aycee Well, on your healing journey, there are so many things that happen and that come up in your life. And so when I say that that first chapter is the best chapter to start with, even though you can start anywhere, knowing your story is important because I like to tell my clients, and the people whom I just meet and with whom we have these discussions, that before you came here, your little soul chose your family. It chose the neighborhood. It chose all of the things that came along with that before you got here. And with that being said, there was also a entire ecosystem happening before you were born. So you were dropped off into something, whether that was ,your grandparents were divorced or they had a happy marriage, your mother, and her sisters, and brother, they either got along really great. There was religion, there was the community.

There were already stories, and stigmas, and joy, happiness, pain already existing. And then here you go getting dropped off right in the middle. And knowing your story is so important because there were so many things happening. You want to know how your parents met, what was happening to you while you were in utero, what was going on with your mother’s relationship with your father, with your father’s relationship with your mother. You want to know all the information because what transpires is that when you don’t know your story, you come into this world and then you have these little idiosyncrasies or these insecurities that start happening for you and you’re like, “Well, why does this feel this way?” Or I even like to say, and not to be negative, you don’t understand the backstory of why your mother and your aunt are in competition or why your uncle is the favorite child.

There’s so many things that are happening. And you’re like, “Well, I understand it from a perspective of this doesn’t feel right, but knowing what was going on before you got here and also while you were in your mother’s wound helps you in a tremendous way with your healing journey. It is probably the most freeing thing you can do for yourself because when I found out my story and when other people who are reading the book found out their stories, I’m already getting the emails and the DMs and they’re like, girl, I asked my mom and I asked my dad and whoa, now it all makes sense.”

Shay And you give some very specific examples in the book from your own life, things that were pivotal. One thing that you share was that the man who raised you, who was your father, wasn’t your biological father. And initially you hadn’t been told that, but you kind of felt it intuitively and then you were told that and then you confirmed it and there’s a few layers to how that became crystal clear. And you also share a very pivotal moment in your story when you were four years old and experienced a very severe burn on your body and had to be hospitalized for two months as a result of that. And then how that shaped your thinking and what you were caring forward about yourself and how much that was affecting the way you saw your life. So those pivotal moments when not really fully recognized and acknowledged can continue to play themselves out without awareness.

And so I think one of the pieces that you emphasize in the book is like you want to know your story so you can do something about it.

Aycee Yes, absolutely. You want to know your story so you can do something about it, but not even do something about it because sometimes there’s nothing to do about it. Sometimes you can’t rewrite history, but what you can do is have the knowledge and the information to understand yourself, to understand your lineage, to understand who you come from and the people you come from and what that lineage and that maternal line, that paternal line, where they are already positioned and placed and how they think, how they move, all of that matters and it’s a part of you. And so you have to kind of reconcile that you have two things, even with me having my, my father, my dad, I’m very similar to him. He met me, he was in my life since I was seven months old. So even though biologically he is not my father, I am his child.

I act like him in some ways. I have his mannerisms because of the integration of me being in his line so early. So there’s still things there. So that’s why it’s just really important for people to take the time. I say, if you do skip that chapter, please, please do the work. It’s going to be hard. It’s going to feel very invasive. And if you do come from parents, which majority of the people I work with do come from parents who are emotionally immature, it will be like pulling teeth. And if you can’t get the answers from them, I always say ask an aunt, ask an uncle, ask someone who you trust who’s going to tell you the truth.

Shay That’s great. And a cool thing for our listeners to know is throughout your book, Embody Your Magic, you have all sorts of questions and exercises. It’s really almost in some ways got a workbook element to it because you’re reading it, but you’re also going through this process yourself. And then in addition on your website, which we’ll put in the show notes, I believe it’s ayceebrown.com. You also have that you can print it out. I actually printed out a whole series of things that are resources and you specifically have something on knowing your story and basically you call them your magical motherfucking downloads throughout the book and it’s like these downloads of things that help people to focus on the particular topic at hand. And so in the resources you include a lot of that as well. So just like other tools that people who are curious about this could use as they’re listening to this conversation.

Aycee Yes. And I wanted to do that. And just FYI, a little behind the scenes tea that the name of the book was going to … I wanted it to be called Your Most Magical Motherfucking Life. They were like, “No, we can’t do that. ” They didn’t go

Shay For it.

Aycee But they let me keep the part where your magical motherfucking downloads. They wouldn’t let me keep … So we came up with Embody Your Magic. So I was like, “Fine.”

Shay There you go. You’re like, “Okay.” Well, as I was saying, I kind of want to go through the different chapters so people understand. So the second one you talk about psychic channeling. And again, some people may have heard those words, but then they’re also like, “Okay, what do you mean by that and how would that apply to my life as I’m listening to this conversation?” So share a little bit about how you’ve utilized psychic channeling in your own life and story.

Aycee Well, I have a guide that I connect with and what a guide is, it is your higher self. It is someone, it could be someone from your ancestral line, or it could be someone just on the other side who has chosen you and you have a connection soul wise. Everyone has guides. So that is not special to me. I just know how to work with my guides. I found out that I was a channel with my guide probably in my 20s and I started doing different techniques, taking classes because I knew that that voice wasn’t mine when I was either giving psychic readings or working on something, whether it was astrology or numerology at the time, or even when I got my life coaching certificate early in my 20s. And so when I would work with people, I would hear stuff or the mediumship would come in.

And so I started doing more research and I was able to connect with my guide. So psychic channeling is something that we all can do. You can do it with either I give an exercise in there to do it. You can do it with that higher self with that guide that may be assigned to you, or you can do it through automatic writing, which is a technique where you can meditate first to calm your body down and then you just start writing and then something takes over and that is usually your guide and you start channeling. All great, I like to say musicians, artists, doctors, they are channels because everyone has an experience and if you talk to anyone who is really good at their craft, they will tell you, “I don’t know what happens. I just kick into gear and then I do something that is their channel that you are channeling, whether it’s writing, whether it’s painting, whether it is doing surgery, you kick it in.

Shay Yeah, I’ve seen that. I saw arguably one of the best pediatric heart surgeons in the world perform a surgery and it was a spiritual moment because I don’t know what was happening with that man, but it was like something was moving through him that had so much elegance and grace. It was like listening to the most beautiful music imaginable. It was just very moving and you could feel that sense of connection to something greater than an individual self.

Aycee I even also say that doctors are some of the most psychic people if they really tap into it, but number one would be surgeons for me because I’ve seen it with my own eyes and I have experience with it as a child remembering when I was in the hospital, I remember the surgeon coming in because my arm and my chest wasn’t healing and I remember him looking at me and confirming that I was going to have to have a skin graft and I never forget that moment because when I was in the hospital what they do, they probably don’t do it now. This is the late 80s. They would come, they have to put, this might still be a practice. They would cover my arm and then they would have to rip off the bandages because they were trying to get the skin to grow back.

So every day a nurse, and it was so sad because they gave a nurse who was freshly out of nursing school. She was probably like 20 and they would give it to her to come and rip off my bandages and she would just be like, “Can you turn your head please?” Or she’d be like, “I’ll come back in an hour, you can eat because here I am a four-year-old, this little body and she has to rip off my bandages every day because they’re trying to get the skin to grow back.” But I never forget that when the surgeon came in, my parents were there, but he looked at me and he was like, “She’s going to have to get a skin graft.” And that’s why my connection, when I see surgeons, I’m always like, “Oh, they’re very psychic. They’re very connected to spirit to source.”

Shay Yeah, certainly the best ones for sure absolutely are, right? You then go on in chapter three to talk about astrology and many of us have heard, and there’s different forms of astrology, right? In different traditions, there’s Vettic astrology. So there’s a number of different types of astrology, but I’d like for you to introduce us to the astrology that you speak to in your book.

Aycee Yes. I use Western astrology, tropical, whole sign astrology. I have a theory that I stick by that I created and because everybody’s always like, “Well, what about Placidus?” Which is another system where the houses aren’t equal. And I like to say, if you have not had your Saturn return, your first one yet, then you can use Placidus. And if you have, you use whole sign. And what a Saturn return is, Saturn makes a return to its natal position in your chart and everybody in there, God willing, they experience two at least at minimum in their lifetime. The first one happens when you’re about 28, 29, all the way until 30, 31. And it is a very shocking, life changing some people, it breaks them down kind of a moment where you really, I like to say, earn your stripes, your soul stripes as a person.

And so astrology is a tool that helps you understand yourself. That’s why it’s in this chapter, the embodiment of self.

Shay And for someone who’s totally new to it, I think you do a nice job of organizing some of the content in the book so that you can … I mean, as long as you know what your sign is, then there’s a lot of instruction that relates to your particular sign. So I feel like that one is very accessible in the way you have it organized. You also talk about numerology and how your grandma kind of introduced, how you had relatives that were very aware of the power of numbers. And so that was kind of your starting point for getting into and embracing numerology, but then obviously you’ve gone on from there. So maybe share again with listeners who are like, “I don’t know very much about numerology.” What’s the basic premise and concept?

Aycee Well, numerology, look at it in the most simplest way. Every number has an energy. So number one, number two, number three, number four, every number. And then you have angel numbers where people are very like, 111, 222, every number has an energy. And so we all as people, there’s several different numbers that you can pull for your name, your birthdate, all of that, but the most common is your life path number. So your life path number is your complete birthday added up to a single digit unless you have a master number, which is 11, 22, or 33. And each of those numbers mean something on not necessarily the trajectory of your life, but more of the through line theme that helps you stay on track for your soul’s purpose and destiny. So I always tell people once you know your life path number, and sometimes people don’t identify with their life path number, but that is usually because of conditioning of just certain types of things, maybe the way that they were raged, maybe it’s religion, but your life path number has a lot of clues that can make you happy, I like to say.

So for instance, I’m a life path five. If I don’t go on a plane for a long time, I’m very upset. I like to travel, I like adventure, I like change and so that is something that I try and stick to. And whatever your life path number, I always tell people to just try and lean into some of the great qualities of it when you feel like you’re off track.

Shay They can also look up from some of the resources that you share to understand a little bit more about that. You also go into more detail about mediumship and it’s become a little bit more popular to see mediums on television shows and things these days. So I think more people are familiar with the gist of it, but I think it would still be good for you to share a little bit about your connection to mediumship and why you thought it was important to offer this in your book.

Aycee Well, mediumship for me is something that I do professionally, but everyone has access to their past loved ones and it happens all the time. Someone pass in your life and then two weeks later, a month later, three weeks later, three months later you smell them or you see a bird that they like. I always tell people and for the listeners, take one of your hands, it doesn’t matter which on and put it right in front of your face. The part of your hand that is close to you is where you are and right on the other side is the spirit world. That’s how close it is. You are not separate from your departed people. The spirit world is not far away. It’s literally, as they always say, the veil is thin. It is that thin. So there are people around you, your guides, your grandmother, all of the people who love you, they are that close and they like to send reminders to you.

Maybe you lose your keys, maybe that’s something that your grandfather did. Maybe you start smelling your grandmother’s perfume. Maybe you have a craving that something that your grandmother used to make you all the time. Those are clues that they are around and that they’re close to you. And the reason why I put it in the book for people to use, because the biggest thing that I get when I do sessions is people really having a hard time with the physical world as we call it and wanting to know that they’re not alone, that they are okay and that they’re going to be okay. And so mediumship does that. It allows you to connect knowing that there is something there that is with you, guiding you, helping you, that you’re not alone on this journey.

Shay And I think for listeners too that may not be familiar with near death experiences or organizations like IANDS, which I believe stands for the International Association of Near Death Studies. But organizations like that can help you if you look at their research that they’ve collected and gathered, it helps you to kind of understand a little bit more of what people bring back from those near death experiences about the other side. And what’s pretty surprising is cross-culturally, people globally that have these experiences bring thematically back a lot of the very same stories and the sort of frameworks and structures of how things work in that thinly veiled other side, just like you were describing. So that might be a fun resource for some people who are listening that just haven’t explored that. There’s some cool YouTube videos-

Aycee Yes, I was going to say that. You can watch so many YouTube videos. Of my mediumship mentors, she would have me watch them all the time, near death experiences because of how it’s same threads, same themes, what they hear, what they find out about the physical world, the messages that they get, it’s all in alignment.

Shay Yeah, it is. It’s pretty remarkable when you look at it. We’ve had Dr. James Doty on the show, who’s somebody who looks a lot at manifestation and attraction and you have a chapter where you talk about kind metaphysics but also some of the laws of attraction and so it’d be, I think, useful to our listeners for you to talk a little bit more about that.

Aycee Well, I love manifesting. I don’t necessarily like manifestation culture where it is today. We all have the ability to manifest things in our life and however, we all have a different vantage point that we are manifesting from. My manifestation experience and your manifestation experience are going to be two different things. Can I still get the things that I want? Yes. Can you get the things that you want? Absolutely. But depending on who we are and depending on the viewpoint that we have, it might look a little bit different for me, the process of it, but the laws are the same. So what I also explained in the book and what I love to talk about is that yes, the laws are the same. The law of attraction applies to you, the law of attraction applies to me. However, because we are souls having a human experience and we live in the human world, the process is going to look a lot different for me because of who I am in this human experience and it still applies.

We can get what we want and I want to always tell people that you can have what you want, you can have these things, your process is just going to look very different.

Shay Yeah, absolutely. And I think you see that and I’ll just make a reference too to Dr. James Doty’s book into the magic shop and then he did a more recent book on the science of manifestation. And so you can start to understand from his perspective, there actually is a science to this. We’re just still kind of understanding exactly how it works. But like you said, there are these sort of fundamental laws or principles and then we’re each using those in a slightly different way to help to create what’s most important. In my life, I’ve always found the most essential element of manifestation is where am I manifesting from? So if I’m trying to manifest from a place of greed or like that’s to my view, a big waste of time and energy. It’s far more essential to connect with a much deeper meaning and purpose around the place from which you want to manifest.

So if you’re wanting to manifest from your heart or from a place of highest intention or greatest good or most loving possibility, that like the essence or the epicenter of the place from which you’re choosing to manifest is central to what then comes into being. And also Dr. Doty talks a fair amount, which I think is interesting about how you align with that clarity around what you want to manifest and then you release to the outcome because sometimes the outcome will actually come forward in a way that you did not anticipate and it might even take years, you may have to be very patient. And so there’s in that process of learning how to manifest, there’s a practice of both rooting and aligning with what you really care about and then setting that intention and visualizing and choosing what it is you want to manifest, but then also releasing so that you’re not really like tying yourself to a specific outcome or a specific way that that has to look because in many cases it just might surprise you.

It might look very different than what you had originally imagined.

Aycee Yeah. Releasing the how is probably the biggest thing. You got to release the how because you never know how it’s going to come.

Shay Never know exactly. Right. Well, a fun topic that you share that I would imagine some of our listeners know about, but many probably don’t, is the whole field of human design. And so I wanted to give you a chance to kind of provide an introduction to human design for anyone who’s listening that’s like, “I never heard of that. ” What is human design?

Aycee Well, human design is a combination of the I Ching, which is a Chinese fortune telling system, but it’s also not just a fortune telling system, it’s a way of life. The Iching is something that people use to have a very spiritual relationship with source. That’s how it’s been explained to me. That’s how I have used it as well. So it’s the I Ching, it’s Western astrology, it’s Kabbalah, it’s the chakra system and pretty much it is, I like to say when we’re comparing human design and astrology, astrology is the who, what, when, why, and human design is the how. So astrology, you already have all of the pieces to your puzzle. Human design is how the world is going to respond to you when you are living in it. So every single person is in the category of one of the five human design types. They either call them aura types or energy types.

So you have generators, manifesting generators, projectors, manifestors, and reflectors. So the generator type family as people call it, the generators and manifesting generators, they make up the majority of the population. And so the generators have sustainable energy because in human design, there is something called a body graph. And if you go to my website, you put in your birth information You’ll get a body graph. The body graph shows you different centers and different lines, gates. There’s a bunch of numbers happening. But in human design, there’s something called the sacral center, which gives generators and manifesting generators have sustainable energy, meaning that you produce your own energetic field based off of just you alone. Then you have the non-sacral types, which are projectors, manifestors, and reflectors. I’m a projector. I don’t have my own sustainable energy. I have to take breaks. I have to rest a lot.

Same with manifestors more so with reflectors. Reflector energy is very nuanced because when you look at a body graph, you will see different squares, triangles, those are called centers and they have a completely open chart so they have no energy at all. Their environment is very important because they are literal sponges wherever they go, whoever they talk to. So they have to be very mindful. Then you have manifestors. What makes them manifestos is they have defined throat and it’s also connected to a motor, but they don’t have a defined sacral center. So they’re here to initiate. They’re here to tell people the next steps. Then you have projectors. Projectors are here to wait for the invitation or wait to be invited to move, speak, and give advice. Because projectors, I like to say, if you think about a football analogy, if you’ve ever watched football or soccer, we call it soccer here, but internationally they call it football.

There’s a panoramic camera that is going back and forth on the field. That is what a projector is. We can see everything. We know what’s happening all over, but our advice or our guidance is not great if we’re giving it unsolicited. So we have to wait for the invitation or wait to be invited for us to then be heard. Then with the generator family, I like to say manifesting generators and generators, they have the same mission. They are both in it for the long haul. They’re here to build mastery. Manifesting generators are here to find a shortcut to mastery. Generators are here to have a longer time in the mastery process.

Shay And because this is a field that’s pretty deep human design, are there any books or apps or websites or resources that you particularly like to recommend that people check out?

Aycee Yes. Well, my podcast Is My Aura on Straight. People start from episode one and I have tons of human design episodes where people still listen to them and they love it because I break down so many of the human design experience when it comes to love, when it comes to business, when it comes to just living and trying to understand yourself. Of course, my section in the book is helpful and I also wrote another book called Your Soul Map, which is about human design as well.

Shay Great. Yeah, that’s wonderful. And we can add into maybe an app as well for people that want to use that.

Aycee There’s so many apps.

Shay There’s so many.

Aycee Right? Yeah. There’s so many apps that you just find one that you like and put in your information.

Shay That sounds great. So we’ll add that in too. The last chapter that you have in your book is called I Am The Embodiment of Destiny. And so I wanted you to have an opportunity to share why that chapter was included and important to you.

Aycee Well, the chapter was included and important because as someone who is very much into internal family systems, I connected so many of this work and these modalities to different parts of myself, doing work on different parts of myself. After you read certain sections of the book, it is something that guides your destiny. You find your footing when you heal. And I’m always encouraging people, if you can just get through the tough part of healing, that “I am” is something that you will feel so embodied by because it guides your next steps. You feel more secure in yourself. You are more self-aware. The biggest thing that I think that healing gives us and why the “I am” is so important for your destiny is that it helps you understand who you are. And when people are lost or people are confused about life, it’s not necessarily a bad thing.

I just like to say you just don’t know who you are yet because when you find out who you are, you know who you are. So there are going to be certain things that you don’t like. For instance, what’s your favorite ice cream that you like to eat?

Shay For me personally?

Aycee Yes.

Shay Peanut butter and chocolate.

Aycee Okay. So you know that. So if someone says to you, “Oh, peanut butter and chocolate is horrible. It’s the worst ice cream ever. You shouldn’t be eating that, Shea. Put it away. You should be focused on having vanilla ice cream only.” You can then say, “Well, that’s not what I like. That’s not who I am. I like peanut butter and chocolate ice cream.” Same for me. I like mint chocolate chip. People hate it. My favorite ice cream. So even down to those little things, knowing yourself is so important for your destiny. So going forward, when you go to anywhere that’s ice cream related, there’s going to be a chance if they don’t have peanut butter and chocolate ice cream, you might not want any ice cream that they have. People are going to say, “Well, you don’t want it? It’s free.” I’m like, “No, I don’t want it because I know that I like peanut butter and chocolate ice cream.” And so something so small is a definitive thing about you that you know about yourself.

And so that makes your journey easier in picking ice cream. It sounds so mundane, but it’s true. I love sparkling water. I love seltzer water. People are always like, “Oh, how do you drink that? It’s so nasty.” And I love it though, but I know who I am. I’d rather have that than flat water.

Shay Right. And then yeah, obviously you scale that and magnify it into all these other areas in your life and you start to design a life that’s much more aligned with who you are. Exactly. And I think for listeners who maybe aren’t as familiar with internal family systems therapy, it was developed by Richard Schwartz. And so if they want to learn more about the idea of the different parts that each of us were not actually, and again, this is my language, not his, but we’re not entirely a unified self that we have all of these different parts of who we are, that many of which formed in early childhood and one part of us might be more of the protector, one might be more of a rebel and we’re constantly trying to figure out how to work with all of these different parts of ourselves and who we are. And so in that body of work, a big part of what you do therapeutically is you kind of get to know each of these different parts, you bring them into conversation with one another so that they can actually have dialogue. You understand maybe why certain parts have been more silenced and why others have been given more voice or more power. And then you can reckon with all of that and then come, I think ultimately people who do that work for many years then do feel like they have kind of a more coherent sense of a unified self that’s embracing all of these different parts, but has like healthy relationships among and amidst all those different parts.

And feel free to add anything else you want to add to that.

Aycee No, that was spot on and also too what I try and help my clients with is that you still have to get to know those parts. You still got to talk to them. You can’t ignore them because that’s why you’re in this mess or that’s why you feel the way, because you’re ignoring it or that’s why that part is stopping you from achieving something because you need to make it feel safe and you need to figure out what it needs to feel safe. So I’m always a big, big advocate for talking to your parts. I will tell people, “Well, what does your part say? What are they asking you? What do they need when you get triggered? What do they need when you don’t feel safe?” Just ask it. Your part will tell you. And I really love, of course, Richard’s book, No Bad Parts.

And then he has another book, I believe it’s called Is It The One. It’s about relationships. Oh my gosh, such good books. I actually like that one better than No Bad Parts. And those are two great resources for you to start with because you have to be in communication with your parts because they are running the show.

Shay Right. Yeah, it is. It’s powerful. And for me, it helped me to understand other people because sometimes you’ll meet someone and they’ll behave with you in a certain way, but then if they get triggered, maybe they go into fear and then this-

Aycee Whole other person shows up.

Shay And you’re like, “Oh, you’re now two people. ” But when you understand IFS or Internal Family Systems work, you’re like, “Oh, it’s a different part is showing up when they’re triggered and scared.” And that part maybe is more protective or even shuts down or withdrawals or whatever the dance is in their case. So it can make relationships a little easier when you understand.

Aycee Right. That’s why I love that book. I think it’s called Is It The One. I think so. Please double check and reference when you put it. We’ll put the link- But that’s why I love that one because that book is because of that. It’s not just romantic relationships. It’s either with friendships, business partnerships, your parents, you can understand so many things from learning parts work and learning how your parts work for you.

Shay And even like you said at the beginning of our conversation, when you know your story, you also know your lineage, your ancestry. So when you want to know your parents, you’re also trying to understand, okay, the story they came into, right? What was the inherited legacy that they walked into? How has that caused them to develop certain parts of their personality and self? And then how are those parts then interacting with you? So it also becomes intergenerational understanding.

Aycee Yeah. We’re all doing intergenerational work. Remember everyone, newsflash, you picked this. I always tell people. Absolutely. And I talk about in the book, even though because people always, “Well, what about the bad stuff?” That is human stuff, but your soul picked this. Your soul said, “Ooh, I want to learn this lesson, that lesson, and this lesson this time.” And it says, “I need the right people to do it with. ” And it picked these people.

Shay Yeah. And sometimes it’s painful. That’s part of the course. You had shared with me before that you had a therapist who told you something that really changed your life, which was they basically said, “Parents are people. They don’t get a badge, a sash or a crown.” And so how did that understanding of, “Wait, parents are just people”, how did that shift for you, your perspective within your own understanding of your parents?

Aycee It changed everything and at the same time it also made things a tad bit challenging because me knowing that part of parents are people. They don’t get a badge, a sash, a crown. They are having a human experience as well. But then my inquisitive investigative mind would always say, “But they also made the decision to have me. ” So now what? And then the other part of having that experience of everyone has their own journey and regardless if they’re your parents, they still have to do their own work and some of our parents opt out of that and it’s not a voluntarily opt out. I think it’s more generational. You have the silent generation and then right after that are the boomers. And so many of my clients and the people that I help, they have boomer parents. And so that generation has a separate idea of what parenting is of what relationships are.

So Gen Xers and millennials are the biggest population that have no contact with their parents. And so there’s through lines and threads there that are not just a people or a human problem, but it’s also sort of a generational issue of how patriarchy and capitalism have also influenced societies and our parents.

Shay Yeah, absolutely. So your book that we’ve been talking about in this conversation, Embody Your Magic came to you in 2020 during the pandemic and a lot of racial reckoning and Black Lives Matter and that the importance of those movements that were emerging in the midst of a lot of international chaos and fear around the pandemic. Why do you think your book arrived kind of in the midst of this societal and racial reckoning?

Aycee That’s a great question. I will say as someone who is connected and people who do this energy work, this psychic work, this spiritual work, that happens more frequently than not where there’ll be world situations or things that will happen and I will feel it first or I will have downloads about it first, hence the whole outline of the book. Unfortunately the book, not unfortunately, excuse me, fortunately when it was supposed to come out into the world was six years later. So I got the download in 2020. It didn’t come out to 2026. So that’s a huge timeframe of source spirit sending me these things, sending me these ideas and then it sourced knowing when it was going to be ready for people to ingest it, for people to read it and understand it. Because even when I started writing the book and pitching the book, I was afraid that no one would get it because it was all of the modalities, because of how I was positioning it.
And that just, thank goodness I have a great editor and people around me and my agent who saw the vision because you do have to have some sort of intuitive future thinking for books and things of that nature, especially in the spiritual mind, body, spirit category. And so with that said and me getting these downloads with all of this strife, everything happened, we didn’t know what was going to go on. We were stuck in our houses and here I am downloading this information two, three o’clock in the morning like, what am I supposed to do with this? So like anything, I just put it in a Google Doc and leave it there. And then when it was time to birth it, it came back around.

Shay Yeah, it’s a beautiful story because it reflects your patience and willingness to just kind of receive and then listen to when it needed to move forward into the world. There’s a framework that you use in the book that I think might be a fun one for people that are listening to hear because we haven’t really spoken to it directly. You call it The Canyon and essentially it’s your framework for doing shadow work or exploring the parts of us that are difficult, sometimes hidden, sometimes a little more out of sight or painful that we don’t really want to work on. So how would you describe the canyon and why you think it’s so important to address?

Aycee Well, the canyon is, like I said, you said, I call it the shadow work that you do. It’s the darkest space, but it’s also very beautiful. It has so much to give you and offer you. Can you get lost there? Absolutely. Can it make you afraid? Absolutely. But once you go through the canyon one time and you heal some of the bigger stuff, because I always like to tell people the canyon is not a on- time event. You can come back to it several different times in your life. Maybe a divorce brings you back to the canyon, a heartbreak, a job loss, a death brings you back into the canyon, but every time you revisit it, you know where things are, you know how to move around it, you know where you’ll feel safe at. You know like, “Oh, this spot here feels comfortable for me.” Or there’s so many different intricacies in the canyon. And so that’s how I look at the shadow self of you or the shadow work that you have to do because there’s so many different layers to it, but on your journey in life, you will always come back to it. It’s always going to come up in some way, shape or form and your job is to learn from it every time you go through it because every time you do go through it, regardless if you go through it a lot or maybe one or two times, it’s going to be different. It’s not going to affect you as much. And so that’s what also your healing journey is. Everyone’s always like, “Oh, I just want to be healed.” You’ll never be fully healed, maybe not. It’s a journey, it’s not linear, but what happens is that you learn how to process and engage with the parts of yourself with the hurt, with the trauma, with the joys in a different way each time you experience them.

Someone like myself or people who are listening, I’m sure that your breakup that you had at 21 is very different at 35 or at 45 or at 50 because you’re different people. You’re a different person having these different experiences. Heartbreak might be the same, but your recovery is different because you’ve done some work.

Shay Yeah, absolutely. I often think of it as like a spiral. We’ll spiral back to things sometimes and then maybe you’re addressing them on a deeper level because you’re at a new phase, you’re not in your early 20s, now you’re in your mid 30s. And so yeah, there is a returning, but from a different vantage point that often happens in healing. You and I have spoken about how there’s not very many women of color that are in the space of self-help and mind, body, spirit, and yet so much of your work is rooted in your lineage and ancestry and things that your relatives were teaching you and gifts that you were inherently given. Why do you see, so I guess two questions here. Why do you see that women of color are often excluded from this space and what do you think we can do to change that?

Aycee Well, that’s a big question and I want to answer it in an honest way. So forgive me for what I’m about to say, if it does rub people the wrong way, but as a Black American, my people built this country and at one point we were less than half of a person. And so when we start off like that in industries and different experiences that happen here and where you’ve always been looked at as less than a person, why would we let you in? So it’s not necessarily a question of, well, why do you think that is? Because that’s what it’s always been. And even though Black women have some of the most amazing wisdom, we’ve had to use this wisdom, whether it was for survival or thriving, it has been something that has been looked at as not worthy of or wrong. I can go into a whole diatribe about how the religion and Christianity was put on us as slaves to get us to assimilate and comply.

They took away our practices of drumming, of talking to spirit, of using herbs and they said, “No, you’re going to read this book and that’s how you’re going to live.” So if that is what has been primed and prepped for us when we have these industries and a lot of the spirituality space started becoming really popular, the spiritualist movements in the 60s, 70s, and still no Black women, no Black people because it was more of, well, that’s not your space or we have the upper hand or of course we’re more connected, we’re better. There’s tons of stories and things that I’ve heard about that. So when people ask that, it’s changing for sure and hopefully it gets better. But the most, gosh, I’ll say this, that with you saying I talk about my lineage a lot because it is part of my bloodline, literally. So when people ask me, “Well, how are you so connected?

And how are you … ” Because my people have always been connected. That was how we had to survive. So it’s in me, it’s in my spirit, it’s in my soul, it’s in every single crevice of me. Now, whether or not society or the business of spirituality accepts that, that is something that I can’t bother with. I have to just do my own thing. The right people will see me, I’ll get the right recognition, but this is also a business. And when there’s not a lot of people who look like me in the business, I’m going to be the one that maybe doesn’t have the credentials or I don’t have the right this or the right that when it’s other people that get platformed and I’ve talked to people who are way, way more popular than me and then I’m like, “Oh, you don’t know anything.

That’s odd and you have six books out. That’s interesting. That’s odd, but it’s a business and I hope that answered it.

Shay Yeah, I think it did. I think well said. Because there’s an element there too of healing that has to happen, right? And because this show is a conversation on healing, I would be interested to think about how what you just shared relates to your understanding or even definition or description of what healing is. How do we actually heal? How do we heal at that level, like with racial injustice and trauma, how do we heal in the ways that you’re encouraging people to heal in your book, embody your magic by using a lot of different kind of known practices to evolve and grow in their own lives?

Aycee Well, my grandmother used to always say, my job as a Black woman is not to show people who started the problem how to heal it. Somebody has to have a meeting. They have to do their work and figure it out because I don’t have anything to do with that, about that journey from that perspective as far as racial injustice and all of that. History has already shown itself to Black women helping everyone out and people turning on us. There’s several movements that all go back all the way to Phyllis Wheatley of this happening. So we are opting out. So it’s not our jobs to do that in this day and age. However, in the healing process just where I help people heal and I have clients from all sorts of backgrounds, you have to be honest with yourself. You have to tell the truth. So when you can tell the truth about what happened, what is, that is half the battle.

We have a huge disconnect for people in the industry, outside of the industry, with racial injustices. They’re not telling the truth about what happened. And so they’re overlooking it. So if you’re going to keep on overlooking it, you can’t get down to the bottom of it if you’re saying it didn’t happen or you’re saying, “Oh, well, it didn’t happen that way.” Or, my favorite, “It wasn’t that bad.” So I can’t work with that. We opt out, majority of Black women are opting out. We can’t work with that. We’ve tried or we’ve given advice over the years. My aunt was a Black Panther, God rest her soul. I know a lot more that I could talk about for days. And yeah, there’s nothing for us to do. We can’t help you. Got to help yourself.

Shay And I think you just named such an important core element to healing in the way you shared that, which is honesty and authenticity. Nothing heals without honestly looking at it and speaking authentically the truth. That is a foundational piece of healing of any kind, right? Yeah. If there’s somebody that’s listening, who’s really just kind of starting on a healing journey, maybe they’re younger or maybe they’ve just had a life that didn’t allow them the opportunity to explore any of this stuff and they finally have a moment to explore it and they’re listening to podcasts like yours in this one. And where would you tell them to begin? They’re in the very early stages, what would you suggest?

Aycee Absolutely. And I tell people who I meet all the time, number one, worry about yourself. That’s the worry about yourself. Focus on yourself, how you feel, what you’re learning, what you’re growing from, what you’re healing from, what you’re telling the truth about. Start there because what I notice with people who do have trauma, whether it’s little T trauma or big T trauma, they are worried about what other people are going to think if they tell the secrets of the family or they tell what really happened. So they’re trying to manage everyone else’s feelings instead of just worrying about their experience and worrying about themselves. And that would be the first step. The second step, if they can find some type of therapy that does work for them, because in that process, when you do have trauma, you do need someone to believe you. And that is usually a big disconnect when you’re trying to grow and you’re starting out because you’re in an environment that for so long may have told you that you were this or you were that.

And so you already believe that you need someone to believe you and that can be different types of therapy, whether it’s so somatic, talk therapy, there’s so many different practices. And then once you have those two pieces, you have a really good chance of your journey, you getting the most out of your journey, but also knowing too, number three, that is a journey. There’s no destination. This is a journey. It’s not going to happen overnight. You’re actually not going anywhere. There’s no insight. This is a journey. So those would be the three pieces is to You worry about yourself, find someone that believes you and know that this is a journey.

Shay I think that’s super helpful. And certainly the resources that you have on your website and that you include in the book are great for helping people to work through their own journey. Because like you said, it’s a process. Everyone in some level that I’ve interviewed on this show, when you ask them about healing, it’s always like that, a journey, a process. It’s never a magic moment and then everything’s transformed. There can be moments like that that feel quick and transformative, but it’s still part of a larger unfolding. Well, I want to just give you an opportunity if there’s anything you haven’t shared with our listeners that you’re like, wait, I just want to say that one thing or give that resource or share that idea. This is an opportunity for you to do that.

Aycee Well, of course, buy the book, Embody Your Magic. If you want to go deeper and do the work, reach out to me. I do one-off sessions, coaching, group coaching, invite me to speak. I love retreats. I’ve done so many retreats. So if you have a retreat idea, I love coming in and teaching people about these modalities and helping them, especially in larger groups and audiences. But my biggest thing would be if you are contemplating changing your life in any way, shape or form, whether it’s an external change or an internal change, listen to that voice that’s pushing you there. Don’t let it get so painful that you have no other choice. Listen to those small little inklings of you knowing like, “Oh, I need to change this. Oh, I want something better. I want to do something better.” Regardless if it’s in relationships, career, money, health.

Take the small steps. You don’t have to lose 50 pounds in three months. Maybe you just focus on drinking a half a gallon of water every day. You don’t have to necessarily become the vice president of the company. Maybe your first step is to become middle management. Take some small action to those desires that you have that are calling you so you can start moving forward. Because each day that you don’t move towards a desire, it makes you feel like life may not be worth it and it is. Your life is worth it. You are unique. There’s only one of you. You get to choose how you play the cards that you’ve been dealt. And I always, this is a joke, but I always tell people, just heal so you don’t have to do this next lifetime if you want to come back. I don’t want to do this again.

I’m opting out. I want to be a spirit guide. I don’t even want to come back. I want to be a spirit guy or a dog, a part of a really great family. That’s it. I don’t want to come back human. So I’m getting all of it out now.

Shay That’s good advice. Yeah. Well, I want to thank you so much Aycee for joining us on The Conversations on Healing Podcast and having a really deep and thoughtful conversation. So thank you for the work that you do.

Aycee Thank you for having me.

Shay Absolutely my pleasure.

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