The Remembrance Codes

Feel It All: The Sacred Power of Embodiment

• Susan Sutherland

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Feeling "too much" has become spiritual taboo in a world obsessed with high vibrations and manifestation. But what if emotional neutrality is just fear in disguise? 

This episode challenges the spiritual bypassing that's become all too common. That subtle voice warning you not to celebrate too loudly so you don't invite disaster, or the pressure to transcend emotions quickly because they are "low vibration." 

We explore embodiment beyond the confines of high-vibration culture and emotional hierarchy and expand tools that many of us have relied on. 

While the Map of Consciousness has helped many name and navigate their inner world, it can also unintentionally shame the very emotions that make us human. What if grief, anger, and tenderness aren’t signs you’ve fallen behind - but invitations to return more fully to yourself?

I introduce Magdalene’s Spiral of Remembrance as a softer, truer way to meet your emotions - not as problems to fix, but as portals to presence. 

This is a conversation for anyone who’s been told they’re too much… and is ready to feel it all without apology.

We are not here to move upward, but inward.  And all of your feelings are doorways.

Available for free in The Keepers' Garden:
*Magdalene's Spiral of Remembrance
*Seven Steps of Embodiment


Speaker 1:

Hello, beautiful soul, and welcome to the Remembrance Codes. Today's episode is for the ones who have ever wondered if feeling too much means they're doing it wrong. I'm going to be talking a lot about embodiment on this podcast, so today's episode is an important one to really expand on teachings about feelings and tools that I have shared before. So this is for the ones who have been told to be high vibe, who learned to smile through grief, or who clipped the wings of their joy because they feared what would come next. Embodiment isn't about fixing or escaping. It's about inhabiting. It means coming home to your body as sacred ground, not a problem to solve. It's choosing to feel what's here without shame, to breathe into the ache without bypassing. To breathe into the ache without bypassing, to let your cells and your muscles and your heartbeat be part of the revelation, not just your mind, because wisdom doesn't live in your thoughts alone. It lives in your skin, in your spine, in the way your belly tightens or your throat softens. Embodiment is the practice of remembering that your truth is not a concept, it is presence, and that presence begins here and it honors all of the feels. Presence begins here and it honors all of the feels. So let's begin by naming a falsehood that so many of us have internalized that if you feel too good, life will knock you down. That it's safest to stay neutral, not too high, not too low, because the universe always needs to balance your happiness with hardship. Maybe you've felt that too. It's the fear that if you let yourself truly fly, that something's going to come and knock you out of the sky. So you stop flying, you become careful with your joy, measured in your celebration, and slowly you become numb to everything in between. But here's what Magdalene taught me you are not the storm, you are the sky. Emotions are weather, they swirl, they rise, they release, but they are not who you are, you are the vastness that holds them. So let's talk about the pendulum.

Speaker 1:

We're often taught that the pendulum swings too high into joy or bliss or ecstasy, that it must swing equally low. So the safe path is to minimize extremes, to aim for neutrality. But neutrality like that is not peace, because it's rooted in fear. Trying to stay neutral as a way to avoid pain is just another form of contraction. It doesn't make you safe, it makes you small, and you were not made to live in emotional grayscale. You can experience the peak of joy without fearing loss. You can feel grief without letting it define you. The goal is not to avoid the swing, but to expand your consciousness so vastly that the swing no longer feels like a threat. In that space, neutrality isn't numbness, it's the seat of the observer, it's the sacred witness who allows all experience without distortion.

Speaker 1:

You are not the pendulum. You are not the pendulum. You are not the swing. You are the field in which the pendulum moves. So you are never meant to fear joy in case sorrow follows. Nor are you meant to suppress sorrow in hopes of staying stable. You are the sky, not the weather. The pendulum does swing, let it. The key is to finding your center within it, to stay anchored in your sky while the weather moves through. Because when you trust that you are not the storm, you no longer fear the rain or the thunder, or even the sun. You can laugh without bracing for loss and you can cry without believing that you've slipped into darkness. You can feel without fear, and friends you must. Spiritual neutrality may actually be the direct avoidance of the depth that embodiment offers. And that's not you. You came here to feel fully, not to flatten your human experience with predictability and neutrality. Flatten your human experience with predictability and neutrality.

Speaker 1:

So next I want to talk about the map of consciousness For a minute. It is the one that Dr David R Hawkins made popular. I've spoken about it many times on Wake Up With Susan. I am longing to expand how I know this map now, because the map of consciousness offers a beautifully organized scalar model from shame to enlightenment that many find clarifying and directional. It presents each level of consciousness as a vibration or frequency and aligns each with corresponding emotions and life views and perceptions of God. And many have used it, as I have, to show how rising into courage or love or joy is part of the path of awakening and that even emotions that we've been taught to fear, like anger, can serve as stepping stones out of lower frequencies like apathy or shame. And yet the model, while helpful, is linear, and we are not.

Speaker 1:

The map is a tool. It is not a cosmic rule book. So when we treat it like a compass, it can point us toward what's next on our evolutionary spiral. But when we treat it as a ladder to climb or as a hierarchy of better emotions, it can become subtly spiritualized shame. You may already sense this when you see that anger is a step up. You're honoring the movement from collapse to aliveness, and that's real. But what the map doesn't always fully hold is the medicine of the moment.

Speaker 1:

Sometimes grief isn't a low vibration, it's a portal. I gave that a whole episode because it needs to be understood and lived. Sometimes sadness isn't something to transcend, it's the exact texture needed for after decades of silence. And this is where embodiment comes in. What the map doesn't show is the spiral. So in this space, we are going to shift away from the ladder and talk about the feminine path that Magdalene walked. It is the descent into feeling, not as regression but as return. There is no hierarchy of feelings, there is only degrees of remembrance. Shame forgets, grief begins to remember, anger clears, courage steps forward. Love, when embodied, doesn't flee the shadows, it kneels beside them. And enlightenment is not above emotion, it is intimacy with all of it. And fear doesn't mean you've blocked your manifestation, it means you're alive. It means the spiral is asking you to move inward again, not backwards deeper. So, yes, use the math, but don't worship it, because your soul doesn't follow coordinates, it follows currents.

Speaker 1:

To honor this embodiment, walk for me, because I am called now to be all up in my feelings. We have created magdalene's spiral of remembrance. This spiral is not a ladder to climb but a path to walk barefoot, circling inward and upward toward your own divine essence. Each emotion is not a block to transcend, but a messenger bearing truth. Messenger bearing truth. We honor the frequency and the function of each state, not to categorize but to remember. The walk inward doesn't flatten the human experience into high and low. It shows us that everything belongs, because healing doesn't happen on a ladder. It happens in a spiral of remembrance where every emotion has wisdom and every layer of feeling brings you closer to your own truth. So I'm not going to go through every emotion, but each have an invitation, a sacred function and the embodied remembrance. So I'll share a couple with you so you understand how it works. I guess differently than the map of consciousness, but it is available for free at the Remembrance Codes Collection in the Keeper's Garden. You just sign up as a free member and you'll be able to download it.

Speaker 1:

Two that I think are good to touch on here, to just share what this looks like. One is guilt. Guilt is the misplacement of responsibility and the invitation that guilt holds is to reclaim your choices with compassion. The sacred function that guilt offers is to teach discernment between action and identity, and the embodied practice is to release apology as identity and breathe into your belly and say I am still whole. So that's just how one of the emotions works, what it offers you, and how you kind of sit with that emotion and start embracing it and finding the wisdom that it is asking you to turn into, to find, to go collect your gift from this feeling. Another one I'll share with you is acceptance. It is the soft unfolding and the invitation is to meet reality as it is. The sacred function is it ends the war with what has been and the embodied practice is to lay your palms open and whisper. Even this belongs because it does so.

Speaker 1:

The Magdalene spiral does walk us through shame to remembrance or enlightenment, but it has an offering, not a score, which I have found really helpful. You are not ascending away from your humanness. You are descending deeper into your soul, not by avoiding the good feelings because you fear the universe is going to settle the score, because you fear the universe is going to settle the score, or by bypassing and denying the low frequency feelings because you fear them. We sit with all of it, because we know that our feelings hold gifts. Are you going to look a gift giver in the mouth? Are you going to do that? Let the spiral hold you. Let the spiral hold you. Let the spiral be you. Not perfect, not linear, but alive.

Speaker 1:

And I promise, as you begin this reframe, if needed, away from spiritual teachings that have moved you up the ladder or have you feeling like good vibes only get your dream life, or that celebrating will invite disaster, I want to invite you to truth. The highest expression is authenticity and you can't fake the system. So believe me when I say that the path inward is far more profound than one seeking upward. To guide you on the path of embodiment, I want to share the seven steps that I practice, seven steps of embodiment and how to walk in the spiral without losing your grounding, without losing your footing, how to allow emotion without drowning. And I told you you don't need to take notes, so this will also be in the Remembrance Codes collection on the Keeper's Garden. It's free, just go grab it, it is yours. But here are the seven steps that I return to again and again.

Speaker 1:

Number one awareness. Name what's alive in you, not with judgment, just presence. Two permission Let it be there. Let it exist, without silencing it or feeling like you need to fix it. Three curiosity when do I feel this in my body? What memory, what truth is surfacing? Four breath Stay with it. Breath, stay with it. Let your breath keep you anchored as the feeling moves through you. Five movement Shake, stretch, yawn, weep, dance. Allow your body to transmute the emotion. Six compassion. Wrap the feeling in love. Hold it like it's a child. It is not who you are, it is what you are witnessing. Wrap it right on up in your love. And seven integration Ask what has this emotion taught me? What part of me just came home? Often, when we are experiencing a big emotion, it is a part of us that is ready to be integrated. Sit with it. Call yourself home, embrace the feeling, embrace this emotion, embrace the part of you that needed to be witnessed.

Speaker 1:

I have been spiraling in and in and in on myself and what I have found is that the deeper truth that I am walking in, the more available I am for all emotions, and when I say available, I mean they are present and there's no avoiding. They are just there. And some of that has been surprising for my family, because truth is not always soft and where I may have bit my tongue or choked back tears before I freaking, can't. If it is not in congruence, it can't stay. It must be spoken, it must be expressed. The tears fall, the words are spoken and and that's just how it is, because that's embodiment, I don't cry less, I cry more. I allow joy to move me to tears, but I also allow disappointment and frustration and sadness. I allow emotions to express fully in my human, not conceptually, but viscerally.

Speaker 1:

So if you've been hiding your joy back, let it rise. If you have been shaming your sadness, let it speak. If you have been hovering in neutrality out of fear, come back to the spiral. You're not too much, your feelings aren't too much. Your feelings aren't low vibe. You're not going to mess up your life by being honest with your humanity. You are the sky and you are the spiral, and your body is the altar where life is felt and transfigured. So let it be holy and let it be whole. All of it it's yours and it's magnificent. So don't forget to go grab your spiral of remembrance and the seven steps to embodiment from the Keeper's Garden and I will see you next week. Feel all of your feelings. All of them, I love you. Have a good week.

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Susan Sutherland

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