Johnny Burke: Welcome to Closer to Venus I’m Johnny Burke and today’s guest is Dr. Susan Corso. She is a medical intuitive, metaphysician and author of several books, as well as publisher of the Ampersand Gazette. Today, we’ll be talking about the human energy system as seen through a prism Dr. Susan, welcome to the show.
Susan Corso: Thank you very much, Johnny. It’s very nice to be here
Johnny Burke: This is the first time I’ve had someone on that is a medical intuitive. Before we get into that, how did you find yourself on this path?
Susan Corso: Well, find yourself on this path is a really good way to put it is the truth.
Johnny Burke: Okay.
Susan Corso: I wasn’t intuitive as a child as so often happens to children who are intuitive. I knew the bad things that were going to happen because bad things have more emotional intensity than good things. So I shut it down at about age eight. I said, ‘yeah, I’m done. I don’t want this. I don’t want to know this. not interested. ‘And then when I was 25, a friend of mine gave me a psychic reading for my birthday And I walked into this woman’s house and she said to me, ” you should be reading for me”. I said, “what? ” Long story short. She told me that I was a healer in Egypt, a color healer.
Johnny Burke: Oh my..
Susan Corso: I was a little more grounded in reality in those days. Or what seems like reality. I said,” yeah, right.” So a friend of mine came, took me out for dinner. I’m telling her about this. And we decide we’re going to go to East West Books on Fifth Avenue in New York City, which is a spiritual bookstore, and look for books on color healing and find out what is going on here. I’m standing in front of a whole bookshelf, and these three books fell off the shelf in front of me. My friend’s name was Susan. I said to her “Sue?” She said,” yeah, they fell, you’re right.” Aha. So I bought the books, I get home and I’m reading and I’m about 50 pages into one and I, said,” I know this stuff. I already know this stuff.””
Johnny Burke: What were the books?
Susan Corso: They were all books about how to use color and energy and vibration for healing.
Johnny Burke: As a child, you had intuitive impressions. You knew things that were going to happen, which sounds like a psychic ability. Did you have any experience with the spirit world as a child?
Susan Corso: Yes, because what actually turned my intuition on was the very tragic and unexpected death of my father. My father was killed in a plane crash, when I was five. It’s terrible enough that he was killed in a plane crash. But in those days, this was a long, long time ago before they had to notify next of kin, my mother heard his name as being one of the deceased in this plane crash on the radio, with me in the car on the way to pick him up from the airport.
Johnny Burke: Wow.
Susan Corso: Yeah, she freaked out and I, of course, I’m five. I don’t know what this is. She said to me, “mommy needs a police car ” and she put me on the roof of our lemon-yellow VW bug. And I closed my little eyes and I put my fists in the air and I said, I need a police car. And I opened my eyes and there was a black and white in front of me. I don’t know how that happened. I can’t tell you to this day, how that happened, but that was when my intuition started to work overtime. And I started to see things to know who was going to be in a car accident, who was going to call on the phone with bad news, who was going to have a family problem. I started seeing problems in my mom’s friends’ marriages. I mean like weird stuff for a kid.
Johnny Burke: Very weird.
Susan Corso: Yeah. As part of that, yes, I did see my father- the spirit world question. I did see my father. No one else did and I kept my mouth shut about it. And I have periodically over the years, seen him since, once or twice, but not in dramatic situations, not in painful situations, just in everyday situations. I was out at a restaurant and looked up at the bar and there, he was.
Johnny Burke: What did he look like?
Susan Corso: Like himself.
Johnny Burke: Did he look the same age? Did he look older? Did he look younger?
Susan Corso: To me, he looked the same age. Understanding that, Earth time is going by and I’m growing up. And my perception of him is as a five-year-old, my last perception of him. So I don’t see him as aging, the 20, some odd years
I’ve lived since then. I saw him as I saw him as a child. So he was in his early twenties. He was 26, I think when he died.
Johnny Burke: Any messages, any dream visitations or anything like that?
Susan Corso: Nope, not a one and he’s not ever sent me a message, like for me to be able to say to you, “oh yeah, Johnny, my dad said, blah. “Nope, never ,just a sense and an abiding sense of his presence. In those days they didn’t tell kids the truth about death. Dr. Spock thought that children couldn’t handle death. So what they said to me and my two younger brothers.I was five, David was three and Frank was about to turn two was “daddy isn’t coming to your birthday party.” It was the whole explanation. so there was no talk about what death was all I knew was that he wasn’t coming back but didn’t know why.
So it took me a very long time to figure out that I had something to grieve and that I have been trying as my nature as a healer to help my mother heal her grief. My mother has three children under the age of five and it’s 1963. And women of her class didn’t work. They were wives and mothers. My mom was at sea. I like to say she moved into a martini glass for a year. And then she married three alcoholics in a row just for fun.
Johnny Burke: Wow.
Susan Corso: Well, it was a lab of sorts for me and I don’t drink because of it.
Johnny Burke: So you found out, or you were told at an early age that you were a healer, I believe in Egypt. Was that ancient Egypt? That obviously brings up the subject of past lives. Do you have any insight into that, or did you experience a past life or several of them?
Susan Corso: I have. I have done past life regression a couple of times. I do find past lives as commonly spoken of in the world of woo, as they say. not everybody was Nefertiti -sorry, but we weren’t, you weren’t Johnny. I’m sorry.
Johnny Burke: I never said I was- the last time someone, asked what I was in the past life, and I have no idea -I’ve had no experiences. I jokingly said,” yes, I had a life in Rome. I was a whipping boy” and they all started laughing. I am skeptical of claims of being Marilyn Monroe or Queen of Sheba or Cleopatra ,yeah.
Susan Corso: So I think I was a temple priestess in Egypt. And what I have done is not experienced that life, but I have researched Ancient Egypt, Egyptian worship and liturgy and spiritual systems. I could see how my skillset would’ve been recognized and developed at that time. It’s a form of energy healing. You can call it Reiki or you can call it Prana or you can call it Chi or you can call it Harold. I don’t care. it’s an ability to interface on an energetic level with anything.
One of the things that happens to me when I walk into someone’s house, is I can see the static energy all around their electronic devices. People leave their computers on, and they don’t clean them energetically. I personally believe that there is such a thing as reincarnation, and that do choose to embody, but I don’t think that there is anything more important about a past life than this one ever. The reason for that is if this one wasn’t the most important, you wouldn’t be here. We need you here as Johnny Burke this time. And it doesn’t matter if you were a whipping boy in Rome or you weren’t
Johnny Burke: I have no idea by the way, I just made that up.
Susan Corso: Yes. I know, but you know what? That’s probably true. And you’re going to get to wherever you go after you’re here and someone’s going to say to you”, Hey, that whipping boy thing was pretty damn smart of you!”
Johnny Burke: And it actually was because I think the lives that we’ve had in the past and the life we have right now is part of a progression. Just out of curiosity, I wanted to ask you about Egypt; you apparently had that life, as let’s say a priestess. Was that in ancient Egypt, like before recorded history, or was it during the time the Pharaohs?
Susan Corso: During the time of the Pharaohs.
Johnny Burke: Did it seem at that time, that the culture, the civilization was perhaps more advanced, consciousness-wise than the one we’re now? Or was it about the same?
Susan Corso: My experience of it, you have to understand a temple priestess is a person who has set aside the chariot mechanics, she doesn’t deal with those people. She’s dealing with people who are on a spiritual journey, because she’s an embodiment of clergy, we would call it today. So given that, I would say that there was a much more, conscious group of people assembled who knew one another. Now we would call that a religious sect now, or a religion or a denomination, in our common parlance. I think there were people who did consciousness work in Egypt. I think that was so during Roman times, I think it was so during Greek civilization, and I think as humanity hit essentially the Middle Ages and the rise of the ecclesia, the Catholic Church.
that was the universal church and the keeping down of the masses as uneducated. When education, the ability to learn about your own self began to be curtailed, because you were only valued for what you could do instead of what you could think or what you could be. Can you plow a field? Good. You do that. So it’s a reductionism, in the perception and treatment of humanity on the part of the priesthood that I think has hurt our civilization damningly to this point.
Johnny Burke: It sounds like if you can imagine consciousness values or, frequency,it kind of hit a peak. And when this happened with the church, the consciousness seemed to be literally going down.
Susan Corso: Well, not going down, but stifled deliberately in the name of power, in the name of greed and in the name of control. And it was power. And it was greed for which is then a belief in,’ I win, you lose.’ Here’s the establishment of polarity, as opposed to we, it’s I. Its ego centered when, before it was much more collective. We live in a village, and I plant potatoes and you plant kale or whatever they were planting in those days. And we swap, I give you potatoes, you get kale. We’re good because we understand that I can’t plant potatoes and kale in the same place. And neither can you.
Johnny Burke: it seems like there’s a comparison between the Piscean Age and Aquarian Age, and the values are much different. Let’s go back to your origins as a healer. Do you get a sense that your mission, or your purpose is to be a healer in this incarnation?
Susan Corso: For a time, I thought that was true. And I still do some one-on-one healing work. I think my greater purpose at this point, I came to earth with an ability to explain very complicated spiritual concepts in simple terms. If I’m in a room full of engineers, civil engineers who make dams, I’m going to use mechanical imagery to help them understand reincarnation, let’s say. My ability is to metaphorize, concepts for access.
What I really think, I am an advocate for humans to understand something fundamental that I think we’ve forgotten. And that’s this, you, Johnny Burke are an integrity unto yourself. I am an integrity unto myself. I am not a flawed, broken problem. So everyone we deal with is actually whole, we have forgotten that though. So I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but so many people in the world these days are leading with their victimhood, right?’ Oh, well, that’s a trigger for me. I can’t talk about that ‘or ‘that’s a trigger for me.’
Johnny Burke: Didn’t Edgar Cayce once say, “there are no victims”?
Susan Corso: I don’t know if he did. That’s awesome if he did.
Johnny Burke: He did. As we wade into the world of the intuitives, I hear more and more people talk about the reincarnation cycle and pre-birth planning ,life in between lives and plan their mission when they come down here- of course they forget. A lot of them do talk about there are no victims. There really isn’t any tragedy. There is no good and bad, just experience. And it’s usually planned- a lot of it, for you, for us, to learn. I thought that was interesting that you brought up victimhood, because that implies we’ve forgotten where we came from. Maybe we’re supposed to, maybe we’re not.
Let’s talk about the human energy system. So we know about your origins as a healer, your intuitive gifts. What is the human energy system, as you see it?
#94 Susan Corso: That’s a really good question. When a person goes to medical school, she studies 11 systems. But very few people who go to medical school, ask this question. What makes the circulatory system circulate? other than the fact that there’s a pump. What makes the respiratory system respire? If you know anything about the mysticism of numbers, you know, that 12 is a mystical number. There are 12 systems, the 12th one that’s not studied in medical school is the human energy system. And that is the life force. That is the animating spark that makes all those other 11 systems go.
I deal with the human energy system through the chakras, which is the life force viewed through a prism, which is why the chakras are noted for their colors, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet rose. So that is a prism on the life force. The spark of you. Now I would call that the God spark or the divine spark, but you don’t have to call it that, I don’t think the divine cares either. I think we just need to know that we have an animating something. Now here’s a concept has a huge implication, which is that it came from somewhere and that it means that there’s a bigger system that we all fit into. There’s a reason that I’m talking to Johnny Burke this morning and not anybody else.
Johnny Burke: In other words, no coincidences.
Susan Corso: No, not only are there no coincidences, but I truly believe everything happens for a reason. And sometimes in the moment when it happens, I can get pretty cranky about it. And so can anybody, why did this happen? Well, it didn’t have to, but it did happen. And it happened for a whole series of reasons. Most of them having to do with free will although very few people live based on free will anymore. Most people live based on free won’t.
#94 Johnny Burke: Free won’t? I like that. That’s an interesting concept- you have free won’t – that’s like saying” there, it isn’t”
Susan Corso: Well, that’s exactly right. So here’s the deal about free won’t; free won’t is what you don’t want, not what you do want. I just don’t want this to happen. I just don’t want that to happen. Well, yeah. What do you want ? How the hell is the universe supposed to respond to you? Is if all you’re saying is what you don’t want?
Johnny Burke: I’ve actually had a discussion about this the other day with another speaker and she was telling me, “you have to be very specific.”
Susan Corso: Amen.
Johnny Burke: in your requests, your ask for, benevolent outcomes and you can’t just say,” I want money.” You have to ask for,” I need $1,700 before this date”
Susan Corso: that’s exactly right.
Johnny Burke: That’s what I’m told anyway.
Susan Corso: This, so I think that’s exactly right, because otherwise, let’s slip to the other side of the conversation, right? The response is,” well, the law of attraction doesn’t work. “Sure. It does. It’s bringing to you everything you say you don’t want, because that’s all you’re saying.
Johnny Burke: Is that like worrying is praying for what you don’t want?
Susan Corso: Yes Sir,
Johnny Burke: There’s been a lot of books and seminars and courses to educate people about chakras. What are some of the biggest misconceptions about chakras?
Susan Corso: What a great question. The first one is that they’re hockey pucks that line up against the spine, like solid discs. They are in color, right? colored discs up your spine. That’s not what chakras are- not even close. Chakras. A, are three-dimensional. B, are in motion and C ,yes, they go along your spine, but they go in front of your spine. They’re in the center of your body, like from here straight down. It’s not little soldiers on your spine, That’s number one. Number two., and this is the one that I am very rah-rah about in particular. If I played middle C for you on a piano and said to you, ” Johnny, this is music” you would say, ” no, it’s not ,it’s middle C.” What happens to make music? Well, somebody talks to middle C. and there’s another note.
The chakra system is a system because they all work together. The most important thing about the chakra is, is that they’re talking to each other. Here’s the thing, you can’t divide and conquer the chakra system. You can’t” okay. I’m going to clean up my third chakra.”. Right. If, if you were in an ER and somebody brought in somebody with a gunshot wound, would you poke it? You wouldn’t, you would look at the tissue all around it and see what it needed.
If you came to me with a third chakra issue, which is yellow, it’s at your solar plexus, and it’s your seat of power in the world. I’m not even going to touch your third chakra. I’m going to go to your second chakra, which is orange, which is what your passions are. And I’m going to see about the space in between them. What’s the yellow-orange doing.? And then I’m going to go to your heart chakra, which is a beautiful Emerald green, and I’m going to go What is it that you love that is thwarting your power? Or what is your power thwarting what you love? And so I’m going to work in the chakras above and below. And I’m going to tell you to work in the chakras above and below rather than poke the wound. Well, the coolest thing in the whole wide world about the chakras, and this is my number three thing about chakras, is that they live in your body and your body is an amazing source of information because bodies don’t lie. The reason bodies don’t lie is because they can’t. Not possible.
Johnny Burke: So how does the common man learn about chakras, in a practical sense? How should they start to begin to learn?
Susan Corso: It depends on what kind of learner you are. You can learn a lot about chakras from books and there are bunches of them and everybody, and their sister has a whole different system and idea about how chakras work. If you’re serious about your chakra work, I wrote eight workbooks on how to learn to work with your own chakra system. And they will teach you depth about chakras. On the other hand, any basic book on chakras, you read will give you a sense of them, but the real way to learn about chakras, it’s to start to pay attention to your own body because shocks have sensation that’s attached to them.
Monday mornings are the worst days in the week for suicide, for example, and that’s a statistic that has been around for decades. Well, if every Sunday night you get a stomachache, I would say to you,” okay, that stomachache is giving you information. Do you have the same thing every Sunday night? If you do stop eating that, whatever it is.” What’s actually going on in your stomach? You’re dreading going to work. What is the message of that dread? What is that about? Is there a person at work that you can’t deal with? Is there a situation at work that you can’t deal with? Is it the work itself? Is it getting there? There are a million reasons to dread going to work, so it’s to start to pay attention to yourself and your own bodily reactions to things, and then to start to ask questions. The first question I would ask anybody, is, is it hot or cold? Which is such a jarring question because you don’t think of an emotion, like dread as having a temperature.
But if it’s cold, it’s probably sad or afraid. And if it’s hot, it’s probably angry. Oh, is it on the front side of your body or the back side of your body? that dread?” Oh, it’s on the front. “Well, if it’s on the front, it has to do with your everyday life. If it’s on the back side of your body, it has to do with your past. Doesn’t matter if it’s past lives or last week or yesterday. So let’s locate it and then let’s start to ask the dread itself, what’s going to help you.?
I had a situation much like that with a client once. And it turned out that the thing he loved his job absolutely loved his jobs. It made no sense that his reaction was dread. It turned out that what it was about for him completely was having to drive to work, he didn’t like the drive to, or from work. He found it stupidly stressful. Well, now his opinion of himself was that I’m a guy who can drive to work. It’s no big deal. But he didn’t like it. I said, “that’s stupid. Pay a friend some gas money, put your headphones on and get a ride to and from work Take an Uber. Do whatever you got to do” well, do you know what? In like two weeks, once he had it worked out, friend to drive him to work his stomach quit hurting. That’s a perfect example.
Johnny Burke: Is energy medicine, closely related or are we actually talking about energy medicine or is that something different?
Susan Corso: We’re talking about energy medicine. The people who work in official energy medicine and I have been one of those people wouldn’t tell you that it was about the chakra system, but they will tell you that it’s about the connectivity in the body, the lymph system, the collagen vascular system. They’ll talk about relationships of things and ENT isn’t thinking about what’s going on in your gut. They’re not. Your nose and throat are thinking about ear nose and throat. Gut doctor is thinking about gut. I’m here to tell you that the ear nose, throat, and gut are connected. That’s not how Western medicine has it hooked up. They have the divide and conquer approach.
Johnny Burke: What if someone was interested in these disciplines, but instead went to shaman. How would a shaman relate the chakras in that system to what this person wanted to explore?
Susan Corso: Indigenous shamanism is about soul work, and soul work is absolutely part of the energy system. Most indigenous systems have their own versions of the chakra system, but they’re different. Usually there are fewer, chakras. In the west we have more occasions to use chakra work and energy in an outward-focused way. And the shaman is going to be in an inward-focused way. So the shaman is interested in changing the being of the person, and then the doing will change. When people come to me, they want to know how to change their doing. And I have to take them the long way, which is through their being.
You are drawn to shamanistic work; you’re going to be connecting with energy. You’re going to be connecting with the soul. You’re going to be connecting with the unseen. Connecting with what I would call the real of a human being, of yourself. Most shamans are capable of journeying within your psyche and structure. To be sure that all of it is connecting and talking to one another. They’ll just do it in their own way. Much of shamanism is soul retrieval. Pieces of soul that are cut off and need to be brought back into present time and integrated.
Johnny Burke: I like that. Let’s talk about the Ampersand Gazette.
Susan Corso: The Ampersand Gazette is based on a sentence that I have been saying for years and years, which is the most important word in every language is” and.” the reason I say that it’s opposite the word,” or” is part of the very simple explanation for how we have gotten ourselves into this horrible polarization that we’re in right now. So I started writing the Ampersand Gazette because it’s a metaphysical take on the news. A way to think about the news that first of all is meant to make you think. And secondly is to say, “aha, maybe this is happening so that we’ll learn this. Maybe there’s a reason that Roe v Wade was overturned and it’s so that we all start to get more active and involved in our political system because there’s a whole lot of lethargy and a whole lot of no, no, no. There are reasons for things I ask people to think about those reasons.
Johnny Burke: I think it goes back to what we were talking about before. Instead of looking at something like, ‘why does this happen to me?’ and ‘why is this happening, and why are these rednecks, holding up a sign ‘Jail for Hillary’? This is going back a couple of years
Susan Corso: Yes, exactly.
Johnny Burke: outside of a church. The best way I think to look at is, what’s the lesson here? I told a story about a girl I knew when I was 18. I thought she was mean as a snake. The man I was talking to- an intuitive,said,” you know, Johnny, chances are you signed up for that.” Would you agree that’s probably a conscious approach to the events around you? These things are happening for a reason.
Susan Corso: I think that’s true. I also think, and here’s another use of the word “and “. So my girlfriend dumped to me, my answer to you as a counselor is going to be “and? So if you need to feel bad, that’s great. I’ll give you 30 seconds. That’s no problem. Feel bad for 30 seconds and then let’s figure out, huh? What’s the message? And what am I supposed to do next? Where do I need to go? What do I need to think? Do I need to forgive myself for something? Do I need to think about something differently? Do I need to examine some of my own behavior? Because the only side of the street, Johnny, that you can clean up is your side.
Johnny Burke: It’s true.
Susan Corso: So why was my dad killed in a plane crash when I was a kid? Somewhere, I agreed to that.
Johnny Burke: That was in the planning.
Susan Corso: That’s right.
Johnny Burke: You agreed to that. I’ll use an example I was, watching Gaia TV. This episode where they were talking about the in-between space, life in between lives and this man, apparently, experienced the mean uncle. They finally got to communicating and the mean uncle said,” don’t you remember? We agreed to this. That just blew my mind.
Susan Corso: Which is one of the reasons why working on your own consciousness, thinking about yourself, learning to listen to your body, paying attention to your own energy. the people I encounter most days are absolutely toast. they’re overburdened. They’re overwhelmed. They’re overscheduled they don’t have a minute to think, they can’t read a book. And I go, “whoa, wait, what are you doing to take care of your own energy?” Instead of constantly being bombarded with more information and more input. No, no, no. That’s why I like my chakra workbooks. That’s why I like the listen to the body part of this.
I’d like to offer your listeners a gift Johnny, before you let me go and that’s this: there’s a way to start working with your chakras right now, today. If you’ll go to chakras.susancorso.com I’ll ask John if he’ll put it in the show notes. There is something that I call the chakra less mores, a behavior that goes with each chakra sometimes to do less of something, sometimes to do more of something.
So let’s talk about the first chakra, which is sort of a Bing Cherry red and it’s about survival and your clan and where you belong here and food, clothing, shelter, warmth. Cool. So the less, more is: complain less, and thank more. If you go to chakras.susancorso.com, you can get a copy of the less mores for you to download for free. You don’t have to put your email address, in it’s really free. I will confess that a second landing page comes up for you to put your email address. And if you want more information about my chakra work, be that as it may, you could start working with the less mores right now. Pay attention where in your body is calling you, pick the chakra that’s closest to it and do a less, or do a more.
Susan Corso: I can look at you and I can read your energy and I can connect to your aura, and I can do all that kind of stuff. It’s much more important what you think about your energy? So I spend an awful lot of time teaching people how to work with their own energy. How do you regenerate? How do you come out of that exhausted thing? One of the things I say to people all the time is just say the colors, red, orange, yellow, go trace them up your body so that you are aware of how your system is starting to work together or where it disconnects.
Johnny Burke: You have a gift, and I would also encourage those of you who like the idea, the Ampersand Gazette, have a look at that. I think there’s definitely a lesson there, Susan. Thanks so much for joining us today. I take it the best way to find out more about you and your practices. Susan corso.com as well as www.chakra.SusanCorso.com
Susan Corso: as well as a website , www.Impersand.org. There’s a lot more chakra work there.