#52 Stephanie Red Feather: The Evolutionary Empath
Johnny Burke: Welcome to Closer to Venus, I’m Johnny Burke. Today’s guest is Reverend Dr. Stephanie Red Feather, a shamanic minister, healer, founder of Blue Star Temple, and author of The Evolutionary Empath. Today, we will be talking about her journey on becoming a shamanic minister and what we need to know about empaths. Stephanie, welcome to the program.
Stephanie Red Feather: Thanks so much, John.
Johnny Burke: A very interesting path you have followed; what made you choose shamanism and becoming a healer and so forth.
Stephanie Red Feather: Yeah, well, the path chose me, as is the way it goes so often. like quick snapshot of my childhood, I was a very creative, intuitive child. I went to a performing arts school, like the TV show fame. I played Cowboys and Indians. I was always the Indian, long before I knew what a medicine woman was. I had my little, crocheted drawstring bag from the seventies, and it had like little rocks and sticks and costume jewelry and bits of stuff, all the seeds were kind of there. And so this, this very nature girl, performing arts dancer, singer writer, fast forward a few years, and I got a math degree and became an air force officer. What I call the pre-quake tremors began as I was preparing to leave the air force.
I was in for 10 years and had that small, still voice that I’m actually surprised I even heard that said it was time to get out. And I didn’t know what I was going to do next. My financial advisor that I’d been with for 10 years said, “well, Hey, Steph, you’re really good with people, you want to be a financial advisor?” I was like, okay, sure because I didn’t, know how to listen to my heart at that time. I’m like, “oh, you think I’ll be good at that? Okay, I’ll do that. ” And so I prepare to spend all this time and I quit and less than six months. Cause I hated it.
That is what really threw me full force into my spiritual awakening. What ensued is about a five-year period of time that I call the spiritual crucible. Where I was just getting cooked down and cooked down and that I thought was solid, started falling apart. I began questioning everything and I think my spiritual awakening was so painful and long because I was fighting. I did not know how to surrender gracefully. I had no tools. I had no prior experience with something this intense. When my time in the crucible was complete, I was able to tune into the subtle energies and understand and explain what was happening at a very subtle level.
From this experience is how my spiritual business was born. It was like, my heartfelt compelled if I could support other people in their spiritual awakening, or through their traumatic events that traditional psychology and traditional methods of help don’t necessarily touch. So that led me through becoming a Reiki master and learning all different kinds of other healing modalities and pursuing the shamanic path.
Johnny Burke: Well, it seems that often the spiritual awakening is triggered by some kind of intuitive voice. I’m interested, how you chose the shamanic path, what exactly is a shamanic practitioner?
Stephanie Red Feather: A shamanic practitioner is someone who has studied shamanism, whether that’s with an indigenous tribe or, through an apprenticeship. , in this day of modern shamanism lines are not as distinct as they used to be. And the initiations are not necessarily done in the old traditional ways of, of many thousands of years. My belief is that everybody is shamanic in their soul, in their being, whether they choose to express or embrace that is of course up to them.
Johnny Burke: we all have that seed within us.
Stephanie Red Feather: I absolutely believe so. As I study and practice and improving in tradition of shamanism called the Pachakuti Mesa tradition. It was created by my teacher, who’s still alive. His name is Don Oscar Miro Quesada. And he says the shaman’s task is to come into the right relationship and reverent communion with the seen and unseen world. So as to mediate between the worlds on behalf of the community or the individual, shamanism at its heart is recognizing that the entire world is, alive and sentient and communicating.
Johnny Burke: What are the parallels between shamanism and mediumship because they both seem to crossover the veil into the spirit world.
Stephanie Red Feather: In my belief is you could list a hundred different Healing modalities. And to me, they’re all just facets of the same thing. all just ways of connecting with the alive sentiment, communicating universe, mediumship is a way of depending on who they’re connecting with. It could be connecting with your soul. The Akashic Records, a future self. It could be connecting with, people that are connected to you and your soul family or people who have passed. So it’s, it’s just a matter of accessing. Alternate dimensions of reality, which are all out happening at the same time.
We’re all interdimensional travelers. We just may not know it. And it takes some effort to do it consciously. many Shamana traditions are rooted in the idea of. Traveling into different dimensions of time and space, in support of whoever’s come to you for healing or for your own healing,
Johnny Burke: So when you talk about traveling into different dimensions, that obviously it brings up time and space I’ve been told several times that the fifth dimension, for instance, time is not linear. As we know it here on earth. Is it possible to actually go back in time and try to correct something where what has an impact on the future, or is that not realistic?
Stephanie Red Feather: Well, my belief is yes, and there’s a level of responsibility and consciousness that that sort of thing should be done with stepping outside of linear time. That’s part of my spiritual practice part of my shamanic practice. To me, that is essentially the same as saying we’re stepping outside of linear time when we step into these other dimensions. Because in the realm of spirit, all dimensions are happening simultaneously parallel universes, past, present, and future all happening at the same time. So if you think of them as parallel roads running in the same direction, and you’re just kind of hopping from one to the next and what does the view look like over here? And how is my life differently if I look at it from this point of view? And what can I access or learn about myself? If I go to the past, or if I go to the future and, meet a future self.
Johnny Burke: Have you or any of your clients- were they able to go back and actually meet their past or their future self for that matter?
Stephanie Red Feather: Yeah. I worked with people to take them on journeys, to meet their future self, to do soul retrieval pieces, to do I don’t call it past life regression, but just access to past lives to access, maybe something that happened then, that is unresolved or affecting them now, or, or some piece of themselves that got left there. When a traumatic event happens, sometimes a piece of us will stay stuck at that point in space-time, and we can go back and retrieve it and up and bring it back into the whole. so yeah, absolutely.
Johnny Burke: It sounds like there may be certain things that a shamanic practitioner is able to do that maybe a medium cannot. Or are they just different avenues to access the Akashic records?
Stephanie Red Feather: In terms of access, I would say mediumship and shamanism are very similar in that they are just accessing, whatever body whatever field of living intelligence they are connecting with. Mediumship in its pure definition is more of a channel, whereas a shamanic adept or shamanic practitioner usually has a healing component to it where they’re doing some sort of healing work with somebody.
Johnny Burke: Which again, draws a parallel to the past life regression therapist, because often that has to do with healing, something from the past.
Stephanie Red Feather: Yeah, absolutely, and they’re also very related. I don’t stove, pipe them and say well, mediumship is only this and shamanism is this because it is through that access to the other dimensions that we can retrieve the information in the energetic frequencies to help heal it.
Johnny Burke: A lot of these things do seem to be related; lots of spiritually transformative events, mystical experiences like a Kundalini Awakening or a near-death experience; they all seem to access that phenomenon that which we call source or the records or the quantum realm, which may be the same thing. How’d you got the name Blue Star Temple? And tell us a little bit more about why you gravitated toward the Peruvian Shamanic tradition.
Stephanie Red Feather: My business I stood it up in March of 2007 with the name red feather connections, red feather being my last name. and it i, actually a llegal last name. red feathers, a name that came to me in a vision with one of my shamanic teachers. And so, I got married the second time I took it on as my legal last name. I very much believe that everything has energy. Everything has a particular frequency. And several years ago is I was visioning where I was headed in my sacred work. I knew that Red Feather Connections as a name, as an energetic container was coming to an end. And it could not hold the magnitude of what I was stepping into.
And so I was petitioning source: what do I call this new version? And as I was falling asleep one night, in that sort of liminal space, half awake, half asleep, I was almost shocked awake, like sat up in bed. And spirit had just downloaded me with blue star university and yes! Of course! Oh my God, that’s perfect! So, in the coming day, I tuned in, did my spiritual practice, did some journaling, I realized that Blue Star University is, the very, very big, picture end goal that I, I haven’t even into consciousness yet all of what that implies. But what they gave me was the first step of Blue Star Temple. I very much am connected to our cosmic origins, to the idea that we have star relatives, that we are Starseeds. that I am most connected to is Sirius or star technically.
Johnny Burke: you must be reading my mind because that was the next question.
Stephanie Red Feather: So blue, temple really is an homage to my star ancestry of Sirius. To a lesser degree, it also includes the earth as a blue planet and Venus, because I do so much work with the divine feminine and the balance of the masculine and feminine. All that symbolism is wrapped up in the name blue star.
Johnny Burke: Now, since you mentioned Starseeds . One of the things that may be an underserved topic as our relation to other star beings and being reincarnated from other worlds.
Stephanie Red Feather: I definitely believe in reincarnation. That just depends on our souls’ choices, many of us have incarnations off-planet. You know, the earth is not the only place to come and embody.
Johnny Burke: Would it make sense to theorize that David Bowie was definitely not of this earth, in a good way because I think he was called the star man for very good reasons, and it wasn’t just a cute title either.
Stephanie Red Feather: Well, and it’s interesting- I dabble in shamanic astrology It’s a specific way of looking at astrology. It’s, it’s slightly different than traditional astrology. There’s a particular placement where if you have your moon in Aquarius, It actually speaks to many, many lifetimes off-planet. My mom has an Aquarius moon and all her life, she has struggled with being in a meat sack!
Johnny Burke: Why do I feel like an alien? Since you mentioned astrology, I think it’s a very interesting topic when we try to connect the dots. Might be a discussion for another day. But I definitely keep that mind because when we talk about the spirit world, the mediums, and, and shamanism and all these different experiences, eventually that tends to spill over into the star beings and the other worlds. It seems that we know very little about it, but what do we need to know about, being reincarnated from other worlds or other star systems?
Stephanie Red Feather: Well, my belief is that the soul incarnates to experience itself. If you’ve read the Conversations With God books, I’m paraphrasing, but basically, God tells Neale Donald Walsch, who wrote the series, that I didn’t want to just know who I am, I wanted to experience who I am. Incarnating and physical form. The soul was making choices, I think souls have personalities too. Some are more adventurous, some are more pragmatic, and so I definitely believe that many, many people have had off-planet incarnations. And I want to tie it back to shamanism for a moment; just about every indigenous tradition on this planet talks openly about the star beings as part of their creation myths, especially for the Andean traditions, the Pleiadeans are very strong,
Johnny Burke: Definitely.
Stephanie Red Feather: I have a very strong tie to Egypt, many past lives there. Sirius plays a very large role in Egyptian ancient culture. There are many places where you can look in our ancient history and see incredible evidence of being visited by off-planet intelligence.
Johnny Burke: Yes, indeed. You just mentioned you remember some of your past lives. Was that from Egypt or was it a collection of different places? Where did they originate in?
Stephanie Red Feather: Yeah. Just through my own healing work and lots of processes I’ve done over 20 years or whatever, I’ve, I’ve touched in with many different past lives. One of them where I fought in the civil war, and one of them where I was a native American and in what is currently the US. While I haven’t tuned into every single past life in Egypt, I have tuned into segments and fragments. I cannot deny the connection I have. I went to Egypt in 2017 and it was just life-changing. My own reaction and emotion and experience of just talking about Egypt, thinking about it, looking at artifacts, reading books about it going there, documentaries about it, it just lights me up from head to toe.
Johnny Burke: Pretty amazing. since we’re on the subject for Egypt, do you believe because of your connection and your feeling, your intuition about that place that at one point, before the time of the pharaohs that that civilization did actually operate in 5 D?
Stephanie Red Feather: We haven’t brought up my book yet, but one of the contexts that I bring up is this concept of the great year. And depending on the source that you cite, some say it’s a 24,000-year cycle. Some say it’s a 26,000-year cycle. The point is we are not as intelligent and evolved as a species as we have ever been.; It is cyclical. In this great year concept shows that we raise in consciousness for many thousands of years, hit our peak in the golden age and then start descending in consciousness and moving back into ignorance. And who knows how many times we have made this loop?
Johnny Burke: Kind of like a stock market chart almost. That what it sounds like. Hopefully, it is trending up, very interesting. Let’s talk about the book, The Evolutionary Empath. First of all, what is an evolutionary empath?
Stephanie Red Feather: Well, empath is a title that’s been used for many decades. Casually, in spiritual circles and consciousness circles. When I sat down to write this book, my spirit guides gave me one directive and that was to create a formal definition. And I said, okay, sure, no pressure. And so yeah, I spent a lot of time just gathering and sorting through data from empath workshops and other workshops that I had done, and really distilled it down to five distinct qualities of an empath. So, in general, an empath is a person who’s highly sensitive. We feel other people’s stuff. I’d like to go ahead and share these five qualities.
Johnny Burke: definitely.
Stephanie Red Feather: awesome. So the first quality is our ability to merge with and absorb the energy of other beings, whether that’s people, animals, anything with life force. Which stems from a very open personal energy field. It’s also the quality that causes us to unconsciously take on other people’s emotions and problems and struggle with boundaries. So each one of these has its sort of antithesis.
Johnny Burke: It’s kind of like a sponge almost, right?
Stephanie Red Feather: Yeah, the second quality is that we have a highly sensitive nervous system, which may sound kind of like, well duh!, nervous systems are supposed to be sensitive, but, for empaths, it’s like the volume got turned up doubly. And so we’re very prone to overwhelm overstimulation, so it requires a lot of extra vigilant self-care.
The third quality is the great sensitivity to energies around us and an inability to perceive or access subtle information that’s stored in the energy field of all types of life forms. So, so this is the quality that makes it easy for us to tune into the unseen realms. So for some people, it’s angels’ apparitions, the Akashic records, experience with paranormal, happening. all of these different sorts of access points.
The fourth quality is the premium that we place on peace and harmony. And that’s in relationships. That’s in our environment, in our own energy field. And the fifth quality is our big open hearts and a desire to serve others. So this to make us very inclined towards careers that focus on serving others, but it also makes us inclined to over-giving and putting ourselves last. The unfortunate corollary that goes with this is most of us as empaths live from the unhealthy aspects of these qualities for the first part of our life, until we recognize we’re an empath and then develop the skills and tools we need to be able to thrive instead of hiding in the corner and curling up and sucking our thumb.
Johnny Burke: Like boundaries. The spirit guides that you mentioned, how, integral were they in writing the book? Did they push the boat off the dock or, were they with you the whole time?
Stephanie Red Feather: They were with me the whole time. Part of my journey of shamanism and personal growth and connection to my version of spirit or creator has been Walking co-creatively, side by side, arm and arm. And so, sometimes they will give me very clear direction or very clear signals or signs or validations. But every time I sat down to work on this book, I would ceremonially set the space. I would go to my altar. I would light a candle. I would call in my guides and just offer myself up as the conduit for this information to flow and for them to direct me as to how to put it together. I created an outline when I started the book, but it certainly did not end up the way it started because all this inspiration came in.
Johnny Burke: Is it possible to be an empath and not have access to spirits, the Akashic records and being able to get into a trance state?
Stephanie Red Feather: Well, here’s what I would say about those five qualities. It’s a spectrum. You don’t have to say yes to all five of those qualities and they don’t necessarily have to be high on the dial. So for some people, their quality number three, that ability to access and tune into these other realms for them, that might be a two out of a 10, whereas their ability to merge and blend with other people might be a nine out of a 10. I know we love our cosmopolitan surveys, but I really didn’t want it to be like, “take this quiz. And if your answers add up to one through 10, you’re a mild empath and 11 through 20 or a moderate empath.” you know.
Johnny Burke: Interesting. The empathic big bang and what you mentioned earlier, which I believe is a cycle of Ascension; it peaks and then it goes down., is there a reason the empathic big bang is happening now that’s related to that cycle??
Stephanie Red Feather: Yeah. my belief, my experience, just from working so many years with energy is that empaths have only been around for maybe a hundred years.
Johnny Burke: That’s it?
Stephanie Red Feather: In very small quantities prior to that, you can look at the great healers and teachers certainly, for the most part, the collective frequency that humanity was vibrating at, was not high enough to sustain this sort of refined, energetic physiology that we have. As humanity is ascending in consciousness and ascending in individual frequency which influences the collective frequency. We’re now at a level where empaths can start to sustain and thrive. But one of the things that I propose in my book that I haven’t really heard many others, or any others talk about, is the fact that I believe empaths are here to help humanity ascend to the next level of consciousness.
Johnny Burke: One of the questions I would have about that- I mentioned this earlier about the Egyptians. one thing that really kind of sticks out is a conversation I had, with a woman who is with a group of her metaphysical friends in Egypt. And they start talking about a cave where I believe there’s a hieroglyph, which basically shows two men holding up what seemed to be like sticks. And there’s this huge rock, which seems to be suspended in the air. And their conclusion was, and I’ve heard this more than once, is that the, some of the pyramids were literally built with telepathy and not with slave labor as it was described in the Bible.
So if that were true in 5 D civilization thousands and thousands of years ago, wouldn’t it make sense that empaths were in an era where the frequency was high enough to actually support them?
Stephanie Red Feather: It all makes sense to me because my belief is that some hundreds or thousands of years from now empath won’t even be a word, it’ll just be synonymous with human. That this is where we’re all headed as we ascend consciousness. And as we ascend in frequency, We’re all going to have these abilities; the highly sensitive nervous system, the ability to feel other people’s emotions and energies acutely to tune into the other realms, to be in a harmonious relationship with our environment. My belief is that’s where we’re all headed.
Speaking to the question about the empathic big bang, basically, those of us who have all incarnated in the last hundred years or so are collectively the empathic big bang, which. bless every soul that chose incarnate as an empath right now, because as the movie Moneyball says, the first guy through the wall always gets bloodied. As the empathic big bang, we are all the first ones through the wall getting bloodied. We didn’t have, and don’t have the mentors and teachers and family and extended family and societies for the most part that understand us. And know how to guide us, know how to give us the tools to manage our sensitivities. So we had to bump around and figure it out and have all kinds of codependent relationships and get overwhelmed and sort of figure it out for ourselves so that we could pave the way for the ones coming behind us.
Johnny Burke: So you think that a lot of the people that are incarnated now are here to help, which would sound pretty consistent with what I’ve heard recently about Atlantis that, previous guests. And she was basically telling me that everyone that is here on this planet right now, now that is here to help came from Atlantis.
Does that make sense or is that a little bit too far-fetched?
Stephanie Red Feather: What I would say is I would absolutely agree that there are people from Atlantis that are incarnating now. And I would say it seems exclusive to say that. Well, all of us who are here now from Atlantis, you know, it’s possible that some of us didn’t incarnate in Atlantis, we were Lemurian, or we came directly from some other incarnations on a different star system or, whatever.
Johnny Burke: Do you have any memories from ancient civilizations?
Stephanie Red Feather: When I traveled to those lifetimes, that specific data doesn’t always accompany, so it’s not like, oh, it was the year, 6,024 BC or,
Johnny Burke: It be nice it was right on your screen.
Stephanie Red Feather: right. I have general impressions; I do have one lifetime that came with a very specific date. In, the Puritan colonies, in the early 17 hundreds. Other than that, I get more of a feeling, I connect more with energies as opposed to those specific pieces of data.
Johnny Burke: Other than what we already discussed, is there any other evidence that we are actually in an Ascension phase?
Stephanie Red Feather: Yeah. I have a whole chapter devoted this into my book where I talk the great year and the implications there. And it is certainly easy to look at the world and say, oh, we, we got to be down in the dregs. We must have hit bottom, but we are actually on the upswing. if you’ve heard of, the Iron Age, Bronze Age, Silver Age, Golden Age, I’m talking about ages of enlightenment or delightment I suppose.
Johnny Burke: I like that.
Stephanie Red Feather: Wisdom keepers around the world that have tried to hold onto and maintain these ancient wisdoms, this ancient knowledge. But what happens often as we devolve move into ignorance on the downswing is we start to doubt the wisdom keepers. We get fractured into accusations and more bids for power and of the things that we used to hold dear, we start to doubt, and then we accuse them of being heretical. All of these things start to devolve. And so oftentimes the ancient wisdom, the scriptures, the texts, the temples are burned and destroyed. And so there are remnants have been held in trust by a lineage of these wisdom keepers. And so it is challenging to figure out exactly precisely where we are in the cycle of Ascension, because a lot of those references have been destroyed or sometimes, they’re very esoteric and difficult to interpret, according to ancient Vedic texts, you know in the Indian culture, we are out of the Iron Age and actually into the Bronze Age.
So, people who are tuned into these sorts of things, it would make sense that we are ascending in consciousness. We’re accessing new information. Just looking at things like junk DNA and realizing there’s a lot more going on in our DNA code than we think, you know, all of these things to me point that we are ascending. So I want to offer an analogy for those who look at our world right now and go, how can we be ascending? We’re deep in the throes. If you look at temperature, Let’s say moving from winter into spring in the Northern hemisphere. So getting warmer every day is not warmer than the day before. I live in the Midwest and so we might have 40 degrees one day, and then the next day it’s 65 and then it’s 29 and then it’s 38 and then it’s 52.
If you chart it, it’s going to go up and down and up and down and up and down. But if you chart the trend from winter into spring, the temperature is getting warmer. And so if you extend that analogy into a longer field of time, we are ascending in consciousness. If you look at human evolution, maybe that’s a year, or 10 years or 20 years, where we’re down in that cold day, but again, the trend is moving upwards. One of the reasons I provide this context in my book, biggest picture context helps us locate ourselves inside what’s happening so that we have reference points, and we can see the bigger picture of what else is happening and how we fit into it.
And so believe it or not, what I just shared with you gives me a lot of hope on those days where, it’s hard to look at the world and see hope.
Johnny Burke: If I use the stock market analogy, it would seem that we are bouncing off the bottom and starting to trend up a little bit, so that does seem reasonable. Really, really cool stuff, Stephanie. Thanks for joining us. How can our listeners find you online?
Stephanie Red Feather: You can find me at www.bluestartemple.org. And I just want to let you know that I have a brand-new Oracle deck called empath activation cards. That’s coming out November 9th, 2020.