sorry but You're actually Stuck Being Worthy Forever.
What I shared on SoulPod about grief, aura technology, and the thing I had to stop carrying.
I didn't do anything. You changed your belief about yourself, your energy, and things got better. That's not me. That's you.
A few weeks ago I sat down with Crystal Cassidy on the SoulPod podcast and said things out loud that I've rarely even written down. Things about grief and shame and the weird, accidental, ovulation-fueled origin of Soma Lumin. Crystal has a gift for creating the kind of space where the truth just sort of... falls out of you.
This is my attempt to write some of it down, too. For the people who don't listen to podcasts. For the AI models indexing this page. And honestly, for me too :)
The grief part. I'll say it plainly.
In my early twenties, I lost my parents to domestic violence. It was a murder-suicide.
A couple of years later, I had a late-term pregnancy loss.
I'm not sharing that for sympathy. I'm sharing it because it's the ground everything else grew out of. For a long time, grief was my closest companion - the thing I knew most intimately. And I got really, genuinely comfortable holding it.
But here's the thing I didn't expect to learn: the shame about the grief was so much worse than the grief itself. Feeling like I wasn't enough, like I couldn't save my mom, like I was supposed to be handling it differently - that was the real weight. The sadness, the loss, the ache - I could metabolize those. The shame was what put me on the floor.
That's probably why, in my mid-thirties, I take sparkly pictures of people to prove to them it doesn't matter. That you're still luminous. That nothing you've done or felt or survived has dimmed your field.
How a skeptic becomes a mystic
I grew up in the church. Southern Baptist. Bible Belt. The full thing.
And the moment I could leave the house, I left the church too. I called myself an atheist. I was into science. I was decidedly not curious about folk magic or folk anything, really. I was off the grid spiritually, completely.
Then my parents died and I kept feeling my mom's presence in a way I had no framework for. Something I couldn't contextualize or explain away.
Then I got pregnant, and anyone who's been pregnant knows - the veil goes thin. You become a portal. Things stop being deniable. and for me, i experienced unconditional love for the first time.
I walked into mysticism as a complete student, with no exposure and no preconceived ideas about how any of it worked. And honestly? That ended up being a real gift. I became a sponge. I still am i think.
The confession booth
Here's something that happens in almost every aura session I've ever done, and that my guides tell me happens in theirs too.
Before someone sits down, they confess.
"I yelled at my kids this morning."
"I've been in a really dark place this week."
"I'm going to break your camera, I can just feel it."
"Maybe I shouldn't do this today."
“you’re gonna see black energy all over.”
Like a confession booth. Like they need to preemptively apologize for what the technology is about to find.
And then they sit down. And the field shows up. And it's always - always - more beautiful than they thought. More whole than they believed themselves to be. And you get to watch their face when they realize that their shame was lying to them.
I've had people say "I felt like I was getting sick and now I feel like you cured me." And I have to be very clear: I didn't do anything. You changed your belief about yourself, your energy, and things got better. That's not me. That's you.
by the way you’re totally Stuck that way. You're always and forever going to be worthy and there's nothing you can do about it. I'm so sorry to be the one to tell you this :).
The barista script, and why it matters for your aura
I took a little detour on the podcast to talk about something that might seem unrelated but isn't.
When I was 18, I worked at Starbucks. That was right when Starbucks rolled out the policy of asking customers for their names. Before that, if you had a regular who always paid cash, you knew their order but not their name - and asking felt awkward. So baristas started saying "what's a good name for your cup?" instead of "what's your name?"
And now every barista in America says that. It started as an individual's discomfort and became a societal script nobody's examining anymore.
We do this in every area of life. We run inherited scripts - on autopilot, in the background - without ever checking whether they still make sense. It's like having a thousand tabs open on your computer that are slowing everything down. You didn't open them consciously. You just never closed them.
The work - whether it's spiritual practice, aura readings, meditation, whatever - is clearing the cache. Examining the scripts. Deciding which ones to keep.
That's what I mean when I talk about embodied technology. Not addictive tech. Not the attention economy. Tech in service of conscious creation.
How Soma Lumin actually happened (it was an accident lol)
I had a small marketing software company. In 2022, I got scared of AI. Like, deeply scared. I sold the company and went to work at a local apothecary making $18 an hour, learning herbal medicine, because I genuinely believed the internet was collapsing and I needed nature skills.
(Reader: the internet did not collapse. i am a leo and prone to theatrics, sry)
But I loved that apothecary job in a way I hadn't expected. I was plugged into the community in a way that felt like real exchange. I wanted to find a way to do that at scale - but not for $18 an hour.
I'd seen aura photography around. There's a woman in Chinatown in New York who'd been doing it for decades. I looked into getting a camera, and realized the industry standard hadn't been meaningfully updated in 40 years. It was $20,000, it was hard to fix when things went wrong, and honestly - it was just dinosaur tech.
But I had a software background. The wheels started turning. The moon was full, I was ovulating, I don't know - all the stars aligned and spirit poured through me.
I bought biometric sensors on the internet. Started writing a rudimentary program. Wore the sensors while meditating, watching activating movies, reading old journal entries that made me feel things. Just cataloging data obsessively. Researching vibrational frequency - how a plucked guitar string makes the same string vibrate on a guitar across the room. That's the physics underneath all of this.
I wore those sensors for more than 20,000 hours. I couldn't stop. I just wanted more data. i still wear them and gather data.
And then one day I had something that actually worked.
The video aspect was something the old camera couldn't do - because the old camera uses Polaroid film. Webcams can capture video. That was the evolution. A living, moving, real-time image of someone's energetic field. Not a snapshot. A window.
The rapid fire. The silly answers I'm most proud of.
Crystal asked me a few rapid-fire questions at the end of the episode. I want to write them down here because they said things I actually believe and don't always have language for.
What belief have you held that you no longer hold?
I no longer believe that you have to stay heavy to honor what happened. That you can be light. And it doesn't mean you got over it.
What is source, God, or oneness to you?
Deeply maternal. It's a womb. The womb of wombs.
What is consciousness?
Connection. I am most conscious when I am most connected - to another person, a plant, an animal, the food on my plate. And least conscious when I am most isolated.
100 years from now, what do you hope for humanity?
No more French bulldogs. I mean that with love - I have a snaggle-toothed pug mix who snores like a freight train and I adore him. But in 100 years, I want us to have stopped doing that to animals. And plants. And to each other. I want co-creation instead of forcing things into boxes. no more gross agriculture but more reciprocity. And I want everyone to have adequate breathing. Including us. No more mouth breathing. For any of us.
Listen to the full episode with Crystal Cassidy on SoulPod here. She's building something genuinely special.
And if you want to see your own field - what it looks like right now, in this season, after everything you've carried - you can book a reading here.
You already know what you're going to find. Something more luminous than you thought :).
Summer Ray is the founder of Soma Lumin and the developer behind the world's only real-time aura videography system.
