Brittany Schembra — She'd Tried Everything. The Pattern Still Wouldn't Move
She'd Tried Everything. The Pattern Still Wouldn't Move.
The therapy, the mindset work, the journaling, the reading — all of it useful, and still the body stays braced, and the same dynamic keeps showing up in different clothes. Brittany Schembra works in that territory: not on the surface of the pattern, but underneath it, in the nervous system and the subconscious, where the body stores what the conscious mind hasn't been able to process. She calls her approach "spirituality without the woo" — and she came to it through her own healing.
In this episode of Who We Become — Life Beyond Change, Amanda Lentz sits down with Brittany Schembra — intuitive healer, former educator of thirteen years, software engineer, and host of the Feral Soul Podcast — for a conversation about the healing work most people only find after they've already tried everything else.
Brittany blends neuroscience, subconscious reprogramming, energy work, and universal laws to help women rewrite the patterns quietly running their lives from the inside out. But she doesn't teach it from a pedestal. She teaches it because she lived it.
Everything That Was Supposed to Fix Her
Brittany describes a fairly ordinary start — a middle-class family, parents who loved her, brothers — and a quiet ache underneath it: she wanted to feel seen, and didn't. She spent her teens and twenties numbing, and then her twenties handed her more than most people carry in a lifetime. Compounding losses, including friends lost to suicide, loved ones to cancer, and her own experiences of abuse. In 2017, she lost her six-year-old niece — the moment she calls the straw that broke the camel's back. Her world exploded, and she turned away from everything she'd believed in.
She got into therapy and learned to compartmentalize. But underneath, something felt broken, and she kept looking outward to fix it. A computer science degree, graduated with honors. A marriage. A child. Each one carrying the same quiet hope — this will make me happy. She's careful to say she loves her husband and daughter and is proud of her work. But she'd been feeding an appetite for external validation, and when she finally had it all, she found herself depleted: her self-image gone, her marriage in shambles, her days full of conflict.
"I just remember thinking — there has got to be more. There has to be more than this."
— Brittany SchembraThere Has to Be More Than This
The turn came, of all places, through a podcast. She heard someone describe intuition not as mysticism but as science — everything in the world made of energy, energy carrying information, and intuition as the act of bringing what's happening in the subconscious up into conscious awareness. It struck her less like new information than like something she'd always known. She threw herself into it: how the body communicates, neuroplasticity, emotions, healing from the inside out.
And slowly, she says, her outer life began to mirror the shift happening inside her — a closer marriage, a deeper bond with her daughter, a version of herself the woman of four years ago couldn't have imagined. Once she'd felt it firsthand, she felt called to share it.
The Body Remembers What the Mind Won't Say
At the center of Brittany's work is a claim she draws from both science and spirituality: the body stores what the mind won't process. Emotions and memories, in her telling, don't just live in the head — they settle into the nervous system. When we move through an experience, large or small, and don't complete the cycle, the charge gets stored. She points to macro traumas and to the subtler micro traumas — an offhand comment, a small moment of not-safety — that quietly shape how the nervous system learns to survive.
Neuroscience, as she frames it, explains the what: the cortisol spikes, the racing heart, the butterflies. Spirituality explains the why. In her framework everything begins as energy and only later becomes physical — so an experience left unwitnessed holds first in the energetic body, then shows up in the physical one. Her own example: a period of knee pain she read intuitively as an inflexibility about "walking her path," which she'd internalized as shame. Once she could name the belief underneath it and disprove it to herself, she says, it released.
Spirituality Without the Woo
The phrase is a little tongue-in-cheek, she admits — she's an intuitive energy healer, so there's inevitably some "woo." But her instinct is to follow the mechanics: neuroscience, the gut-brain connection, quantum physics, the way energy moves. She calls it spiritual science. And her background gives her an unusual lens on it.
"I'm a computer scientist. I think of intuition as another coding language — millions of bits of data coming in, and you're finding the pattern, finding the bug, and reprogramming it."
— Brittany SchembraShe's quick to add that she believes in Western medicine, too — that there's a place for everything, a yin and a yang in all of it. Her real aim in dropping the mystical dialect is accessibility: you shouldn't need a certain vocabulary, she says, to understand what your own soul is trying to tell you.
The Familiar Hell
When Amanda asks what she'd say to a skeptic, Brittany doesn't push. What's meant for you will find you, she believes. But she also names what resistance usually is: the ego trying to keep you safe — and to the ego, safe means familiar.
"Your ego will always choose a familiar hell over an unfamiliar heaven. It chooses what it knows, even when what it knows is no longer serving you."
— Brittany SchembraHer invitation is to lean into the discomfort rather than run from it — to notice that you've done it your way your whole life and ask, honestly, where that's gotten you. Patterns, she explains, form broadly, across every area of life, but have to be reprogrammed narrowly, one at a time — which is how the ego convinces you you've healed everything when one domain is still running the old code. She's made peace with hers by giving it a name: Martha, as in Martha Stewart, forever wanting everything perfect. "Calm down, Martha."
How to Start Recognizing a Pattern
The subconscious, Brittany explains, is an operating system running beneath awareness — not logical, but efficient, built on pattern recognition and threat detection. Most of its rules were written in childhood, when the logical brain wasn't yet developed and we absorbed everything like sponges, deciding what our experiences meant about us. We carry those rules into adulthood as masks, rarely noticing we put them on.
Her way in is emotion.
"Emotions are the messengers of our soul. You can be sitting at a desk thinking you're fine — and there's something else going on underneath, until you take a moment to sit with yourself."
— Brittany SchembraStart with awareness, she says — simply notice your emotional state, then ask whether the thought running through you actually aligns with who you innately are. If it doesn't, that's a pattern, a conditioning, a mask you have the ability to take off. The whole point, in her telling, isn't blame or guilt; it's arriving somewhere you genuinely love yourself and your life. And she keeps it doable with a single daily question: what's the one thing I can do today that gets me a little closer? Then she lets that be enough.
Who She Is Now
Brittany holds a lot at once — thirteen years in education, software engineer by day, intuitive healer by calling, podcast host. What surprises her most now is how comfortable she's become sharing herself and connecting with people, and how much she loves modeling for her daughter what real, inner beauty looks like. She's also honest that a part of her still whispers you should be doing more — she didn't call herself the feral soul for nothing. She's still, in her words, a messy human, living inside the paradox of wanting to become while already being whole.
"I do all the things a little bit by little bit. What's the one thing that gets me one percent closer? And I let it be enough."
— Brittany SchembraWhy This Conversation Matters
Brittany Schembra found her calling by doing the work on herself — by sitting in the kind of truth she'd spent years avoiding, and discovering that what was on the other side of it wasn't destruction but freedom.
As Amanda puts it in her closing: the patterns we can't seem to break are not character flaws. They're stored information — and stored information can be updated. If you've done the surface work and something still hasn't moved, it isn't evidence that you're unfixable. It's evidence that the work needs to go somewhere the talking hasn't reached yet.
Where in your life has the thinking taken you as far as it can — and what might change if you listened to your body instead?
This episode touches on grief, loss, abuse, and suicide. If you're struggling, you don't have to sit in it alone.
988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline — free and confidential support, 24/7. Call or text 988 in the US, or chat at 988lifeline.org.
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