Rewilding the Soul and Embracing the Path of the Priestess – An Interview with Chase Butticé

What if courage isn’t about conquering fear—but about trusting your intuition enough to leap into the unknown?

For Chase Butticé, that leap has shaped a life devoted to sovereignty, mysticism, and the reclamation of the divine feminine. From her early years as a psychic and empath navigating the wild edges of life, to her bold decision to leave conventional paths behind and embrace healing, astrology, and spiritual teaching, Chase has built a body of work that helps others reconnect to Source. Her book Witchy Bitch and her courses on boundaries, rewilding, and shadow work offer seekers practical tools for deep transformation.

In this conversation, Chase shares why intuition is the core of integrity, how empaths can protect their energy without losing compassion, and what it means to live with courage as both a spiritual practice and a way of life. She also opens up about the teachers in her life—including Spirit, her horse—who mirror back the sacred power of authenticity and presence. Continue reading or listen in by subscribing for free on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or YouTube to discover how Chase Butticé’s wisdom can inspire you to anchor into your truth and courageously step into your own power.

You like to describe yourself as a seer and also as a high priestess. I’d love to understand more about how you see those words and how you embody them.

Chase Butticé: It’s taken me years to own these archetypes—not in a pretentious or cheesy way, but in a way that feels authentic. The word high priestess especially can make people roll their eyes, but I use it because it’s an archetype of the tarot, a true archetype. It comes from an ancient lineage—deep, old, and wise—connected to Isis, to Inanna, to the high feminine.

It carries the energy of mysticism and magic, the ability to see into something deeply, to sense the energy behind matter. It’s about wisdom, about perceiving what lies beyond logic. Those are the attributes of priestess energy, and I feel called to bring that lineage back.

Our culture has forgotten it, especially since the reign of patriarchal world culture and monotheistic religions. We’ve really lost touch with the energetics of the priestess and what she represents. I love the Albert Einstein quote: “Intuition should be our guide, and rationality its faithful servant.” In our society, we’ve flipped that. Priestess energy is about revering wisdom, honoring what is beyond logic and rationality, and remembering that these forces govern our universe. To me, it’s about honoring and venerating them again.

I love the texture that you bring. It’s so easy to read someone’s bio on Instagram or a website, but hearing what you’re embodying adds a whole different dimension. I’d like to go back to your own awakening to consciousness, mindfulness, and spirituality—specifically, your childhood. Did you grow up with faith or spirituality as part of your upbringing, or did that come later in life?

Chase Butticé: You know, it’s funny. My mom always said I was born with one gray hair on my head and that I didn’t cry when I was born. I’m authentically Californian—my dad was in the rock and roll business, working with Elektra Records. His band was the Eagles, Hotel California. My mom was an Aquarius, and freedom was a strong theme in my childhood.

I didn’t have many rules. I had no religion—zero spirituality. That’s both what’s beautiful and what’s missing about America. Sure, we have Christianity and other religions, but a lot of people don’t have a deep connection to Source. They might meditate or dabble in New Age practices, but they don’t necessarily know what true connection feels like.

For me, it’s taken years to understand what I was experiencing. I’ve always been very psychic and sensitive to others’ energies, and I’ve come to realize that’s part of my priestess lineage. Over time, I’ve grounded into my connection with Source and created my structure around spirituality.

What were some of the markers or breakthrough points where you felt, “Oh wow, that was a really big shift in how I saw things”? Anything come to mind?

Chase Butticé: I’ve had so many of those moments in my life. I’ve always been wild and free, following my instincts and intuition, and that’s led me down some very unconventional paths. For years, I lived on the fringes—never able to work in a corporation or hold a “normal” job.

In 2016, I finally decided to start my own business and work for myself as a healer. That’s when I began to feel I had gained true sovereignty and energetic control over my life, rather than outsourcing it to a boss. Entrepreneurship is a deeply spiritual path—it tunes you into the flow of the divine. It challenges you to work with energies of abundance, flow, and consciousness, rather than relying on external structures for safety. That shift forced me to examine my relationship with Source and abundance in a much deeper way.

Of course, I’ve had many other wake-up calls. For example, I once moved to the bush of Alaska and lived alone in a cabin in the woods. I thought I was searching for wildness, really pushing into the extremes of nature. But at some point, I realized how isolated I was—and honestly, I was terrified. There were bears, eagles, and so much raw wilderness that I had to face the limits of what I was chasing. That was another profound lesson in balance.

What motivated you to move to Alaska?

Chase Butticé: Wildness. After graduate school, I was desperate to break free of institutions and the ways society tries to box us in. I have a master’s degree in Sustainable Communities with an emphasis on consciousness and social change, and my thesis was on rewilding. Ironically, I hated graduate school—it drained me. Afterward, I moved to Alaska with my boyfriend because I wanted to be free of domestication, competition, and institutional constraints. I wanted to reconnect with nature on a primal, visceral level.

As you were sensing this calling to start your own business in 2016, what was that transition like? Many of our listeners are in that space right now—feeling intuitive gifts, wondering if they should share them, but also struggling with questions like, “Do I give this away for free? Is it strange to charge for it?” How did you navigate that shift?

Chase Butticé: You have to trust your gut and intuition, and follow what feels deeply true for you. As an empath, mystic, healer, and psychic, I had given away my gifts for free my entire life. When you feel people’s pain, the instinct is to help. But eventually I realized it was harming me—my health, my finances, and my sense of balance.

We live in a culture that has historically extracted from the feminine, from mysticism and magic, without honoring it. To shift into new paradigms, we have to honor ourselves first. That means recognizing that when we give something from the deepest place in our heart and soul, there must also be reciprocation—material or otherwise. There has to be an equal exchange, like an infinity loop, where energy flows both ways.

It took me a long time to come to terms with that truth, but learning to receive as much as I give has been essential to my path.

One of the things people wrestle with is the stability of a job—the steady paycheck. I remember you described it once as a “pseudo structure.” Can you talk more about that? What were you doing professionally at the time, and how did you make the mental shift to start your own thing?

Chase Butticé: Yeah, outsourcing your power—that’s really what it is.

Gosh, what was I doing? I’ve done so many different things. I speak Arabic, I was in the Peace Corps, and I have a master’s degree. But I’ve always refused to comply with office life—I just can’t do it. At that point, I think I was working as a wellness counselor at an integrative pharmacy.

Even then, I knew I needed to evolve. My potential felt so much greater than the box I was in. And I think many of us know that feeling—you’re lulled into a semblance of safety, but inside you feel numbed, dulled, bored, stifled. There’s this inner pull toward something deeper, something truer.

But to make that leap, you have to cultivate deep faith and connection to Source. If you stay rooted in fear and scarcity, you’ll only encounter more of it. The shift requires energetic work—choosing trust, believing your intuition is nature itself, guiding you toward the right path. To me, opening to that is opening to love—trusting that what you’re drawn to will hold and support you as you step forward.

That’s so good. I remember when I made a big shift in 2003—it’s like you said, you can’t keep holding on. You’ve got to know you’re held by Source. That’s such a powerful visual. I love that.

Chase Butticé: Yes. And the older I get, the more I realize it’s really about receiving. Can you accept that this earth, this universe, is made of love? We’ve inverted it into fear, but its natural expression is love. The question is—can you accept that love?

I’m curious how you would articulate your mission in this season of life. What do you sense you are here for, and how long did it take you to gain clarity on that?

Chase Butticé: I know I am here as an anchor of authenticity, here to reclaim and re-inhabit the energetics of the divine feminine. I often say my mission is to recalibrate the divine feminine on planet Earth.

That doesn’t mean a woman rises and says, “Listen to me.” It’s about remembering the energy inside all of us that is connected to Source—beyond rationality, rooted in mystery, grounded in energy. It’s about having faith in that connection and finding authentic power through it.

I’ve done a lot of shadow work, which I call light work, because it’s really about moving past limitations so we can open fully to our potential. For me, intuition is the core ethos of everything I teach. To truly know yourself, you must tune into your intuition, align with it, follow it, and work with it. That’s something we’ve lost in our modern world, and it’s so important to restore it.

How do we tap into our intuition, and then how do we actually listen to it instead of letting fear or people-pleasing take over?

Chase Butticé: Those are real challenges. For me, this comes back to energetic boundaries—a core ethos of my work. Empaths, especially, need to ground themselves in boundaries. That means paying attention to that inner voice that says, “This doesn’t feel good,” and honoring it.

So often we’re programmed, especially in America, to constantly say yes, to take every opportunity, to work ourselves to the bone. It’s a culture of constant output, which is exhausting and depleting. In that cycle, we never receive, and our well of self-worth runs dry. Developing energetic boundaries means protecting your energy, protecting that younger part of yourself inside. As an adult, it’s your role to safeguard that inner child.

I love that—protecting your energy. What happens when we don’t? What are some clues that I might not be protecting my energy?

Chase Butticé: Exhaustion. Your nervous system is rattled. You struggle to make decisions, lack self-trust, and are pulled in multiple directions.

I saw it constantly when I worked as a healer. Many sensitive people ended up with autoimmune disorders—illnesses the Western medical system doesn’t fully understand. But from an energetic perspective, it’s the result of constant extraction. When your energy is drained and not replenished, the body eventually breaks down. Exhaustion becomes the norm, and that imbalance has been humanity’s operating system for far too long—especially in America. That’s why it’s essential to stand firm and say, “No. I will not allow this to continue.”

You recently wrote about empaths being caught in a “trance of othering.” Can you explain what you mean by that and how we can wake up from it? I feel like it ties directly into protecting your energy.

Chase Butticé: Absolutely. Empaths often merge their energy fields with others without even realizing it. No one has taught us otherwise. Being an empath simply means being highly sensitive to energy—but energy isn’t something we’re taught to recognize in the modern world.

Because of this, empaths live with open energy fields, constantly merging with the energies around them. It depletes us, confuses us, and blurs the line between what’s ours and what belongs to someone else. We end up doing enormous amounts of energetic labor for others—whether to hide, to help, or to feel useful.

The most powerful step is to fortify your energetic field, to know where you end and another begins. That stops the merging process.

This is especially relevant right now because we’ve just entered the Age of Aquarius. In the Age of Pisces, which we’re moving out of, sensitivity and merging were the norm. Pisces energy is deeply empathetic, but without boundaries, it leads to toxic, codependent dynamics. Aquarius, on the other hand, is air—symbolized by the sword archetype. It’s about clarity, detachment, and cutting away what’s unhealthy.

That’s why these conversations are becoming more accessible now. We’re learning to detach from toxic relationships and power structures and to connect with Source on our own terms. The Age of Aquarius is giving us that opportunity.

I want to read a paragraph from your post, because when I first saw the title “The Trance of Othering,” I thought of it in the cultural sense—judging or labeling others. But you’re using it differently. You wrote: “This is what the true essence of codependence is. We have come to believe that our energy—our creative process, ideas, mojo, power, and essence—is not enough. This is the core wound that leads us to leave our bodies all the time. We find other people more interesting, and we are busier helping them. In a way, we seek out suffering. The empath mantra becomes, ‘I feel sorry for them.’ This is shame in a bottle. This is the essence of shame.”

How do we extract ourselves from that pattern of othering and reclaim our own energetic field?

Chase Butticé: It starts with coming to terms with pain—just like you said earlier, the pain of saying no. Most of us avoid it. Two things happen: we feel someone else’s pain and want to help, but at the same time, we’re avoiding our own. Those dynamics feed on each other.

This shows up in what you could call empath–narcissist dynamics, or patriarchal world conditioning—any situation where there’s a dominator and a submissive. We’re moving out of those dynamics now. For those of us who’ve been the submissive, the over-givers, we have to learn to prioritize our own energy. That shift alone can cause a crisis of consciousness—an existential crisis—because if you’ve never focused on yourself, the act of doing so can feel foreign and even painful.

But we’ve reached a collective impasse. People are no longer willing to live with the toxic, imbalanced status quo. That’s good news, because it means creativity and potential that’s been suppressed is finally beginning to surface.

As empaths, we will always care. That won’t change. But we can care differently. Before, I would take on people’s energy, doing all the work for them. Now I’ve learned: I can have compassion without absorption. I can be present without carrying their pain. I call it “observe, don’t absorb.”

When we allow others to process their own energy, we not only set ourselves free—we set them free too. We give them the dignity of standing on their own two feet and learning to care for themselves. Historically, healers and empaths have carried too much of the collective energetic load. That exhaustion must be reconciled. To move forward, we need to distinguish between what is ours and what is not.

At Awakened Magazine, I often say that the person I’m most passionate about reaching is a woman whose kids are finishing high school or starting college. She’s in transition, asking, “I’ve given everything to my kids, to my partner—now what? Is this all there is to life?” It’s such a powerful moment of reckoning.

Chase Butticé: Exactly. Empaths are simply people who are sensitive—people who merge with others and feel what others are feeling. And sensitivity exists on a spectrum. To some degree, we all wrestle with it. That’s why these conversations matter—not just for empaths, but for anyone navigating relationships and energetic boundaries in our culture.

One of the virtues that’s very dear to you is courage. How would you define courage, and how do you embody it in your life?

Chase Butticé: Courage, to me, is following your intuition without having any idea how it’s going to work out. It’s about jumping into the void—and trusting.

The more you practice it, the more you realize that true integrity is when your internal state matches your external actions. That alignment is integrity. Yet most of us have been trained out of honoring our intuition. We’ve been told to suppress it when, in fact, it is our deepest self, our direct line to Source.

When we begin to trust and act from that place, we’re working with magic. We’re shaping reality through vision, discernment, and trust—even when we have no idea how it will unfold. My life has been a series of moments where I had a vision, followed my intuition, and had no clue where the money, the opportunities, or the support would come from. But then it all began to form itself.

That’s when you realize life is more like a play, not a rigid, linear path. Intuition is the doorway into that mystery. It takes courage to step into it, because it’s scary. You have to root yourself in Source and live, at least in part, in that wild, liminal space where you’re trusting something greater than yourself.

Do you have daily, weekly, or monthly practices that help you stay connected to that Source and grounded in courage?

Chase Butticé: Yes. Every morning, I make my green tea with mint and sit at my altar. I pray, meditate, read, and journal. I use divination tools, and I return often to the wisdom of my teachers. I also walk in nature.

One of the most powerful practices for me is working with the energy of I am. Especially in these times, when we’re shifting from one paradigm into the next, claiming I am is how we step into the reality we’re becoming.

When you say you’re playing with the energy of I am, can you explain that in simpler terms—like you’re teaching a kindergartner?

Chase Butticé: Of course. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. Our essence is eternal, and when we leave these bodies, we return to formless energy. The practice of I am is about claiming that essence—your spirit—rather than only identifying with your earthly identity.

You can shape and form that energy. Let’s say you want to embody more courage. You don’t just say, “I want courage.”You step into the energy of it: “I am courage.” And you don’t just say it in your head—you feel it in your gut, you align it with your whole being.

That’s the key: it’s not about words alone, it’s about embodiment. When thought, feeling, and intention align, that’s when transformation happens. That’s what people mean when they talk about quantum leaping. You claim the essence, feel it, live it, and reality begins to reshape itself around you.

You also wrote a book, titled Witchy Bitch: A Revolution in Reclaiming Your Self-Worth and Divine Feminine Power. What motivated you to write it, and what is it all about?

Chase Butticé: I wrote that book a while ago, during a period when I was doing a lot of healing work. What I kept encountering were clients who were exhausted, depleted, and disconnected from Source. Many of them struggled with autoimmune issues. When I’d ask if they had a spiritual practice, the answer was often, “Not really,” or “I meditate sometimes,” or they were religious but not truly connected.

There was a hollowness there—a longing for a deeper connection to something greater. That’s who I wrote the book for: people who want to establish a strong, consistent spiritual practice.

It’s structured as a seven-week journey. The first week is about creating an altar and learning how to pray. The second focuses on intuition. Weeks three and four are about shadow work. Week five is about rewilding and authenticity. Week six covers self-worth and receptivity. And the final week explores the transformation of the self. In a way, it’s like an ayahuasca journey—but in text form, with a grounded, step-by-step structure.

Tell us about the ways people can work with you now. I know astrology is a big part of your current work, and you also have something called a “spiritual portfolio,” which I think is a really cool entry point for people.

Chase Butticé: Yes! I host a weekly podcast called Oracle: A Priestess Podcast, where I share astrological and energetic updates. That’s a free offering.

Beyond that, I teach a variety of courses: Witchy Bitch, Sacred Boundaries, Rewilding, shadow work, and even a course I’m developing right now on using AI for self-realization. I also offer one-on-one coaching in six-week, three-month, and six-month containers, as well as astrological readings.

The Spiritual Portfolio is a unique offering where I bring together multiple tools—numerology, astrology, human design, gene keys, Chinese astrology, tarot, rune profiles, and sacred geometry. It’s like weaving together a full, energetic blueprint of your soul signature. It gives people a clear picture of their essence and guidance for living in alignment.

I think that’s such a powerful offering—so many different tools brought together at an accessible price point. It is unique. Now, shifting a bit—you live with a dog named Bear and a horse named Spirit. Not everyone has a horse! How did that come about? Did you grow up with horses?

Chase Butticé: No, I didn’t grow up with horses. I spent a little time around them as a child—one of my friends had a horse—but it wasn’t a big part of my upbringing. The connection came later, almost intuitively.

I think it ties into the divine feminine, the rise of consciousness, and our relationship with sentient beings. Horses are wild souls that have been domesticated by humans. They’re mirrors—beautiful, powerful, sometimes intimidating, yet deeply tender. Just being in their presence can calm your nervous system. Their energy field alone can bring healing, and they often reflect your shadows, inviting you to grow.

I first got into horses through a friend, started taking lessons, and eventually found myself with a horse of my own. Spirit has been an incredible teacher—showing me so much about myself, about presence, and the sacred bond between human and animal.

Does Spirit live on your property, or do you visit him at a stable?

Chase Butticé: He’s currently at a stable, but I was just on the phone right before this podcast about moving him. I’ll probably be living on a property with him soon.

What do you specifically love about Spirit—not just about horses in general, but about him?

Chase Butticé: He’s autonomous. He’s never been fully broken. Spirit is an Appaloosa—a Native American breed known for its distinct white-rimmed eyes that look almost human. He’s pure presence, a sacred mirror, a true reflector. He’s my friend.

He’s huge—16.2 hands tall (about 5 feet 6 inches at the shoulder)—and being around him challenges me to step more fully into my own power. I feel like I’m still unraveling the mystery of this horse. But in this expansive period of my life, it feels profound to have him by my side as both a companion and a teacher.

And if I asked you, “What does Spirit love about you?” what would you say?

Chase Butticé: He would say that I treat him like a friend, not like a horse. I talk to him, ask his opinion, and see him as a family member. I don’t dominate him—I honor him. Because of that, he gets to be himself with me.

Beautiful. For those who want to connect with you and your work, what’s the best place for them to start?

Chase Butticé: You can find me at ChaseButtice.com. My podcast, Oracle: A Priestess Podcast, is available weekly, and on my site, you can also book sessions or contact me. I’m on Instagram at @chasebuttice.

If someone listening today identifies as sensitive—whether or not they call themselves an empath—and they’re just beginning to explore energetic boundaries, what encouragement would you give them?

Chase Butticé: Find a way to get quiet with yourself. Prioritize your energy. Pause and tune in to your authentic voice, your true feelings, and honor them. Most of us spend our lives ignoring ourselves. But when we begin to pay attention to our soul, our intuition, and our truth, that’s what self-love and self-worth really are.

If more of us honored that, the world would change. Instead of projecting our pain onto others, we would shine more light. It begins with listening inward and giving ourselves permission to value what we feel.

Thank you so much, Chase. It’s been a gift to hear your wisdom and your story.

Chase Butticé: Thank you so much.