JC resident‘s ‘The Self-Consciousness Podcast’ at 84 episodes - and counting

Before she did 83 episodes of "The Self-Consciousness Podcast," Jennifer Wai worked in reality show business. When the Jersey City resident compares reality shows now to the shows she worked on at the genre's beginning, the increasing dearth, the way participants have seen seasons of these shows and act how they think they're supposed act, is part of what she set out to sidestep in her podcast.

The podcast drops its 84th episode today, Oct. 16, with an installment in which Wai interviews NPR's "Ask Me Another" host Ophira Eisenberg .

"We used to record in tape on analog and then when you record over another, it just gets a lower quality of video," Wai said earlier this week. "That's kind of what we're getting with either the information coming from spiritual gurus or (even) people seeing how they're supposed to act on a reality TV show.

"It's hard in this day and age to extract how you really feel apart from what you're seeing, because it's so easy to ... be influenced by all of these ideas, and you're absorbing it, whether you mean to regurgitate it or not. You're going to regurgitate some stuff that you heard that you agree with, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but ..."

If it's a copy of a copy, if it's filtered through the kind of lowest common denominator sensibilities that appeal to most people in a visceral way, maybe it becomes that much harder to know what you might think otherwise, Wai posits.

"The philosophy (behind) 'The Self-Consciousness Podcast' is really just ... 'What is it like exploring this big idea of spirituality from a place of being an overly self-conscious person?'" Wai said.

Wai considers herself a psychic and, acknowledging that field is steeped in being entertainment, elaborated on what she believes that term means.

"A psychic is an interpreter of consciousness," Wai said. "The podcast is kind of a record of my journey going through understanding my own psychic ability ... and kind of parsing through the various new age sort of modalities and stories and trying to sift through the b******t to really find what's at the core of personal spiritual development. I hope to take along people who have hopefully listened from the beginning, or who can always go back to the beginning – anyone who wants to kind of hear someone find their enlightenment, because I really believe that over the course of the years that I've been doing this podcast, and hopefully to come, it's allowing other people to kind of witness me becoming a stronger person in a way that's more palpable."

And the key to that, Wai said, is vulnerability and seeming "awkwardness," all the things that pop culture encourages people to be above.

"I want to put my cringy moments out there, you know, 'cause I love every part of the journey for myself. If I kind of listen back to some of those episodes where I went really vulnerable, it can be a little embarrassing. But my goal is to really bring to the forefront the parts that people want to push away from themselves.

"All my life I've felt awkward," Wai continued. "And I've always felt like I say too much and I'm too much in general, or I just kind of keep going on like I have ... very much an autistic behavior, at least to how it's showing up in me. I will kind of over-talk and I will kind of over-focus on myself. But the whole time, I'm worried about every aspect of it, so I'm worried about how people are hearing it."

To Wai, being "psychic" and interpreting other consciousnesses is about being able to trust that judgement on some level.

"... When you're very self-conscious and insecure, the last thing you're doing is trusting yourself," Wai said. "You're really motivated by kind of how it's going to sound to other people, so it seems like they're opposite things, but ... I'm trying to find that... that sort of sweet spot in the middle of it."

It's a delicate road, Wai noted. "As a psychic ... I'm encouraging people to reconnect their head to their body because we live in such a mental world ... of belief systems. And things have just continued to get corrupted by power, greed, patriarchy, capitalism ...

"We are so used to elevating other people around us," Wai continued. "When you elevate someone around you, whether it's a celebrity, whether it's someone on TikTok you're in that action. We don't pay attention to this fact, but in that action you're setting yourself below ... that person, and that's living in a disempowered state."

With "The Self-Consciousness Podcast," while acknowledging the very real additional challenges that can come with race and class, Wai hopes episodes like the one where she listens to the last messages from her late mother will challenge listeners to find their own empowered state.