Hi. I’m Candice Schutter. I started The Deeper Pulse podcast during the pandemic, repackaging personal stories as self-help epiphanies because old habits die hard and turning pain into profit was at the heart of what I’d long bought and sold as a new-age grifter. 🥴
Eventually, I began to look more critically at two decades spent in spirituality and wellness circles, and sharing about those years publicly for the first time in 2022 (See Episode 33) meant becoming a wellness cult whistleblower. For the next two years, I dove headfirst into cult recovery, and former colleagues and I grappled with our moral injuries and the ways in which toxic positivity had long silenced us.
Cue 2024 and the birth of the MAHA movement (along with its by-design wellness to alt-right pipeline); it really underscored many of the ‘cult’ure series takeaways along with their implications – both in our backyards and geopolitically. Currently, the pod focuses on current events, critical perspectives (related to gender, race, and class), and ongoing deconstruction of the hierarchical frameworks that live inside and around us.
Candice Schutter (she/her) has a BA in Psychology, an MA in Social Impact, and is currently a post-graduate student in Organizational Leadership at ASU. In 2016, Candice became a Graduate Fellow of the Atheneum Master Writing Program through The Attic Institute in Portland, Oregon. She’s trained extensively in mind-body modalities and has worked as a teacher, trainer, and educational consultant for a variety of fitness and self-improvement organizations. In 2019, she stepped away from wellness ‘cult’ure to grapple with the moral injuries she experienced while working in various new age wellness circles and then perpetuated herself through predatory sales practices as a “life coach.” She is best known for the ‘cult’ure series – Episodes 32-84 of her podcast – where she shares personal stories and critiques The Nia Technique (aka ‘the Org’) with friends and former colleagues. The series also features stories from cult survivors and experts of religious/spiritual abuse, cult-of-one abuse, etc.
As a queer, cult awareness advocate, Candice provides a platform for folks to step outside the bounds of psychosocial indoctrination and restore a sense of personal agency. Her primary intention is to normalize conversations around everyday cult dynamics in our families, workplaces, and communities, speak to how colonial biases shape everyday behaviors in the Western world, and to challenge the idea that ‘leadership’ is a viable pathway toward equity and justice.
She lives in Arizona with her partner of twelve years and their two furbaby kittos.
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