Jennie’s Story
From the first moment I remember I was called by my deep wonder and my own wild nature out into the red rock canyons, into the Ponderosa Pine Tree forest, and deep into the creeks and rivers.
I knew as a little one, my true home was on the earth.
I have always known an enthusiasm, curiosity and full-body awe that has drawn me to explore up the rocky steep trail to the summit to catch the sunrise or to wander deeper into the canyon to discover what treasure lies around the next bend or to follow the dry creek bed until I hear the sound of trickling water and a clear pool. This way of journeying is a way I have known since I can remember.
I was blessed to grow up in a home that was filled with love, care and an invitation to follow my wild nature. I napped under the Ponderosa Pine Trees in our backyard and played freely among the pine trees, lizards, and sky season after season.
From a young age, my brother and I would spend hours building forts, steeping in our epic world of imagination, being drawn down the trails knowing we had to be home by dark. My deep connection with the earth was nurtured in the forests of our backyard.
Alongside this intimacy with earth, an innate mothering spirit was sparked in me after the birth of my baby sister at 5 years old. As a young girl, I was in awe of motherhood. Every baby I met, I held. It was the most natural thing in the world to me. This earthy mothering spirit is rooted in my marrow and has carried me through the decades, weaving my care and love into all the places I travel.
But like all fairy tales, mine was not without my own trials and underworld journeys. If I were going to learn how to guide others back home to themselves, I’d need to get abducted from the path. At 13, divorce, loss, sexual assault, and self-destructive rites of passage came to initiate me into the pain of losing myself. I’ve spent my entire life since, learning how to return to remember my body-heart-soul as home, to feel earth holding me, and the great web of family, seen and unseen, human and more than human, at my back and by my side.
To return to remember myself at age 15 and into my late teens, I discovered journaling, soul poetry, going on long wanders, bike-rides and cross-country skis, self-reflection, solo explorations initiating my wild, robust, brave, adventurous one. In this time I explored new languages, cultures, friendships, finding supportive community, learning ways of alchemizing wounds into gifts by being in nature, and continuously returning back to my roots—my love of earth, writing through transitions, and a deep flowing curiosity and wonder of this wild precious life.
At 21, a doorway opened, I entered massage school and I began my journey as a body-centered healer and birth doula. There was no going back. Giving thanks to my hands every day for the sacred, humble work of healing touch became an evening ritual. Into my 20’s, I intimately tended family, close beloved friends and community through healing, illnesses, aging, dying, birth and the countless visible and invisible thresholds between. In my personal life, I was taken to my own edges, the deepest love coupled with the deepest grief beckoned me to claim life as heartbreaking and holy.
I encountered the rugged path of crisis and a complex living death experience with a soul-mate love that initiated even more the fierce lover, mother, healer, shapeshifter and my own embodiment of “holy love~holy grief”.
For me the doorways to my own aliveness were moving my body, praying, writing, and immersing myself in wild earth places in the depths of the Grand Canyon, frigid creeks, cobblestone roads, and high mountains. These soul homes woke up an ancient remembering of enacting personal ceremonies as if my life depended on it. It was the only way that life made sense. My capacity to show up widened and deepened. I grew trust in the mystery, mess, muck and magic in ways I could have never imagined. The fierce, gentle, loving healer/mother/lover/warrior/community tender in myself was initiated.
I cultivated a full-time private practice as a massage therapist and birth doula and was quite a radical village tender. I devotedly partnered and mothered, and committed to showing up to life in whatever way I was called. I also apprenticed to my limits and boundaries and with a broken~clear heart, I learned how to “disappoint another to be true to myself” (Oriah Mountain Dreamer). Eventually, I grew a longing to expand my understanding of the intersections of body, heart, mind and how our life stories are embedded in our bodies and I simultaneously had a longing for a strong community of well-women. With those calls nudging me forward I moved to Boulder, CO and journeyed down a path of deepening my learning, studying Body-Centered Psychotherapy and Dance/Movement Therapy at Naropa University with masterful body-centered teachers. New doors opened!
Into my 30’s my soul community began growing and I stepped fully into the dance of my life with Melissa Michael’s and Golden Bridge’s international embodied rites of passage programs and SomaSource programs while continuing to deepen through studying Somatic Archeology with Ruby Gibson and deepened with Bill Plotkin and other soul-centered nature guides through the Animas Valley Institute. I began weaving the elements of body, mind, heart, soul, earth, movement, community, ritual and rites of passage into the ways I served and supported in my work and birthed “Artistry of Remembering.” In my 3rd decade I also fell in love with my beloved soulmate, friend, lover and true companion deepening into a relational journey that has expanded, humbled, softened and sharpened me beyond what I ever could have ever dreamed. We met being in service to our community and from the beginning, this collective devotion to being on purpose together has shaped our friendship, our lovership and our ongoing becoming.
My 40’s have been a decade of living my earth-rooted, soul-centered somatic medicine into the world, serving an intergenerational ocean of precious souls and of course being shaped by my own life’s thresholds. The earthy mothering spirit that has been infused since the beginning always thought she would give birth to her own children in this lifetime. Through an epic, spirit-infused fertility journey that had me riding heart-crushing waves of hope and loss, bringing me to my knees, tumbling me and humbling me~each wave is part of shaping who I am today, I bow to the wild mystery of life and the great story that holds it all. What I know in my bones is that these narrow passageways call on concentric circles of support; earth and her trusting ways, my incredible family, my beloved husband and the wise, wild, fiercely loving women in my life holding me in times when it felt impossible to make it through. Not only did I make it through, the Mother-Queen of me celebrates the miracle of each sunrise with a wink and a tear, in my own Holy Love~Holy Grief dance and my heart is more open and ROBUST for it. And I see my niece look directly into my eyes and say, “I’m yours.” The children know.
Over the past 28-plus years of supporting individuals and groups through life's thresholds, I have come to realize that how earth holds me is how I hold the precious humans I support. The way that earth remembers us and welcomes us home and into our true nature—this is what I do. It’s not what I sought out to do. It’s not what I thought I’d be doing. It’s what I have no choice but to do and I am honored by this truth. It’s my own soul story and I am in love with what I am blessed to live.
My heart bursts open with gratitude for my precious family, my deep sisters, my bad-ass community, Earth and all the wild ones. I would not be here in this way without each one of you~and all of you. Truly Blessed.
