Jill - A Little More About Me, Pt.II
Eventually, late in 2017, I went on to complete a 50hr meditation teacher training (during which I met Jordan, who was teaching weekly meditation classes). This training was one of the most life changing for me - not only because I met the future father of my future child, but in ways that are difficult to tangibly describe. This became the ground from which I approached every practice I engaged with until now, and the foundation from which I guide classes. It’s like I finally began to open up to what was always there, waiting for me… it opened the doors for everything that came after in Divine Order. I was fascinated with the technology of the human and the capacity to shift states of consciousness without external substance. During this time, more esoteric knowledge began to enter my field, and I found a lot of correlations within the fields of what I knew of physics, geometry, energy, consciousness, and the intelligence of the natural world.
Shortly after that, wanting to get more involved in one of the local studios, I completed a 100hr adjusters training to become a hands-on adjuster during classes. The adjuster’s training brought me closer to a curiosity for hands-on compassionate touch, and I completed yet another training in Thai massage foundations (Northern style). I left my career as a geophysicist in 2018 and began guiding in-studio yoga classes, offering Thai massages, and working at a sensory deprivation float centre, moving into full time teaching in yoga studios in 2019.
In 2019, after traveling to a music festival in Costa Rica, I was called to join a training in Guatemala called Permaculture for the Herbalists Path… a 5 week intensive deep dive into permaculture and herbalism. I had never felt a calling in my gut like that before, like I HAD to go. As I worked with that land, I felt a deep remembrance of Mother Earth energy. I reconnected with parts of myself I didn’t know existed... past, present, and future. My consciousness expanded into previously unexplored realms, feeling the most at home I had ever felt with the reciprocal relationships we were regenerating with the Earth, Spirit, and community. I began remembering MAGIC. We studied alchemy, potion making, and energetic communication with plants. I committed to sobriety from alcohol there, realizing its intense impediment on my ability to connect with these energies, and surrounded with the support of a group who was navigating a similar journey. I further renewed my relationship with my body, easing away from treating it as something to continually bend to my egoic will, but as something to nourish so that I could realize it in its highest expression - a vessel to receive and transmit a clarity in consciousness. I committed to nourishing nature’s wisdom and rhythms through my action and expression. I remembered then that my body was never failing me - only showing me the way.
On that trip, I fostered a deeper connection to cosmic energies in cyclic relationship to the Earth, experiencing a felt sense of them. Never really “believing” in astrology, my interest piqued and I began to question: how could the energetics of the planets and stars affect the signatures and potencies of the herbs I was using in my potions like we had studied in herbal alchemy? I took a course called Botanical Constellations through the School of Evolutionary Herbalism, and learned more about using plants to help others heal by looking at their natal charts - dipping my toes into medical astrology. I came through that experience with more questions than answers! I became fascinated with learning how to read a natal chart, and how I could use this tool to map out patterns in my own life.
Through some self-lead learning, I quickly became overwhelmed by the complexities, layers, and nuances of reading a natal chart, and something really nagged at me about everything I was seeing… traditional interpretations felt restrictive, disempowering, full of black-and-white thinking, and like something was missing. There were puzzle pieces that didn’t quite fit together.
Enter: Krista Reierson (Chalice Grove). She was someone I had been following in the community for some time as a kundalini yoga teacher, but she began posting more and more about astrology... 80% of what she spoke about elicited a mental response in me along the lines of “wtf is she talking about?” or “well that makes me feel fucking uncomfortable”, but something about how her words landed in my body, the intensity of curiosity that was piqued, I just knew that this was information that I was being guided to receive. I was elated when she announced that she would be guiding a training for people wanting to learn to read a natal chart the way she did - although it still took me months to commit to investing in the part of myself that longed to know more. That investment was the beginning of the cascade of initiations I’ve been going through since engaging with that work, and slowly the puzzle pieces started coming together.
