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Do you like people telling you what to do?
I don’t.
Instead, I deeply relish realizing my own insights, draw my own conclusions.
Don’t get me wrong I love to receive advice & to share resources, insights & teachings with others.
But when it comes to the really deep, challenging times – I don’t want a lecture of some theory or conceptual idea. I want to be lead into the real heart of my challenges, so I can be vulnerable with them, and liberate what’s at the heart of them.
Perhaps I’ve always been this way.
Perhaps this is why my pharmacy career was destined to end.
Many moons ago I was working as a hospital pharmacist. And I was sick.
Monday through Friday I was suffering nausea that would have me on a cold sweat on the dispensary floor.
There was no rational diagnosis for it. No logical or cognitive answer.
The prescription anti-nausea meds I trialed didn’t touch the sides.
Modern medicine had no answers.
So I turned to alternative healers.
Enter my first kinesiology session & a practitioner who was examining deeper mechanics of emotions & energy as potential causes.
In one session my amazing kinesiologist blew me away & set me on a new course.
I signed up for Kinesiology school & soon after had my Certificates & Diplomas, opening my own in-person practice in Brisbane, Australia.
The first 12 months of my Kinesiology practice were eye-opening.
I was applying this amazing healing modality to my clients. And what that looked like is they would lie down on a massage table, and I would use some subtle body markers, combined with acupressure points, to determine where their energy was flowing & where it was blocked. We’d discover stress in the system, and fit it.
The experience was 100% guided by me. It wasn’t something my client could do by themselves. Now, this isn’t to say that all kinesiologists work this way, but this is how I was taught.
And after a while – I began to find this really unfulfilling.
I wanted my clients to be having the insights & a real sense of ah-ha, I understand the dynamic that’s going on right now – rather than being told it’s this meridian or that chakra.
I wanted them to meet the vulnerability of anger, shame, “I am not enough” and fear that their system was telling me was there. I didn’t want it to be a cognitive discussion of “this is what’s here and let me just magic it away for you”.
Because deep down it felt like a lie, it felt unauthentic.
And in my own personal life, I wasn’t seeing benefits from this kind of practice.
At this same time, in my own life, I was blessed to be surrounded by friends who were indirectly introducing me to more vulnerable, more embodied ways of operating. Where we met the emotional & mental shames that was hiding, and we embrace them, felt them, freed them.
These women were full of pleasure, full of aliveness, just full of truth. And I knew that this is how I too wanted to operate. I wanted to prioritize what I felt, over what I thought.
So I started weaving some of these ways I was discovering, of feeling, inquiring, meeting the tender spots and welcoming them in my sessions with clients.
Over the course of a year, my sessions went from being on the massage table “doing” kinesiology to a client, to in my coaching chairs asking the client to do the work on themselves.
I stopped telling clients what was ‘wrong’, or what they ‘should do’ to balance it. And instead invited them with inquiry to open new doors, guiding them into themselves.
The results began to speak for themselves.
I was lit up & turned on.
Using these tools in my own life was begging to create generous ripples.
My clients loved it. They started signing up for longer packages. More clients began coming through my door. And they were the clients I wanted to work with.
Without changing anything on my website, or my marketing a different type of client began to appear – and she wanted this thing that I was doing which definitely wasn’t kinesiology, and was some yet undefined type of coaching that I couldn’t name.
At the end of that year, I realized the essence of what I was doing with my clients was embodiment.
Inviting them into the temple of the body so that they could come into contact with the root texture, the felt sense of all their dimensions. We work with thoughts, emotions, energy & intuition through the physical body in the feminine embodiment coaching model.
So I took the esoteric theory I knew from kinesiology, the scientific theory of acute stress & dissociation I knew from my clinical pharmacy background & I started exploring embodiment.
I googled embodied.
I searched for embodiment training.
And I came up pretty short.
Not a lot was being offered into space at that time.
In fact, there was not a single training in the art of embodiment coaching that I could find.
There were some experts teaching embodiment focused movement methods, so I studded those & became a qualified teacher. There were some experts studying, publishing & teaching on specific aspects of the mechanics of embodiment that I was coming to realize, so I studied & read everything I could of their work.
And I kept coaching.
I took on more & more clients, refining this system. Developing the body of work.
I took my work online & worked with different women, from different cultures, backgrounds, age groups. I began to coach small groups of women using this work & its principles. And demand just grew.
Pretty soon I had coached women from over 22 different countries on 5 different continents.
And It was about this point that some of my past students and peers actually started asking me…
“Jenna, when can we learn to do this with our clients? Can we study this with you?”
The idea of offering this modality to others hadn’t been on my game plan when I started out. In fact, I had no plan if I’m honest, I was just following the threads of knowing my body was slowly revealing.
This is how I run my business & my life, the body-based way. Listening to those subtle nudges that one becomes sensitivity to when they are constantly working with the body.
It’s clear to me that I didn’t “create” the feminine, or embodiment.
These aspects are part of nature, timeless in their omnipresence.
All I did was put a structure, a framework, and some tools so that coaches can reproducible work with these tools, and understand their mechanics.
My job as the headteacher in the feminine embodiment coaching certification is to guide students to learn these tools, practice them to the point of self-mastery within their own bodies & lives, and then support them to weave this modality into the natural gifts & lived experience they are as a unique individual in this space.
If we break down what ‘feminine embodiment coaching’ really it’s about
1. Coaching
Coaching is a partnership between two people. By asking powerful questions, a coach can invite a client to create new awareness & make new connections and insights. The coach doesn’t have to have the answers, rather they invite the client into their own knowing.
2. Feminine
As a feminine coach, we’re taking into consideration the feeling, flowing, emotional & sensitive aspect of a client. Inviting not only her logic & head to the discussion but also the subtle inner energies & intuitions she has access to.
3. Embodiment
The types of questions we ask to invite the whole body – all 4 dimensions (physical, mental, emotional & energetic). We’re asking our clients to not only think their way forward but to FEEL and to experience that insight and desire in the body. This means that our coaching isn’t only cognitive. Instead, we use the Pillars of Embodiment to bring the entire client in on the discussion.
In my opinion, it’s this unique combination that makes this modality such an amazing & successful way to work with clients.
Practically, a Feminine Embodiment Coaching session is held 1-1, either in person or online. The session might range from 20-30mins, 60-90mins, or even whole-day experiences.
In August 2017 we opened the doors for our first round of the Feminine Embodiment Coaching Certification.
Since then we’ve had over 60 students complete the program with amazing success.
These amazing women & peers are out in the world doing their own work in areas like leadership, career changes, business, mothering, grief, divorce, birth, relationships and so much more. They work with women, men & other gender identities.
You can hear some of their stories first hand over at feminineembodimentcoaching.com if you’re interested.
Right now the doors are open for our March 2020 class of the Feminine Embodiment Coaching Certification. If you’d like to find out more about this modality & if it could be a fit for supporting your unique passions to find their way out into the work you can learn more at feminineembodimentcoaching.com
