As we walk through our lives, along paths that at times feel fluid and at other times terrifying, we all will experience pain, grief and woundings. It is how we face, understand and integrate these experiences that fill us with the wisdom and vitality to continue on. In the words of Francis Weller “Our lives are meant to be a work of art, with the dark colors bringing the contrast, the depths…”. Without the darkness to contrast the light, how are we to experience this rich life we have been offered.
This month, Lauren Furutani LMFT speaks with Stephanie Joy Jenkins, a radiant soul companion, in a unique meeting of minds and hearts. This interview is a sacred space where two paths converge - the path of a psychotherapist and the path of a soul companion. The tapestry of Stephanie’s teachings, shared through this interview, echo the emotional landscapes that we psychotherapists traverse daily with those that we work with. Stephanie offers a fresh perspective that intertwines seamlessly with the therapeutic work of grief, loss, connection and spiritual growth.
Lauren: Well, I'm so glad we could have this conversation today. I've been wanting to introduce you to my MHT community for quite some time. I'm glad that we're here. This is odd. I don't think I've ever been on Zoom with you before. We're usually in the wilderness together, actually, and having unfolding conversations. But you're a dear friend and also someone I admire who has really taught me a lot and deeply impacted my work as a therapist and just being a human on this planet. Yeah, you know so much about this place that we inhabit, our plant and animal friends, and you have really... Yeah, you have shown me a... This sounds cheesy, but you have really shown me a deeper, more intentional way of living and being. That's a broad introduction. I want to give you an opportunity to just introduce yourself and speak on who you are and what you're up to. And yeah, I'll let you go from there.
Stephanie: Cool. Thank you, Lauren. Yeah, thanks for this opportunity. I'm excited to see what unfolds as we hold this space together. And I'm just so grateful for the ways that my journey as a human has been enriched by our friendship. It's just such a testimony to how we really need community. We need relationship in order to step into our fullness. I'm grateful for the ways that we've been able to offer that to each other. So thanks for taking our wild conversations into this space.
L: Yeah, and we'll see how it unfolds.
S: We'll see where it takes us. Yeah. So I am an educator. I teach eighth grade English in the public schools for the last 19 years. And the last three years, I've been moving out of that work full-time and also pursuing the work of my soul, which is really creating opportunities for women to break free from the cultural conditioning that's kept us small and contained. I consider myself a recovering good daughter of the patriarchy. And so creating opportunities to step into a new way of being, really listening to our embodied wisdom, tapping into our inherent belonging to this wild earth, and listening to the truth of our own soul's knowing. And these are ways of being that I have found so enlightening and so rich, and yet there is so few spaces for that knowledge of self to exist. So I do that in a couple of ways. I offer one-on-one soul companionship and journey individually with women in their own soul journeys. And also I offer some courses and events to support that as well in community because there's so much power that comes when we get to be together and circle. So yeah, that's my work in the world.
L: Nice. Thanks for sharing. I have participated in some of your communal gatherings around the fire and out in nature and connecting to the tamed part of our wild nature in the presence of others. Yeah, it's been fun and freeing and has really offered an opportunity, I think, to go more deeply into myself and to witness others moving deeply into themselves, which I'm partially biased towards, I suppose, as a therapist. But I think that's why so many of our conversations that we have when we're meandering through the hills around us or the trails around us, because I feel like we have a shared passion for that work, not only for ourselves, but with others. And... Yeah. So tell me a little bit about just what's been on your mind lately, what's been interesting you, what's been showing up in your journey or the journeys as you've been companioning with others?
S: Yeah. Well, I think to be honest with you, I mean, you already know this, but to be honest with those of you that are listening, I am in my own dark night of the soul, you might call it, or a descent into the lesser-known regions of myself. It's partially being in midlife. I'm 43, and I feel like there is the developmental mental reality to what I'm going through, and also just life circumstances as well, unraveling and shifting in some really significant ways that have caused me to question everything. And so the image that I feel is like I'm in the well, I'm in the depths right now and navigating that for myself, which is... And being supported, being supported by my friends and my own mentors, and my own therapist. That's where I'm finding myself right now, is doing this work that I help guide other people into and revisiting it in a new way. And it just reminds me that this journey of becoming, we're given such a linear model, like you start here and you end here, and it's just the straight line. Or maybe it's even going like this, maybe ups and downs, peaks and valleys, but that a better understanding of it, at least from my experience and from those that I've journeyed with, is the spiral. This idea that we are going to come back to the same lessons over and over again, and that when we've made a descent, it's not over, right? It's the future. I wish it were. Yeah, but you go deeper down and discover even more that wasn't accessible the first time round. And so there's this real living of that in my experience right now. Yeah.
L: We've talked in our conversations, we talk a lot about the reality that we can't do the work we do, we have different expressions of a very similar type of work with people. But yeah, that we can't do our work well if we don't do it with ourselves. That disrupts us, though. I mean, it can disrupt the path we have set forward on. That's not bad, but that we have to be able to go into ourselves and do the work also so that we can offer that for others. It sounds like you're living that right now. You're modeling that. You're in it.
“I consider myself a recovering good daughter of the patriarchy. And so creating opportunities to step into a new way of being, really listening to our embodied wisdom, tapping into our inherent belonging to this wild earth, and listening to the truth of our own soul’s knowing. And these are ways of being that I have found so enlightening and so rich, and yet there is so few spaces for that knowledge of self to exist.”
S: Yeah, I'm definitely in it right now. It's so true. We're not able to offer what we have not experienced. We're not able to journey with others where we've dared not go ourselves. And so maybe it's a cautionary tale to anyone that wants to journey with people in this way, whatever modality that calls you as a healer is that this is really part of it. This is really part of it is that you will be invited into the descent, into the depths, into your own grief, and loss, and shadow, and all of that is so necessary. We have this hierarchical model of healing in our own culture where the healers are the professional experts who are above the human experience. They are the ones that, they know the things, but we don't expect them, or maybe we don't allow them to have their own messy human encounters with reality. And I don't think that that's the right model, that sense of hierarchy, that sense of separation. I think that separation is the thing that probably hurts us the most. We have such a model for that in our Western culture, the binaries that we've created of healer and sick or of spirit and matter or the masculine and the feminine. There are so many ways that we could keep separating things out. And a true healer is one who has known their own wounding because the reality is we are all... We are all wounded in some ways because we are living, right? But when we make our wounds the problem, and instead of a portal, instead of a gateway into deeper knowledge of self and deeper knowledge of what it means to be human, then we maintain that sense of separation. And that's harmful because we're perpetuating... We're perpetuating the hierarchies that these power over paradigms that have hurt so many people and continue to hurt our planet. I feel like the journey of soul, this is the language that I use for the work that I do, the journey of soul is one of messy participation. It's about getting into the places that we have been either forbidden from going or too afraid because it has been vilified or demonized or just made to be an end unto itself. Yeah, I think we really see the descent as being if you're standing on the edge of grief and you're looking over into the well it's like I don't want to go down there because I'll never get out. I know I felt that. I've felt that energy before where I just don't want to go there because if I go there, I'll never get out.
L: Well, I think it can feel like death. Yeah, I think that gets spoken all the time. I feel like it will end me. There's just so much fear. I can't go there. I feel like it will end me or I might die or I think of even suicidal ideation as just the death. Yet I think what you're speaking to is the necessary cycles of death and loss that actually bring life, which maybe I'll lead into another thing we talk about often. Take it away.
S: Oh, yes. Let's talk about death. I want to just say that it's so serious, right? That feeling of fear and of annihilation and of not wanting to face into the grief, that's really real. I've been there myself, so I don't want to make light of it. But I think that we have been given a story of what death means that has really limited our capacity to hold ourselves and to hold the reality of life because we have created that sense of separation between life and death, that life and death are opposites of each other, that death is the end to life. And one of the things that I'm really passionate about is deepening into the wisdom of the Earth, which is cyclical, which is the rhythm of life that we all are literally dependent on. And when we look at Earth and we look at the way that she does things, death is not the opposite of life. Death is just one side of life. All of it is life. It's all part of the cycle. And so death, it changes from this static, concrete, it's finished and over to an opportunity for transformation. If we just think about the fact that we ate something today. I had oatmeal for breakfast, and that grain had to die in order for it to become part of my life. And now it is literally in my body as life. And this is the way that things happen in the natural cycles that all of what lives will die, but then it will live again in this transformational way. And so there's this rhythm of life to death to life again that is written into the fabric of reality, of our matter, and is mirrored by our own souls, our own psychies, our own inner life as well. And so that when we face that dissent or that grief or that loss, I know I'm living that right now. I can trust that although it's taking me down and it's taking me into territory that is challenging and heart-wrenching, I know that it's transformational. I know that there will be the spring that comes after winter, that this is part of my own cyclical way of being.
L: Yeah. Well, and it speaks to, having been a friend to you during this season and just understanding where you are, it's also just it's so, I think, it's wild. You've done so much work. It comes up often in therapy, like, When am I going to be done? When am I going to be done? This isn't getting easier. It's like, Ah, it doesn't. We build capacity for more and we get in contact with more and it doesn't feel easier. Maybe we move through it differently or maybe, and even then, not always. And it's... Yeah. But it's richer. Yeah, it just is. And there's vitality born out of going into those... Experiencing those deaths, I think, and living into our grief. It does really allow for life. I was thinking too when you were talking earlier, I don't know if it came up in a... Anyway, someone was commenting lately, but I had noticed last time I was at Arlington Gardens, it was a couple of months ago, but it was just a mess. It was a mess there. It's usually so tidy and beautiful. It's intentional because leaving the leaves as they fall is beneficial to the whole little ecosystem that's in that magical little plot of land in the middle of Pasadena next to a busy road. Yeah, just thinking about how what you said earlier, just the messy participation. Yeah. It's not tidy and it is painful and it's cyclical and there's always more.
S: Yeah, exactly. The leaves don't just drop their trees one autumn and then they're like, Now we're done. We never have to drop them again. And I think this is a real important piece of the body, and specifically female bodies that we are naturally cyclical. And I think just one of the important parts of my own journey is reclaiming my own cyclical nature through my menstrual cycle and recognizing that this every-every-month, I go through a descent, a letting go, a releasing, this dark period where I'm tired and my body doesn't have as much energy, and then the rising and the peak of ovulation where I have a lot more outward-facing energy. And this is written into the female body, and it mirrors the body of the moon who does the same thing on the same time schedule, and of course, the seasons of the Earth. And I really think returning to a worldview that is not driven by economy of productivity and capitalism, but that is paying attention to the ecological reality of the way that life is creates space for us to hold that capacity that you're talking about, because we just see that, Oh, this is life. This is life. And we've traded life in its fullness and in its cyclical, spiral, wild, messy, holding all the things.
L: Wisdom!
S: Yeah, we've traded that for control, right? One of the places that you and I like to go and walk is the Hahamonga watershed, the lower Arroyo Seco. And that river that's there has been caged in concrete. It was a wild river, and sometimes you and I will trace it back to the foothills where it's still wild and put our bodies in the cold water and feel the aliveness that's there. But where we live, it was put in a concrete channel because it was too wild. The 19th centuries, when it flooded, like every 100 years, this little dry creek becomes this huge torrent. And the government stepped in and said, We can't have rivers getting so big and so on. Danger. Danger.
L: How many things we've deemed dangerous.
S: Yeah, and putting it in this concrete channel and the consequence of that, yes, the water is controlled. Yes, there's no more flooding that happens. And also, all the species that have disappeared because the river doesn't get to participate in the ecosystem anymore. The grizzlies, and the wolves and the trout and the frogs and all of the wild ones who used to rely on that water source have been cut off. And so in the name of control, life has left. And ironically, water is life. And yet we've cut off our land from the source of life. And I think we do that. We do that with ourselves because of all of this cultural conditioning that we have that says put all those things away. I mean, just even me talking about the menstrual cycle, that's so taboo, that's so shameful. And there's so much of that that we have pushed away from being part of our actual life. And we've tried to get rid of it. Of course, you can't really get rid of it, but we've tried to.
L: We can't fully manage it away! But yeah.
S: Yeah. And so reconnecting to a different imagination. I think that's something that I know that I need, is a different imagination about what life means, getting rid of this happily ever after success ladder that is the narrative that we typically have, and remembering an older story, this story of Earth, this story of life as it actually appears in body form through our own bodies and through the body of the planet.
L: Yeah. Well, I mean, creativity is coming to mind now and just knowing that for myself, and I'm having a memory in my mind, too, of one of our walks also. So many things on the hikes. But just that I feel most connected, most in touch with my creativity when I'm out in the expanse and feel held. You made a funny joke one time like, You are a poet. When we were rattling off on a trail somewhere. But allowing our experience of nature around us to create poetry and playing in that space. It's something that was probably four or five years ago. I mean, it's forever. In my felt, felt, felt memory of just how alive that moment was and how creative we were together and myself.
S: Yeah, that's beautiful. Yeah, I remember that. I think that this is the secret of the dissent that we don't know because nobody talked or not nobody, but it's not talked about because it's just not experienced. But the reality is that death and decay is the fertile ground for new life to come. And if we're talking about psychologically, emotionally, in your landscape, but also literally, like you talked about the leaves and needing to leave the leaves on the ground and not blow them away or rake them up and put them in the trash can, but let it sit and let it rot and let it become rich, fertile soil so that all that new life that wants to come forth can come forth. And this is what happens when we allow ourselves to be transformed by the journey, and not resist trying to just keep our heads above the water, but let ourselves with sacred holding from others to help make it safe, but let ourselves go there. And new life will come. New life will come because this is the pulse of the cosmos. The universe is still moving out into wherever, infinity.
L: Whatever it all means, we're still expanding there!
“Here’s another separation, nature versus humanity. I guess it would be this way, humans on top, dominating and using and nature as being something separate, but we’re nature. Our bodies don’t exist without the riot of relationships that we are. Every breath you and I are taking right now is because there are trees and phytoplankton offering that oxygen. And when we breathe out that carbon dioxide that we give off is taken into their bodies. And so this is this beautiful exchange of reciprocity that is at the heart of all of creation. Yeah, which gets me into one of my favorite ideas, which is erotic ecology.”
S: Yes. It is still unfurling itself. It is still this great, expansive becoming, and we are part of that. I think this is another piece that just feels so important to what I want to be about is remembering myself and the human species as part of this bigger cosmic course. That we are not something outside of it. Here's another separation, nature versus humanity. I guess it would be this way, humans on top, dominating and using and nature as being something separate, but we're nature. Our bodies don't exist without the riot of relationships that we are. Every breath you and I are taking right now is because there are trees and phytoplankton offering that oxygen. And when we breathe out that carbon dioxide that we give off is taken into their bodies. And so this is this beautiful exchange of reciprocity that is at the heart of all of creation. Yeah, which gets me into one of my favorite ideas, which is erotic ecology, which you have to. You're getting there. Yes, erotic ecology is very exciting idea. And this idea is from Andres Webber, whose book I highly recommend. It's called Matter and Desire. And he's an eco-philosopher. And what he is speaking about is this quality of aros. Aros is that Greek idea of sensuality, but sensuality beyond what we've done to it. Just like we've limited death, we've limited aros. We've limited aros to being a sexual relationship between two humans. But what I just described between the bodies of the trees and the bodies of ourselves, that's Aros too. That's another expression. And arrows being this desire for the individual to be fully oneself and to lose oneself fully into participation with the world around it. And how this is what nature does all the time. That river that's in concrete. She just wants to give herself, right? Give herself. Yeah. To the Earth and make mud and then go up the roots of the trees and just be a tree and flow from the mountains and join the sea and all while being fully herself, but then just losing herself to this web of relationships and these physical encounters. It's all bodily, right? And even when we get down to the atomic, the smallest whatever, matter. The smallest matter. Yeah, we know that it's actually a relationship, a relationship of electrons and protons and this coming together and repelling and this dance that is not actually one thing. It's a relationship. And so that's what erotic ecology is about. It's about recognizing the relationship and this physical reciprocity that is inherent in the creative world. And when we do that, like you were talking about when we're walking through nature and connecting to that. Yes, we feel that creativity. We feel that vitality because it is all around us. It's literally under the ground and in the air and even the light that's touching our skin is contacting us. We're being touched by the light of the sun that traveled across the cosmos to touch us. And that's so intimate. It can be so intimate if we choose to see it that way.
L: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so many people are anxious and depressed and feel disconnected and cut off and don't understand how to get out. I just deeply, deeply, deeply believe in the connection to that sensuality of the world and the elements and the natural physical world that we live in and the play with those elements as maybe not entirely a cure, although maybe. There's lots of different things we need in order to heal, but certainly such an important relationship for healing that I don't think gets enough attention.We, we, some of us are fortunate, I suppose, to be raised with a deep respect and curiosity and relationship with the natural world. A lot of us aren't though. Yeah, we're just missing out on... Yeah, missing out.
S: We're missing out, and it's putting our whole species at risk. Because we've lost that imagination that reminds us that we are part of this web of belonging. It is true whether we see it as true or not. But because we don't connect to it, then we can turn the body of the earth into resource, and we can destroy rivers, and we can destroy mountains, and and forests, and commodify them, like turning ancient growth forest into lumber, not recognizing that our atmosphere and the oxygen we breathe is coming from those green ones and those growing ones. I'm struck by... Many people have pointed this out. I think Clarissa Estes-Pinkola was the one, I forget.
L: Pinkola-Estes, yeah. Where is it, around me somewhere? Women Who Run with the Wolves.
S: Such a good one. But she talks about how what we've done to the wilds without is what we have done to the wilderness within. And I feel that deeply in my own experience of… I just went on a trip recently to Morrow Bay Estuary, and I was overwhelmed to learn that although these estuaries, which are the mixing place between the ocean and the freshwater rivers meeting the ocean, and oftentimes, they're protected by the way that the land has shaped around the water. And so there's fresh water coming in and there's salt water coming in. It's this merging. It's not one or the other, right? The binary has been mixed and muddy, and it's in that place of mixing that life really comes to be. It's where the sharks and the rays and the seals and the birds are all having their babies and finding food and being nourished.
L: I was just going to say and having a meal!
S: And having a meal, exactly.
L: But that is all part of it.
S: Yes, it is not one thing, right? It's a place of life and death. When I went, there was a dead harbor seal, and there were vultures eating this dead harbor seal in these nursing waters where the harbor seal probably had been born or maybe had her own children. And so there is no either or. It's both and with nature. And yet this sacred space, we have replaced 95% of these wetlands with human development, with suburbia and strip malls and linear grids of roads in the name of productivity. And it just speaks to our own lack of wildness, how what we care about externally, productivity, really comfortable houses, electricity, it's same internal. It's like when the voice in me that's like, When am I not going to be in the descent or have grief or loss? When am I going to just be okay? It's that same energy of like, There's only one way that's okay to be, or maybe five ways, but all the rest of it is not allowed. And the messy, muddy waters of the estuary, the place where sharks. I mean, we're so scared of predators, just like we're so scared of our own rage, our own hunger, our own whatever. So many expressions of self that we have cut ourselves off from.
L: Desire! Throw that one in there. Hunger and desire, yeah.
S: Yeah, fire. I mean, California. Oh, gosh, I could go on and on. Don't get started. But the indigenous people of California knew that fire was part of our ecosystem and used fire with respect as a way to enhance the ecosystem. And we've lost that knowledge. And part of the reason why we're having so many fires is because of all the suppression of fires for over 100 years now. And that's not the only reason, but that is one reason. And it's so symbolic. So then when the fire comes, it is really destructive because it has been suppressed for so long. And that sounds really similar to our own emotional and psychological journeys when we are suppressing and suppressing. When that energy finally does come, oh!
L: And it does freak us out. I think that's where we have to build a capacity to connect to that in doses that don't overwhelm us entirely. Unfortunately, though, the greater capacity we have the more we feel and go deeper and yeah.
S: Yeah, right? Yeah. Yes. I think too, in addition to the more that we feel and the deeper that we go into our own experience, it also opens up our capacity to connect to what is just true about the human experience. And so we can hold more for ourselves, but also for others. Tapping in, I've learned this through the loss of my brother and through my own other losses, that that personal journey has given me such appreciation and empathy and capacity to be with others, to really be able to meet people where they are instead of from a place of separation to be able to enter in. And that doesn't come at a small price. That comes at, like you said, the cost of living it yourself. But the gifts are, for ourselves and for others, are just so tremendous. Yeah.
L: Like you said, I think we could speak for hours.
S: We could, probably.
L: We're getting 45 minutes in. Any other burning desires? Anything you want to share on your mind? This is such a rich conversation.
S: Yeah. I mean, I just... I'm grateful that we get to do this together. I think that that is so important, is for people to find others to journey with them, whether that is a professional healer or other soul friends and companions who can come alongside. It's just so it makes life so much more rich. And I really don't think we can enter the depths of life on our own. I think we need sacred holding. I know that I've experienced that with you, that in conversation, I can access myself in a way that I can't when I'm just on my own. And so, yeah, just encouraging people to get out in nature and find some good companions and friends and healers to journey with you.
L: Well, and thank you for sharing your wisdom. I mean, you're just an avid learner and one of the most curious people I know and I so admire and love taking you in. So thank you for joining me in conversation today.
S: Yeah, thanks for having me. I love a soapbox. Yeah. Thanks a lot.
L: Well, thank you. And more to come.
Stephanie Joy Jenkins provides one-on-one soul companionship to walk alongside women on their unique spiritual journey. She also offers courses and events for the community. To find out more, check out Stephanie at https://www.stephaniejoyjenkins.com