Jenna Herbst
Counsellor
I specialise in:
About me
I have been on a life-long journey of healing, and study of both the healing and the awakening journey. I received my Masters of Divinity in 2006 from a Buddhist university (Naropa). I studied meditation for many years and received a certificate in mindfulness instruction and working with difficult states, also going on many silent retreats, and several month-long meditation retreats. I studied with many nondual teachers, including Adyashanti. I learned techniques such as Alchemy from Cindy Teevans. I learned somatic meditation, and integrative techniques to slowly heal trauma in the nervous system, as well as untie the tangles of the mind. I have a particular interest in early childhood attachment and and our sensitive relationship to self and other, as, in my experience this is often in the heart of our confusion and pain. Even obsessive thinking, OCD, and PTSD can, in part, have their roots in our need to heal our attachment. I worked for six years with veterans with PTSD. I am currently studying somatic experiencing to enhance my understanding of trauma. I also discovered and practice an energy healing technique called Circles of Enrichment, which helps the body re-learn its most important function of the Yin principle, which allows the collapse and rejuvination of our system. I work with people to bring home all the parts of themselves into loving awareness, and heal and resolve trauma, balancing our system and making us more resilient. It is my joy to help others recover their birthright of joyful living.
My own journey of deep healing informs my practice with people, and has awakened a deep compassion for our humanness, our sensitivity, and our ability to leave ourselves, as well as our innate knowing and intuition about how to return. I believe everyone can heal, and our knowing of this path is innate, and cannot be taken away.
For those interested in the integration of the awakening process with the healing process, I also work with people whose awakening journey has led them to unwind kundalini and other experiential knowing.
I'm also an artist and musician, and locally teach in both of those arenas.
I speak:
Location:
Approach
I have a deep curiosity about human beings and their present - moment experience. I believe this curiosity in itself is healing, as it's a form of deep attunement and validation. Unwinding our mental chatter, and our constant self-critic takes a new kind of attunement, in which we feel accepted, and known, and when that acceptance starts to sink into our way of Being. I help people slow down and honor their experience in this moment, feeling fully what is arising for them. The nervous system is sensitive and deeply intelligent. Sometimes there is inquiry needed to truly understand what we are feeling and thinking. Attachment wounds begin to soften and heal when we shift our allegience to what is true and real for us. When we tell the story of how our suffering is arising in this context, it has a healing quality, and reconnects rather than moving us away from ourselves. When we gently return to the body, feeling and knowing ourselves through what is arising in this moment, we expand our capacity for feeling, and allow ourselves to digest old energies that are stuck and recycled. In being seen, listened to, validated, and attuned to, we can reorient inside of our wounds and transform them. The success in working this way is that our system begins to learn through our direct knowing and experience how to reconnect ourselves with the loving awareness that mends us on a visceral level. This is an actual experience of healing and shifting.
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