Welcome to Everything Speaks if You Listen with Jen CobbleWorks where we befriend our humanity and the Sacred through story, soul questions, and every day life.

In this week's episode, I return after almost a 6 week break to explore a spiritual pain point: the idea that the body and the soul are separated and at war with each other. I share some details with my long journey with Hashimoto's and personal spiritual path and notice how I spent many years trying to diminish, dismiss, and tame my body so that it couldn't cause "problems" for me and I could be "good".

I trace this theology/philosophy back to Pluto's concept of the Forms where he posits that the body is a prison for the soul and that the soul is hindered, even tainted by the possible corruption the body can evoke. I also look at how this shows up in some of my Christian roots and how the my Hashimoto's helped me deconstruct from this pattern of oppressing the body to elevate or protect the soul.

Instead, I explore the sense of union and gateway I experience through my body now, its sacred presence and invitation even through illness, conflicting emotions, etc. and talk about my early days with Celtic Spirituality and Ignatian Spirituality helped me stop waging a war between body and soul.

This is a tender, gentle, kind of slowly paced podcast filled with deep personal soul stories, body stories, and inner reflections. I offer it in hope that it helps you frame your own relationship between your humanity and your soul.

I'm Jen Cobble Willhoite, a contemplative storyteller, spiritual tool designer, and life-long soul seeker. My path is formed and framed by questions more than answers. I'm more comfortable wondering and wandering about things spiritual than I am in ideology, religion, or dogma.

My soul language and connection with Spirit is primarily grounded in Celtic Spirituality, science, nature, seasonal cycles, myth, folklore, and stories of all kinds. I do have roots in progressive Christianity that I sometimes speak from. My tap root, though, is ordinary life. I believe enlightenment is rhythmic, unfolding, and found in our everyday experiences and selves. I also offer tools and courses on my modern interpretation of the examen: a daily ritual of looking back, looking within, and looking ahead to cultivate a rapport with your inner wisdom and the Sacred as you understand it.

Every week, I share an episode from my own spiritual explorations, offering invitations for you to explore these themes on your own. Thanks for journeying with me!

Welcome to Everything Speaks if You Listen with Jen CobbleWorks where we befriend our humanity and the Sacred through story, soul questions, and every day life.

In this week's episode, I open up about some of my journey with chronic illness and a new invitation I'm receiving about how to engage with it. I explore the concept of becoming a friend to oneself by looking at the ancient storytelling concept of following your fear--something that sounds very different from following your heart, but is actually a deep expression of that same thing.

I also explore what it means to become friends with an aspect of yourself that is frightening, intimidating, or just not wanted at all by listening to the wisdom of feral animals...cats in particular.

If there's something you're struggling to come to terms with in your life, or something you feel like you simply must improve on or eliminate, but the very effort of that is draining your love and inner capacity to show up for yourself and the world, I believe you'll find some resonance here (or at least some invitational questions to travel with).

I'm Jen Cobble Willhoite, a contemplative storyteller, spiritual tool designer, and life-long soul seeker. My path is formed and framed by questions more than answers. I'm more comfortable wondering and wandering about things spiritual than I am in ideology, religion, or dogma.

My soul language and connection with Spirit is primarily grounded in Celtic Spirituality, science, nature, seasonal cycles, myth, folklore, and stories of all kinds. I do have roots in progressive Christianity that I sometimes speak from. My tap root, though, is ordinary life. I believe enlightenment is rhythmic, unfolding, and found in our everyday experiences and selves. I also offer tools and courses on my modern interpretation of the examen: a daily ritual of looking back, looking within, and looking ahead to cultivate a rapport with your inner wisdom and the Sacred as you understand it.

Every week, I share an episode from my own spiritual explorations, offering invitations for you to explore these themes on your own. Thanks for journeying with me!

Welcome to Everything Speaks if You Listen with Jen CobbleWorks where we befriend our humanity and the Sacred through story, soul questions, and every day life.

In this week's episode, I share two invitations with you. The first one is to join me for an upcoming podcast episode where my teacher and friend, Mary DeJong of Waymarkers, will tell the story of Fox Woman Dreaming and encourage us to listen to Story's sacred presence and wisdom more often. I spend the first part of this episode sharing my own love of story and applied mythology and introducing you to the themes Mary and her work are grounded in.

The second invitation this episode has us stretching into the innate shadow and light of the winter season and the sacred holidays that we celebrate this time of year. I talk about my own need to recognize what is hard and challenging and dark in my life right now, and in our shared realities right now, while also needing to recognize what is alive and brimming on the horizon. We are not asked to demean or diminish the dark in favor of a saving light. We are asked to witness the dark, see it for more than fear and trauma, but also a place of seed bearing, like a womb. We are asked not to live in the dark so much and so long that we cannot tolerate hope and the possibility of peace. We need both. And this episode explores these needs and the tension they create...which is sometimes a beautiful, creative tension.

The link to the Shadow + Light course I mention (with NO homework in it!) is below. Use coupon code BOTHAND at checkout for 10% off the $37 cost. If this cost does not align with your budget this year, please email me at jen@jencobbleworks.com

cobbleworks.teachable.com/p/shadowandlight

I'm Jen Cobble Willhoite, a contemplative storyteller, spiritual tool designer, and life-long soul seeker. My path is formed and framed by questions more than answers. I'm more comfortable wondering and wandering about things spiritual than I am in ideology, religion, or dogma.

My soul language and connection with Spirit is primarily grounded in Celtic Spirituality, science, nature, seasonal cycles, myth, folklore, and stories of all kinds. I do have roots in progressive Christianity that I sometimes speak from. My tap root, though, is ordinary life. I believe enlightenment is rhythmic, unfolding, and found in our everyday experiences and selves. I also offer tools and courses on my modern interpretation of the examen: a daily ritual of looking back, looking within, and looking ahead to cultivate a rapport with your inner wisdom and the Sacred as you understand it.

Every week, I share an episode from my own spiritual explorations, offering invitations for you to explore these themes on your own. Thanks for journeying with me!

Welcome to Everything Speaks if You Listen with Jen CobbleWorks where we befriend our humanity and the Sacred through story, soul questions, and every day life.

In this week's episode, we explore the provocative, yet sacred invitation that our daily triggers can hold. We do this through the lens of the examen practice, of daily reflection and listening within. In the ritual of the examen, there are a pair of powerful questions that sit in the center of the practice. They ask us where and when we felt deep connection to ourselves and the Sacred, and were and when we felt deep disconnection to them.

Our minds often want to open up a moral courtroom and engage in dualistic, binary thinking when we encounter these questions. We want to assume that the connection (consolation) is good and the disconnection is bad. But this is only our surface response, our reaction to our triggers.

Self-reflection and listening within ask us to go deeper, to make space to let these questions sit within our souls, giving rise to answers in their own good time. When we reflect on our ordinary day, the answer to where we felt sacred connection and disconnection might seem meaningless because it's ordinary (like a trip to the grocery store). But we're being asked to see that great wisdom, magic, transformation and presence live within and beneath ordinary things.

When we make it a habit to self-reflect, we get used to making space for the ordinary to reveal its deeper story and truths. This helps us know ourselves and the Sacred more intimately and uniquely. And it helps us find meaning in our lives just as they are.

I use my Compassionate Card Deck as a tool in this episode. If you're interested in more information on these or to purchase a deck for yourself, the link is below:

Compassionate Question Cards

I'm Jen Cobble Willhoite, a contemplative storyteller, spiritual tool designer, and life-long soul seeker. My path is formed and framed by questions more than answers. I'm more comfortable wondering and wandering about things spiritual than I am in ideology, religion, or dogma.

My soul language and connection with Spirit is primarily grounded in Celtic Spirituality, science, nature, seasonal cycles, myth, folklore, and stories of all kinds. I do have roots in progressive Christianity that I sometimes speak from. My tap root, though, is ordinary life. I believe enlightenment is rhythmic, unfolding, and found in our everyday experiences and selves. I also offer tools and courses on my modern interpretation of the examen: a daily ritual of looking back, looking within, and looking ahead to cultivate a rapport with your inner wisdom and the Sacred as you understand it.

Every week, I share an episode from my own spiritual explorations, offering invitations for you to explore these themes on your own. Thanks for journeying with me!

Welcome to Everything Speaks if You Listen with Jen CobbleWorks where we befriend our humanity and the Sacred through story, soul questions, and every day life.

In this week's episode, we consider a deep (maybe the taproot?) invitation from Samhain, All Soul's Day, and All Saint's Day which is: If this is a short season where the veil is thin, how can we connect to the thinning veils within us? This feels important because we have to decide whether we are going to open our hearts to Sacred presence or not. We have to consider our inner veils, the places where we often can feel very guarded and protected even from love and Spirit.

Honestly, receiving love can feel extraordinarily vulnerable. It is no small task to ask ourselves to stay open and welcoming even to love. We can convince ourselves we are not worthy of it. We can begin to believe that Love doesn't really *do* anything anyways. We can armor ourselves up internally and refuse Spirit's embrace. It's ok if we need to do this. There is nothing wrong with self-protection. But when we're in a season where all of existence is drawing closer together, it's reasonable to ask ourselves if we can lower our guards and thin our own inner veils.

This is a short, liminal season that can help us feel connected to parts of us we have almost forgotten and we want to reclaim. It can help us feel connected to precious memories, people, places, animals, events, even things. This communion of who and what we hold most dear becomes part of our own inner strength and connection to the divine as we know it. It edifies our hope and our sense of love in the world. But for this communion to occur, we need to welcome it, to thin our inner veils.

Weirdly and honestly, I share how an 80's pop song from REO Speedwagon is often the catalyst that reminds me to pick up the invitation of spiritual communion from Samhain, All Soul's, and All Saint's and receive the love that is abundantly available to me, to all of us...even if I don't always feel "chill" receiving it.

If you'd like to email me about 1:1 work, please do so at jen@jencobbleworks.com

I'm Jen Cobble Willhoite, a contemplative storyteller, spiritual tool designer, and life-long soul seeker. My path is formed and framed by questions more than answers. I'm more comfortable wondering and wandering about things spiritual than I am in ideology, religion, or dogma.

My soul language and connection with Spirit is primarily grounded in Celtic Spirituality, science, nature, seasonal cycles, myth, folklore, and stories of all kinds. I do have roots in progressive Christianity that I sometimes speak from. My tap root, though, is ordinary life. I believe enlightenment is rhythmic, unfolding, and found in our everyday experiences and selves. I also offer tools and courses on my modern interpretation of the examen: a daily ritual of looking back, looking within, and looking ahead to cultivate a rapport with your inner wisdom and the Sacred as you understand it.

Every week, I share an episode from my own spiritual explorations, offering invitations for you to explore these themes on your own. Thanks for journeying with me!

Welcome to Everything Speaks if You Listen with Jen CobbleWorks where we befriend our humanity and the Sacred through story, soul questions, and every day life.

In this week's episode, we look at why we often resist the invitation to listen within and practice reflection. The fact is, we can encounter a lot of painful or shadowy stuff when we do practices like this. And our response can (naturally) be one of, "Why should I dig up all this stuff again?"

But in our avoidance of journeying within and reflecting, we miss some big, compassionate revelations. One is that there is more love, creativity, mercy, and healing within our shadowy parts than we originally think. And another is that our immediate judgment *against* our shadow, our umbra, can actually occlude us more, block us more, and prevent more growth than whatever "bad" things we might encounter there.

Again, we turn to the cosmos and the recent and upcoming eclipses for applied metaphors in how we can embrace our own shadows and be more willing to practice inner listening and "go there". The recent annular solar eclipse gives us imagery of a sacred ring of fiery protection, of Love's embrace, that holds us safely while we reflect. It also circles something for us, highlighting something within us that wants more time and space to be heard, expressed, or healed.

The upcoming lunar eclipse gives us the imagery of the umbra, the shadow that is cast by something that is illuminated. When we consider Spirit, Source lighting or accompanying our reflection practice, we get the opportunity to see our selves AND our shadow. Light offers us both as meaningful invitations to know ourselves better.

Ultimately, my hope is that you will find this episode affirming of how scary it can feel to reflect and journey within, but even more affirming of the powerful seeds of creativity and soul wisdom you hold within your inner dark places. They are more than a fearful basement within ourselves to be avoided. Our shadows are also seed beds.

Link to the Soulful Halloween journal is here (VERY compassionate, yet surprising, invitations into deeper self-love and connection to Spirit): Soulful Halloween Mini Course

If you'd like to do an inner listening practice with me or in a small group to make it less scary and more enlightening, simply email me here. Times for this are opening up in November: jen@jencobbleworks.com

I'm Jen Cobble Willhoite, a contemplative storyteller, spiritual tool designer, and life-long soul seeker. My path is formed and framed by questions more than answers. I'm more comfortable wondering and wandering about things spiritual than I am in ideology, religion, or dogma.

My soul language and connection with Spirit is primarily grounded in Celtic Spirituality, science, nature, seasonal cycles, myth, folklore, and stories of all kinds. I do have roots in progressive Christianity that I sometimes speak from. My tap root, though, is ordinary life. I believe enlightenment is rhythmic, unfolding, and found in our everyday experiences and selves. I also offer tools and courses on my modern interpretation of the examen: a daily ritual of looking back, looking within, and looking ahead to cultivate a rapport with your inner wisdom and the Sacred as you understand it.

Every week, I share an episode from my own spiritual explorations, offering invitations for you to explore these themes on your own. Thanks for journeying with me!

Welcome to Everything Speaks if You Listen with Jen CobbleWorks where we befriend our humanity and the Sacred through story, soul questions, and every day life.

In this week's episode, we name the catastrophic human loss the world is experiencing through war as well as earthquakes, fires, and flooding, and talk about how we can engage with peace by learning to calm our inner storms in response. When we do this, we remember our humanity and the humanity of others, making it harder to give into acts of vengeance, revenge, or applied chaos. We explore the story of Peter stepping off the boat and wanting to not only calm stormy sea waters, but to walk on water as he saw Jesus do. Rather than experiencing fear, churn, and turmoil and then deciding we just aren't strong enough or good enough to do anything about it, we can expand the margins of this story and imagining leaping off the edge into storminess over and over again, so that we can practice feeling our own fears and "sinking-ness" while also practice calming those inner waters. The more we grow our capacity to calm ourselves within, the more we can balance and have faith in even the worst swells around us. And most importantly, the more we connect to others in a humane way.

We talk about how this is the covenant edge of peace, the generative, creative edge of bridge building within and outside of us where we transform the energy of destruction into one of collaborative respect. But we must be able to do this within ourselves if we're to do it with others.

One of the ways that tethers us to our humanity and the humanity of others so that we do not plunge into the storm entirely, is to plunge into Love, to fall in Love, in our everyday life. As pat as it sounds, engaging in activities and with people that enliven us stirs our hope and sense of possibility. We remember why life is precious, not just for us, but for everyone. Finding connections of Love in everyday life keeps our inner flame of hope alive which lets us share that hope with others in tangible ways.

I'm Jen Cobble Willhoite, a contemplative storyteller, spiritual tool designer, and life-long soul seeker. My path is formed and framed by questions more than answers. I'm more comfortable wondering and wandering about things spiritual than I am in ideology, religion, or dogma.

My soul language and connection with Spirit is primarily grounded in Celtic Spirituality, science, nature, seasonal cycles, myth, folklore, and stories of all kinds. I do have roots in progressive Christianity that I sometimes speak from. My tap root, though, is ordinary life. I believe enlightenment is rhythmic, unfolding, and found in our everyday experiences and selves. I also offer tools and courses on my modern interpretation of the examen: a daily ritual of looking back, looking within, and looking ahead to cultivate a rapport with your inner wisdom and the Sacred as you understand it.

Every week, I share an episode from my own spiritual explorations, offering invitations for you to explore these themes on your own. Thanks for journeying with me!

Welcome to Everything Speaks if You Listen with Jen CobbleWorks where we befriend our humanity and the Sacred through story, soul questions, and every day life.

In this week's episode, we name our painful shared context right now: war, climate catastrophe, and ongoing pandemic while we also naming our personal pains and struggles (I articulate a few of my own as example). We acknowledge the despair that comes with all of these, how it feels like we might be at a breaking point. We consider that a breaking point is also called a threshold, and then notice the other definition of a threshold: a place of change, of travel, of reunion and departure, of new life.

Holding both of these at once, the notion of being at our limit and being at a place of growth, we look at how limits within us (what we're stubborn about, what we won't let go of, etc) can be softened into portals. We can soothe and massage our limits, making them softer and dilating them so that we can open up and receive something different.

One way we can soften within to make room for life beyond despair is to turn to things that provide us structure and also freedom of imagination and hope. The two things that always come to mind for me are questions and poetry. Both have the certain structure we long to lean on while also giving us the permission to tap into what is mysterious and infinite and ineffable.

In the midst of breaking points globally and personally, I share my own Wild God invitations that won't be silenced right now. There is something sacred that is clawing at my door and it is demanding some sort of responsive action in me. I want to resist it and say that there are bigger things afoot, but it will not stop howling at me.

The poem I have been turning to in this season of uncertainty, avoidance, and seeking is Sometimes A Wild God by Tom Hirons. I read it for you and hopefully, inspire you to read it over and over again for yourself. It creates space within me, space for what is awful in my life right now and space for what is nonetheless stirring with life in my life right now. I hope it works in your soul in a similar way. As promised, here is the link to learn more about Tom Hirons and his poetry and work in the universe:

Tom Hirons

And here are the links I also mentioned from my own work, ways to connect to a ritual of inner listening and reflection as well as the current Halloween mini course. Enjoy :)

The newsletter ...with info and resources on inner listening

The Halloween mini course

I'm Jen Cobble Willhoite, a contemplative storyteller, spiritual tool designer, and life-long soul seeker. My path is formed and framed by questions more than answers. I'm more comfortable wondering and wandering about things spiritual than I am in ideology, religion, or dogma.

My soul language and connection with Spirit is primarily grounded in Celtic Spirituality, science, nature, seasonal cycles, myth, folklore, and stories of all kinds. I do have roots in progressive Christianity that I sometimes speak from. My tap root, though, is ordinary life. I believe enlightenment is rhythmic, unfolding, and found in our everyday experiences and selves. I also offer tools and courses on my modern interpretation of the examen: a daily ritual of looking back, looking within, and looking ahead to cultivate a rapport with your inner wisdom and the Sacred as you understand it.

Every week, I share an episode from my own spiritual explorations, offering invitations for you to explore these themes on your own. Thanks for journeying with me!

Welcome to Everything Speaks if You Listen with Jen CobbleWorks where we befriend our humanity and the Sacred through story, soul questions, and every day life.

In this week's episode, I answer two questions I get A LOT: Why do I use so many different names for God/Spirit/Sacred/The Divine? (see? I did it again :D ) and How do I engage with and use spiritual cards such as: prayer cards, oracle decks, and Tarot?

In talking about why I use so many different names for Spirit, we consider how language is an act of creation itself which involves both expansion and contraction, growth and winnowing. In my experience, Spirit is so massive in its concept, energy, shape, size, history, and diverse expression, as well as so mysterious and paradoxically, intimately known, one or two consistent words for it feels too small, both in trying to name the unnameable and in honoring our unique experiences with the sacred.

We talk about our voice and language as a threshold itself and the first step in co-creating, in that alchemical and logical process of moving the intangible into the world of the tangible.

Secondly, I hear from a lot of people that they are curious about prayer cards, oracle cards, and tarot cards as a spiritual support in their daily life and larger soul journey, but that they were told they are dangerous, possibly even immoral or evil. I share my own experience with each of these kinds of spiritual tools, note the lineage (as I understand it) from them, and share how I engage with them in a relational way. As someone who has co-created/channeled/received/made at least two oracle style decks, I share my intention and process with you. We talk about how all of these tools, in my understanding are fundamentally invitational and not prescriptive or foretelling.

I mention Lindsay Mack as a tarot teacher I trust. You can learn more about her work and podcast in the link below:

Tarot for the Wild Soul

I also mention Jeff Hinshaw as a trusted teacher in this arena. Their link is below:

Cosmic Cousins

My Love + Hope Halloween Journal and Mini Course is available. If you would like to engage with underworld and Halloween themes as a (surprising!) entre to deeper self-love and deeper communion with Spirit as you understand them, this is a lovely and compassionate way to begin that unearthing and deep listening practice. The course is $19 and the link is below:

Love + Hope Soulful Halloween

I'm Jen Cobble Willhoite, a contemplative storyteller, spiritual tool designer, and life-long soul seeker. My path is formed and framed by questions more than answers. I'm more comfortable wondering and wandering about things spiritual than I am in ideology, religion, or dogma.

My soul language and connection with Spirit is primarily grounded in Celtic Spirituality, science, nature, seasonal cycles, myth, folklore, and stories of all kinds. I do have roots in progressive Christianity that I sometimes speak from. My tap root, though, is ordinary life. I believe enlightenment is rhythmic, unfolding, and found in our everyday experiences and selves. I also offer tools and courses on my modern interpretation of the examen: a daily ritual of looking back, looking within, and looking ahead to cultivate a rapport with your inner wisdom and the Sacred as you understand it.

Every week, I share an episode from my own spiritual explorations, offering invitations for you to explore these themes on your own. Thanks for journeying with me!

Welcome to Everything Speaks if You Listen with Jen CobbleWorks where we befriend our humanity and the Sacred through story, soul questions, and every day life.

In this week's episode, we look at the insightful gifts we can receive when we engage with symbols and stories that often scare us. This is not the same as worshiping what scares us, or agreeing with everything that scares us. It's about being engaged so that our fear doesn't grow. What I mean by "engage" is staying open and curious and non-judgmental rather than trying to admonish or defeat our shadows or our fears. Fundamentally, there can be beauty, truth, expansion, opportunities for healing, greater self-love, and a deeper connection to the Sacred even beneath scary triggers. Pausing to notice what we react to and then how we respond is the core of living into life's questions and being curious. It's at the core of reflection and contemplation. Halloween is no different.

As an example, I share a story about why I loathed and was terrified of the Noah and the Ark story as a kid (and am still wrestling with it) and then we spend some time on ghosts: how they can represent regrets, fear about our place in the world in the midst of changing roles and technology, and an ache for something in the past to be different than it was. All of these examples point to one thing: if we turn away from every frightening image in our culture, stories, myths, and folklore, we are turning away from profound invitations that can be a threshold into greater freedom, understanding, and self-love.

The link to the Halloween journal and mini course (featuring Love + Hope!) is:

https://cobbleworks.teachable.com/p/soulful-halloween

You can follow along some more of this exploration of the underworld and the invitations it offers for our spiritual growth over on Instagram:

@cobbleworks

Or feel free to email me with questions on the course or anything else at:

jen@jencobbleworks.com

I'm Jen Cobble Willhoite, a contemplative storyteller, spiritual tool designer, and life-long soul seeker. My path is formed and framed by questions more than answers. I'm more comfortable wondering and wandering about things spiritual than I am in ideology, religion, or dogma.

My soul language and connection with Spirit is primarily grounded in Celtic Spirituality, science, nature, seasonal cycles, myth, folklore, and stories of all kinds. I do have roots in progressive Christianity that I sometimes speak from. My tap root, though, is ordinary life. I believe enlightenment is rhythmic, unfolding, and found in our everyday experiences and selves. I also offer tools and courses on my modern interpretation of the examen: a daily ritual of looking back, looking within, and looking ahead to cultivate a rapport with your inner wisdom and the Sacred as you understand it.

Every week, I share an episode from my own spiritual explorations, offering invitations for you to explore these themes on your own. Thanks for journeying with me!

Welcome to Everything Speaks if You Listen with Jen CobbleWorks where we befriend our humanity and the Sacred through story, soul questions, and every day life.

In this week's episode, we explore two invitations: one from the autumnal (and spring) equinox, and one from Halloween. Both are offered as seasonal lenses into deeper self-reflection, self-love, and connection to Spirit.

The equinox is a day where we experience equal amounts of daylight and nighttime (roughly). Through this, a reflection question emerges: where do we notice mutuality and healthy balance in our daily lives and in our relationships? And where do we notice imbalance? As we consider the balance of day and night, we are invited to consider what is balancing for us in our rhythms of work, rest, and relationship and what we might want to bring into greater balance.

I shared last week that I have a mini course available with a Love + Hope illustrated journal and 8 audio lessons/stories inviting you into deeper self-love and connection to the Divine. What may be surprising and unconventional to hear is that the lens we are using for this mini course is Halloween! We begin to explore some basic differences between the Celtic roots of Halloween, Samhaim, and Halloween itself. And then I share why I think this unconventional, often controversial holiday, is a welcome doorway into greater connection to ourselves and Spirit. I will be sharing more about this course and the 4 primary spiritual invitations into spiritual growth I believe it offers, but this is a great intro.

I think you'll find this mini course compassionate, insightful, gentle, and surprisingly deep. It's $19 and is available now. Click the link below to learn more and enroll.

A Soulful Halloween Mini Course

I'm Jen Cobble Willhoite, a contemplative storyteller, spiritual tool designer, and life-long soul seeker. My path is formed and framed by questions more than answers. I'm more comfortable wondering and wandering about things spiritual than I am in ideology, religion, or dogma.

My soul language and connection with Spirit is primarily grounded in Celtic Spirituality, science, nature, seasonal cycles, myth, folklore, and stories of all kinds. I do have roots in progressive Christianity that I sometimes speak from. My tap root, though, is ordinary life. I believe enlightenment is rhythmic, unfolding, and found in our everyday experiences and selves. I also offer tools and courses on my modern interpretation of the examen: a daily ritual of looking back, looking within, and looking ahead to cultivate a rapport with your inner wisdom and the Sacred as you understand it.

Every week, I share an episode from my own spiritual explorations, offering invitations for you to explore these themes on your own. Thanks for journeying with me!

Welcome to Everything Speaks if You Listen with Jen CobbleWorks where we befriend our humanity and the Sacred through story, soul questions, and every day life.

In this week's episode, I share more about the sacred presence and magic already alive in our daily lives and how a reflection practice reminds us of this. Then, I lead you in a guided examen, an inner listening exercise where you look back on your day or week and then plan ahead a bit. We listen to moments of deep soul connection as well as deep soul disconnection and ask Spirit to tell us more about the significance of these ordinary, yet potent moments for us. We consider what is left undone in the day, where we might need to shore up boundaries, recommit to routines, and/or repair relationships with ourselves or others. And then we look ahead before we move ahead. We consider what we need to do and what we want to do going forward.

It's a compassionate, beautiful pause to help you let go, release, accept, and move on with love and integrity.

Links to the reflection resources I mention at the end are below. The first one is for my newsletter which regularly explores themes of inner listening and self-reflection from both a spiritual and pragmatic approach. Signing up also gives you a copy of a free mini book on the examen practice and my unique approach to it. *A quick note about newsletters: I send things weekly at the most. I easily get overwhelmed by a bunch of emails and strive to share at a respectful rate myself. I am always trying to honor both the deep, slow time of soul as well as the faster rhythm of everyday life, so expect newsletters to come from me 2-4 times a month and no more as a way to stay connected, but respect our need for space and quiet in our inboxes. ;)

Newsletter and illustrated mini book: www.jencobbleworks.com/free

Card Decks for Self-Reflection, inner listening and the examen can be found here: www.etsy.com/shop/CobbleWorks

I'm Jen Cobble Willhoite, a contemplative storyteller, spiritual tool designer, and life-long soul seeker. My path is formed and framed by questions more than answers. I'm more comfortable wondering and wandering about things spiritual than I am in ideology, religion, or dogma.

My soul language and connection with Spirit is primarily grounded in Celtic Spirituality, science, nature, seasonal cycles, myth, folklore, and stories of all kinds. I do have roots in progressive Christianity that I sometimes speak from. My tap root, though, is ordinary life. I believe enlightenment is rhythmic, unfolding, and found in our everyday experiences and selves. I also offer tools and courses on my modern interpretation of the examen: a daily ritual of looking back, looking within, and looking ahead to cultivate a rapport with your inner wisdom and the Sacred as you understand it.

Every week, I share an episode from my own spiritual explorations, offering invitations for you to explore these themes on your own. Thanks for journeying with me!

Welcome to Everything Speaks if You Listen with Jen CobbleWorks where we befriend our humanity and the Sacred through story, soul questions, and every day life.

In this week's episode, I share a real-time example of my own inner listening and reflection practice. So often, I think these practices feel stodgy or dogmatic or ideological, like we have to do them the "right" way or else. In my experience, that's just old traditions and my fear and wounding talking. In every day life doing this practice, the examen truly arrives as a friend with unconditional support and acceptance.

This practice feels alive to me, like it has its own energy and spirit to it. When I say it bounded out the door after me when I was out for a walk and really worn down by heavy emotions, concerns, and worries, I mean it. The practice felt like a mystical wind, a spiritual friend that hustled after me when I stumbled/stormed out the door, came alongside me, and gently started to ask me questions to help me process and cope.

The practice always feels this loving to me, but I sometimes forget that when we are in relationship with Spirit and with our practices, we can receive them as much as we can go to them. It's not just about sitting down and committing to a practice. It's also about being willing to let the practice find you, come to you, and then open up to its invitations when it does.

We don't listen within and reflect to connect to ourselves and Spirit because it makes us "good". We do it because it helps us cope with our inner and outer worlds. We do it because it's a friendship, something that shows up for us as we show up for it. An ongoing spiritual practice is truly a friend in this way. And I'm sharing this real life experience of it in case it helps you notice how Love, how Spirit, how the Divine comes alongside you, how your own practices come to you when they know you need supportive love.

I'm Jen Cobble Willhoite, a contemplative storyteller, spiritual tool designer, and life-long soul seeker. My path is formed and framed by questions more than answers. I'm more comfortable wondering and wandering about things spiritual than I am in ideology, religion, or dogma.

My soul language and connection with Spirit is primarily grounded in Celtic Spirituality, science, nature, seasonal cycles, myth, folklore, and stories of all kinds. I do have roots in progressive Christianity that I sometimes speak from. My tap root, though, is ordinary life. I believe enlightenment is rhythmic, unfolding, and found in our everyday experiences and selves. I also offer tools and courses on my modern interpretation of the examen: a daily ritual of looking back, looking within, and looking ahead to cultivate a rapport with your inner wisdom and the Sacred as you understand it.

Every week, I share an episode from my own spiritual explorations, offering invitations for you to explore these themes on your own. Thanks for journeying with me!

Welcome to Everything Speaks if You Listen with Jen CobbleWorks where we befriend our humanity and the Sacred through story, soul questions, and every day life.

In this week's episode, we talk about the need for solid ground and certainty (ok, we talk about how *I* need that...or think I need that in life) and how maybe it's not realistic given that the one constant in life is change. We look to rocks, geology, and their own metamorphic nature to consider how even the most stable things in life still experience change. We explore how change and transformation happens at different rates and how we can put that on a moral scale (fast progress is good and slow change is bad, for example, when that may not be accurate or helpful).

We frame some questions like, "Could I be confusing solid ground and certainty with my own resistance to change?" and "What would it feel like to trust in our innate ability to experience transformation and manage uncertainty because we are changing beings also?"

IF you're feeling like you're on slippery ground, like the rug is being pulled out from under you or like you can't get your footing and you want some commiseration with that feeling while also receiving some new perspectives on it, to possibly challenge you and open you a little, you'll enjoy this podcast. I make myself the example of the resistance and the change in this episode so I'm firmly in the mess of life and seeking with you.

Finally, I name two daily practices/philosophies that help me honor my human desire for stability while also honoring the need and innate quality of change in life.

If you'd like to learn more about the practices I mention and/or would like to be in closer community with the themes of this podcast, please sign up for my newsletter. You can do so at:

www.jencobbleworks.com/free

I'm Jen Cobble Willhoite, a contemplative storyteller, spiritual tool designer, and life-long soul seeker. My path is formed and framed by questions more than answers. I'm more comfortable wondering and wandering about things spiritual than I am in ideology, religion, or dogma.

My soul language and connection with Spirit is primarily grounded in Celtic Spirituality, science, nature, seasonal cycles, myth, folklore, and stories of all kinds. I do have roots in progressive Christianity that I sometimes speak from. My tap root, though, is ordinary life. I believe enlightenment is rhythmic, unfolding, and found in our everyday experiences and selves. I also offer tools and courses on my modern interpretation of the examen: a daily ritual of looking back, looking within, and looking ahead to cultivate a rapport with your inner wisdom and the Sacred as you understand it.

Every week, I share an episode from my own spiritual explorations, offering invitations for you to explore these themes on your own. Thanks for journeying with me!

Welcome to Everything Speaks if You Listen with Jen CobbleWorks where we befriend our humanity and the Sacred through story, soul questions, and every day life.

In this week's episode, we stay in the cosmos letting the moon (and stars) offer us invitations into radical self-acceptance and love. I have often experienced, in my spiritual journey, an unspoken "rule" that suggests that if a person ever feels disconnected from their true self and/or the Divine, it's because they are not faithful enough, not doing ritual or prayer correctly, or are somehow tainting their intentions or energies with negativity or "bad influences". I find this deeply confusing and shameful. It reduces human experience down to pure will and motivation which is absurd. We cannot control everything even if we are "pure" of heart all of the time (whatever that even means). This outlook also suggests that once we find/experience spiritual connection to our true selves and the Divine, then it stays there forever (unless we screw it up in some way).

But in my lived experience through practicing inner listening via the examen and connecting to self and Spirit through nature, story, science, and intuitive practice, this "rule" doesn't apply at all. Instead, what I have experienced is a two-fold reality: my connection to self and Spirit is constant and ever-present AND my connection to self and Spirit waxes in wanes insofar as my perception of it. Meaning: we are always connected to our soul and to Spirit, but we may not always feel that way and that's natural! The moon reminds me of the natural seasonality of this waxing and waning perception.

This week, we will explore what it means to accept this about ourselves and let that acceptance be a flexible threshold for our connection to pass through. I share a reasonably embarrassing (and joyful) story of visiting a giant telescope and seeing Saturn with my own eyes.

If you've ever felt like your connection to self and Spirit is absent and you've blamed yourself for that, this episode offers a new compassionate perspective that I think you will find nourishing.

For more ways we can stay connected, consider joining my newsletter where we chat about this stuff and where I share free illustrations, journals, and tools with subscribers. The link is here:

www.jencobbleworks.com/free

I'm Jen Cobble Willhoite, a contemplative storyteller, spiritual tool designer, and life-long soul seeker. My path is formed and framed by questions more than answers. I'm more comfortable wondering and wandering about things spiritual than I am in ideology, religion, or dogma.

My soul language and connection with Spirit is primarily grounded in Celtic Spirituality, science, nature, seasonal cycles, myth, folklore, and stories of all kinds. I do have roots in progressive Christianity that I sometimes speak from. My tap root, though, is ordinary life. I believe enlightenment is rhythmic, unfolding, and found in our everyday experiences and selves. I also offer tools and courses on my modern interpretation of the examen: a daily ritual of looking back, looking within, and looking ahead to cultivate a rapport with your inner wisdom and the Sacred as you understand it.

Every week, I share an episode from my own spiritual explorations, offering invitations for you to explore these themes on your own. Thanks for journeying with me!

Welcome to Everything Speaks if You Listen with Jen CobbleWorks where we befriend our humanity and the Sacred through story, soul questions, and every day life.

In this week's episode, we talk about mercury retrograde from two perspectives: astronomical and astrological and how both form a beautiful invitation into self-reflection and compassionate inner listening.

If you love syncing with the rhythms of nature and the universe as a way to prompt, nudge, and encourage your own rhythm of spiritual practice and inner listening (to self and Sacred), you're going to enjoy this unique look at mercury retrograde from astronomical and astrological lenses.

Two astrological podcasts I love are:

Ghost of a Podcast with Jessica Lanyadoo

and

The Radiance Project with Heidi Rose Robbins (she features lots of gorgeous poetry too for you poetry lovers out there!)

Both podcasts can be found on Apple and Spotify.

I will be sharing some examen practices and running a sale throughout this mercury retrograde so stay tuned to IG @cobbleworks for more info or sign up for my newsletter:

jencobbleworks.com/free

I'm Jen Cobble Willhoite, a contemplative storyteller, spiritual tool designer, and life-long soul seeker. My path is formed and framed by questions more than answers. I'm more comfortable wondering and wandering about things spiritual than I am in ideology, religion, or dogma.

My soul language and connection with Spirit is primarily grounded in Celtic Spirituality, science, nature, seasonal cycles, myth, folklore, and stories of all kinds. I do have roots in progressive Christianity that I sometimes speak from. My tap root, though, is ordinary life. I believe enlightenment is rhythmic, unfolding, and found in our everyday experiences and selves. I also offer tools and courses on my modern interpretation of the examen: a daily ritual of looking back, looking within, and looking ahead to cultivate a rapport with your inner wisdom and the Sacred as you understand it.

Every week, I share an episode from my own spiritual explorations, offering invitations for you to explore these themes on your own. Thanks for journeying with me!

Welcome to Everything Speaks if You Listen with Jen CobbleWorks where we befriend our humanity and the Sacred through story, soul questions, and every day life.

In this week's episode, we talk about the Zen Buddhist invitation: Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. I've been home from my Iona pilgrimage for a few weeks now and some things feel like a hamster wheel again. They feel hard and intractable. I'm remembering this Zen Buddhist invitation from past Zen teachers who let me live into different responses to it. This week, we explore some of those responses. The first is the very relatable concern that spiritual growth is meaningless because it doesn't really affect our day to day existence. The second is that we can have mere moments of enlightenment and it changes the way we relate to day to day tasks. The third is to consider enlightenment, pilgrimage, and transformation not as something we achieve, but something that is given to us as a portal, as a threshold, or a doorway that connects us to enchantment and sacred presence even in the so-called mundane.

If you're interested in my newsletter where we talk about spiritual invitations like this and where I share opportunities to work together 1:1 or in small groups, you can learn more and sign up here:

www.jencobbleworks.com/free

If you have trouble with this link or have any questions, you are always welcome to email me directly at jen@jencobbleworks.com

Again this week, I mention the work of Mary DeJong at Waymarkers. I consider her a friend, teacher, and guide on my own path and warmly encourage you to seek out her work at:

waymarkers.net

I'm Jen Cobble Willhoite, a contemplative storyteller, spiritual tool designer, and life-long soul seeker. My path is formed and framed by questions more than answers. I'm more comfortable wondering and wandering about things spiritual than I am in ideology, religion, or dogma.

My soul language and connection with Spirit is primarily grounded in Celtic Spirituality, science, nature, seasonal cycles, myth, folklore, and stories of all kinds. I do have roots in progressive Christianity that I sometimes speak from. My tap root, though, is ordinary life. I believe enlightenment is rhythmic, unfolding, and found in our everyday experiences and selves. I also offer tools and courses on my modern interpretation of the examen: a daily ritual of looking back, looking within, and looking ahead to cultivate a rapport with your inner wisdom and the Sacred as you understand it.

Every week, I share an episode from my own spiritual explorations, offering invitations for you to explore these themes on your own. Thanks for journeying with me!

Welcome to Everything Speaks if You Listen with Jen CobbleWorks where we befriend our humanity and the Sacred through story, soul questions, and every day life.

In this week's episode, I share more deeply about my spiritual growth experiences in Iona, Scotland. I am not surprised that I was surprised by the gift of pilgrimage. It turns out, I needed to get out of my mind and settle into the body of the island and the body of my own being. My personal transformation was rooted in embodiment and invitations into greater embodiment.

I want to honor the guides and teachers who offered paths and wisdom for me to leap off of during this pilgrimage: the island of Iona, the people of Iona (on this side of the veil and the other), the animals and elements alive on the island, the human beings seeking and traveling with me, and our guide, Mary De Jong of Waymarkers are all part of the community and the spiritual ecosystem that encouraged my growth.

The story I mention in this episdode, The Lindworm, is a tale for all people, but was first shared with me by Mary De Jong. The wisdom and insight around my own experiences of personal exile, of giving parts of myself away because I find them unlovable or unacceptable emerge from my own journey and relationship to Sacred, but I have been guided by Mary's experience and wisdom as a story carrier. And I honor what she has given me as a threshold to personal growth. If you'd like to know more about Mary's work, you can find her at:

www.waymarkers.net

For those of you who are interested in small group work with me or 1:1 work with me, please email me directly at jen@jencobbleworks.com.

I'm Jen Cobble Willhoite, a contemplative storyteller, spiritual tool designer, and life-long soul seeker. My path is formed and framed by questions more than answers. I'm more comfortable wondering and wandering about things spiritual than I am in ideology, religion, or dogma.

My soul language and connection with Spirit is primarily grounded in Celtic Spirituality, science, nature, seasonal cycles, myth, folklore, and stories of all kinds. I do have roots in progressive Christianity that I sometimes speak from. My tap root, though, is ordinary life. I believe enlightenment is rhythmic, unfolding, and found in our everyday experiences and selves. I also offer tools and courses on my modern interpretation of the examen: a daily ritual of looking back, looking within, and looking ahead to cultivate a rapport with your inner wisdom and the Sacred as you understand it.

Every week, I share an episode from my own spiritual explorations, offering invitations for you to explore these themes on your own. Thanks for journeying with me!

Welcome to Everything Speaks if You Listen with Jen CobbleWorks where we befriend our humanity and the Sacred through story, soul questions, and every day life.

In this week's episode, I share a little about returning from Iona where I was on recently on pilgrimage. The experience was life-changing in unexpected ways...exactly what we expect from transformational journeys and spiritual coddiwompling. I will have more to share over the next few weeks, but the first invitation I'm offering you from my experience is a gift Iona gave me which is a fundamental re-framing of our innate goodness.

Many of us have been told (through a variety of voices and sources) that we cannot hold our goodness because we are an unworthy vessel, that we are fundamentally no good, broken, or inherently bent towards wrongness. Sacred spoke through Iona and upended this inaccuracy during my trip. It said: You cannot contain your goodness because you are a wellspring of goodness and it not only spills out of you, but it fills and refills itself within you over and over and over again. It was deeply healing for me and, I hope, it feels deeply healing for you.

I must thank my friend, guide, and teacher during this trip and throughout the years of my daily journeying, Mary De Jong of Waymarkers. Please visit her website and connect to her wellspring of wisdom and wild story. She has another pilgrimage to Iona next summer that is filling up quickly. She also has ongoing offerings in the United States and virtual spaces throughout the year. You can learn more about her at:

www.waymarkers.net

I'm Jen Cobble Willhoite, a contemplative storyteller, spiritual tool designer, and life-long soul seeker. My path is formed and framed by questions more than answers. I'm more comfortable wondering and wandering about things spiritual than I am in ideology, religion, or dogma.

My soul language and connection with Spirit is primarily grounded in Celtic Spirituality, science, nature, seasonal cycles, myth, folklore, and stories of all kinds. I do have roots in progressive Christianity that I sometimes speak from. My tap root, though, is ordinary life. I believe enlightenment is rhythmic, unfolding, and found in our everyday experiences and selves. I also offer tools and courses on my modern interpretation of the examen: a daily ritual of looking back, looking within, and looking ahead to cultivate a rapport with your inner wisdom and the Sacred as you understand it.

Every week, I share an episode from my own spiritual explorations, offering invitations for you to explore these themes on your own. Thanks for journeying with me!

Welcome to Everything Speaks if You Listen with Jen CobbleWorks where we befriend our humanity and the Sacred through story, soul questions, and every day life.

In this week's episode, we take another look at summer's invitation to go within, to take refuge from the heat of our lives and the heat of our emotions and enter an inner journey of self-reflection. One thing we might notice when we do, are the well-worn paths and thoughts that animate many of our beliefs and actions, but don't actually serve our transformation any longer. We might notice that when we pause to reflect and go on an inner journey, these habitual thoughts and beliefs want to stay hidden. They don't want to be seen or acknowledged. They definitely don't want to be uprooted.

But Spirit has a way of framing questions in our pauses that unearth what no longer serves our growth. And Spirit does this unearthing in surprising ways.

This episode speaks directly to our ability to name our needs and wants when Spirit asks us about them as well as the inner urge to "not go there" and face such questions if they fly in the face of old thinking. I share that my own well-worn belief system suggests I can't or shouldn't have any needs or wants...like they're unnecessary or should be ignored for some reason. All of this is coming to light as I face the real possibility of not being able to take my Iona pilgrimage as planned. I wasn't expecting part of the pilgrimage journey to include not going on the pilgrimage journey. But as I wait for more details to emerge to tell me how things will play out, as I'm in a holding pattern, another liminal space of uncertainty, Spirit has some questions about what I need and want, especially as it relates to self-love and self-compassion. And my old thinking is avoiding and arguing with Spirit as a result.

Also surprisingly, it's through this wrestling with Spirit that my truer needs and wants have been revealed and are actually being met. I wonder if, when listening to this week's episode, you'll find a similar unearthing pattern in your own experience. I'd love to hear from you!

The link to the newsletter is here:

www.jencobbleworks.com/free

And the link to the Summer Soul-stice Reflection Journal is here. Remember to use code SHINEON to get the $24 price:

https://cobbleworks.teachable.com/p/loveandhopesummersoulstice

I'm Jen Cobble Willhoite, a contemplative storyteller, spiritual tool designer, and life-long soul seeker. My path is formed and framed by questions more than answers. I'm more comfortable wondering and wandering about things spiritual than I am in ideology, religion, or dogma.

My soul language and connection with Spirit is primarily grounded in Celtic Spirituality, science, nature, seasonal cycles, myth, folklore, and stories of all kinds. I do have roots in progressive Christianity that I sometimes speak from. My tap root, though, is ordinary life. I believe enlightenment is rhythmic, unfolding, and found in our everyday experiences and selves. I also offer tools and courses on my modern interpretation of the examen: a daily ritual of looking back, looking within, and looking ahead to cultivate a rapport with your inner wisdom and the Sacred as you understand it.

Every week, I share an episode from my own spiritual explorations, offering invitations for you to explore these themes on your own. Thanks for journeying with me!

Welcome to Everything Speaks if You Listen with Jen CobbleWorks where we befriend our humanity and the Sacred through story, soul questions, and every day life.

In this week's episode, we are revisiting themes of pilgrimage and transformational journeys into the unknown. I share some of my fears and anxieties about my upcoming trip to Iona, Scotland and have a good laugh at myself...while also acknowledging how incredibly scary it can be to say "yes" to Mystery. We think we're giving consent for a particular adventure and path only to realize a bit later that there is no way we can 100% know what we're agreeing to do, or how we're going to be changed and transformed by some things in life.

We talk a little bit about pilgrimages we never asked for, the unexpected things in life that just happen to us that we don't ever have to like, but do require some form of a "yes" if we're to move forward with the reality of them.

I share a visual I was given during contemplation and meditation that felt healing to me as my nerves about this pilgrimage and soul journey gets closer: that of the wounded healer centered on loving compassion. The exact image involves Chiron, the mythological centaur who is said to have been a wounded healer and the Cosmic Christ, the figure in Christian tradition who creates a connecting gate through wounds, suffering, and even death sitting around a warm campfire with the moon at the edge of everything. some selkies show up as well. It is an invitation into relationship and loving compassion with spiritual friends who know both the adventure and the pain of a transformational journey.

I mention the work of eco-theologian and spiritual teacher, Mary De Jong of Waymarkers in this episode. A link to her work is here:

https://www.waymarkers.net/

I am also traveling with Victoria Loorz of Church of the Wild. A link to her work is here:

https://www.victorialoorz.com/

I also share the work of spiritual teacher and astrologer, Jeff Hinshaw, who gifted me an expanded image of the Wounded Healer archetype. A link to their work is here:

https://www.cosmiccousins.com/jeff-hinshaw

If you are feeling a pull to reflect on the journey of 2023 thus far, my Summer Soul-stice journal and mini course is still available. Use coupon code: SHINEON for 20% off. Here's the link:

www.cobbleworks.teachable.com/p/loveandhopesummersoulstice

I'm Jen Cobble Willhoite, a contemplative storyteller, spiritual tool designer, and life-long soul seeker. My path is formed and framed by questions more than answers. I'm more comfortable wondering and wandering about things spiritual than I am in ideology, religion, or dogma.

My soul language and connection with Spirit is primarily grounded in Celtic Spirituality, science, nature, seasonal cycles, myth, folklore, and stories of all kinds. I do have roots in progressive Christianity that I sometimes speak from. My tap root, though, is ordinary life. I believe enlightenment is rhythmic, unfolding, and found in our everyday experiences and selves. I also offer tools and courses on my modern interpretation of the examen: a daily ritual of looking back, looking within, and looking ahead to cultivate a rapport with your inner wisdom and the Sacred as you understand it.

Every week, I share an episode from my own spiritual explorations, offering invitations for you to explore these themes on your own. Thanks for journeying with me!

Welcome to Everything Speaks if You Listen with Jen CobbleWorks where we befriend our humanity and the Sacred through story, soul questions, and every day life.

In this week's episode, we look at a few dualistic/double-sided invitations from the solstice. The first comes from the concept of stillness. The word solstice translates to "the sun stands still" and this idea of stillness offers us two spiritual reflection points. One is the persistence of what it means for something to be still. In other words, what is sticking around in your life? What is not going away? What is still here and still with you? Welcoming the light of the solstice, we are reminded to let all of our answers come to light, to truly admit and honor the painful aspects of something lingering and not leaving our lives, especially when we have lost patience with it or are run down by its ongoing presence. And also to acknowledge and honor the beautiful aspects of something lingering and staying with us. Are there qualities you've cultivated in the last six months that are not only sticking with you, but helping you stick with yourself? Are there friendships, practices, relationships, and communities that have stood by you and with you? Can you take time to celebrate that ever-presence?

The other way stillness invites us into our own inner journey and growth is to ask what is bringing you calm and peace right now? What is providing you inner stillness, even if things are raucous outside of yourself? Where are you finding your inner ground and stillness?

We also look at how the solstice, both summer and winter, are always offering us dual invitations. They happen concurrently. They complement one another. In the summer solstice, we are experiencing a season of savoring, sharing, and storing the fruits of our lives, not just because the present moment shines forth with this opportunity, but because after this time, we are moving towards more darkness and less light. We will need to rely on what we've stored in the summer to help us get through our upcoming winter...both literally and figuratively. And in a complementary way, the winter solstice for the Southern Hemisphere is moving towards more light and away from a season of restful darkness from this point forward. People and beings in the Southern Hemisphere will need the restoration they have experienced over winter to fuel them for the coming dawn.

If you're interested in exploring more dualistic invitations of the summer solstice in particular, I have an illustrated reflection journal and mini course still available. It's $24 when you use the code: SHINEON at check out. It's a beautiful companion to look within, look ahead, and celebrate you and your growth. The link is here:

https://cobbleworks.teachable.com/p/loveandhopesummersoulstice

I'm Jen Cobble Willhoite, a contemplative storyteller, spiritual tool designer, and life-long soul seeker. My path is formed and framed by questions more than answers. I'm more comfortable wondering and wandering about things spiritual than I am in ideology, religion, or dogma.

My soul language and connection with Spirit is primarily grounded in Celtic Spirituality, science, nature, seasonal cycles, myth, folklore, and stories of all kinds. I do have roots in progressive Christianity that I sometimes speak from. My tap root, though, is ordinary life. I believe enlightenment is rhythmic, unfolding, and found in our everyday experiences and selves. I also offer tools and courses on my modern interpretation of the examen: a daily ritual of looking back, looking within, and looking ahead to cultivate a rapport with your inner wisdom and the Sacred as you understand it.

Every week, I share an episode from my own spiritual explorations, offering invitations for you to explore these themes on your own. Thanks for journeying with me!

Welcome to Everything Speaks if You Listen with Jen CobbleWorks where we befriend our humanity and the Sacred through story, soul questions, and every day life.

In this week's episode, we talk about what it means to come home to ourselves spiritually speaking, how we find that inner sanctuary of perpetual love and acceptance that abides within us. And what we sink our teeth into is how this is not necessarily easy or obvious. It's a journey all its own, to find and reclaim our inner peace. We also talk about coming home to old places and parts of ourselves. I share a recent experience of reconnecting with a friend and admit to the grief and loss I felt (and am still feeling) that I let so much time go by since we last connected. Like the pilgrimage and adventure of coming home to our soul and Spirit Within, the process of coming home to old opportunities, places, and others is not necessarily easy. Stories that feature a quest and simply end with, "And they lived happily ever after" are not really representative of life as we know it. In our everyday human experiences, reconnecting and homecoming can be fraught, painful, and confusing. We can experience social exile, illness, and all kinds of separation that is hard to return from.

To explore how we might navigate these experiences in life, we look (briefly) at the story of Odysseus coming home in the epic, the Odyssey. We also consider (briefly) Frodo and the Hobbits coming home in The Lord of the Rings, what is missing, but what we might long for in the homecoming story of Jesus (what kind of healing did he experience so that he wasn't traumatized or seeking vengeance?), and finally the story of Persephone and Demeter.

It is here, with Persephone, that I suggest we're given a model we could use for our own homecoming adventures. She comes home to her mother and a broken earth again and again. She brings seeds with her again and again. She befriends and cultivates her old life and creates a new one, again and again. Is there something in this rhythm and tenacious befriending that could help us with our homecomings and personal pilgrimages?

Although it is only briefly mentioned and not in any detail, please note that the Persephone story touches on possible physical and sexual harm. Additionally, the story of homecoming always comes with it the acknowledgement of separation and exile. This episode treads gently, but honor your own heart around these challenging themes.

The link to the Summer Soul-stice Journal and Mini Course is here:

https://cobbleworks.teachable.com/p/loveandhopesummersoulstice

I'm Jen Cobble Willhoite, a contemplative storyteller, spiritual tool designer, and life-long soul seeker. My path is formed and framed by questions more than answers. I'm more comfortable wondering and wandering about things spiritual than I am in ideology, religion, or dogma.

My soul language and connection with Spirit is primarily grounded in Celtic Spirituality, science, nature, seasonal cycles, myth, folklore, and stories of all kinds. I do have roots in progressive Christianity that I sometimes speak from. My tap root, though, is ordinary life. I believe enlightenment is rhythmic, unfolding, and found in our everyday experiences and selves. I also offer tools and courses on my modern interpretation of the examen: a daily ritual of looking back, looking within, and looking ahead to cultivate a rapport with your inner wisdom and the Sacred as you understand it.

Every week, I share an episode from my own spiritual explorations, offering invitations for you to explore these themes on your own. Thanks for journeying with me!

Welcome to Everything Speaks if You Listen with Jen CobbleWorks where we befriend our humanity and the Sacred through story, soul questions, and every day life.

In this week's episode, we talk about FOMO (fear of missing out) and also jealousy, imposter syndrome, and feeling like we've missed our boat. We explore these by first noticing seeds and sparks within us, those active longings and desires that stir within our being, but sometimes seem really vague. We want to do *something*, we feel an urge to create, to make, to risk...but we aren't sure exactly what that would look like or where to start.

And then we admit that we can sometimes notice other people's work and expressions in life and overlook any resonance and jump right to jealousy or fomo. We notice how quickly we can douse our own inner sparks and seeds and conclude that someone else got to the manifested idea better than we did. Or maybe they simply did it faster. And then we tend to just feel awful.

But what if the point is not to be the first at something, be the best, or be the most innovative..or the *only* one doing something? What if that flies in the face of the beautiful diversity our universe is created (and is creating) with? What if iteration is naturally gorgeous? And what if what we're resonating with outside of ourselves is not a sign of competition, but an invitation for us to join the party so to speak? What if it's resonance, encouragement, and a midwife that helps us birth our own sparks + seeds in the world?

What would it feel like if we noticed something stirring in us, saw someone or something out the world doing something similar and felt encouragement and a sense of belonging from that rather than a sign we were too late with our ideas?

With seriousness and silliness, we let roses, soup, and cookies lead the way on this new outlook. And we visit with the spirit of Ralph Waldo Emerson and his lovely, but infuriating essay of Self Reliance as friend and foil for our discernment.

I'm Jen Cobble Willhoite, a contemplative storyteller, spiritual tool designer, and life-long soul seeker. My path is formed and framed by questions more than answers. I'm more comfortable wondering and wandering about things spiritual than I am in ideology, religion, or dogma.

My soul language and connection with Spirit is primarily grounded in Celtic Spirituality, science, nature, seasonal cycles, myth, folklore, and stories of all kinds. I do have roots in progressive Christianity that I sometimes speak from. My tap root, though, is ordinary life. I believe enlightenment is rhythmic, unfolding, and found in our everyday experiences and selves. I also offer tools and courses on my modern interpretation of the examen: a daily ritual of looking back, looking within, and looking ahead to cultivate a rapport with your inner wisdom and the Sacred as you understand it.

Every week, I share an episode from my own spiritual explorations, offering invitations for you to explore these themes on your own. Thanks for journeying with me!

Welcome to Everything Speaks if You Listen with Jen CobbleWorks where we befriend our humanity and the Sacred through story, soul questions, and every day life.

In this week's episode, we start with pilgrimage (again) with a focus on the gatekeeping and resistance that comes after we've said, "Yes, I wanna do this. I wanna take a risk towards transformation!" I share a personal story of my own resistance (do we call it a nightmare or a haunting? Maybe.) against my upcoming pilgrimage to Iona, Scotland. And from this place of personal resistance, we start to name the elemental feelings that we all have that are also harder to accept or manage. These include: overwhelming creativity, deep frustration, anger, and feeling extremely restless/unsettled.

To explore these fiery elements of our humanity, we move to a metaphor that was gifted me in meditation and prayer: God of the Forge. This is an image that overlaps the image of the Sacred Heart, a spiritual inner-forge. The forge gives us space to intentionally work with our fire as well as more stubborn and immovable parts of ourselves, the "iron" that needs to be softened, tempered, and shaped. I hope to travel with this imagery more in the future, so this is just the beginning! But it is a surprising gift from Spirit not to be told to "calm down", but to remain in one's heat, one's passion, one's creativity, maybe even in one's anger and let those human experiences both shape and be shaped into something wholly new. It is a decidedly creative and expansive and compassionate take on intense emotions that I could not have predicted. I hope it opens inner doors for you!

I also share about and weave in my new Summer Soul-stice mini course that is just now launching. This is a beautiful time to welcome the heat and warmth of the sun as well as our own. It's a beautiful time to take the sun's pause and make it our own so that we can look back on the last 6 months and see how we have grown and celebrate that. It's $30 and if you use the coupon code: SHINEON you can receive 20% off. The link to know more about this is below:

https://cobbleworks.teachable.com/p/loveandhopesummersoulstice

I'm Jen Cobble Willhoite, a contemplative storyteller, spiritual tool designer, and life-long soul seeker. My path is formed and framed by questions more than answers. I'm more comfortable wondering and wandering about things spiritual than I am in ideology, religion, or dogma.

My soul language and connection with Spirit is primarily grounded in Celtic Spirituality, science, nature, seasonal cycles, myth, folklore, and stories of all kinds. I do have roots in progressive Christianity that I sometimes speak from. My tap root, though, is ordinary life. I believe enlightenment is rhythmic, unfolding, and found in our everyday experiences and selves. I also offer tools and courses on my modern interpretation of the examen: a daily ritual of looking back, looking within, and looking ahead to cultivate a rapport with your inner wisdom and the Sacred as you understand it.

Every week, I share an episode from my own spiritual explorations, offering invitations for you to explore these themes on your own. Thanks for journeying with me!

Welcome to Everything Speaks if You Listen with Jen CobbleWorks where we befriend our humanity and the Sacred through story, soul questions, and every day life.

In this week's episode, I share what I call Porch Rhythms, a metaphor to welcome embodied liminality or how to give yourself space and time when you are in the middle of a transition. Just like a porch is neither in the house or totally outside of it, we have ways we occupy and honor seasonal transformations. For this episode, we look at some of the ordinary "interruptions" we experience, like: holidays, time set aside for vacation or retreat, or milestones such as graduations. I use my family's visit and departure as a personal example of how we embody these normal, yet in-between times in our lives by anticipating them and then letting the goodbye linger after they're done. The routine of getting back to "normal" seems to involve days of joy and sadness, something our souls and humanity want us to feel and process.

If you've ever had to "come down" after vacation, or felt the tears show up days after you parted from someone,

If you've ever found yourself moving slowly and feeling a bit tender around a "basic" birthday or other event,

If you've noticed you're wiped out emotionally, spiritually, mentally, and physically even after you've had loads of fun and connection with others, I think you'll see yourself in this episode. I hope it offers you encouragement to take buffering time before and after such experiences to let yourself anticipate and integrate everything.

It's this kind of reaching out, in ordinary ways, to others and also to ourselves that feels like one of our spiritual invitations right now. We aren't building cathedrals anymore. We're trying to find ourselves, find each other, and learn how to hold on and connect with space, dignity, and grace.

If you'd like to join my newsletter where we talk about spiritual and human stuff like this all the time, the link is below. You'll receive a free illustrated mini book on reflection and inner listening when you do.

www.jencobbleworks.com/free

If you're looking for inspirational, down-to-earth art, stories, and hands-on tools for inner listening, check out my shop below:

www.etsy.com/shop/CobbleWorks

Get ready for something new! I'll be hosting a mini reflection course on the Summer Solstice very soon. I can't wait to tell you about it.

I'm Jen Cobble Willhoite, a contemplative storyteller, spiritual tool designer, and life-long soul seeker. My path is formed and framed by questions more than answers. I'm more comfortable wondering and wandering about things spiritual than I am in ideology, religion, or dogma.

My soul language and connection with Spirit is primarily grounded in Celtic Spirituality, science, nature, seasonal cycles, myth, folklore, and stories of all kinds. I do have roots in progressive Christianity that I sometimes speak from. My tap root, though, is ordinary life. I believe enlightenment is rhythmic, unfolding, and found in our everyday experiences and selves. I also offer tools and courses on my modern interpretation of the examen: a daily ritual of looking back, looking within, and looking ahead to cultivate a rapport with your inner wisdom and the Sacred as you understand it.

Every week, I share an episode from my own spiritual explorations, offering invitations for you to explore these themes on your own. Thanks for journeying with me!

Welcome to Everything Speaks if You Listen with Jen CobbleWorks where we befriend our humanity and the Sacred through story, soul questions, and every day life.

In this week's episode, we explore sacred circles, our personal communion of saints, a kind of soul-centered found family of people, animals, objects, and stories that not only help to define us, but help to anchor us and connect us with our community and the wider universe. I talk about how my dad and I agreed to be reincarnated as otters if that's an option, how working in the garden and using every day tools like a saw connect us to all of those who worked the soil before us and made the saw we now hold in our hands. In short, we discuss how we are invited to honor the great web of life, in its joy and heartache, by seeing people, beings, and things not as singularities, but members of a kin-dom, a dynamic community creation.

When we name the communal truth of existence, we get to experience anchoring and grounding as well as transformational change. It is a profound antidote to loneliness and invitation to belonging that does not ask us to diminish or erase our own uniqueness, but to respect it and respect the same in others.

We frame this spiritual community/found-family through anam cara which means "soul friend" and seek anam cara with the living, the beloved dead, the known and unknown in our life.

I mention two books in this episode and want to give you the links to them:

Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden by Camille Dungy

Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom by John O'Donohue

As always, I invite you to join me over at my newsletter and receive an illustrated mini book on the examen practice where we also share thoughts, stories, comics, and art on the many ways we seek connection to humanity and the divine. The link to that is here:

www.jencobbleworks.com/free

I'm Jen Cobble Willhoite, a contemplative storyteller, spiritual tool designer, and life-long soul seeker. My path is formed and framed by questions more than answers. I'm more comfortable wondering and wandering about things spiritual than I am in ideology, religion, or dogma.

My soul language and connection with Spirit is primarily grounded in Celtic Spirituality, science, nature, seasonal cycles, myth, folklore, and stories of all kinds. I do have roots in progressive Christianity that I sometimes speak from. My tap root, though, is ordinary life. I believe enlightenment is rhythmic, unfolding, and found in our everyday experiences and selves. I also offer tools and courses on my modern interpretation of the examen: a daily ritual of looking back, looking within, and looking ahead to cultivate a rapport with your inner wisdom and the Sacred as you understand it.

Every week, I share an episode from my own spiritual explorations, offering invitations for you to explore these themes on your own. Thanks for journeying with me!

Welcome to Everything Speaks if You Listen with Jen CobbleWorks where we befriend our humanity and the Sacred through story, soul questions, and every day life.

In this week's episode, we wrap up our mini series on the ritual practice of inner listening and self-reflection known as the examen. It is not traditional, but I share with you how I was taught to end this practice and how I now teach others to end it, which is to return to the beginning: gratitude. Stopping where we start helps us notice the spiral-like nature of growth and life. When we intentionally end as we began, we acknowledge that we have gone through *something*. We've grown, we've changed, we've experienced events, insights, and transformations. We are not who and where we were. And yet, we are in some ways, the same. To honor this both/and nature of life, growth, and spiritual journeying, we end our practice with the same step we started it with.

This week, we also talk about the "hidden step" of the examen, the thing that was baked in, but not directly named in the rhythm. In my own interpretation of this practice, I name this necessary and expected step which is to take action, to live (as best as we can) in alignment with what we just reflected on. Basically, the very last step of our internal reflection and spiritual listening to the Sacred is to go walk our talk. We do this knowing that we will not get things right on a regular basis, but we also do this with a spirit of striving and community connection. We are not floating heads with ideas to just constantly think about. We are not souls without bodies. We are not theories and no lived experience. We are not islands unconnected to others and the world. It is not even clear if "right" is what the Sacred is inviting us into so much as its deeper relationship with other human beings and creatures on this earth. Because it is all connected and we are social beings alive and embodied in this universe. Therefore, our action is invited and expected everyday lest our contemplation devolves only into theory.

Because the examen ritual is spiral-like and repetitive, we are constantly invited to reflect on our action, let our reflection inform new action, and then reflect again. The recurrent, seasonal aspect of this ritual is one of its greatest gifts invoking forgiveness, compassion, and community.

Here are the links I mentioned for the Step-by-Step Examen Cards in this episode as well as the newsletter with the free illustrated book, comics, and art.

www.etsy.com/shop/CobbleWorks

www.jencobbleworks.com/free

I'm Jen Cobble Willhoite, a contemplative storyteller, spiritual tool designer, and life-long soul seeker. My path is formed and framed by questions more than answers. I'm more comfortable wondering and wandering about things spiritual than I am in ideology, religion, or dogma.

My soul language and connection with Spirit is primarily grounded in Celtic Spirituality, science, nature, seasonal cycles, myth, folklore, and stories of all kinds. I do have roots in progressive Christianity that I sometimes speak from. My tap root, though, is ordinary life. I believe enlightenment is rhythmic, unfolding, and found in our everyday experiences and selves. I also offer tools and courses on my modern interpretation of the examen: a daily ritual of looking back, looking within, and looking ahead to cultivate a rapport with your inner wisdom and the Sacred as you understand it.

Every few weeks, I share an episode from my own spiritual explorations, offering invitations for you to explore these themes on your own. Thanks for journeying with me!

Welcome to Everything Speaks if You Listen with Jen CobbleWorks where we befriend our humanity and the Sacred through story, soul questions, and every day life.

In this week's episode, we look at two aspects of what it means to look ahead and set intentions. We consider goal setting and ticking off things from our to-do list as a way to nourish and provision ourselves for what's coming up. But we also consider how this focus on getting things done can suppress our ability and willingness to hear the wild and untamed voice of Spirit calling out to us, and inviting us to adventure something wholly new.

We talk about how scary and vulnerable it can feel to get our hopes up when we risk dreaming big and stepping into the unknown and out of our comfort zone. We talk about how Spirit, in its wild and untamed form, will always ask us to dream and live beyond our fear.

If you're interested in the free, illustrated mini book on the examen that I mention in the podcast, you can find it here:

www.jencobbleworks.com/free

This will also connect you to my newsletter which comes out about twice a month and is filled with community and resources for your spiritual exploration and wondering.

If you're interested in the small group work around the examen, please email me directly at: jen@jencobbleworks.com. I'd love to hear if this interests you!

I'm Jen Cobble Willhoite, a contemplative storyteller, spiritual tool designer, and life-long soul seeker. My path is formed and framed by questions more than answers. I'm more comfortable wondering and wandering about things spiritual than I am in ideology, religion, or dogma.

My soul language and connection with Spirit is primarily grounded in Celtic Spirituality, science, nature, seasonal cycles, myth, folklore, and stories of all kinds. I do have roots in progressive Christianity that I sometimes speak from. My tap root, though, is ordinary life. I believe enlightenment is rhythmic, unfolding, and found in our everyday experiences and selves. I also offer tools and courses on my modern interpretation of the examen: a daily ritual of looking back, looking within, and looking ahead to cultivate a rapport with your inner wisdom and the Sacred as you understand it.

Every few weeks, I share an episode from my own spiritual explorations, offering invitations for you to explore these themes on your own. Thanks for journeying with me!

Welcome to Everything Speaks if You Listen with Jen CobbleWorks where we befriend our humanity and the Sacred through story, soul questions, and every day life.

In this week's episode, I share my interpretation of what it means to mend and tend to our relationships. We discuss not only the important work of apology and changed behavior, and personal accountability, but new interpretations of what amend-making means. We consider our relationships as gardens where resources get drained from real world experience and every day life, and how amending those relationships might involve resourcing them in new ways. Is there something we can add to our relationships with others or ourselves that got lost along the way?

We also explore the idea of personal boundaries as it relates to the permeability of a cell wall. Can we consider that boundaries change and that they give us shape based on our current needs?

Fundamentally, we also talk about the fact that each of us is an expression of Love. The opportunity to make amends and to enter into repair work with ourselves and others is not about punishing blame and shame. It is an opportunity born from Love to let us reconnect and make whole again. It is a gift. We all fall apart sometimes. We all experience brokenness. And we all get to enter, individually, and collectively, a wonderful opportunity to re-memeber ourselves.

I think you'll find this episode deeply compassionate and nuanced while also being direct. I hope you find it to be a kind of spiritual connective tissue.

I'm Jen Cobble Willhoite, a contemplative storyteller, spiritual tool designer, and life-long soul seeker. My path is formed and framed by questions more than answers. I'm more comfortable wondering and wandering about things spiritual than I am in ideology, religion, or dogma.

My soul language and connection with Spirit is primarily grounded in Celtic Spirituality, science, nature, seasonal cycles, myth, folklore, and stories of all kinds. I do have roots in progressive Christianity that I sometimes speak from. My tap root, though, is ordinary life. I believe enlightenment is rhythmic, unfolding, and found in our everyday experiences and selves. I also offer tools and courses on my modern interpretation of the examen: a daily ritual of looking back, looking within, and looking ahead to cultivate a rapport with your inner wisdom and the Sacred as you understand it.

Every weeks, I share an episode from my own spiritual explorations, offering invitations for you to explore these themes on your own. Thanks for journeying with me!

www.jencobbleworks.com

IG @cobbleworks

www.etsy.com/shop/CobbleWorks

Welcome to Everything Speaks if You Listen with Jen CobbleWorks where we befriend our humanity and the Sacred through story, soul questions, and every day life.

In this week's episode, we sink into the practice and the belly of our being in Step 3 of the examen ritual. We talk about listening beneath the surface of our day and our being by letting moments of deep connection and disconnection find us, and then asking ourselves and Spirit what wisdom and insight might want to be shared through these lenses.

I'm Jen Cobble Willhoite, a contemplative storyteller, spiritual tool designer, and life-long soul seeker. My path is formed and framed by questions more than answers. I'm more comfortable wondering and wandering about things spiritual than I am in ideology, religion, or dogma.

My soul language and connection with Spirit is primarily grounded in Celtic Spirituality, science, nature, seasonal cycles, myth, folklore, and stories of all kinds. I do have roots in progressive Christianity that I sometimes speak from. My tap root, though, is ordinary life. I believe enlightenment is rhythmic, unfolding, and found in our everyday experiences and selves. I also offer tools and courses on my modern interpretation of the examen: a daily ritual of looking back, looking within, and looking ahead to cultivate a rapport with your inner wisdom and the Sacred as you understand it.

Every week, I share an episode from my own spiritual explorations, offering invitations for you to explore these themes on your own. Thanks for journeying with me!

Welcome to Everything Speaks if You Listen with Jen CobbleWorks where we befriend our humanity and the Sacred through story, soul questions, and every day life.

In this week's episode, we continue our exploration of the examen practice, a daily ritual of self-reflection and inner listening rooted in our everyday experience. This is a pragmatic spiritual practice I've relied on for over 10 years. It helps me make decisions that align with my true self, it helps me listen to my own inner wisdom and differentiate it from my inner critic or "old tapes". It helps me befriend myself as I am while also helping me grow. This is a practice that goes beyond self-love and a growth mindset because it also asks us to welcome the Sacred into our daily conversation ritual. It doesn't require you to be religious or to even have a super developed sense of who or what the Sacred even is. It just leaves space for something that lives within us and is also bigger than us to speak to and through our lives. As we practice the examen over time, we get to know the voice of the Sacred for ourselves and come into our own unique relationship with it (which may or may not look like anyone else's relationship).

The second step of the examen practice is about looking back on your day and noticing what happened and how you felt about it. I share that when you do this, you dignify your experiences and feelings as well as understand more clearly how vast your days are. A lot happens to you in a day. A lot happens around you in a day. A lot happens within you in a day. This step asks you to give attention and respect to these facts. In doing so, you may discover parts of yourself that have been left behind or forgotten about and so, your reflection becomes not just remembering what happened and how you felt, but a kind of re-membering, a re-joining and reintegration of yourself.

Lots to share and discuss! Can't wait to hear your thoughts on what it means to look back to find yourself and your path.

If you'd like to learn more about my work and my approach to this daily ritual of soul listening, you can download a free, illustrated mini book when you join my newsletter. Just visit: jencobbleworks.com/free

...or follow me on Instagram where the conversation is ongoing daily.

I'm Jen Cobble Willhoite, a contemplative storyteller, spiritual tool designer, and life-long soul seeker. My path is formed and framed by questions more than answers. I'm more comfortable wondering and wandering about things spiritual than I am in ideology, religion, or dogma.

My soul language and connection with Spirit is primarily grounded in Celtic Spirituality, science, nature, seasonal cycles, myth, folklore, and stories of all kinds. I do have roots in progressive Christianity that I sometimes speak from. My tap root, though, is ordinary life. I believe enlightenment is rhythmic, unfolding, and found in our everyday experiences and selves. I also offer tools and courses on my modern interpretation of the examen: a daily ritual of looking back, looking within, and looking ahead to cultivate a rapport with your inner wisdom and the Sacred as you understand it.

Every week, I share an episode from my own spiritual explorations, offering invitations for you to explore these themes on your own. Thanks for journeying with me!

Welcome to Everything Speaks if You Listen with Jen CobbleWorks where we befriend our humanity and the Sacred through story, soul questions, and every day life.

In this week's episode, we explore step 1 of the examen more deeply and broadly. We look at gratitude and how it is more expansive than a list of what is good in our lives. It is actually a form of mutual seeing, where we begin to notice the unique ways Spirit reaches out to us and the unique ways we are enlivened by the world.

Additionally, gratitude helps us get to know ourselves. We tell the truth about who we are and what matters to us when we name things we cherish and hold dear in our lives.

I share with you a poem by Gerard Manly Hopkins and talk about how he, like me (and maybe you too?) at one time thought that it was a good idea to sacrifice what he loves in order to be more spiritual. He changed his mind about that and I did too. It altered my spiritual path and let me grow to know myself and Spirit with more trust when I stopped this notion of false sacrifice and let myself truly embrace what brought me alive.

This is one of my favorite podcasts so far! I truly hope this new way of looking at gratitude, as a way where we can let ourselves enter into relationship more easily and let ourselves see and be seen (by ourselves and Spirit) opens doors within you and around you. It was rather revolutionary for me, personally.

I'm Jen Cobble Willhoite, a contemplative storyteller, spiritual tool designer, and life-long soul seeker. My path is formed and framed by questions more than answers. I'm more comfortable wondering and wandering about things spiritual than I am in ideology, religion, or dogma.

My soul language and connection with Spirit is primarily grounded in Celtic Spirituality, science, nature, seasonal cycles, myth, folklore, and stories of all kinds. I do have roots in progressive Christianity that I sometimes speak from. My tap root, though, is ordinary life. I believe enlightenment is rhythmic, unfolding, and found in our everyday experiences and selves. I also offer tools and courses on my modern interpretation of the examen: a daily ritual of looking back, looking within, and looking ahead to cultivate a rapport with your inner wisdom and the Sacred as you understand it.

Every week, I share an episode from my own spiritual explorations, offering invitations for you to explore these themes on your own. Thanks for journeying with me!

Welcome to Everything Speaks if You Listen with Jen CobbleWorks where we befriend our humanity and the Sacred through story, soul questions, and every day life.

In this week's episode, I share how much I need affirmations and words of assurance, especially when I feel a sense of hopelessness and despair. But the fact is, I can't receive the gift of affirmations until I actually feel my hopelessness and despair and listen to what wisdom it might be offering me. Affirmation isn't helpful if it bypasses our human experience in the name of spirituality or goodness.

Yet, we aren't meant to live in nothing but sadness and overwhelm. So, how does a person feel their pain and suffering, and move with it or past it honestly?

In my experience, two words help me honor what hurts in life while leaving a foot in the door for hope and possibility. They are: "I wonder...". When I use these words, I get to admit my true feelings while gently interrogating and questioning whether these feelings tell the whole story of reality.

Join me as I share how wonder creates space for the Sacred to meet us where we are, letting the work of affirmation take root when the time is right.

This is a shorter podcast because I want to invite you into your own pragmatic, spiritual practice of wonder. In the closing minutes, I read through a series of 10-13 I Wonder statements from my I Wonder Card Deck with pauses in between for you to notice what resonates with your own soul and humanity.

I find that these "wonder" statements can be provocative and even challenging, but they always open a wider horizon beyond my fear. I hope they serve you with the same compassion.

If you'd like to see the I Wonder Deck or learn more about it, you can check it out here: www.etsy.com/shop/CobbleWorks

I'm Jen Cobble Willhoite, a contemplative storyteller, spiritual tool designer, and life-long soul seeker. My path is formed and framed by questions more than answers. I'm more comfortable wondering and wandering about things spiritual than I am in ideology, religion, or dogma.

My soul language and connection with Spirit is primarily grounded in Celtic Spirituality, science, nature, seasonal cycles, myth, folklore, and stories of all kinds. I do have roots in progressive Christianity that I sometimes speak from. My tap root, though, is ordinary life. I believe enlightenment is rhythmic, unfolding, and found in our everyday experiences and selves. I also offer tools and courses on my modern interpretation of the examen: a daily ritual of looking back, looking within, and looking ahead to cultivate a rapport with your inner wisdom and the Sacred as you understand it.

Every few weeks, I share an episode from my own spiritual explorations, offering invitations for you to explore these themes on your own. Thanks for journeying with me!

Welcome to Everything Speaks if You Listen with Jen CobbleWorks where we befriend our humanity and the Sacred through story, soul questions, and every day life.

In this week's episode, I share about a conversation with a friend where we wondered whether we can trust our wants. Are they just appetites we need to regard with caution? Are they the beginning of something glorious? Are they selfish? What if we were told our wants were sinful or futile and pointless? How do we embody our wants and desires and enter into relationship with them before passing judgment on whether they're trustworthy? (Especially if we have past experiences that have "proven" that our wants only lead to trouble.)

Weirdly, I'm getting some breathing space and insight around these questions from a scene in the movie, Talledega Nights. I'm not saying it's a bastion of wisdom, but I honestly hear some living wisdom when the movie asks whether it's true that if "you're not first, you're last".

Since Imbolc is approaching (the time we mark that we're about 75% of the way through winter), we have another (more beautiful?) invitation from the earth and Celtic Spirituality to notice the earth thawing and seeds rumbling within. It feels like we are right on time to be asking if we can trust these rumblings.

I mention an online gathering where we will be doing an Imbolc Examen. You can sign up for the newsletter here to learn more about it or email me directly at jen@jencobbleworks.com

I'm Jen Cobble Willhoite, a contemplative storyteller, spiritual tool designer, and life-long soul seeker. My path is formed and framed by questions more than answers. I'm more comfortable wondering and wandering about things spiritual than I am in ideology, religion, or dogma.

My soul language and connection with Spirit is primarily grounded in Celtic Spirituality, science, nature, seasonal cycles, myth, folklore, and stories of all kinds. I do have roots in progressive Christianity that I sometimes speak from. My tap root, though, is ordinary life. I believe enlightenment is rhythmic, unfolding, and found in our everyday experiences and selves. I also offer tools and courses on my modern interpretation of the examen: a daily ritual of looking back, looking within, and looking ahead to cultivate a rapport with your inner wisdom and the Sacred as you understand it.

Every week, I share an episode from my own spiritual explorations, offering invitations for you to explore these themes on your own. Thanks for journeying with me!

Welcome to Everything Speaks if You Listen with Jen CobbleWorks where we befriend our humanity and the Sacred through story, soul questions, and every day life.

In this week's episode, I introduce my FAVORITE spiritual practice, the examen, and my unique approach to it. The examen is a daily ritual of inner listening, self-reflection, and connection to the Sacred (however you name that). It has helped me get to know myself, embrace my humanity, heal wounds, do shadow work, practice accountability, set intentions, and cultivate a unique relationship to the Sacred. It is a spiritual and mindfulness practice that honors our left brain rationality as well as our intuition and inner wisdom. I love it! It's practical and beautiful.

I explore a little of the history of the examen practice, my approach to it, and walk through each step using my own experience as a guide and example. (I also stumble with my grammar and say "more easier" which would make my mother fall out of her chair. lol.)

Below are the resources I mention if you'd like to learn more about this practice and my approach to it. I really think this is a tool that can serve us well in this time of change and transformation. It helps us to build inner ground when life feels rather groundless.

Inner Wisdom Step-by-Step Examen Cards: www.etsy.com/shop/CobbleWorks

Compassionate Question Cards: www.etsy.com/shop/CobbleWorks

Newsletter that comes with a free illustrated mini book on the examen: www.jencobbleworks.com/free

I'm Jen Cobble Willhoite, a contemplative storyteller, spiritual tool designer, and life-long soul seeker. My path is formed and framed by questions more than answers. I'm more comfortable wondering and wandering about things spiritual than I am in ideology, religion, or dogma.

My soul language and connection with Spirit is primarily grounded in Celtic Spirituality, science, nature, seasonal cycles, myth, folklore, and stories of all kinds. I do have roots in progressive Christianity that I sometimes speak from. My tap root, though, is ordinary life. I believe enlightenment is rhythmic, unfolding, and found in our everyday experiences and selves. I also offer tools and courses on my modern interpretation of the examen: a daily ritual of looking back, looking within, and looking ahead to cultivate a rapport with your inner wisdom and the Sacred as you understand it.

Every few weeks, I share an episode from my own spiritual explorations, offering invitations for you to explore these themes on your own. Thanks for journeying with me!

Welcome to Everything Speaks if You Listen with Jen CobbleWorks where we befriend our humanity and the Sacred through story, soul questions, and every day life. 

In this week's episode, we talk about uncertainty and how it can be so painful and cornering, that the only thing we (often) end up feeling is tremendous fear. And also...uncertainty marks a threshold, a place of the Unknown and Mystery where all things are possible because no things are yet determined which means we are being gifted something HUGE: the opportunity to pay attention and see a bigger horizon.

We honor how this is not easy or trite and explore what it would feel like to grow in our ability to abide with uncertainty until we can see the amazing sense of possibility it brings (even if we're still feeling afraid).

There are more dog sounds in this podcast, a few yawns and gurgles from the jackhuahua in my life. There is also me singing a totally made up, not rhyming, not particularly good song, and an invitation to affirm that it is ok, always, to not know something. Here is the link to the comic I drew and mention in the episode. I hope you join me this week for Everything Speaks if You Listen!

https://www.instagram.com/p/Cpx9PoqPnxA/

I'm Jen Cobble Willhoite, a contemplative storyteller, spiritual tool designer, and life-long soul seeker. My path is formed and framed by questions more than answers. I'm more comfortable wondering and wandering about things spiritual than I am in ideology, religion, or dogma.

My soul language and connection with Spirit is primarily grounded in Celtic Spirituality, science, nature, seasonal cycles, myth, folklore, and stories of all kinds. I do have roots in progressive Christianity that I sometimes speak from. My tap root, though, is ordinary life. I believe enlightenment is rhythmic, unfolding, and found in our everyday experiences and selves. I also offer tools and courses on my modern interpretation of the examen: a daily ritual of looking back, looking within, and looking ahead to cultivate a rapport with your inner wisdom and the Sacred as you understand it.

Every few weeks, I share an episode from my own spiritual explorations, offering invitations for you to explore these themes on your own. Thanks for journeying with me!

Welcome to Everything Speaks if You Listen with Jen CobbleWorks where we befriend our humanity and the Sacred through story, soul questions, and every day life. 

In this week's episode, we explore some of the symbolism and spiritual invitations from the full moon for our human and soul growth. There's also a guided meditation/reflection at the end for you to engage with in your imagination or journal.

We cover themes around the cyclical nature and seasonality of life and how the moon's waxing and waning affirms seasonality as natural, and as a way to find grounding even through things that shift and change. I introduce questions you can ask yourself every month at the full moon which help you name what has come to fruition and what needs to be released before you move forward. And we spend a fair amount of time remembering that this process involves celebration, savoring, and pleasure from what has matured in our life as well as re-framing release, pruning, and surrender not as something punishing, but as part of what it means to transform and grow. 

There's a brief exploration of gardening by the moon, a family tradition from my ancestry of gathering in the graveyard for remembrance and storytelling, and a visit from Snake, who teaches us that letting go can be vulnerable even though it's necessary and reminds us that we remain ourselves even after a season of release. Enjoy! I hope it's fruitful listening.

The link to the Moon Oracle Deck by Alauna Whelan is here:

https://alaunawhelan.com/products/moon-mantra-oracle-deck

I'm Jen Cobble Willhoite, a contemplative storyteller, spiritual tool designer, and life-long soul seeker. My path is formed and framed by questions more than answers. I'm more comfortable wondering and wandering about things spiritual than I am in ideology, religion, or dogma.

My soul language and connection with Spirit is primarily grounded in Celtic Spirituality, science, nature, seasonal cycles, myth, folklore, and stories of all kinds. I do have roots in progressive Christianity that I sometimes speak from. My tap root, though, is ordinary life. I believe enlightenment is rhythmic, unfolding, and found in our everyday experiences and selves. I also offer tools and courses on my modern interpretation of the examen: a daily ritual of looking back, looking within, and looking ahead to cultivate a rapport with your inner wisdom and the Sacred as you understand it.

Every week, I share an episode from my own spiritual explorations, offering invitations and questions for you to explore on your own. Thanks for journeying with me!

Welcome to Everything Speaks if You Listen with Jen CobbleWorks where we befriend our humanity and the Sacred through story, soul questions, and every day life. 

I'm Jen Cobble Willhoite, a contemplative storyteller, spiritual tool designer, and life-long soul seeker. My path is formed and framed by questions more than answers. I'm more comfortable wondering and wandering about things spiritual than I am in ideology, religion, or dogma.

My soul language and connection with Spirit is primarily grounded in Celtic Spirituality, science, nature, seasonal cycles, myth, folklore, and stories of all kinds. I do have roots in progressive Christianity that I sometimes speak from. My tap root, though, is ordinary life. I believe enlightenment is rhythmic, unfolding, and found in our everyday experiences and selves. I also offer tools and courses on my modern interpretation of the examen: a daily ritual of looking back, looking within, and looking ahead to cultivate a rapport with your inner wisdom and the Sacred as you understand it.

Every week, I share an episode from my own spiritual explorations, offering invitations for you to explore these themes on your own. Thanks for journeying with me!

In this week's episode, we explore coddiwompling: the act of intentionally journeying towards an unknown destination. I frame this, a bit, through the lens of Lent, but expand the conversation to include any kind of conscious, on-purpose journey-before-the-journey. All of us experience various thresholds in life where we consent to a leap of faith, a stepping out, an embrace of transformation that feels *right* even though it also feels mysterious and likely, scary. What would a pre-journey do for us, a season where we listened to our human fears, dreams, and questions and regularly sat down at a campfire with the sacred to honor them and receive more wisdom around them? Would we grow braver and more prepared to enter our "big journey", our leap of faith transformation? Would we grow a friendship with ourselves and the sacred that would make the bigger journey more doable? Lots of questions to explore when we walk with intention into uncertainty. Join me in coddiwompling this week! And...hear me sing a small bit of a Patti LaBelle song too.

www.jencobbleworks.com

IG @cobbleworks

www.etsy.com/shop/CobbleWorks

Welcome to Inner Journey, Outer Worlds with Jen CobbleWorks where we befriend our humanity and the Sacred through story, soul questions, and every day life. I'm Jen Cobble Willhoite, a contemplative storyteller, spiritual tool designer, and life-long soul seeker. My path is formed and framed by questions more than answers. I'm more comfortable wondering and wandering about things spiritual than I am in ideology, religion, or dogma.

My soul language and connection with Spirit is primarily grounded in Celtic Spirituality, science, nature, seasonal cycles, myth, folklore, and stories of all kinds. I do have roots in progressive Christianity that I sometimes speak from. My tap root, though, is ordinary life. I believe enlightenment is rhythmic, unfolding, and found in our everyday experiences and selves. I also offer tools and courses on my modern interpretation of the examen: a daily ritual of looking back, looking within, and looking ahead to cultivate a rapport with your inner wisdom and the Sacred as you understand it.

Every few weeks, I share an episode from my own spiritual explorations, offering invitations for you to explore these themes on your own. Thanks for journeying with me!

In this week's episode, I talk about the thing I rarely talk about: Jesus. Namely, the tradition of Lent and how starting this season with a lens towards our own mortality, while it's relevant and meaningful, is not vibing with me this year. What DOES feel like an invitation this year is to consider 40 days in the wilderness as a spiritual honeymoon rather than an exile. What also resonates this year is a desire to be marked by stardust and earth, things that expand and ground our lives, rather than by dust, the symbol of our life's end.

It's elemental, deep, casual, and--I hope--good company for you on your own journey. Thanks for accompanying me.

Welcome to Everything Speaks if You Listen with Jen CobbleWorks where we befriend our humanity and the Sacred through story, soul questions, and every day life.

In this week's episode, I give you a snapshot of how I approach the new year and how it doesn't yet involve a word of the year, resolutions, goals, or even a clear vision. After years of an inner listening and reflection practice, I've learned that the winter-ness of January supersedes the cultural push of a fresh start. All this talk of new year, new you, doesn't resonate with me in this season. The cultural approach to the new year is full of initiating and instigating energy which is the opposite of the seasonal invitation of winter which is liminal, in-between, hibernating, resting, dreaming, and preparing.

I share what this looks like in real life and some of what I've learned from my not-yet-completed annual reflection practice (the examen). I hope this offers you permission and encouragement to listen within to your own seasonal needs and try to align your day to day life with what you have the energy and capacity for.

This doesn't mean you're behind! It means you're living in your own integrity and honoring your own humanity...which is a really beautiful and powerful thing to do.

If you'd like to learn more about the examen practice I focus on and receive the illustrated annual reflection journal for 2023 (which looks ahead to 2024), please join my newsletter.

The link is here:

www.jencobbleworks.com/free

I'm Jen Cobble Willhoite, a contemplative storyteller, spiritual tool designer, and life-long soul seeker. My path is formed and framed by questions more than answers. I'm more comfortable wondering and wandering about things spiritual than I am in ideology, religion, or dogma.

My soul language and connection with Spirit is primarily grounded in Celtic Spirituality, science, nature, seasonal cycles, myth, folklore, and stories of all kinds. I do have roots in progressive Christianity that I sometimes speak from. My tap root, though, is ordinary life. I believe enlightenment is rhythmic, unfolding, and found in our everyday experiences and selves. I also offer tools and courses on my modern interpretation of the examen: a daily ritual of looking back, looking within, and looking ahead to cultivate a rapport with your inner wisdom and the Sacred as you understand it.

Every week, I share an episode from my own spiritual explorations, offering invitations for you to explore these themes on your own. Thanks for journeying with me!

Welcome to Everything Speaks if You Listen with Jen CobbleWorks where we befriend our humanity and the Sacred through story, soul questions, and every day life.

In this week's episode, we talk about the winter solstice and its invitation to be still and to notice the restlessness within us, the stillness of what persists in our life that we wish would be over or would hurry up.

And from this dual approach to stillness, we're invited into a deeper stillness within, a kind of sacred sanctuary we hold in our beings as well as a feeling of being held in the womb of Spirit.

The winter light is lean and delicate. It is just over the horizon rather than overpoweringly overhead. In this image of winter light, we are invited to consider the Light of the World with similar vulnerability. Jesus is enfleshed, embodied, and incarnated as a babe: vulnerable, tender, dependent, and needing care, compassion, nourishment, and love.

What would it be like if we turned to our inner light as well as our most vulnerable parts of ourselves and treated them the same way we would treat a babe? What would we grow up to be if we met our innermost tender parts, the parts that STILL haven't grown up or healed, the parts we often get frustrated and harsh with, with ongoing love and compassion? What if the image of the Light of the World being vulnerable and fragile is just as sacred and powerful as the Light of the World being mighty? How would this seeing the Light in this new, thin winter light offer us an opportunity of greater self-love and love of others?

I'm Jen Cobble Willhoite, a contemplative storyteller, spiritual tool designer, and life-long soul seeker. My path is formed and framed by questions more than answers. I'm more comfortable wondering and wandering about things spiritual than I am in ideology, religion, or dogma.

My soul language and connection with Spirit is primarily grounded in Celtic Spirituality, science, nature, seasonal cycles, myth, folklore, and stories of all kinds. I do have roots in progressive Christianity that I sometimes speak from. My tap root, though, is ordinary life. I believe enlightenment is rhythmic, unfolding, and found in our everyday experiences and selves. I also offer tools and courses on my modern interpretation of the examen: a daily ritual of looking back, looking within, and looking ahead to cultivate a rapport with your inner wisdom and the Sacred as you understand it.

Every week, I share an episode from my own spiritual explorations, offering invitations for you to explore these themes on your own. Thanks for journeying with me!

Welcome to Everything Speaks if You Listen with Jen CobbleWorks where we befriend our humanity and the Sacred through story, soul questions, and every day life.

In this week's episode, we look at the sacred invitation of letting our imagination run away with us. When we are focused on goals and outcomes, we can see imagination as something that distracts us. We can even suggest that imagination wrongly tempts us! But many spiritual practices are rooted in imagination and letting ourselves be led by it.

When we dream and explore from the back of imagination, we stretch our ability to hold difference and diverse possibility within ourselves. We make room for what at first glance feels impossible or unfathomable. When we consider ourselves seed carriers, light bearers, and sacred vessels, we can then manifest, birth, express, and share these wild, new hopes within us in service to our shared humanity and community.

In other words: imagination helps us cultivate possibilities within that become possibilities of peace and inclusion for the world we share.

The modern world is different than the ancient world as it approaches imagination. There is an animus within our ability to create and wonder that the ancient world recognized that sometimes gets squashed by forces of productivity and ideology now.

This week's episode focuses on these questions: How can we cultivate a tangible peace outside of if we cannot make room to dream about it within us? And how can we tolerate and love the humanity of others if own compassion within is not stretched by a creativity beyond our fears within?

Link to my shop in case you are still doing some holiday shopping is here:

www.etsy.com/shop/CobbleWorks

and the link to my newsletter is here:

www.jencobbleworks.com/free

I'm Jen Cobble Willhoite, a contemplative storyteller, spiritual tool designer, and life-long soul seeker. My path is formed and framed by questions more than answers. I'm more comfortable wondering and wandering about things spiritual than I am in ideology, religion, or dogma.

My soul language and connection with Spirit is primarily grounded in Celtic Spirituality, science, nature, seasonal cycles, myth, folklore, and stories of all kinds. I do have roots in progressive Christianity that I sometimes speak from. My tap root, though, is ordinary life. I believe enlightenment is rhythmic, unfolding, and found in our everyday experiences and selves. I also offer tools and courses on my modern interpretation of the examen: a daily ritual of looking back, looking within, and looking ahead to cultivate a rapport with your inner wisdom and the Sacred as you understand it.

Every few weeks, I share an episode from my own spiritual explorations, offering invitations for you to explore these themes on your own. Thanks for journeying with me!

Welcome to Everything Speaks if You Listen with Jen CobbleWorks where we befriend our humanity and the Sacred through story, soul questions, and every day life.

In this week's episode, I share a way I've been trying to stay connected to love ones who aren't around as much anymore. We talk about all the little things our days hold, all the ways we connect with each other, ourselves, and the Sacred: small conversations, reports on nothing in particular, song lyrics that are stuck in our head. On the surface, none of this is important or has meaning, but beneath and between this ordinary sharing, is a fully formed life, a sacred self and ground where we grow and reach out to others.

The examen is nothing more than a time to listen to these little conversations. It is a vessel that holds the tiny things that seem so inconsequential, but together form our heart, soul, and sense of self, even our belonging in the world.

Welcome to Everything Speaks if You Listen with Jen CobbleWorks where we befriend our humanity and the Sacred through story, soul questions, and every day life.

I'm Jen Cobble Willhoite, a contemplative storyteller, spiritual tool designer, and life-long soul seeker. My path is formed and framed by questions more than answers. I'm more comfortable wondering and wandering about things spiritual than I am in ideology, religion, or dogma.

My soul language and connection with Spirit is primarily grounded in Celtic Spirituality, science, nature, seasonal cycles, myth, folklore, and stories of all kinds. I do have roots in progressive Christianity that I sometimes speak from. My tap root, though, is ordinary life. I believe enlightenment is rhythmic, unfolding, and found in our everyday experiences and selves. I also offer tools and courses on my modern interpretation of the examen: a daily ritual of looking back, looking within, and looking ahead to cultivate a rapport with your inner wisdom and the Sacred as you understand it.

Every week, I share an episode from my own spiritual explorations, offering invitations for you to explore these themes on your own. Thanks for journeying with me!

I am excited to welcome my friend and Iona soul guide, Mary DeJong, on today's podcast. Today, we will be talking about how Story connects us to the earth, ourselves, and each other as an expression and vehicle of the sacred. She will gift us with telling the Inuit story of Fox Woman Dreaming, a beautiful, but challenging story about belonging to self and each other.

*Show note: Fox Woman Dreaming contains an expletive within its story. This is important for the tone of what is being shared.

Mary is a spiritual ecologist, ecotheologian, wild soul guide, urban naturalist, and practitioner and guide of place-based pilgrimage. She specializes in the spiritual companionship of "rewilding" and instructs spiritual directors and companions through Spiritual Directors International and One Spirit Learning Alliance.

Mary facilitates retreats and pilgrimages in the Pacific Northwest and in Iona, Scotland that strengthen the unique and mystical interconnection of participants, the sacred, and the natural world. She has studied and practiced within the Celtic Christian spiritual tradition, her own maternal line heritage, for over twenty years, and is influenced by the lives of Celtic saints, and the lands that guided them.

She holds a post-Heroic Journey framework that calls us to emerge as poets and prophets, instead of heros, an applied mythological worldview that is connected to her training within mythology and the emerging field of ecopyschology. Mary's theoretical and praxis focus within deep ecology, eco-spirituality, ecotheology, ecopsychology and specialization in Thomas Berry's Universe Story delves into why place matters, the sacramentality of creation, and how together this informs the development of our ecological self. Mary terms this work “sacred eco-awakening” and sees this as a critical and holy endeavor as it allows us to come to grievous terms of our human history and to posture ourselves once again side-by-side with the whole of creation.

Find out more about Mary's work here:

Waymarkers Iona Pilgrimage: https://www.waymarkers.net/iona-pilgrimage

Rewilding Retreats (day retreats and April 2024 weekend long in the Cascade Mountains:

https://www.waymarkers.net/rewildingretreats

https://www.waymarkers.net/cascade-mountains-rewilding-retreat

Wild Seasons: https://www.waymarkers.net/wild-seasons

You can also find Mary on Instagram @waymarkers