Awesome Health Podcast with Wade T. Lightheart
Episode 86: Transforming Yourself Through Grief with Jasmin Jenkins
Notes from episode:
Grief equates to sadness for most of us, but can we go further with it and actually experience the transformative journey of grief? Our guest is here to tell us how.
Jasmin Jenkins is an Integrative Grief Guide and the founder of Fall Up, a community created to support people navigating the spectrum of grief. In her work, she brings her clients into the invitations within their grief journeys and supports them in co-creating a healing process through the transformative journey of grief.
Because this is an atypical topic, and a very unique career path, I was curious to know where it all began for Jasmin and that is where we begin our episode of Awesome Health Podcast today.
Jasmin's mom died of cancer when she was 15. Her mom had been diagnosed a few years earlier and had been in and out of remission until she ultimately lost her battle. Jasmin was devastated but didn't have the tools or the emotional capacity to talk about her feelings. Instead, she shut everything down internally. Until her brother took his own life 10 years later, then she woke up and began her own healing journey.
She says she never would have imagined 11 years ago that today she would be holding space for so many different aspects of grief, but she now does it with gratitude and reverence. She believes it is one of the deepest honors to have another person share their grief journey with her.
We go on to talk about the specifics of her own transformative journey of grief, and some of the healing modalities that were most helpful for her: EMDR and plant medicine. EMDR stands for eye movement and desensitization and reprocessing, and it is a therapeutic tool that she used a few months after her brother died. The three plant medicines she used were ayahuasca, kanna and sassafras. She explains plant medicine can be very beneficial when you are with the right teacher at the right time so do your due diligence ahead of time.
She also describes the four invitations that grief offers us: pause, breathe, feel and heal. These are the framework for the work she does. And if you are in the midst of grief or are feeling a heavy weight from loss, Jasmin suggests treating these feelings like you would a small child: with kindness and gentleness.
You can uncover more pearls of wisdom from her when you join us for this touching edition of Awesome Health Podcast.