Hi there Beautiful friends.
Let’s dig into the roots of what it means to be a conscious human connected to our natural world.
Is it a science? Is it energy? Is it a vibe? Yes. Yes. And Yes.
Come get nerdy with us as we discuss energy transference and how it lead me to be a soulful scientist.
Our foundational lens for interpreting the world around us is fashioned from our childhood experiences. For some of us, these memories are rich with positive support, kindness, laughter, and love. For others, these memories are painful landmines we gently tiptoe over time and time again until we choose to carefully defuse the explosive parts and grow from within.
Most of us are a woven tapestry of threads from both experience extremes. It isn’t until some major, potentially crisis, event occurs in our adulthood that we end up face down in the dirt, tear-streaked, muddy faced, and pleading with ourselves to not have to face ourselves…that we realize the only way out is through.
My earliest memory of energy transference glimmers with Pennsylvania summer sunlight streaming through the kitchen windows as my grandma rolled out pie dough on her butcher block board reserved only for serious matters of baking.
As she gently manipulated the dough, she looked at me and said:
“You must think good thoughts when you are rolling out your dough. Tell it sweet words...or else it will crumble when you move it to the pie plate.”
Three-year-old me giggled and probably said something silly like “pie crust doesn’t have ears, grandma.”
My Catholic grandma is not someone I would consider to be tapped into the spiritual realm. There were a lot of toxic behaviors that came along with being a life-long housewife in a small town.
Gossip, negativity, criticism, body shaming, and general victim mentality were also a part of growing up raised, in part, by my grandma.
My mom was a seventeen when she had me and because of my grandparents support she was able to balance the life of being a single mom at such a young age. There was love, though often it felt very conditional upon my behaviors.
As a result, I grew into an adept shape-shifter, molding into whatever version of Jessica was most appropriate at the time, or the one that would be most accepted and loved.
One of my grandma’s other favorite sayings for me was
“Don’t make waves, Jessica. Be a good girl.”
I remember at a very young age being able to walk in a space and feel what people had once felt, almost as though the walls absorbed the emotions of those who lived there. Sometimes this felt very scary and dark.
Sometimes it felt warm, like a big hug. I have since learned, being an adult empath, is usually a result of child you needing to scan the room for anything that feels amiss and address that immediately as a threat or unstable. It’s exhausting for most of us to be in crowds because we can sense and feel everybody’s stuff.
As a child, I often found myself taking solace in the forest, because that was true peace. The trees, the damp earth, the vines, the mushrooms, the constant rustling, chirping noise of nature lulling me into alignment with a higher vibration of who I genuinely was deep inside.
My late teen and early twenties were spent dabbling towards a degree in something that changed every semester or so. Mostly, I loved traveling and music and did a lot of both of those simultaneously. It was in this music scene I began to experiment with psychedelics and address who I was, truly, without the expectation of others factored into my equation.
I had found my person, my soulmate and we lived this life of pure bliss following the tides of energy for each move we would make. I was able to use my empathic powers in this environment to uncover the meaning of “All are one,” blessed to witness the sheer intensity of hundreds of thousands of people all crowded together to be moved by the music.
There were moments I could see the energy swelling above the crowds and my grandma’s words “Don’t make waves…” would make me laugh out loud, because as human beings we are primarily composed of water, ruled by the phases of the moon just as the tides…the waves. How can we not make waves?
We are the waves. We emit the waves. We absorb the waves of others. Ultimately, we can learn to navigate the tides of this life with grace and ease by healing our inner shit. Our healing journey becomes the boat and the more work we put in, the more stable we are in the shifting tides.
My inner-gypsy eventually became satiated and we moved to Phoenix simply because I didn’t want to be cold anymore.
Here, I found community, connection, and like-minded people to be sparse. For the first decade of living in this desert city I wanted to leave. However, it grows on you…like a moss and before you know it, it’s cleared a soft, fuzzy space in your heart. I settled into a degree path at Arizona State University and graduated with high honors with a B.S. in Biology, Ecological Sustainability and Conservation.
I thought I would work for Game and Fish or some conservation society, so I began to apply to various jobs that each felt like the I was putting a left shoe on my right foot. The final straw was walking out of an interview of the AZDA in which I was told my job would be going to Yuma and testing pesticide levels in their farm fields. Yeah. No.
I aligned myself with the genetics professors at ASU and learned from them. I took every class I could on focused on genetics and botany. One professor told me about a job at the Desert Botanical Garden, and I went for the interview. It was a project in their herbarium digitizing plant specimens from hundreds of years of collecting. It was boring work and paid very little…but hey I was using that degree!
Eventually, I was asked to work on projects in the lab using genetic data of rare and endemic plant populations to determine their endangered status. Over the course of five years, I worked my way up to the lab manager, got published multiple times, and got pregnant…twice.
After baby number two in two years, it wasn’t possible for me to return to work while their father worked his way up the corporate ladder at two jobs, simultaneously. So, I became that stay-at-home mom…just like my grandma.
I had been making soap as a hobby for a few years before my daughter was born.
When she came home as a 2-day old baby with eczema, I thought I broke her…
We tried everything to deter the rashes, the itching, the discomfort. Nothing worked. We had an entire cabinet of “lotions and potions.”
At six months old, she was crawling and eating and…messy. I had to wash her with something other than water. I fused together my love of holistic living and my knowledge of plants, chemistry, and soap making and I created a super gentle soap formula.
I would make batches and share with friends and neighbors…who eventually wanted to actually buy it from me because it cleared their psoriasis, or eczema, or dry skin ailments.
A business concept was born. I was at home, a mama of two babies and desperately craving some sort of interaction with an adult human. I needed to, at the very least, exercise the parts of my brain that craved science, formulas, ingredients, solutions, reactions, limiting reagents…I was so hungry to have a piece of myself from my professional life back and this offered that solution, while helping my daughter and our friends.
I spent late nights sneaking out of my bed, exhausted from the day, but excited to have time for me.
I would mix the oils, mix the lye solution, combine and wait. Add the herbs and the essential oils and pour…
Meanwhile, my marriage was falling apart.
I was isolated in a way I have never experienced. So deep in throws of motherhood and housekeeping, yet alone in it all, hoping, wishing, praying I would hear his car pull into the driveway. Many nights passed when I didn’t hear that car and it wasn’t long before all the pieces of infidelity fit together into a painful mess right in front of my face.
This…this was my face down, in the dirt and the muck, moment.
I remember the first text I saw from her to him and how it felt like the air had been sucked out of my lungs, the room, the house, the entire Universe.
We tried to put it all back together quite a few times, but the damage was so great and neither of us were equipped with the tools, the time, or the energy to work on the broken connection.
After one more baby, a Near-Death-Experience, and more infidelity on both parts, we eventually divorced.
And through all of this…I kept making soap.
I stayed focused on what I was creating. How I was helping others and what I could do that was important in this world.
There were nights the tears would stream off my face and into the oil/lye mixture as I processed the grief, the death of what I once believed my life was going to be.
There were nights I would collapse on the kitchen floor of my apartment from the weight of what a single-mom life was going to be for me. There were (many) nights I drank too much wine and just wished, prayed, hoped for a way to make it on my own.
On occasion, a batch of soap would inexplicably flop. And every. Single. Time. It had to do with the energy I was holding while pouring the batch. It was never the vulnerable grief, the tears, the sadness, or the joyful, laughing batches that gave issue. It was the angry, bitter, frustrated, fearful batches that wouldn’t solidify or cure correctly.
“You must think good thoughts when you are rolling out your dough. Tell it sweet words...or else it will crumble when you move it to the pie plate.”
What I do is absolutely a science, a beautiful fusion of chemistry, botany, and biology. The hum my products create is a function of my soulful existence. This podcast is all about exploring human consciousness.
What it means to be a sacred being having a human experience and how we can elevate ourselves and those around us by using nature and science as our guides.
Tune in every Friday to get vulnerable with us about conscious living, from skin care to spiritual practice, let’s get deep about how we’re all connected by scientific roots and soulful branches.
Grow on, babes
- Jessica