The Age of the Guide

musings of a college drop out

I dropped out of community college my second semester. I was eighteen, the world was my oyster, and I was convinced that I knew…well…everything.

For a long time I told people that I dropped out because I was smarter than my professors and I could teach circles around them, which is categorically not true considering I barely passed basic algebra.

Twenty years later what I have come to realize is that even as a fiery eighteen year old I had deep knowing in my bones, but it was the language and skill that I lacked to wrangle that knowing into true and aligned action.

As a thirty eight year old woman, I now know that there was no way they could teach me in those classrooms the lessons my soul was yearning for. It wasn’t that I was smarter than anyone. It was that somehow I knew the things I was meant to learn were going to happen “out there”, not sitting at a desk staring at a white board. It didn’t matter to me the scientific data or fact-based findings collected in text books. The curriculum I wanted and needed, the anecdotal evidence I couldn’t wait to gather, was going to come from life itself.

I’ve always been an experiential learner. I actually have multiple vivid memories of sitting in elementary, middle, and high school, looking around wondering what we were all really doing there. Not that I don’t think an education is important. For me it’s more so the route to obtaining the education that felt most potent. The journey, not the destination.

Though I love learning, sitting in a classroom felt monotonous. I wrote once in a previous iteration of Field Notes about how I remembered sitting in the backseat as a child on the way home from church one Sunday morning, looking up at the passing tree canopies thinking “there has to be more than this.” There were many times in a classroom where I’d often look around, gauging everyone else’s commitment to the collective whatever-we-were-doing, and have the same thought. To have the same yearning for more strung between so many early life experiences really got to me, and is what I can only describe now as a search for God. Meaning. Magic. Truth.

I chose lived experience over structured education. I’ve been a data collector as I’ve, as Bill Murray puts it, “tried to be available for life to happen to me” because “if you’re available, life gets huge. You’re really living it.” I am always measuring as I test and experiment and dive in head first and just do the thing. If someone tells me to do (or not do) something, I’ll still follow my own way because I need to understand in a felt sense the information gathered there.

If I have an idea that really excites me and feels like a yes, I do it. This year I invited someone to pay me to coach them based off of a full body yes I got to my own idea, and they accepted my invitation. They’ve become one of my favorite clients.

I get ideas, they excite me, and I act. It’s the only way I know of to affirm to Life that I am indeed listening, that I want my life to be huge, that I am open to really living it. It is the only way I know how to live. It is my design.

It is not always in ease. Choosing a path that is unconventional has come with immense inner work that I am almost never prepared for. Everyone talks about nervous system regulation these days and some days I’m not sure if I’m regulating my nervous system or if my nervous system is regulating me!

There is a such a magnificently rich characteristic to presence, though, when you really can regulate yourself to be there. It often has everything you need. It is an incredibly resourced place. For me, learning to anchor into the safety of presence as a resourced space has garnered an immense trust in myself, the process, God/the Universe, and in Trust itself.

Having a presence practice - meditation, exercise, working with my own coach (in years past it’s been therapists and bodyworkers and energy workers and naturopaths and chiropractors and acupuncturists; a true village), writing, building and practicing emotional intelligence, offering myself love and compassion, and so much more - has not given me a sense of control but rather made me ok with out it.

I deeply believe all of that work, practice, and undying commitment to my own evolvement, healing, and coming home to myself has contributed the most potently, beyond any of my training, to my ability to be with clients in their process. To be a human of heart whose belief is most rooted in truth and love. And to tell her own truth, for myself first, but also so that others know for themselves that it can be done. And that it is so, so worth it.

A couple of months ago I ordered online a sweater from a company I’ve never shopped from before. It was marked as Delivered a few days later despite me not receiving it. Amidst a busy life, I forgot about it.

Today I received an email from the office at the apartment community I live letting me know that I received mail. Weird, considering I have a mailbox in my building where both mail and packages are always delivered. I walked over to the office to find a package from a clothing company.

“Oh, the sweater…” I said aloud. As I walked back to my apartment, I remembered before even opening the package that the sweater was red. I smiled. When I spent a couple of months in Santa Fe, NM right before the pandemic in 2020, I remember buying a red fleece at a thrift store. The woman I was staying with reminded me that in many story lines, the color red is used to symbolize when the main character is going through a pivotal shift in their journey or identity.

Last month the romantic relationship that I’ve been in since 2023 when I moved to Traverse City ended, and through that break up I have felt more loved, more valued, more worthy than I truly believe I ever have in my entire life. It also led to a conversation with my dad that uncovered a belief I’ve carried with me since I was eleven when my parents got divorced. That belief weaved its way into romantic and work relationships, playing out the same difficult story over and over again.

Exposing the belief removed a few key components that were seemingly “blocking” our connection and instantly formed a new, more solid bond. I can not describe the grief, the beauty, the brutality, the magic that comes from healing what feels like lifetimes of issues around self worth in regards to the most pivotal men in my life. To feel so safe and open to once again receive love from them after closing myself off that day when I was eleven years old felt like something very old in me crumbling. I’m still making sense of it.

I’ve walked the road less traveled. The one forged simply by the continual uncovering of my own truth. Tomorrow I will wear a red sweater in a symbolic honoring of the ever-pivoting nature of being a researcher and data collector of life. In honor of every single version of me, especially the version of me that I am today. She is bold, daring, soft, curious, tired, excited, wise, trusting, and practicing everyday to be less and less afraid of her life.

As a coach and guide, I could tell you about my collection of trainings spanning across the last fifteen years that have had me traverse landscapes in the psyche, the body, emotions, behavior patterns, the energy field, and beyond. But my biggest accomplishment has been in my becoming. In not so much where I’m going, but how I’m getting there. In my ability to make friends with grief as I let go over and over and over again. In my ability to surrender. To walk toward my joy. To become in playful and devoted relationship with the unknown. To skillfully and confidently walk with others through their own journey into the unknown.

Because other than my belief in love and truth (I’m still deciding if those two things are different or quite possibly the exact same thing) I whole heartedly believe that your life is yours to create. There is no one right way. The only model is your authentic blue printed one. That we are meant to do the things that feel weird and different and scary but thrilling, the things that feel so innate to us, no matter how realistic it seems or not. And I believe in it so deeply because I’ve lived it. I’m doing it. And so, you know it can be done.

So here’s to trusting the path - especially when it’s your own.

See you here next month.

Tallyho,
Jenny