We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jacia Kornwise a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Jacia , appreciate you joining us today. Was there a moment in your career that meaningfully altered your trajectory? If so, we’d love to hear the backstory.
About one year ago, my beloved Dad passed away. I was honored and so grateful to be with him through his last weeks on his home hospice team. I wrote something to share at his graveside funeral. It came straight from the heart. My family and friends were amazed I could speak slowly, clearly and without completely breaking down. My cousin says, “You missed your calling, you were meant to be a great speaker. ” Working for 31 years now as a highly trained counselor, coach, and embodiment teacher I have led plenty of retreats and group workshops but I never thought of that as “Speaking”.
I flew back to California, I spent the next three month mourning the loss of my father and sitting in lots of stillness. I started asking myself, what is the best way I can continue to reach even more people to live free of suffering and feed their souls dreams? I knew I was ready to do anything to achieve this…as time is short, and we don’t know how much time we have to share our gifts here. I had been waiting to take my next steps to reach a global audience and not knowing how. Suddenly I could swear I felt my father’s presence whisper to me, “Yes! Do it! Go apply for a TEDx talk.”
Although I had never thought of this as something I was interested in, chills went up and down every inch of my body. This is one of my telltale signs of being guided; my intuition followed. When I applied, I knew this wasn’t a question of “if” but of “when.” Within three months, I was accepted to the TEDxCherryCreekhs stage, and within six months from then , I was on that stage, exactly one year later, on the day of my Father’s passing, my TEDx talk was uploaded to the platform for the world to view. Now, I am still an Embodied Soul Coach and Transformational Experience Facilitator. I, and am also an inspirational speaker and a newly published author. So much can change in a day, and a year when we follow our intuition and listen to our soul.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I call myself a Master Embodied Soul Coach and Transformational Experience Facilitator. Of course, no one knows what I mean by that, so it’s a great conversation starter. After working as a trained counsellor/MFTT as well as a Master Shadow Coach, leading my dance therapy I called “AcceptDance”, and later studying to become a 5 Rhyhms trained and certified teacher…I knew I could not be a therapist in a traditional way. In the early 90’s, there were boundaries for understandable ethical reasons not to combine some of this work. For both conscious and unconscious reasons at the time, I had to rebel, so I left and found a spiritual minister’s license to practice under. Slowly, I grew my toolkit partially out of my own need to heal a horrific violent crime I had been a victim of and mend a grieving heart from a tragic loss earlier in my life. My path was windy and intense and took me into alternative ways of thinking and knowing outside of a traditional Western framework, opening my consciousness to explorations and generational trauma healing.
I wanted to bring everything I could to the plate; I wanted to use dance, breath, movement, grounding tools, trauma-informed skills, somatic tools, counselling, coaching, appropriate touch if needed, nature, teaching, dreamwork, intuitive work, whatever it took. So, I had to find a way to be embodied fully with my clients. I wanted to be able to dance, breathe, sound, sing and play/pray with them as valuable tools as much as listening and talking were. That is what I bring to the table. I am blessed and grateful to have found my gifts in my professional world from a young age.
I worked for a decade in private practice in San Francisco and opened The Satori Healing Center and Dance Studio in Northern California, I have worked there as a coach and as a workshop and dance facilitator for the past 23 years, as well as my online platform at www.jaciakornwise.com
I brought 5 Rhythms to Chico, California and set the stage for many dance waves to come. I was one of the founders of Soul Shake Dance and ran it for ten years.
My work is based on my experience that we all have a profound dream/purpose with which our souls come here. We often get hurt, injured or lost along the way. I am committed to inspiring people to find resilience, learn to live inside their bodies and reclaim their intuitions by rekindling and rebuilding their self-love and self-care tools and grounding them in the roots of who they really are.
I have worked with 1000s of people in the past thirty-one years, individually, in groups, in classes, in retreats, festivals, offering training, and now sharing authentic and inspiring stories and tools on stages and just about to be published pages. I offer in-person work, online video courses, toolkits, group and individual coaching packages made for your event offerings, and customised talks.
I offer 5 rhythms dance classes, AcceptDance workshops,Transformational Breathwork Journeys, Individual and Group Embodied Coaching, Rites of Passage workshops, Creativity and Wholeness experiences and meditations, visualizations and stress release tools.
My clients vary in age, gender, shape, and colour as much as they do with their needs. I am working to help you find that unwavering love and embodied intuition within that is always there to guide you to a life of resilience, joy and purpose….to dream you awake.
My book, “The LoveBall Game, Embracing Yourself and Embodying Your Soul,” is now available on Amazon at Link to My Book
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
We all come into this world perfectly imperfect, yet we quickly learn there is a problem with imperfection. Most of us can relate to having some part of ourselves that we considered our “fatal” flaw. I was born blind in my left eye. The world inadvertently told me, “There is something wrong with you.” “What’s up with your bad eye?” “You’re deformed”. This core wound set me up from the get-go to have to find a way to face the world every day with compassion for myself and others and with the willingness to go on. As a child and teenager, I carried the fear that I would never fit in and be loved, let alone be able to be seen on a stage, zine or screen.
I turned this understanding around in my twenties and began to see and believe that this eye was actually my gift, my superpower. My inner vision was my way to discern who I was and wanted to be. Anytime we turn our injuries into gifts, we become the love we seek. We are living resilience. I suffered many losses this life I had to find my way back from; my best friend and beloved brother, Robert Ian Kornwise, was killed by a drunk driver at nearly 17, and my life was shattered along with his. I was a victim of multiple horrific violent crimes at 27. The path never has been easy. Yet, after my brother’s life ended I was determined to make more meaning of mine, no matter what.
When I turned 50, I decided I was ready to fully own the stage and model in a runway show modelling for a local artist collective. Up until that point, I could not imagine doing it. Modelling represented the one stage I was afraid of. People stared at my face when I was not supposed to smile. I had to wear a resting, relaxed face. Smiling made people not notice my eyes were not the same size. Plus, I couldn’t wow them with my words, my dance, my empathy, my care….I just had to walk up and down a catwalk in front of over 1000 people. I would photographed looking like this. This was my moment of fully facing and embracing myself landed in my power. I was ever so ready! When I walked out on stage, I knew without any doubt that I was grounded inside my core and could rock any stage. I had no idea I would be speaking on larger stages soon but, I sensed there were stages ahead.
Resilience is when we find a way to take the hardest stuff life has brought to us, continue onwards and keep rising upwards into our own dreams.
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
One of the most challenging lessons I have learned in life is that trauma is held in our bodies. Not just in our minds or our hearts. I am a multiple-time trauma survivor and grief survivor. No matter how much work I did on myself or helped thousands of others along the way, I seemed to reach a barrier where I would spiral down, unable to reach my next dream. Without using and fully understanding the tools of embodied breath, dance, movement and grounding regularly ….my anxiety and mental spill-out would repeat, leaving me unable to get focused or confident enough to bring me to my next level of personal fulfilment and purpose. I had to stop using breathwork, dance, and meditation to escape my body and use it instead to welcome myself back home and into it. This meant dancing, meditating, and breath practice to feel “high” and “good” were not the goal. Perhaps they would be the outcome, but we must be willing to feel and slow down and listen to our inner information while remaining present. I had to unlearn at a cellular level the fear still stuck in my body as a victim. I had to unlearn the feeling that I needed to be afraid of something that happened in the past. I had to become fully present in the NOW.
I learned this a few years ago when I had the opportunity to face one of my violent assailants in a parole trial. My commitment to these very practices allowed the remaining energy in my body to release and my full power to flood through me.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.jaciakornwise.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jaciakornwise/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SatoriCenter
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacia-kornwise-14b2a513/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16mDEFDgNiI&t=719s
- Other: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0alkaguQWPI&t=386s