Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Jaymi Jai. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Jaymi, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.

I found myself at the edge of helplessness. It was an abyss of darkness promising to swallow me whole, and I had two choices – die or die. I could stay at the edge where certainty was promised in the illusion of security. The mask of my false self clutched desperately in my hands to shield me from the pain I was too afraid to own while my soul screamed silently from the cage I held it in. Or, I could jump into the dark unknown and allow the journey of discovery to liberate my heart’s devotion to the wonder of authentic aliveness.

I stood on this edge for years, because I was terrified of the pain of my past. I didn’t want to go back there and face the trauma, the shame, or the heartbreak. I was exhausted from numbing it all through cannabis, excessive work, and perfectionism. I was successful in my career while homeschooling my children and sleeping three hours a night while drowning in despair. It took the pain of inconsolable grief to break and inspire me to take the greatest risk I’ve ever taken – to jump into the abyss of my inner world and shadow walk my way home to my heart.

In this journey of self-liberation, I would take many risks. I sat with the feelings I’d been avoiding. I learned to embrace them as teachers and how to alchemize them into microdoses of wisdom. I faced my inner critic and discovered how much love I had for all the ways she had tried to keep me safe and held her as she softened the power she held over my soul’s expansion. I left a successful career and started my own business. I left my marriage and became a single mother. And, I took a risk on embracing the unknown as an adventure that continues to surprise me with wonder and awe.

Jaymi, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I am a former high-school teacher and activist who wasn’t living a soulfully authentic life. I was living as the walking dead while masking myself as successful. It wasn’t until I reached extreme burnout and was diagnosed with Severe Depression and Anxiety that I came face to face with a decision to continue living inauthentically or to burn the masks and surrender in faith to my inner artist to create an heartistically inspired life.

The work I do now is inspired by my journey and the self-discoveries I’ve owned and integrated along the way.

I need freedom to create and evolve, so I designed a business that allows me to work alongside visionaries and creatives who desire freedom from the deep, emotional wounds holding them hostage to fear, so they can unleash their soul to blaze the path their heart knows it was born to walk. Each and every session and 1:1 mentorship is customized and co-created soul-to-soul with an intention to collaboratively discover, design and implement the skills and tools that will empower continued and independent personal growth.

Working with me is an odyssey of guided self-discovery where we connect with the inner child to access and address unresolved emotional trauma and engage in shadow work to love, honor and integrate the abandoned and rejected self as a source of strength and creative inspiration. Each person is offered deep, emotional support as they navigate through their feelings and fears towards self-acceptance and transformation, while being encouraged to hold themselves with the same depth of sacred compassion and reverence as I do.

What I love most about my work is that it attracts souls, mostly men, who identify as neurodivergent outlaws who live, think, feel, and create outside the normative box. Because I meet each client where they’re at rather than through a one-size fits all approach, each and every session is as unique as the person I am honored to serve. This allows for a dynamic and co-creative approach to personal transformation that fosters the type of independence changemakers need to revolutionize the world.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

I’d like to rephrase this question and empower each person reading this to ask themselves ‘What can I do to best support myself as an artist and creative who serves thriving creative ecosystems.’ Allow me to explain why.

There is not a single person alive who is not a creative or an artist, because each and every single one of us has something sacred and deeply meaningful within us just waiting to be discovered and shared with the world. The problem is that the ‘society’ we currently accept is one that does not encourage the artist to create the new paradigms of reality it was designed to, and this is why we are in need of social revolution that begins with an inner revolution.

By this, I mean we need individuals who choose to confront their fear and engage in the inner work of self-liberation that revolutionizes the externalized system working against creative self-expression. This is soul work that empowers the individual to first accept themselves as an artist and to create an inner creative ecosystem that allows the heart to open and express its unique vision to the collective social sphere that will inspire thriving and collective creative ecosystems.

Are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

My early creative journey was compromised by giving too much power to external resources, and I wish I had given more value to internal resources such as intuition, emotional awareness, self-compassion, inner peace, resilience, and authenticity. Everything we need is already within us. We just need to take that leap of faith into our own inner landscape to discover and activate the potential of our creative power.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://jaymijai.com
• Instagram: @jaymi.jai

Image Credits

Sarah Bowman Portraits