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

Hi Cassie L., thanks for joining us today. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?

Thank you for the opportunity to share a story about taking a risk!

When we look at what kinds of risks we are willing to take in our lives, we have to begin with the end in mind. We have to dig deeper and know our “big why” for doing what we are doing. I love to pose this statement to my clients…If I finally had (blank) then I could finally be who I am and do what I want. Or if we time travel to your 80th birthday party, what is your life story going to feel, sound, be like?? We always have to see a bigger picture, so we have a foundation for why we are willing to take the risk.

There are choice points or places in our lives when we slow down enough to go inside and start asking where we have been and where we are going on our life path. We might wonder, “Is this it?” followed quickly by, “There has to be more to this life?!” Some might see it as a midlife crisis and others feel it as a spiritual awakening. Nonetheless, it is when we have this yearning and desire to understand ourselves more deeply and we start the search for what is next for us. I work with Empaths and the highly sensitive souls of the world who have a deep calling to answer the call and find their life purpose. Yet they can feel really stuck and not sure how to make their visions and dreams come into reality.

One of the first things I offer people when we start working together is that we are here to start breaking all of the old rules! We have all grown up with a rule list of “supposed to’s” that drive our unconscious to look outside for who we are. It can also feel like a huge risk to our bodies to do something new! By the time we are 35, our inner landscapes are hardwired for routine and comfort, so going on an adventure to find ourselves can feel like entering into a foreign country. Yet when we feel in our bones that it is time to take the risk to move forward on our life paths, we know we need support in navigating the journey. We start looking for our mentors and teachers and find others who are walking the path of the heart. It is courageous work to get to know who we really are underneath a lifetime of being who we were “supposed to be”! I often wonder what happened to our magic? What happened to our creativity and joy?! We have to take the risk of finding the parts and pieces of ourselves that we lost along the way. I’m here as a guide to help you remember that your magic is always right inside of you!! It is a risk to become more aware and heal ourselves, but what is the real cost in the end if you don’t listen to your heart?

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?

Hello beautiful people, I’m Cassie and I am so honored for this space and time to share who I am and what I offer to the world.

So who am I? I always dread this question because I am SO many things. I am one of those people who never quite fit into any kind of box, but went to college anyway looking for a path. Bachelors left with a Bachelors in advocacy for People with Disabilities and two Masters in counseling. I don’t really use any of that education now in my work as they keep me too small in what I offer to the world. This is also a big issue for the empaths and sensitive souls I support…they don’t fit into this world. They can’t really find a “career” in the “system” that feels good enough to this deeper yearning they have to “be the change” on the planet. Most find jobs as the care-givers, healers, and helpers of the world until they burn out and are ready to come back to the visions of their dreams.

I have been a clinical psychotherapist for over a decade and stepped out of that box to weave together all the tools I have without any rules. The work I do is helping you navigate rehabilitating your inner landscape. It is all experiential, which means we don’t just “talk” about it, we “feel” or embody it and get to know our own energy. Only then do we “know” it as our truth and then self-awareness becomes a lifestyle, not just a weekly appointment. The work I do is seen through the paradigm of aligning with our soul’s purpose and/or inner child healing. My toolbox is full of ancient wisdom, energy psychology, and somatic healing practices. I am sort of the weaver of all things that work in the healing world! 90% of who we are is unconscious, so I have found all the ways we can integrate more of our own innate wisdom.

As a Mentor and Coach, I love supporting you to awaken and rediscover more of who you really are, so you can bring your gifts to the world. It is my heart-bursting passion to watch people come back to life once they start touching those lost places where they left their magic! The question, “who were you before the world told you who to be” is my motto. I am just here to help you build a bridge where your soul can meet your body. You might know that place deep inside that has a yearning or that you know you are here for more. I believe we are all on a hero’s journey that is always unfolding like magical breadcrumbs if we are paying attention. In our culture, we got so many wrong memos! We grew up without being taught how to connect with our inner knowing or really nurture important inner guides such as our intuition, emotions, imagination, and creativity! I help people recover and rehabilitate their inner landscapes so that they can embody that they are so much more than they think they are! It is in our inner landscapes that this information lies dormant until we are ready to recover it. As a loving mentor and a heart healer, I weave ancient wisdom with modern mind-body therapies to support you to open your life to a larger vista so you can start awakening your full potential. I also teach classes on intuition and energy healing as well as lead groups and retreats to support deeper work.

I don’t know how I got so lucky, but I have such a sacred job you guys!! I have this opportunity to be a guide at pivotal moments in people’s life stories. They give me a front row ticket to support them in accessing more of their fullest potential or what I like to call recovering their magic! Together, we break through the inner glass ceiling that has kept them back from living an extraordinary life.

I love this question and thank you for asking! What am I most proud of?
I am most proud of doing my own inner work. At the end of my life, I know I will leave looking back on a life well lived. I did my own healing work to be able to open my heart and feel my feelings so I could connect to all that is! This planet has so much beauty that we miss it because we are too busy and plugged in! I am proud that I created a life I love and it allows my body to breathe deeply. As I have healed my own inner child, the entire world is poetry. I am a kinesthetic learner, so I touch, smell, and sound allow me to savor everything! At the end of my life, I want my rainbow colored tombstone to say “she lived a magically wild life.”

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

I have started several businesses and had many successes and failures. So many lessons learned! So many fears I have had to face along the way that I love this question of what have I had to unlearn?

The biggest unlearning was that perfection is an illusion that keeps us spinning. We are so programmed that we need to be a certain way or do things that look a certain way in all of our business ventures that it keeps us stuck in the mud! So many people are frozen in their bodies that they can’t emotionally conjure what it would take to become the entrepreneur they were born to be. What I have seen in thousands of hours of helping people quit jobs or whatever is not serving their highest good to recover their dreams is consistently because they are so afraid of failure or making mistakes. We get this script from school and childhood where we didn’t want to ask questions because that makes us look like we don’t know what we are doing or weak. What a loss of creatives and visionaries that we are missing in this world because we feel that we might mess up. I have found that the magic is in the mess and failure is an opportunity to come back with lessons and more clarity and confidence in what actually works.didn’t

I was born to work for myself. I have been an entrepreneur since the age of 19 when I started renting a booth in a salon as a cosmetologist. They don’t teach you anything about marketing in school (or they didn’t 25 years ago). So I would just go to work and wait for people to “walk in” to get their hair done. It was horrible. I felt like such a failure. I thought I paid all this money to go to school and I am not going to make any money doing this! I was so young and gave up quickly on my own business because I had no tools. I ended up going to work at JCPenneys where, at least, you got an hourly wage and I went back to college. I thought I must have done something wrong because this did not end up looking like the perfect vision I had built in my inner world. After a couple of years, I had a foundation of skills built underneath myself. I was more confident and was so happy I chose exactly what I did so that I could go back out into the world with a clientele to follow me, rent a booth, and be my own boss again.

What is so interesting is it was the exact same thing as a therapist. No one taught me how to market this business and there are ethics around how we can. I had some idea that I would create a website and if I built it, they would come. Ha! Boy was I living in an illusion yet again. We really don’t know until we know and then we can make another choice. I once did all this marketing for a group I wanted to teach. I made gorgeous fliers, sent them to people who put it in their newsletters, sent emails, I did all the things. Well, the day came and I had it all set up beautifully. I sat at the head of this table and waited and waited for people to show up. No one came. I breathed deeply and heard one of my teachers, Brené Brown, whisper that if this is a failure looks like, maybe I should really feel it. So I sat and sat there at this empty table of failure. I wanted it to teach me. I thought, if this shame that I am feeling, who’s shame is it? Where did this story come from? I cried for a bit and held my heart and remembered self-compassion. Self-compassion means talking to yourself like you would sweetly talk to a young child. So out of my heart-broken mouth I said, “Look at how beautiful this looks! Cassie, you worked really hard and it is okay. We aren’t giving up. I got you.”

If you could go back in time, do you think you would have chosen a different profession or specialty?

I don’t have any regrets as I believe everything led me to where I am right now. But if there was something I could change I would have chosen not to go to college and train as a psychotherapist. After a decade of college, I spent the next decade unlearning old ways and ego structures that were not serving the way I wanted to show up in the world. If I could wave a magic wand, I would have followed the breadcrumbs I had at 24 to be a life coach and searched for more opportunities to learn ancient, experiential, and embodied ways of healing and growing.

I would have asked for teachers and went out into the world to apprentice under someone who embodies ancient wisdom instead of the head “knowledge” that my academic experience offered me. I would have had mentors that helped me go inside to remember that I have been a healer for lifetimes and that wisdom is already part of my inner makeup instead of searching outside by reading all the books and taking all the certifications looking for who I was. (I love learning, so I would probably still do that just at the same time discovering more of me.)

I have had to unlearn a lot from that system where we love to put everyone in boxes with diagnosis and treatment goals. All the while, people still don’t know how to breathe or feel their feelings or follow their intuition. I am speaking in broad terms, as I know there is so much beautiful healing happening in talk therapy all over the world. But I knew I needed more than that world could offer me. I now have a skill set because I know it in my cells. I can have fierce boundaries because I am not scared to feel it. I can laugh and cry at the same time because it’s okay that you are feeling so many things all at once. I believe it is our own energy system that makes us able to hold space that is sacred to others, which means we have to start with cleaning up our own trauma and junk in the trunk. We are the first generation to feel and heal!! And when we heal ourselves, we heal the planet.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.cassieljones.com
• Instagram: @embodied_empath
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/iamcassieljones
• OMy link tree: linktr.ee/iamcassieljones

Image Credits
@danijonesphotgraphy @husbandandwifephotography