We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jill Leigh. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jill below.
Alright, Jill thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Was there a defining moment in your professional career? A moment that changed the trajectory of your career?
I’ve had quite a few defining moments in my career. I’ll work my way backwards through a few of them because looking back is one of the ways that we understand how pivotal a choice, decision or experience has been.
In early 2023, I made the decision to bring in a business partner to Energy Healing Institute, with the long range goal of selling her the school and its courses and programs., becoming EHI’s Founder Emeritus. My partner and I have been working to bring her up to speed on the operations of the business, and she now has responsibility for all of the course and program interactions with our practitioners and learners interested in self-healing. That decision has freed me in numerous ways that I hadn’t planned for. I’m launching a consultancy working with coaches, consultants, spiritual leaders to design and develop curriculum that advances their message, creates passive income and extends their brand. I didn’t see it coming, but it’s a natural, organic evolution that fills my heart, and stimulates my creative fires in ways I hadn’t foreseen.
Early on in Covid, I began to shoot videos of the hands-on, classroom-based components of my big ticket practitioner programs, convering them into fully online programs. With social distancing, masking and other concerns, it was hard to imagine my business surviving when people would need to fly to Oregon (where I lived) to attend 7-10 days of classroom training! In January of 2021, the work was complete. I realized that my business was now completely driven by servers and computers, and I was location independent. By October 2021, I had immigrated to Portugal. Again, a pivotal moment that was the result of a strategic, essential choice for my business.
In the late 90’s, I was still a corporate wonk. I was an entrepreneur, owned a consulting business with a partner serving clients in the call center space. I loved owning and running a business. Call centers? A gig. Spirituality, gardening, beekeeping, alternative healing fueled my passion, but I never thought about harnessing my passion to earn a living. Then the call center industry took a sharp turn offshore. India, the Philippines and other countries began to rise as cost-effective ways of delivering service and generating sales. My business partner and I were both mothers of young children;. moving our focus to traveling to India and the Philippines was not an option. We closed the business in 2002. I was unemployable (most entrepreneurs are), and I had no idea what to do. Until I realized that I was spending 5 or 6 hours a week on calls with ‘clients’ who were seeking my support with their healing journey. I had studied and practiced clairvoyance and energy healing since 1991 because it was a passionate interest. On January 1, 2002 it became my career, and Energy Healing Institute is my legacy.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
Our practitioner programs are in-depth, robust, comprehensive and certification-based. There are 3 levels of programs that introduce practitioners to the Astral body and working with emotional energy, the Etheric body, supporting physical healing. The third level is a rigorous program for certified practitioners in the Astral and Etheric programs to learn a broad spectrum of tools to ascertain the root cause behind a client’s diagnosis or illness.
We don’t believe in weekend ‘Masters’. We believe in Mastery, which takes time, consistent practice, case supervision and ongoing learning. At EHI, we’re all about the work without the woo.
We support and promote the awareness that sovereignty is absolute. That owning and embodying our energy is the key to sovereignty, autonomy and individuated awareness. We offer courses that take esoteric or New Age concepts and ground them with practical, actionable, real-time tools. The energy body is a system – just like the physical body – lots of moving parts, that ideally, operate in conscious connection with one another. We debunk New Age rhetoric, we ground spiritual practice with powerful, evolutionary, science-based resources.
Ellen Donaldson and I are so honored to serve our consciously curious practitioners and learners who are working on their own healing and evolution. It’s a gift and a privilege that we thrive on every day.
How’d you meet your business partner?
I met my business partner, Ellen Donaldson in 2008. My client practice was in Boston, Massachusetts, and she was referred to me by a colleague who I’d worked with for a couple of years. When Ellen walked through the door, I knew she was ‘my people’. We’re not really alike, rather we harmonize well together. We do have similar values and beliefs, which is pretty essential for an aligned partnership. And we definitely have things in common that we love to do – garden, travel, work with our hands. But our phases in life are very different, her son is emancipating now; he was about 5 when I met Ellen. My son is 35, married with two children. At the time we met, he was a junior in college. But we clicked. And I knew. Ellen is one of the people I want to know for the rest of my life.
After a few years working together, Ellen began to feel restless in her corporate role at a digital media agency. She started exploring other options, and found herself enrolling in EHI’s practitioner program. She is a natural. She embraced the work, felt at ease working with energy, internalized the skills, and launched her practice.
We’ve never stopped working together. She shifted from her client role to one where I was consulting to her practice, supervising client sessions and supporting the strategic initiatives that have helped her business grow.
As I began to think about expanding beyond my teaching role, Ellen was the first person I thought of to take over some of my classroom activities. She’s been masterful working with practitioners as they embrace the work and figure out how to bring it to their communities.
In 2023, I let her know that she was the heir apparent for EHI. She knows me, she knows the business, she works beautifully with practitioners, and she could handle the role without giving up her client practice. We began integrating her into the operations of the business, which she now runs on the company’s behalf. She began expanding her role working with practitioners, and she has operational and leadership authority for all of EHI’s courses and programs.
As the business grows and evolves, her partnership percentage increases, and we both know that the day will come when I hand her the ‘keys’, and stand fully in the Founder Emeritus role. I’ll always be available to support the business and Ellen knows that I’m in no rush to depart. We’re working our way through the transition in a seamless and gracious way, and it means the world to me to have her in my life.
How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?
I’m a straight shooter. I’m direct, clear and choose my words carefully. I also have a healthy dose of humor and irreverence. When doing deep spiritual work, there can be (and perhaps should be), moments of absolute hilarity. Sometimes epiphanies and insights are messy business. Sometimes it takes a muddle or conflating multiple things together — a yarnball of chaos — to find the path, clarity and flow. Being clear, coupled with irreverence, can be a powerful combination for shaking loose stuck, held energies that can be shifted and evolved.
Beyond that, I’m not very woo. I don’t use starscapes and swirling energies on my website. I use pictures that are of the Earth. I’m not breathy or wispy. I’m grounded. I’m strong. One of my early teachers shared an insight that lives in me to this day – the farther in your body you can go, the farther out of your body you can go. In other words, consciousness begins with embodiment. From embodied awareness, there are no limits. I am now and forever a student of consciousness, and my embodied self is able to access and harness powerful energies, constructs and resources because I am deeply at home within myself.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://energyhealinginstitute.org
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/energyhealinginstitute/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/energyhealinginstitute/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jill-leigh-1a213011/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/EnergyHealingInstitute
Image Credits
Michael Rosenberg