Jody England is the visionary behind the creation of Untamed You and Understanding your Soul Medicine Path, Host of the Wild Soul Medicine Radio Show, and Co-Author of an upcoming book on the path of the High Priestess.

Ever the contradiction, she is a mid-western farm girl turned psychic medicine woman who loves heavy metal bands as much as a Tibetan singing bowl concert. She uses her extraordinary gift of seeing to mid-wife the return of the wild souls of bold women. She is an irreverent Soul Tracker passionately championing the return of Essence as she teaches women to tango with their shadow and excavate their true Self.

As a relentless seeker and evolutionary risk taker, Jody is addicted to inquiry and entertains deep and paradigm-shifting conversations on her weekly radio show with the thought leaders and revolutionaries of our time. Her keen insight and straight talking ways have positioned her as an emerging voice of the New Age. She’s an old soul with a healer’s heart. A natural introvert walking the threshold of sharing her inner world with the outer world, she is most happy with her bare feet on the earth and fresh air in her lungs. Enjoy her exclusive Business Heroine interview…

BH: One of your sage pieces of advice you share is “Lose your Story – Find Yourself.” Tell us your journey around this… What is your own story of losing your story?

Jody: It’s a lifetime work of losing our story, we’re always losing pieces and pieces of it.  For me, how you get from being a Midwestern Farm Girl to a Psychic Medicine Woman is that you open yourself to experiences.  So, I actually used to be in the business world. I was a Sales Manager for a Fortune 400 Insurance Company for ten years. I started my own Insurance Agency and then managed other people doing the same work. I was educated prior to that in the coaching, self-improvement industry.  So, I have had this varied background. And I was always on this mission – I was driven and I wanted to wake women up, but I couldn’t figure out how to marry those two things.  I tried all of these different versions of how to do it.

My last ten years have been in this vein of the work, where essentially I am bringing women back to the core of who they really are. Which is not the work they’ve done, not the success they’ve had, not the elevator pitch they give at the beginning of their introduction, but really at your core – what makes you tick. Who are you?  What flows out of that discovery is that when you are in Essence, you’ll do some stuff in the world, you’ll have a purpose and share your gifts. But they’ll be a reflection or extension of who you are, rather than a way of identifying or hiding who you really are.  So, that’s what I’ve been doing and I would say it’s a never ending job – I haven’t completely lost my story. That’s what Untaming is really about, it’s continuing to excavate and excavate, so that your Essence can really be the thing that shines.

BH: What is Untamed You? Why is Untaming Important?

Jody: At the core, Untaming is really about Un-raveling your story. It’s not about looking like me. Not everybody’s going to wear feathers in their hair and be a rebel.  That just happens to be the opposite of what my path had been. Untaming is really about each woman finding out what is the opposite of what you’ve been. So, it might be that if you start out looking like me now, your Untaming might be getting more grounded, becoming more organized and getting your shit together. And if you’re more of a head-in-the-clouds type of person, or a mystic or psychic to start with, maybe your Untaming is getting stability in your life. So, there are all different ways that Untaming looks and that’s what is cool about being in Essence. Essence is our unique footprint of what our path really is.

So, what we’re about is helping women figure out what is that Untaming for themselves.  We live the example by being “un” everything. We have an un-website, we do un-launches.  We do everything the opposite of how it’s done.  It’s tricky – there are a whole wave of people who are challenging the paradigm, but still doing it in the traditional man’s suit.  There is no blueprint, we’re just creating it as we go. That’s why inquiry is so important – we’re asking the question “How do we get our work out in the world in a feminine way, and also honor the ways that we create and make magic?”  We don’t have the answers yet, but being in inquiry together in community is so important.  The new feminine leadership looks like women being willing to be vulnerable and be both the student and the teacher.  Let’s collaborate in this unraveling!

BH: What is a Soul Medicine Path?

Jody: This is really the evolution of my work over the last ten years. What I’ve discovered is that every soul has a path and there are templates to those paths.  There are five different paths, and every soul comes in with a primary and then usually a secondary path.  What’s cool about knowing those is that it helps you understand what your lessons are for this lifetime. So, you’ve actually been on this path for many lifetimes. But this time, it’s sort of like getting handed a roadmap that explains “Oh, these are the lessons I came to learn.”  What occurs in your journey is that you have an event, usually around age 5 or 6, which is the moment that your ego forms.  That ego formation moment is a reflection of all of these soul path essences. It’s the basis of every single thing you do – every block, ever trigger, every preference, what you’re here to do, what gifts you’re here to offer. All of it is solidified in this one moment.  The Soul Medicine Paths are really a short-cut to understanding what you’re here for based on the moment your ego forms.

The awareness for the Soul Path is understanding that it’s the roadmap.  So many coaching paths and interventions are about “Find what’s wrong and then Fix what’s wrong and Get to the place you aren’t already.”  So there’s always this striving energy to fix yourself and be better – which is all the masculine.  In this new paradigm, you never transcend it. It’s not about getting off the path, because the path is your soul’s infinite work.  It’s actually like a labyrinth, you weave in and out of the sides. So, sometimes you’re in the path of learning, in the triggers, having the hard medicine/lessons. And then you move into the gifts side of the labyrinth and expand out into the world.  You’re always cycling back and through, never leaving your path.  What’s really freeing about this work is it allows women to embrace the fact that they’re on a path, and that the Path is The Point.  It’s not about getting off the path or changing the path… you’re on the path you chose and the Path is the Point!

BH: I’ve heard you use the term Evolutionary Velocity. What does that mean?

Jody: I’ve always been a person who’s interested in speed. I like danger, I like risk-taking. I’ve always had this penchant for velocity and yet also evolution. But when you look up the definition of evolution, it talks about slow change over time. And it’s a very long process. So, I married the two terms. Everybody feels that things are speeding up and change is happening faster and the reason for that is because we’re at a crucial point in our history and our evolution that we have to GET it. We have to start learning these lessons faster in order to make the changes that are going to move us into the new age, if we’re ever going to get there.

In general, I like to position for people that evolution can happen so much quicker than it has been. When we look at a meta-system like the Soul Medicine Path, you can transcend a paradigm really quickly by stepping up above it, rather than doing this one-one-one, “I’m having a block, let me work it out,” mind stuff. Evolutionary Velocity is looking for the quantum leaps that literally catapult you forward in your ability to change at a fast rate.

BH: What is the single biggest mistake you see women making in their businesses?

Jody: The biggest mistake I see women making is operating outside of themselves, skipping the Essence piece. This is what I did for many years.  In our minds we think “Oh, we’re going to be successful, get the things, have our career… and then we’re going to focus on ourselves and cleaning up all of this stuff we don’t really look at.” What ends up happening is that it becomes really unsustainable because you’re trying to be a copy of, at best, a feminine guru who’s maybe doing it in a masculine way, or at worse, you’re trying to be a man and do it completely in a way that doesn’t actually serve you.

When you operate from Essence, it’s so much easier, because then your business is really an extension of who you are, rather than a separate thing that you’re trying to fit yourself into and wondering why it’s not connecting. It’s not that something’s wrong with you, it’s that you’re not BEING you.  When we as women learn to break our cardinal rule of not giving time to ourselves and not focusing on really freeing ourselves up, that’s the Untaming. That’s why our company is named after this freeing principle. It’s so foreign for us as women.  We’re taught to be nice, fit in the box, follow the rules. So, it’s a challenge to operate from Essence. Believe me, it was not easy for me to shift from that really ingrained paradigm that I was brought up in and that I operated in for so long. Every step feels like jumping off the cliff!  We really have to do this work in community. When we try to do it by ourselves, it’s hard to tell if you’re in Essence – you need someone to reflect back and offer you insight about if you’re replicating someone else or if you’re actually in Truth.  When you’re in Essence, you’re really lost in yourself and in the moment, you aren’t questioning anything.

BH: What is one thing a woman can implement starting today to excavate her essence?

Jody: Beautiful question!  I think the best place to start is to give yourself a couple quiet minutes to look at “What is one way that you could be the opposite that you have been?” So, just try it out! If you would normally come home and have dinner on the table at 6pm – what if you didn’t make dinner at all, or ordered it in. Think about stretching it the maximum way you could. Maybe it’s asking your husband to make dinner. So, it will be different for every woman.  Or if you’re with a client, is there a way that you’ve typically been behaving? What would be the opposite of that? How could you step out of the dance that you’ve normally been in, to try one new behavior. And then to find out that you won’t die when that happens! And also that being the opposite could be really exhilarating.  So, do one Untamed thing today and do two Untamed things tomorrow!

BH: How can the Heroines tuning in get more of you?

Jody: Go to http://www.untamedyou.com/#Joinus to sign up to receive sweet medicine for your Untamed Soul. There are interviews with game changers, thought-provoking musings, and wild romps into the unseen!

I’m also offering a beautiful PDF version of the Untamed Creed. Heroines can download it at http://www.untamedyou.com/#TheCreed

April Issue 2014