Cover Interview: Jody England Champions the Return of Essence

Jody England (Business Heroine Magazine)

Photo Credit: Heather Brand

Jody England is the visionary behind the creation of Untamed You, and host of the Wild Soul Medicine Radio Show. 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. She’s an old Soul with a healer’s heart whose keen insight and straight talking ways have positioned her as a leading voice of the New Age.

Enjoy her exclusive Business Heroine interview…

BH: What is Wild Soul Medicine?

Jody: Wild Soul Medicine is really about embodying the feminine, and that means integrating all of the parts of who we are into all facets of our lives. I think many of us have tried to do that through the years, through the decades really with these thoughts of “Can we have it all?” “Can we balance being a stay-at-home-mom and being in the workplace?” “In the workplace can we have a positive relationship so we can have the things we want to have?”

Many of us have been reaching and trying to figure out what this alchemy is or what the missing pieces are, and the missing piece is Soul. We actually haven’t yet been in a Soul conversation, which is where we connect with ourselves at the deepest level – the essence of who we really are as a being. Then we don’t have to have separate places where we do this one thing over and over. We don’t have to do this one thing at work and then this other thing at home, and then if there’s anything left over we might do a little something for ourselves.

Instead, you can actually have your Soul be on her throne of queendom on the center of your whole experience, so that your life and business are expressions of who you are are rather than separate things trotting out during a certain hours of the day.

Photo Credit: Heather Brand

BH: What does Wild Soul have to do with having a self-expressed abundantly flowing magical business?

Jody: Increasingly, I see that at every single level it’s all one and the same. You begin to free yourself up and actually be in conversation with who you are and allow who you are to be the commodity. Your essence is the commodity. It IS your exchange with life. When you can free yourself to the point where you can actually exchange yourself as the thing, then really everything else doesn’t matter. What you’re charging and what you’re offering and who your clients are, having them or not having them – all of that just falls away. All of that old business stuff that we’ve all been doing for so many years falls away, and it really just becomes about living living the life. And you have to do some stuff while you’re living the life, but then you’ll actually be in alignment.

BH: Could you share some examples of when you witnessed this actually being the truth?

Jody: I remember several years ago I was in this piece of my evolutionary path where I was getting a glimpse of the essence of myself, of who I really am, and it was very different from who I was in the world. I was a 6-figure a year coach with a big full practice and brilliant work, and yet I was a workaholic and there was a false facade between me and that. There was this whole marketing machine between me and that.

I started to get this glimpse of thinking my purpose is to be in essence.

I thought that might actually be what I’m here to do, but that’s would mean I couldn’t do this whole business. In my system it felt like either or – either I get to be who I am OR I get to do this brilliant work in the world that should really be getting done.

I felt this conflict for years around being pulled towards essence and then this pull towards being really successful.

And I got to the point where essence was pulling so strongly that I just said all right, I have to follow essence and so I’m going to do that. If it means I never have another client, if it means I won’t ever work again and I’m poor the rest of my life, I have to do that to follow essence.

There were no models. Nobody was doing this in our world. So I just got very committed to escalating my essence and then I could hear myself at such a deep level, and I got so in touch with myself that I really wanted to talk about what’s happening in my life. And I was getting messages like “Show the work. Be the work.” And what came up was Wild Soul Medicine Radio.

So I developed this radio show where I basically come every single week for an hour. My friend just said “It’s like watching a medicine journey unfold week by week.” Because the medicine journey is my life and so I showed up and said “Here’s what’s happening for me. Here’s where I’m stuck, here’s what’s unfolding, the big breakthrough I had.” And it’s vulnerable, and in the moment, tearful, sometimes beautiful, epic, and it’s magnetic. And I don’t do it for anyone else. I have a thousand listeners a week who come and do their work along with me. But that work enlivens me, and it is my path and work, so there’s this congruence now, and my personal practice is also what I teach. What I sell is also how I live.

And what’s so beautiful is that when you’re in this place of congruence, you don’t have to try to be genius, you just BE. Then it is genius. That’s so beautiful.

Photo Credit: Heather Brand

BH: How does Life as Medicine work?

Jody: In my practice, I really use everything that happens to me as metaphor, as information, as opening. We’re often making sense of “all signs are pointing to this thing,” and as I deepen into it, there’s lesson in that for me. And so we’re seated in a place of self-responsibility using everything in our lives as windows to knowing ourselves more. We’re moving people closer to themselves. I hold up a giant mirror not for people to see my journey, but to see themselves deeper through my journey. We’re taking them deeper in and moving more and more into the center of the thing, and that’s just a lot easier to do when you have wise women in the conversation. We’re all using our lives as medicine.

It’s a little like poetry. The more in essence I got, the more poetically I began to speak and the more in touch I got with my creativity. I went from a very left-brain, logical businesswoman to just really having this bigger capacity for sort of poetry in motion. So often what comes through in these experiences is this very enigmatic, mysterious, beautiful things.

That’s what’s been fascinating for me. As I show up as myself, I literally say “I’m doing this only for me – this is an ego check for ME.” In that, I’m forced to not show up as ‘done.’ People aren’t following me as some example of someone who no longer has problems or who has it all together. This is life. This is potent, powerful, feminine beingness.

And so it turns out, when I show up in that, it is immensely powerful. This is the magic.

BH: For those who are really wanting their business to be successful or are working on getting their business up and running, what is the bridge between doing things the structured linear way we’ve been taught and really stepping into essence so that it’s magnetic?

Jody: I have two levels of answer to that.

The deepest answer is that it can’t be a ‘so that.’ This is tempting. You think, “how can I do essence, so that I can have a successful business?” And then essence just becomes another strategy. I always wish there was a quicker, easier answer, but in my experience with my clients and myself, it’s only when you really surrender the idea that the business is only going to be an extension of who you are – the highest priority needs to be getting to the bottom of who you are always.

And it doesn’t mean that you have to fully know who you are to then start offering business, but that has to be the foundational practice, because your ego is always going to be attaching. Our egos are going to do that even when essence is sitting in her throne. It takes that pattern interrupt to actually stop doing a ‘so that,’ to stop applying a business strategy. It takes listening and quiet and spaciousness and sometimes wrecking some stuff you already have in place, so you can put something more true in its place.

Photo Credit: Heather Brand

BH: For Business Heroines tuning in connecting with your essence and wanting more of you, can you share a couple ways that they can dive into the Wild Soul Medicine world?

Jody: To listen to the radio show, it’s at WildSoulMedicineRadio.com. And all of the episodes are there if you click on tracks. And we also have the Tribe where we continue the conversation after the show and support each other, and that’s at WildSoulTribe.com (another one!).

BH: Is there anything else you’d like to share with our Business Heroines?

Jody: One of the key pieces for us is that being in relationship with your Soul takes a lot of courage. And you cannot do it by yourself, because when you’re truly in essence, you don’t even know that you’re in essence. It takes people to be able to reflect you and what they see and where you are.

I think that because we’ve tried to follow this masculine paradigm, we’re in competition and comparison and isolation and trying to quietly copy our neighbors. We don’t have to make ourselves wrong for that, it’s just what the paradigm lends itself to.

Being in our essence is a completely new way of being in the world. It is very feminine and it’s not being done very many places yet, so I just want to offer women who are considering this path the thought that it can’t be done in isolation. There are women in the conversation and who can stand with you. It’s important that we find ways to stand together as we’re taking these first trepidatious steps into building our Souls again.

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