Nourished Energy

09/13/2025

🧡

Progress is messy.

Doing things differently even when it’s uncomfortable is healing.
Resting when you used to push through? Healing.
Speaking up when you used to stay silent? Healing.
Feeling your feelings instead of numbing them? Also healing.

You don’t need to have it all figured out for it to count.

💬 Tag a friend who needs this reminder.

09/09/2025

So honored to co-create healing relationships in which people can allow themselves to be seen and known.

09/06/2025

West Michigan peeps! And incredible yoga opportunity if you are in a place to start exploring your body in a deeper way.

Gentle Yoga for Trauma Recovery
Sundays • 9:00–9:45 AM • Yogi Union Studio
Pay-What-You-Can

This class is designed specifically for those navigating the effects of trauma, stress, or overwhelm. You don’t need to have yoga experience—just a willingness to explore how movement, breath, and stillness can support your healing journey.

What makes this space different?
Choice + Consent: My language is invitational, not directive. You are always in charge of your body. I offer suggestions, not commands, and you decide what feels right for you.

Predictable Environment: I stay in one spot. The setup is always the same. This consistency supports your nervous system and builds trust and safety.
Time + Space: You’ll have plenty of time in each shape to simply be—to let sensations settle and move through your system at your pace.

Subtle, Somatic Work: Behind the scenes, I’m guiding a class rooted in somatic principles that support the vagus nerve and fascia. You don’t have to know how it works—just show up and let your body have the experience.
This class includes slow, gentle movement with lots of options. You’re welcome to participate as much or as little as feels right. It’s an opportunity to explore your body with curiosity, not judgment.

"Many participants shared the empowering realization that they have ownership and control over their bodies, as well as a greater ability to acknowledge, tolerate, and confront emotions that previously felt overwhelming—such as anger, shame, or vulnerability."
—West et al. (2016)
Research shows that yoga practices emphasizing interoceptive awareness (your sense of your internal body state), without external correction, can help trauma survivors reconnect with their bodies—by as much as 45% improvement in body awareness.
—Price & Hooven (2018)
This class is a pay-what-you-can offering and is open to anyone who feels called to attend.

08/30/2025

So important!

It’s not always what happened that keeps our suffering alive.
It’s how we adapted in order to survive what happened—or what didn’t happen.

NARM shifts the focus from the trauma itself to the adaptations we made in response—adaptations like shutting down, people-pleasing, becoming hyper-independent, among others.

These patterns protected us then. But now they may be keeping us stuck in cycles we’re ready to move beyond.

In NARM, healing developmental trauma is about honoring how we adapted... and opening space for something new to emerge.

08/20/2025

Bodies are for living in, not "overcoming".

We don’t need to “overcome” our bodies. We live in them. We find ways to be in relationship with them.
The rhetoric from the weight loss industry would have us believing we somehow have to “overcome” our bodies. “Overcome” our fatness. “Overcome” our “slow metabolism.” “Overcome” our “sweet tooth.”
We are supposed to “overcome” body changes and illness and the need for rest and hunger. It’s all such BS. We were never meant to “overcome” our bodies.
My job is not to “overcome” my fatness even though the culture wants me to believe that it is. I don’t need to “overcome” my body, because my body is not a problem. You do not need to “overcome” your body because your body is not a problem.
There is plenty we “overcome” in life including the messages from the weight loss industry and diet culture. But our bodies are not something to “overcome.”
Image description: there is a teal and orange background with text that says: a body is not something to overcome

08/20/2025

Feeling it!

08/10/2025

**Opening for a new client** Wednesdays 10AM weekly or every other week starting in September. Reach out if you have been thinking about beginning or resuming therapy. Email me, jen@nourishedenergy.com, if you want to explore working together.

07/23/2025

My very sweet office neighbor saved this for me from their desk, calendar thinking I would appreciate it. I do! And he didn't even realize my birthday is July 19, so even more special ❤️

07/23/2025

Childhood is a time for exploration, development and safe holding. MANY people did not get the care they needed as kids from caregivers who struggled with their own unresolved trauma manifesting as mental health challenges and addictions. This is not about blame, it is about naming. Here are 5 things adults who did not get the care they needed as kids often deal with:
1) Fears around being "out-of-control" (hypervigilance)
2) Distrust - of others and self (trust is vulnerable)
3) Avoidance of feelings (feelings can feel terrifying)
4) Over-responsibility (taking care of others as a default)
5) Ignoring their own needs (hard to say no to others, put self first, stick with self-care routines)
Healing is laborious and non-linear, and DO-ABLE. Psychotherapy can help with 5 issues above. How?
1) Maybe in your therapists office you can learn to let down your guard and not control the process
2) Slowly you can learn to trust your therapist and yourself as you practice vulnerability - letting yourself be seen
3) You do not have to take care of your therapist and being in a relationship where you do not get to take on the role of caretaker is part of the healing
4) Your therapist can hold up a mirror for you to see where you take on more than is actually yours
5) In therapy there is space to explore self-care, the very act of coming to therapy - even when it is hard - is healing the false story from your childhood that you are not worthy of care

06/13/2025

I am consistently in a self inquiry process around "what is the purpose of therapy". Lately it is boiling down to creating a space and opportunities for another to not run away from themselves. Humans are incredibly skilled at survival and cutting off pain - running away from ourselves - however doing so ultimately cuts us off from ourselves. Therapy is a place to find ourselves. I can only show up in my humanity offering space, witness and sometimes even tools for those I serve. It is up to each of us to find our own courage to face our fears and ourselves, if we so choose. 🙏💜

06/10/2025

I am now one of a just handful of NARM® Master Therapists in Michigan. I am incredibly proud and humbled. "The spontaneous movement in all of us is toward connection and health. No matter how withdrawn and isolating we have become, or how serious the trauma we have experienced, on the deepest level, just as a plant spontaneously moves towards the sun, there is in each of us an impulse moving toward connection. This organismic impulse is the fuel of The NeuroAffective Relational Model™."

05/12/2025

Shame is often misunderstood and this podcast episode does a great job of diving into in a profound way. "When we consider shame in adulthood, the emotion becomes less of a noun or something that our younger selves were given and more of a verb, behaviors we can safely scrutinize and ultimately assert agency over." It might be hard to believe at first but we CAN shame ourselves less and feel more free, authentic and alive over time if we are willing to confront how are using shame to disconnect from ourselves in adulthood.

Transforming Trauma Episode 159: Letting Go of Shame That Isn’t Yours with Dr. Laurence Heller A podcast brought to you by the Complex Trauma Training Center For all its popularity as a talking point, shame remains one of the least-documented human emotions. While shame has become a hot topic for ...