"Grieve no more…your heart is healing now.
Breathe in more…your heart is healing now.
This is the Journey of the Soul, your journey home.
It’s my love that makes you whole, this love it makes us whole.
Do you see now...how precious your life is?
Do you see how...the hard times were a gift?”
- Lyrics to 'Journey of the Soul'
The journey home, is the journey back to your self. It’s the journey we are all on, individually, and as a collective. When Jen Rose sings these lyrics, she expresses the pure life-essence of a woman who has had many dark nights of the soul. These lyrics describe a woman who has gone through her own version of ‘hell’ and lived to tell the story but they are also rich with the power of Intention and call forth a new type of woman…a woman who is confident and secure in her divine connection. A woman who’s heart is healed, re-opened and awakened, and a woman who has disciplined her mind to hold an empowered space knowing that SHE is her own connection to Spirit/Source. It is through this divine connection that she offers organically inspired teachings, songs, messages, and meditations. She is a musical and auditory intuitive guide that is both captivating and comforting.
Jen’s first spiritual experience was hearing the voice of an angel at 12 years old.
“I was attempting to commit suicide. I was in my room with a knife to my wrist trying to take my life. I was at my end, and no one around me knew. I kept everything in when I was a young girl. I was beginning to draw blood when I heard an audible voice outside myself say… “Hold on, things will get better.” and I dropped the knife, completely freaked out. I fell to my knees in gratitude. What else can you do in the presence of something holy and mysterious?”
She describes the experience as life-changing and a ‘gift’ because from then on she knew that the spirit world was ‘real’.
“I grew up an only child for the first 10 years of my life. I was alone a lot so I was very aware of my inner world. I always felt a connection to the concept of ‘God’…that there was something intelligent ‘out there’ that I could connect to.”
Through another spiritual experience, Jen was given guidance through a dream to go to Atlanta, and she moved there never having visited before. This change in her environment led her to discover meditation and yoga in 2000.
“Finally out of the college scene I was able to read books that I wanted to read for the first time. I began to devour The Celestine Prophesy, the whole 6 book series of Conversations with God, Many Lives, Many Masters, The Artist’s Way, Siddhartha, The Mind-Body Connection, Wheels of Life, and other mind-awakening books. I was reading five books at a time…totally captivated and obsessively focused on learning as much as I could.”
She became vegan and experimented with fasting doing several rounds of ‘The Master Cleanse’ and water fasting became a regular form of meditation often fasting up to 2 weeks at a time just on water.
Jen Rose emerged Priestess through the lineage of Lisa Michaels having apprenticed with Lisa in a Priestess Process in 2002. She began working at Crystal Blue in Little Five Points working with crystal energy and began gathering with people every week for toning and prayer circles. She actively coordinated and facilitated women’s circle, moon & solstice gatherings. She continued her Priestess studies in a Mystery School directed by respected community elder, Shasta Zaring, studying the North American Medicine Wheel teachings and South American Shamanic practices. Her teacher invited her to Ayahuasca ceremonies, a private Shaman-led Spirit quest. Ayahuasca is an entheogenic brew made out of Banisteriopsiscap vine and the Psychotria viridian leaf. This brew is used as a traditional spirt medicine in ceremonies among the Indigenous people’s of the Amazon. During these ceremonies she was activated by Icaros, medicine songs that Shamans play while everyone is journeying. Her experience was that of deep spiritual awakening regarding her purpose on Earth. During ceremony, Jen experienced a 3rd eye awakening and activation that was so intense it threw her off her feet. She had a vision of her pineal gland bursting open and her 3rd eye/Brow Chakra being cleansed and reset. She gained access to higher spiritual dimensions and made contact with various benevolent beings who now act as her spirit guides and healers.
This was the beginning of Jen Rose awakening to her own personal healing power.
But in the midst of her spiritual journey of the soul, Jen was presented with the concepts of ‘hell’ and ‘evil’ by a close friend ‘preaching the Gospel’.
“I was told, that if I didn’t receive Jesus Christ as my ‘Lord and Savior’ I would go to hell…This person looked into my eyes and told me I had evil inside of me. It really scared me. I was frightened that something bad was going to happen to me because I hadn’t been the perfect person in the past…this person made me feel like I was suddenly unworthy of love…unworthy of God’s love.”
Determined to get to the bottom of all this ‘evil’ business she began to ask those around her…her mentors and her teachers what they thought about evil.
“No one really would give me a straight answer. This subject would make people shift in their seats. They would look away, I was perplexed and had to find the truth. One person finally said to me, “Well, the Bible mentions evil…maybe you should read it. And maybe you should start working with Jesus.”
Already a skillful meditator and devout practitioner of creative visualization Jen came across a white, sacred heart Jesus statue. She began to create an alter around this statue and meditate on Jesus. She was guided to do a seven day water fast and on the third night of her fast she felt a longing to connect deeper. She decided to say the ‘Sinner’s Prayer’ out loud right there in her home. This prayer had been given to her months earlier and ignored until this moment.
The beginning stated: You don’t have to understand this for it to work, just feel the words with your heart. Jen began to recite this simple prayer and felt Jesus {Yeshua} enter the room.
“I had a divine visitation from Jesus. He wrapped his arms around me and showed me the Father’s Love. He healed my heart and I wept for three blissful hours…on the floor, knelt at that little alter. The next day, I was reborn. The whole world looked different….the sky was bluer, the trees were greener. My friends… seeing this white, angelic Light emanating from my face and body, asked if I had fallen in love and I said, “Yes! I’m in love with Jesus!”… of course they thought I was crazy,” Jen, laughs. “But it was true….I call it Christ Consciousness now…but back then it was the beginning of a personal relationship. It was a divine touch from God. I was different because of it. ”
The down-side of this divine visitation is that Jen was told she now needed to become a Christian and go to church.
“I was so shaken by this spiritual experience and thought…well what do I do now? And there was someone there to tell me exactly what to do. “Oh, well now you have to go to church..now you have to read the Bible…now you’re a Christian!”…and thus began an 8 year journey of giving away my power to someone else.
The eight years Jen was a Christian she poured her heart and soul into it and had many divine experiences. She was divinely inspired to read the Bible from cover to cover in 7 months, diligently taking notes and looking up references. She was baptized in the Spirit and can speak and sing in Spirit languages and Light Codes.
“Being a Christian wasn’t all bad…it taught me a lot of values that I had been missing. I stopped telling white lies. I stopped all forms of stealing. I really worked on myself and tried to do everything the church and my paster told me to do. I went every Wednesday to Bible study, I served on the deliverance ministry and church choir, I tithed and gave my money to my church and gave to others in need. But doing all this every day began to exhaust me. All of a sudden I started to feel very angry inside. This rage was boiling up inside of me and it was uncontrollable.”
In the midst of Jen’s spiritual uncertainty her son, Aden Troy was born. Jen attempted a home birth with a mid-wife but after 36 hours of back labor with no progression, she had to have an emergency cesarian. Aden was born healthy and strong on June 2, 2010.
“I was completely in love with this little being. He became my world. I put aside everything to take on the role of ‘Mother’ and I enjoyed every second.”
Despite the intense love she felt for her newborn son…the deep-seated anger Jen felt wouldn’t go away. Actually, it kept growing…
“I became irritated all day long because I was stressed out and exhausted with a new baby. Money was tight and we didn’t have family around, I felt isolated and depressed. It was the month of December, 2010 I mentally decided to “fast” from anger knowing January was coming and I could make a New Year’s Resolution. I literally made a decision to force myself to stop feeling this emotion. Every time I felt it, I would breathe and push it back down. I began to repress it…totally in fear and conditioned that ‘anger’ was ‘bad’ because there was all this biblical scripture on how anger is sinful.”
When Aden was just 8 months old, Jen found a lump in her breast the size of a quarter.
“It was New Year’s Day morning, 2011 and I was breast feeding Aden and rocking him when I felt this hard lump in the soft tissue of my right breast. When woman are breast feeding they are really aware and connected to their breasts. I thought it might be a plugged milk duct so I scheduled an OBGYN visit within a week. My OBGYN examined me and sent me straight to a specialist without any reassurance. The specialist then took an x-ray and started calling it a “mass”, he made me very uneasy…”
After a series of tests and a needle biopsy Jen heard the dreaded words, ‘breast cancer’ and was scheduled for a mastectomy within three days. The doctor ordered her to wean her baby immediately and a removal of her right breast was scheduled.
“I remember my parents were there when I got the call confirming in was cancer… after I got off the phone the silence in the room was deafening. My mom’s eyes were watering and my dad ran for the restroom, physically sick… as the diagnosis sunk in we just looked at each other, wide-eyed. As soon as they left, I went straight to my yoga mat…I remember it so vividly… I went outside on my balcony that was high above a beautiful lake with native birds and trees and I felt the sun on my skin and connected with nature.
I began a series of Surya Namaskara A - Sun Salutations and it felt familiar and comforting. I began to cry but I felt strong in my limbs and torso as I moved from pose to pose. In an instant, I was divinely guided. I heard an audible voice say, “YOU ARE HEALED. NO SURGERY, NO CHEMO, NO WEANING OF YOUR BABY.” The voice was so powerful I dropped to my knees in utter shock and disbelief! I wept tears of joy as a deep peace washed over me. I sat there very calm, and quiet…OK, I got the message. I canceled the surgery the next day and kept breastfeeding Aden. It wasn’t dangerous for him because I was diagnosed with a rare form of breast-cancer that developed in the soft tissue of the breast, not the milk ducts but to my surprise, he intuitively began to nurse only on my left breast.”
Jen went on to fight the breast cancer for a full year on her own. She calls it a ‘gift’ and a Spirit Quest that changed the course of her life. In that year, Jen read every book on cancer she could find, eating raw vegan and tried every cancer-remedy she came across from eating raw habanero peppers every day, to drinking baking soda, weekly colonics and daily enemas, bio-feedback machines, coaching from Hippocrates Institute in West Palm Beach and fasted on home-made organic juice for 100 days straight. She read self-help books, and went to therapy sessions that helped her uncover her suppressed emotions. She sat with her anger and let herself feel it for the first time, realizing she had years worth of pent up emotion inside. She began to open her mind again to the ways of the Priestess…reading Louise Hay’s book, “You Can Heal Your Life” shook her to the core. She realized that her tumor was in the right breast…and that was her masculine side of ‘giving’…she had been over-giving for too long and over nurturing everyone else around her but herself.
She began to listen to her anger…and her anger began to show her where her boundaries had been crossed. Her anger showed her that in some places, she had no boundaries from her own lack of self-love and self-worth.
The awakening continued as she encountered and pondered her death every day as the tumor grew bigger and bigger. All these remedies, detoxing and cleansing seemed not to be working. As Jen’s Soul grew brighter and more awake, her body began to get thinner and more frail. At the end of that year, her tumor had grown to a whopping 4 pounds, and she had to hold it in the crook of her arm to walk across the room, it was so heavy.
“It was most definitely the darkest days of my life. I had this beautiful baby boy that gave me joy every day…but inside I was so scared and alone. I was juicing every 2 hours while watching him…washing and cutting pounds and pounds of produce. By the end I couldn’t care for him any longer. I was bed-ridden because the tumor had started to open up and come out of my skin…”
A naturopathic doctor Jen was visiting advised her that the tumor would come out of her skin if the body couldn’t break it down. That seemed to be what was happening, but Jen was guessing and self-diagnosing at this point because there was no one around her who had seen a case like this, not even this naturopath…Jen had reached her end.
“I remember the sun hitting the window just so…and I was in bed, with this huge open wound…an Adele song came on, “When the rain is pouring in your face…and the whole world is on your case. I will hold you for a million years, and make you feel my love”…
I was so tired and scared. I ached for my mom.”
Jen called her mom that morning and it was the first time she had seen her daughter in six months. She saw the state of her daughter and cried on the inside but gave her a supportive hug. After her parents left that morning…Jen felt the pain from the tumor hit her for the first time.
“It was like their presence released something in me…I felt all the pain come all at once, the tumor had begun to grow on a nerve…and this nerve pain was shooting down my right arm…”
That night Jen admitted herself into the ER. A team of doctors and nurses swarmed around her shocked at the sight of this young woman with a tumor this big had gone without medical care for so long. There was a sense of shame in the room and a palpable shock of the staff who saw her.
“Once I was admitted I felt very uneasy. I really just wanted help managing the pain. My original surgeon who had wanted the mastectomy a year ago, Dr. Joseph Casey from Holy Cross Medical Center…came in to examine me. He was visibly upset and told me that he feared the cancer had spread to other areas. We did a series of tests and found out the cancer had stayed localized and had not spread to any other areas of my body. He said it was a miracle and that I was lucky. I felt his fear…it transferred to me. I wasn’t sure what to do because I had heard Spirit so clearly tell me I was healed and I should not do surgery. In the face of a medical doctor and a team of hospital staff, my parents…I didn’t want to let anybody down. I didn’t want to die and leave my son behind. I was confused by all of it….and I reluctantly scheduled a mastectomy the next day.”
Late that evening, while a nurse was helping Jen shower, the tumor burst and seemed to physically change.
“It felt like jelly. Which was a significant change because this thing had been hard as a rock this whole time. I thought, “I’m healing! I’m healing!”… every cell inside of me was telling me I was healing…I was overjoyed.”
The next day Jen couldn’t wait to speak with the doctor. She told him what had happened the night before and asked him to examine her. He gave her a stern look and told her that she was in denial. That this tumor was not healed, that it was going through a process called ‘necrosis’ where the tumor outgrows its blood supply. He said, “Jen, we don’t know how deep this tumor has grown inside of you…it could have grown into your chest wall. We have to remove this…now!”
As tears streamed down her face she was wheeled into surgery. Riddled with confusion and not knowing what else to do…she ignored her own personal spiritual direction and listened to someone else.
The instant Jen woke up in the recovery room she knew she had made the wrong choice…
“I woke up from the anesthesia in a panic. I felt I had disobeyed ‘God’…I had done the wrong thing and I knew it. For the next few months I was depressed and struggled with a lot of guilt. Although it was the first time in a long time I could stop thinking about ‘cancer’ I felt sad and confused. Like I had given up the ‘race’ right before the finish line.”
Four months later Jen found a second tumor on the scar line the size of dime. She knew exactly what it was and scheduled a visit to the doctor. He confirmed that it was the same cancer coming back and that it was aggressive. She scheduled a lumpectomy and agreed to the next level of medical intervention: radiation.
“When the cancer came back a second time…I was furious. I was angry. I thought, What the fuck am I doing wrong? I need to make some SERIOUS changes! I’ve had enough! I’m not going to die from this shit! I grew some more courage, I dug deep. I dug my heels in and refused to give up. It was in this moment that I knew I needed a divorce and an extreme environment change.”
Jen made radical changes while she underwent radiation treatments. She filed for a divorce and moved in with her parents with her now 2-year old son for eight months.
“Living with my parents was extremely humbling. I had to ask my closest friends for help with money to put gas in my car and buy groceries. I got a waitressing job and went to work to start a new life for myself and my son. It was the hardest but best time in my life. I didn’t care what I had to do…because I was free! I had a new start, a brand new life to build and I was going to grab a hold of it and never look back.”
For those eight months living with her parents back in her home town of Jupiter, Florida Jen began to rehabilitate her body, mind and soul. She knew she needed to get back to a regular yoga practice and a girlfriend told her about a yoga studio that was ‘by donation’ only.
“I was so happy to find Kula Yoga Shala, because I was so broken financially and emotionally. Here was a place I could go and take a class, feel supported and start my inward journey of healing.”
It was that same girlfriend who encouraged Jen to take Yoga Teacher Training.
“We were having dinner with some friends, it was her birthday I think…and as I updated her on my breast cancer progress she suggested I take Yoga Teacher Training. I looked at her in complete shock and said, “I am not in a place to teach anybody anything. I’m recently divorced, have a 2 year old kid and I’m in the middle of fighting breast cancer!” I laughed at her ludicrous suggestion but she replied, “Jen, you love yoga so much….you’ve been a serious practitioner for over a decade. You should take the training just to learn more about yoga, just to do something for yourself. You don’t have to teach afterwards, it’s just an awesome thing to do!”
With that encouragement, and thinking deeper about it, Jen realized that Yoga Teacher Training would be the perfect way to heal from the past few years’ events. She went to Kula Yoga Shala, and signed up for YTT and was deep into the program within a few weeks.
In the midst of her divorce and YTT $40,000 worth of studio equipment, prized instruments and music intellectual property was stolen from her home. She was advised by a trusted yogi friend to contact an attorney as soon as possible. That attorney was Matthew Benzion.
“Our first conversation was electric. I knew nothing about lawyers, I had never needed one before. I told him my whole story…why I wanted divorce, what had happened to all our studio gear, my 2-year old son, and that I had just had surgery and was starting radiation treatments in the midst of all this…I remember the timbre of his voice was so comforting, and he impressed me with his knowledge and empathetic approach. I trusted him instantly. He ended up referring me to another lawyer, so he could keep talking to me on a personal level. He told me, if I ever need legal advice that I could call him, free of charge.”
Jen used another lawyer to file for divorce and kept talking to Matt over the phone. Weeks and months went by and they continued to talk and text.
“I was not interested in guys at the time, at all. I was totally focused on getting healthy and restarting my life. However, my divorce was messy so I had to talk to him often, needing support and legal advice. He began to ask me out for a drink, and I declined him several times.”
Matt was persistent however, and on their first date they made dinner at home and connected for the first time in person. Before that same date, Jen had just had a series of radiation treatments and was in pain from the burning. Matt’s humor, clever conversation, and warm heart took all her pain away…they’ve been together ever since and have a daughter, now 2 1/2 years old, Ilyana Rose, who was born on July 10, 2014.
“She is my miracle baby…had I had chemo she would not be here. She quickly made us all a family. She completed us."
Matt and Jen Rose married a few years later on Oct 20th, 2016.
Yoga Teacher Training helped Jen de-condition her mind and Spirit. She began to align with her true Source again, her Self. Yoga asana and philosophy began to take root and alchemize all her trauma.
After YTT she created a new mantra for herself, “I am healing myself and others.” This became her intention for everything she did, keeping her on a higher vibration, she began to attract people, training and experiences that supported this intention.
Jen Rose dove deeper into her pranayama and chanting practice ‘japa’ and found a mentorship with South Florida’s respected world and jazz musician and yogi, Richard Brookens. She vocally supported his mantra events and they played live sacred music events, sound healing and concerts together for 2 years building a musical synergy and friendship.
Jen Rose has also had the pleasure and honor of studying under, and facilitating live Kirtan with one of the most highly regarded mantra teachers in the world, Russill Paul. From Russill, Jen received a powerful and grounding activation in Nada (Sound) Yoga and learn not only musical and philosophical knowledge but how to cultivate and maintain a deep presence in the practice.
During a concert with Snatam Kuar, Jen received another activation. And another with Krishna Das and another from Manose with Deva Premal. After renowned writer and speaker, Wayne Dyer died, his spirit came to Jen and foretold of her future and offered his guiding help. Jen humbly accepted and works with him for speaking and writing projects.
Jen Rose took her time, merging her heart for healing, scholarly knowledge, devotion to practice, teaching, and musicianship and began to explore her own expression of Kirtan. Her Priestess background in Shamanism naturally began to infuse her events with depth and authenticity. Her singing and songwriting skills harmonize beautifully with Spirit as she channels conscious songs and music production. Jen works closely with her fellow Light Workers, Musicians, Yoga Teachers and Sound Healers in the community, from Jupiter to Miami. She collaborates and facilitates live sacred music events, concerts, women’s gatherings, Kirtan, yoga classes, and private sessions. Through her devotion to serve, Jen Rose has become an expert in Personal Transformation through 16 years of facilitation, study, practice and personal work. She is a public speaker, intuitive guide, sacred musician, music producer and gifted master of sacred ceremonies.
