Modern science is beginning to confirm what wisdom traditions have long understood: love is not sentimental, abstract, or optional. It is physiological. Research shows that feelings of love and connection activate powerful hormonal responses that support healing, regulation, and resilience in the body. This reflection explores how practices like lovingkindness meditation create the conditions for the nervous system to soften and restore, not through force or positivity, but through genuine connection.
In a time that asks us to stay engaged, act with integrity, and navigate daily demands without burning out, love emerges as a foundational resource rather than a luxury. Whether directed toward a person, a memory, a place, or a sense of belonging, love supports both personal health and collective capacity. The article invites readers to consider love as a practice that sustains the body, steadies the mind, and quietly strengthens our ability to show up for what matters.
Love is Medicine
On Connection, Healing, and the Science of Care
Tips for ending the Procrastination Loop
Procrastination is often misunderstood as laziness or a lack of drive, but this piece reframes it as a nervous system response rather than a character flaw. Drawing from years of coaching experience, the article explains how avoidance temporarily reduces discomfort, reinforcing the habit of putting things off. Instead of self criticism, it invites a more compassionate and practical understanding of why procrastination happens in the first place.
The solution offered is surprisingly simple and grounded in neuroscience. By breaking overwhelming tasks into clearly defined, manageable steps, the brain begins to perceive action as safe and achievable. Small wins reduce emotional cost and interrupt the avoidance cycle, allowing momentum to build without force or burnout. The article offers a realistic, actionable path toward clarity and follow through.
Why Procrastination Is Not a Lack of Motivation
Intentions Over New Year’s Resolutions
On Intention, Creativity, and Choosing the Inner Way
As the new year arrives with its familiar surge of optimism, this reflection invites a quieter and more enduring approach to change. Rather than rigid resolutions that often dissolve by early spring, the piece explores intentions as a gentler, more sustainable way of orienting our lives. Drawing from moments of travel, nature, and creative insight, it speaks to the human longing to begin again while staying true to our inner rhythm.
Using the image of a tightly bound flower on the edge of bloom, the article weaves together creativity, community, and self expression. It asks what might happen if, instead of conforming to external norms, we allowed ourselves to open gradually and authentically. Intention becomes a north star rather than a demand, offering space to grow, adapt, and blossom in our own time.
Hope as a Practice
Hope is often misunderstood as a feeling that arrives when circumstances improve. But for those who carry responsibility, whether as leaders, teachers, or caregivers, hope is not sentimental or passive. It is a practice. Drawing from decades of leadership experience, this piece explores what it means to continue showing up when the inner world feels tender, fractured, or quietly grieving. It speaks to the unspoken terrain of leadership, the moments when clarity is required even as the heart feels heavy.
Grounded in psychological research, philosophy, and lived experience, the article reframes hope as a measurable capacity rooted in action, agency, and ethical movement forward. Hope, practiced deliberately, supports the nervous system that leadership depends on and preserves responsiveness rather than collapse. When cultivated as a discipline rather than a mood, hope becomes a form of health, one that quietly sustains not only the leader, but the communities they serve.
How to Lead When Your Heart is Breaking
Rest as Rebellion
The Quiet Superpower That Fuels Lasting Productivity
In a world that glorifies hustle culture and constant doing, rest can feel counterintuitive, even guilt-inducing. Many assume that people in the wellness world live in a perpetual state of calm, but anyone who teaches, leads, or runs a community knows this is far from true. Jess shares her own story of growing up with peaceful roots, becoming a driven Type-A achiever, and eventually learning that rest is not laziness but a necessary and powerful source of energy. Through personal experiences and hard-earned lessons, she explores how the pressure to produce shapes our lives more than we realize.
As Jess reflects on her journey through yoga, business leadership, and personal health, she reveals how rest became a turning point that transformed her productivity from fragile and frantic to strong and sustainable. Rest is not a retreat from life but a strategic return to clarity, creativity, and inner intelligence. By slowing down, even for a few minutes, we create space for insight, resilience, and meaningful contribution. In a culture that equates rest with weakness, reclaiming it becomes an act of strength.
Beginning Again
Remembering Your Worth Beyond the Numbers
Starting over can feel humbling, especially in a world obsessed with numbers, metrics, and external markers of success. Even with years of wisdom and spiritual practice, that quiet whisper of self-doubt can still creep in: “You are not enough.” Yet, beneath that noise exists a gentler, truer voice that asks us to return to what is real, what is grounded, and what is already whole within us. This is the space where beginning again becomes not a failure, but a calling back to ourselves.
In navigating new platforms, new communities, or new chapters, we often meet two inner voices: the one that holds us back and the one that nudges us forward. They exist side by side like storm clouds and sunlight, both present and both shaping us. But when we remember that our goodness exists independent of performance, numbers, or external validation, we step into a more honest, undivided way of living. And from that place, beginning again becomes not something to fear, but something to embrace.
Exploring Wellness, Leadership, and a Life Filled With Many Hats
All the Things
Welcome. I’m Jess, and this space is where I share the practices, stories, and resources that have renewed my courage and clarity throughout my life in wellness, leadership, and community building. After two decades co-founding and guiding Modo Yoga from a single idea to a global community, I stepped into a new chapter rooted in reflection, creativity, and honest storytelling. Here, I hope to offer both meaningful insights and lighthearted pieces, from wellness lessons to easy kitchen experiments and everything in between.
My own path into wellness began long before adulthood, shaped by a hidden spinal disability that taught me resilience, curiosity, and a deep desire to understand healing from the inside out. That journey led me across disciplines, from anatomy and yoga therapy to Buddhist studies and somatics, and eventually into a life of teaching, leading, creating, and supporting others. In this space, I hope to gather all those threads and share the lessons, questions, and discoveries that come from a life lived wearing many hats. I’m grateful you are here.