Jennifer Patterson is a grief worker who uses plants, breath, and words to explore survivorhood, body(ies) and healing. A queer and trans affirming and centering, trauma-experienced herbalist and breathwork facilitator, Jennifer offers sliding scale care as a practitioner through her private practice Corpus Ritual and is a member of The Breathe Network. She has facilitated workshops at healing centers, LGBTQ centers, a needle exchange and harm reduction clinic, online with the Transformative Language Arts Network, sexual violence resource centers, at colleges and universities, veterans hospitals, the collective What Would an HIV Doula Do? and a Hasidic and Orthodox Jewish healing center. She is also a teacher in training programs with The Breathe Network and Breath Liberation Society. She is the author of The Power of Breathwork: Simple Practices to Promote Wellbeing (Quarto). Editor of the anthology Queering Sexual Violence: Radical Voices from Within the Anti-Violence Movement (2016), Jennifer speaks across the country, and has had writing published in places like VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, 580 Split, OCHO: A Journal of Queer Arts, Nat. Brut, The Establishment, HandJob, and The Feminist Wire. She was also the creative nonfiction editor of Hematopoiesis Press. A graduate of Goddard College’s MA program, Jennifer is finishing a book project focused on translating embodied traumatic experience through somatic practices and critical and creative nonfiction. You can find more at corpusritual.com.

 

In This Episode: 

• Jennifer shares her origins story and how she came into trauma and sexual violence counseling and healing. 
• What prompted Jennifer to start studying herbalism, healing from mainstream spaces, and psychedelics.  
• How she started creating safe spaces for survivors and centering queer, trans, and non-binary people. 
• What led Jennifer to leave New York City and move to Northern New Mexico. 
• Her thoughts on how trauma has now become a mainstream word. 
• Jennifer's approach to healing to mitigate trauma and harm reduction. 
• How plant medicines helped Jennifer to understand the trauma in her body. 
• Rewriting the narrative around dissociation and the protective tools that we use as children and adults that are not necessarily negative. 
• How Jennifer incorporates writing and breathwork into her healing practice. 
• Jennifer's experiences in unwellness spaces and navigating these spaces. 
• Jennifer's current favorite plants.