About
Hi, I'm Jes.
I help men come home to their bodies: to breathe again, to feel again, and to enjoy the strange, wonderful fact of being alive in a human body.
I'm a men's embodiment coach and group facilitator based in Nanaimo, on Vancouver Island. My work weaves together three disciplines I've trained in and practise daily: somatic sex education, Medical Qi Gong, and hypnosis and meditation. I call the whole thing Heavenly Embodiment.
The long version
I came to this work the way most people do: because I needed it.
For more than fifteen years I worked with people at their most vulnerable. I worked in nursing care, and I led therapeutic recreation programs for adults with developmental disabilities. I've helped people through illness, disability and dying. That work taught me how to be with people honestly and up close, how to hold boundaries with real care, and how much people blossom when they finally feel safe.
Meanwhile I was having my own reckoning. I'd been a sensitive kid who didn't fit the mould of what a boy was supposed to be, and I carried that into adulthood as anxiety, loneliness, a complicated relationship with my body, and a sexuality wrapped in more shame than pleasure. The usual answers (push through, numb out, keep it to yourself) didn't work.
So I went looking. Qi Gong found me first, in 2006, through a friend who practised Chinese medicine. I remember the profound peace and joy I felt after those first classes, and I've practised ever since. Later came hypnotherapy and somatic sex education. The second one blew the doors off what I thought was possible in a body.
We are far more magnificent and powerful than we usually allow ourselves to be, and the way back to that runs straight through the body.
In 2017 I opened a practice in Victoria called Heavenly Embodiment. Then I went to Thailand three times for intensive three-week teacher trainings in White Tiger Medical Qi Gong with Master Tevia Feng. It's leading-edge work that bridges East and West, spirit and science.
Now I'm in Nanaimo, and the practice has grown up and narrowed its focus: men. Men are starving for this, often without knowing what "this" is. Men really do need the love and support of other men, and I believe a lot of the hurt in the world comes from men who've been hurting quietly for a very long time.
Training & background
What I bring into the room.
- Somatic Sex Education
- Certified Somatic Sex Educator and Sexological Bodyworker (2017). Member of the Somatic Sex Educators Association.
- Hypnotherapy
- A year-long hypnotherapy training with Linda Campbell at Your Authentic Self Hypnotherapy School. Specialties: trance, guided visualisation, and erotic hypnosis.
- Medical Qi Gong
- Practising since 2006, starting in the Kong Jing lineage of Master Hing Cheung. Then three three-week intensive teacher trainings in White Tiger Medical Qi Gong with Master Tevia Feng at Tao Garden, Thailand.
- Meditation
- Ten years of Transcendental Meditation before Qi Gong. Daily microcosmic-orbit meditation ever since.
- Care & facilitation
- More than fifteen years of hands-on care work in nursing and therapeutic recreation, supporting people through disability, illness and the end of life, and designing and leading group programs.
How I work
A playful taskmaster.
I'm a coach, not a doctor or a guru. A doctor tends to diagnose and prescribe. I work alongside you, so you find your own answers, build real skills, and become the main driver of your own change. The goal is that one day you won't need me.
I bring a lot of warmth and a lot of play, because pleasure is the best teacher there is. I'm also a bit of a taskmaster. We're here in these bodies to do something that matters, and I'll encourage you to take risks and push your edges, from a place where you feel safe enough to do it.
I'm equally at home with the science (nervous systems, neuroplasticity, the chemistry of pleasure) and with the mystical. I don't think they're at odds. They're two hemispheres of the same brain.
A few true things
- I'm a distant relative of the poets Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, romantics and lovers of words. I like to think some of it rubbed off.
- I've been known to call myself a "sex wizard." It's tongue-in-cheek, mostly.
- Qi Gong is my best self-healing tool, my spiritual practice, and, on a good day, an art form.
- I'm still learning. I still fall off my practice sometimes, and I know how to climb back on. That's most of what I teach.
Let's talk.
A free, no-pressure call of up to 30 minutes. You tell me what's going on, I tell you honestly whether I can help, and we both get a feel for working together.