Today we’d like to introduce you to Jamy Rae Stanczyk
Hi Jamy Rae, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
It takes a village
It all began in the forest really. I was already there when the grief arrived, already walking through the trees, listening to the rhythm of the land, when my life began to fall apart. The ending of a 15 year marriage arrived like a fire. Sudden. Consuming. And I didn’t know what to do with the grief it left behind. It was too big to hold. Too loud to quiet. My inner world felt scorched, burnt to ash. I was terrified to be alone. Terrified to be with myself. With my thoughts, my pain, the reality of what was happening in my life. But there she was. Ready to catch me. In my sorrow. In my silence. In my screaming and wailing. In the parts of me that felt too heavy to carry. She stood with me, steady, rooted, alive. The land, ancient, wild, never mine, but deeply beloved,…held me. She asked nothing of me but presence. She offered steadiness when everything else felt unsteady. The earth was preparing me. With every quiet step she was reminding me where I come from. She was making space in me for something new to rise. But my grief was still stuck. It felt too big for my body, like it was trying to pour out and stay buried all at once. My chest ached. My stomach twisted. It was uncomfortable to be in my body. I wanted to run away. To distract. To not be in my body at all. Until one day my body began to move. She rose with a soft fierceness full of ancestral wisdom. She whispered, I got this. Let me do this for us. She danced. Not to perform. Not to escape. But to remember. Because the body knows. She knows how to hold grief. How to metabolize trauma. How to move disappointment, fear, heartbreak, not thought the mind, but through breath, rhythm, sensation, release. And when we stop resisting her, when we stop controlling her and instead allow her to move freely without shame and judgment she moves us toward freedom. Not the kind of freedom that ignores our pain but the kind that says, “ you don’t have to carry it like this anymore.” In that dance, by body led me to something I had long forgotten, a place inside of me untouched by suffering. A place of wholeness, wisdom, peace.
And something in me, the parts that had been guarding, managing, resisting for so long…finally surrendered. The protective system that had held everything together was too tired to keep bracing. And in that moment I surrendered to the medicine of my body. The art of her movement. It was the beginning of a return. Not just to myself but to the many selves within me. The ones I had ignored, misunderstood, or tried to outrun. Because I am not one. I am many. Inside me lives a village of parts. Some are fierce. Some are fragile. Some speak loudly while others hide in silence. Some want connection while others want protection. All of them trying so hard to help. For most of my life they had been operating alone. Fighting for control. Overcompensating. Shouting over one another, leaving me completely disregulated and reactive to the world. But what I came to understand, what the forest, my body, and the dance began to teach me was that these parts didn’t need to be silenced and ignored. They needed to be welcomed back together. Because it takes a village. Healing didn’t come through thinking my way through. It came through relationship. Through listening. A deep radical listening. Though slowing down enough to hear the deeper need underneath the behavior. It came through offering curiosity instead of judgment. Compassion instead of control. And in that sacred return I realized this is not just my story but OUR story. We live in a world that teaches us to pathologies our humanity. To see our pain, our responses, our behaviors through the lens of what is wrong with us. We are taught to say, “ I have anxiety. I am depressed.” As if our experience are disorders to manage rather than intelligent adaptations born from inner parts trying to survive a chaotic world. When we see ourselves through this lens, we lose our agency. We forget our wholeness. We start to believe that healing is for someone else, someone stronger, less damaged. But what if we saw ourselves differently? What if our symptoms are simply messages? What if our behaviors were the language of a fragmented village longing to come back into connection? What if we are not broken but disconnected? And what if healing isn’t about fixing, but about remembering? Returning. Reweaving.
This is the heart of my work now. Not to diagnose. Not to fix. But to walk beside. I am not the expert of anyones inner world. I am a companion. A steward. A midwife of the remembering. I get the privilege to walk with people as they return to their bodies, their breath, their broken-open hearts. To the village within them. To the sacred soil of their own becoming. I listen for the parts of them they have exiled. I hold space for the ones that feel unloveable. I help translate the language of behavior into the wisdom of need. We gather the parts. We slow down. We make room for every voice to be heard, every emotion to move, every protective part to rest. Because it takes a village and no part of us is meant to heal alone,. Together we remember that we are made of many. That none of our parts are too much. That the earth knows. The body remembers. And every part of us has a place on sacred ground.
This work, this returning, this remembering is not just for us. I am a mother and the truth is my children didn’t grow up with a mother who loved herself. I love THEM with everything thing I had because thats what I was told to do. Pour it all into them. Give everything. Thats what good mothers do. But I see it now. That wasn’t love. At least not in its truest form. It was sacrifice without self regard. It was devotion built on depletion. And while it came from love, I taught my children something I never meant to pass on…love is about abandoning yourself for others. Now im doing it differently. To show them, even now as adults that it’s never too late to return to yourself. That self love is not selfish. Its sacred. Its stabilizing. Its the foundation of every other kind of love. We do this work for us. For our children. We do it for the people we love. For the next generation. For the collective. Because the world needs more love. Because when we tend to our inner village, when we meet ourselves with compassion instead of criticism we stop passing down what was never ours to carry. This is how the world changes. Not all at once, but breath by breath, part by part, love by love. And it begins here, with the brave quiet act of choosing to come home to yourself.
This is the way forward. In right relationship with our inner village. Where every part of us is welcomed, heard and held. In right relationship with our bodies. As sacred guides that move us toward freedom of suffering. In right relationship with the living world, where mother nature reminds us how to slow down how to soften, how to belong. This is how we heal. How we return. This is how we bring balance to a world aching under the weight of disconnection and division. It begins inside. With rhythm. With dance. With love. With the choice to come home again and again to the wild, wise village within.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Few smooth roads. I don’t think the human path is smooth. It’s hard here as a human and I’ve learned that what makes the struggle the hardest is not being aware of our inner worlds. Not being aware of and not tending to the chaos. Listening to the world that tells us to run away from our feelings and make them go away. All of my life I’ve had lots of parts of me that have been very concerned about what others will think. So worried about being judged. So worried about not being liked. Not belonging. They have been terrified of these things and now I tend to their fear. I tell them it’s impossible for us to be authentically us and not be disliked or judged. Literally impossible. And it’s not because we aren’t likable, it’s because our values don’t match the people who don’t like us. It’s okay to not be liked. It’s okay to be weird. It’s okay to not belong in some spaces. And through the judgement and the weird looks we will be okay. We can be strong and we can stay true to what we know, what we believe and what we are here to teach. I tend to their fear and I show them the way.
In my work I am also inviting people to be very vulnerable. We have strong protective systems inside that spend their whole lives keeping us from vulnerability. Asking these warriors to do things differently is a big ask sometimes. To do something unknown is often scary. The struggle has been to get these parts to allow people to try. Try doing it differently. Asking them to step back to allow the healing to happen. As humans we are scared to feel, scared to move, to dance, to allow others to see us in our wholeness.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about Nurtured Spirit Relational Healing ?
Im having a hard time naming what I do these days. I am a therapist by degree and training, however I do not resonate with this title, especially now with where we are in the world. Therapy comes with stigma and I want to change that. Traditional methods of therapy are outdated, they don’t work well in my opinion and are keeping us stuck in a model of pathology. I am trained in Internal Family Systems and the core of my work is based in that model. This model has been around since the 80’s and is growing rapidly throughout the world. It works and I believe in it with everything I am. It has changed who I am as a person and as a healer. When we see ourselves and others as multiple, and can use curiosity and compassion to understand our own behaviors and those of others, our worldview begins to shift. We begin to see the world and its humans with more compassion and care. I think that’s a real good thing right now.
My work is relational. I help people with their relationships with themselves, their bodies, the earth and with the ones they love. Through my work I am passionate about bringing more peace, harmony, clarity, compassion, calm, patience, playfulness, and love into the world, one village at a time. My work isn’t about telling people how to be healthy using my own set of values. It is about staying curious and learning what matters to them and then figuring out what gets in the way of being the best version of themselves.
Can you share something surprising about yourself?
Before two years ago, you would have never caught me dancing. Even by myself. Now, I can’t stop:)
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