Love and Connection with Jackie James
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There are certain moments in life that change you forever.
Not just in what happened but in who you become after. I didn’t choose grief. But grief chose me. And it cracked me open in a way I never expected. I’m not here because I have it all figured out. I’m here because life brought me into deeper truth, and I couldn’t go back to surface level living.
My story is rooted in love. Deep love.
When you lose someone you love deeply, you don’t just lose them. You lose parts of yourself too. Your sense of safety. Your sense of how life works. Your relationship with time, and meaning, and everything you thought you knew.
For much of my life, I didn’t know how much grief I was carrying. I pushed a lot down. I hid pain. I rushed past hard seasons, believing I needed to be strong, productive, and okay.
And then there came a point where I couldn’t outrun it anymore. The grief caught up with me, and old wounds began surfacing in ways I didn’t expect. It wasn’t just one loss. It was layered grief. Accumulated grief. Grief from years of holding it together.
I began searching for answers, not just to understand grief in theory, but to understand what was happening inside of me, and what I kept seeing in others too.
In that search, I felt guided to complete the Grief Educator Program taught by David Kessler, world renowned grief expert and one of the most trusted voices in the grief space.
I didn’t do it to become someone with all the right answers. I did it because I wanted to understand grief with more honesty, depth, and compassion for myself and for others.
One of the biggest things grief has taught me is: when you allow yourself to feel grief, you don’t just feel sadness. You expand your capacity to feel everything.
Grief has opened me to deeper tenderness, deeper love, deeper presence, and deeper emotion. I still have moments where grief rises up because love doesn’t disappear, but I also have many moments of awe, wonder, joy, gratitude, and a profound appreciation for being alive.
After my mom and many others passed, the world didn’t just feel different, it started speaking differently too. Songs would show up, synchronicities, moments that felt too specific to be random. And one sign became a thread that kept weaving itself into my life.
The words "Wild Child"
This was one of my mom’s favorite songs by Enya, and after her passing, I started hearing it everywhere and seeing the words “wild child” and “wild” show up like life itself was whispering, she’s here. Love is here. You’re not alone.
To me, Wild Child isn’t about being reckless. It’s about being real. It’s the part of us that still believes in aliveness. The part of us that remembers wonder. The part of us that wants to move, breathe, laugh, create, and feel again.
So, that is what I’m creating now. A movement of in person spaces rooted in presence, nature, human connection, nervous system safety, and love that doesn’t rush.