Jessica (meaning to see) Dugan (meaning black)

Where there is darkness, there is light.

Myss’s work helped me accept and understand my physical crisis as a spiritual crisis. This allowed me to fully surrender to my frazzled system at the age of 27, whilst living under the support of my parents in my childhood home. Her writing gave me the discipline to commit fully to meditation and the power of prayer, the only thing she says one can turn to when nothing else has worked and literally everything else has been tried. So pray to something beyond what I could fully comprehend, I did and continue to do.

A devotion to spirit enabled me to see my unwellness as a master teacher and befriend the darkness. From this place of submission, I saw that the more I gave myself to my tucked-away ugly parts, the more I understood the impact of the hardships of my life on my nervous system and, in turn, emotional body and mental health. It is from this place that I was able to retrieve the belief that a broken heart is part of a whole heart and that where we are the most broken, the strongest salve for healing resides.  

There's holiness in the holes that make us whole.

As I’ve come to understand it, healing is an ongoing process, and the idea that it eventually ends is incongruent with my experience. What has inevitably changed is my capacity to meet life’s circumstances from a more healed place, falling less into the original wounds that are both at my core and a part of my system, intergenerationally. Surrounding myself with people carrying a similar understanding has been imperative along my path. Earth, herself, has been one of my greatest teachers, showcasing the constancy of life birthing while simultaneously dying and using that death to make more life.

Our precious human life is both painful and enriching. It begs for our evolution and will continue to set us up to do the work, whether through illness, relational despair, death, or job loss. As much as possible, I use these ongoing encounters as invitations to evolve. Sometimes it’s obvious, and other times these initiations take years to unpack, make sense of, and act from. Timing is an extraordinary factor in the evolution of our healing, and a great degree of patience, along with a commitment to the ongoing work, is required for authentic healing to occur.

For me, it’s always been an ongoing choice to return to trusting in a better way to experience myself in the human body. Little wins along the way became the breadcrumb trail that ultimately led me to what I perceive and practice today as wholeness. Wholeness is the ideal template made accessible when all aspects of the self are acknowledged and cared for by the overarching capital “S” Self, or consciousness, from the integration of all parts. The Self is a moving target, requiring ongoing maintenance to sustain. Life’s unpredictability guarantees the fallout of alignment from this place. It is in the discovering of the template of wholeness, however, that allows us to return home time and time again, whatever crisis, big or small, life has in store — because it always will.

My personal, clinical, and spiritual understanding of depression, trauma in the nervous system, and the condition imposed upon us by our earliest relationships, families, friends, and society, has granted me the capacity to see life’s inevitable variables as instruments that make us and hold the potential to break us and break us open, if we allow them. I’ve dedicated my life’s work to guiding people through these descents and offer individuals access points via psychotherapy, yoga, and intuitive bodywork in Denver, Colorado.