About
My name is Jen Estevez. My path has led me to living and working all over the world, becoming a CEO and founder, studying a multitude of disciplines, shamanism, spirituality, and mysticism. I am a coach, a public speaker, a medicine woman, an entrepreneur, a wild woman, a digital nomad, and an advocate for living a sustainable, mindful, plant-based lifestyle. I have worked as an entrepreneur and executive, in the world of food, beverage, hospitality, CPG, and food tech for over a decade. Now, I want to get personal with my offerings in a way that lights me on fire. My personal work is my way of creating an offering, and sharing practices and tools that helped me create a more grounded centered way of living, working, and being. As many great teachers say, in order to save the planet we need to start with ourselves. It is my hope that anyone reading my story will receive it as an invitation to get curious about how they can begin to create change in their life.
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Finding our power is finding our own divinity, and embracing ourselves in the fullness of our expression, in all of our wildness.
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How it Started
My curiosity for living a unique life began at a young age and I have been engaged with science, spirituality, mysticism, martial arts, meditation, mindfulness and psychology since I was a child. I have always been fascinated by the confluence of holistic modalities of healing and self work alongside rational Western schools of thought and practice. From psychedelics, to business, to mindfulness coaching, I am constantly working with human consciousness. Working with consciousness is in my DNA. I grew up in a household of spiritual vegetarians, both of my parents were scientists, and academics; my mom is a microbiologist, and my father is a Neurologist. My days were often spent playing in the lab with my parents, and I even published papers with them in Science magazine on depression and dementia.
I eventually rebelled against my upbringing because I love working with people and being of service. This led me into the restaurant and wine business. I moved to San Francisco with $450 in my pocket. After years of study, I became a CMS Advanced Sommelier (one of only 1,000 or so in the world). While creating my first company, a marketing and communications agency for food & beverage called OMvino, I also taught yoga and fitness. At that time, I additionally had the opportunity to co-found a wine club app. I would never admit it at that time, but this was too much, and lead me to burnout. I wore my burnout like a badge of honor. I was not living in integrity, or practicing self care and was operating from a place of wounding, using my work as a route to self validation and self worth. Conversely, this period of time also gave me the opportunity to travel the world, inspired me to become a digital nomad and deepen my spiritual practices
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I began to travel and work remotely first, for the wine club app, going to wine tastings, creating content and looking for wines to import. I added on small side trips to satisfy my other spiritual and intellectual curiosity. After I took my 500 hour RYTT in Rishikesh and worked abroad for a month and a half and I knew I would never be the same. I learned a huge host of truly beautiful forms of breath work, yoga, meditation, and above all that I was committed to living and work abroad.
During the pandemic, I hit bottom. I suffered a debilitating back injury (20mm disk bulge in my L5), and a simultaneous separation from my first business partner, and a romantic partner all within a week of lockdown beginning. I had to truly sit with myself and look at all the ways I was out of integrity, and burnout. I committed to looking for ways to change.
As it often does when you ask for it, change found me. Normally, every year I traveled somewhere exotic for my birthday, but lock down prevented that. Instead, I chose to journey within myself and joined an ayahuasca retreat. It was a beautiful and confronting journey that helped me to begin making the BIG life shifts I was seeking. Madrecita Ayahuasca showed me I needed to use my voice and that I would work with plant food and plant medicine to bring change into the world. This journey helped me understand the ways that I was out of alignment in my life with incredible clarity. I was letting trauma govern my life, people pleasing and burnout was my perpetual state of being. Most importantly, I was not happy, and that was MY choice. I began to shed many layers, said goodbye to drinking, weed, and dropped back into my practices. It was time to bring my work and life balance together. At that time I created an advisory firm for plant-based sustainable companies and non-profits. I had consulted on many startups since the wine club app. I wanted to support entrepreneurs in building conscious companies from the ground up with my startup experiences. My heart was in this work. I also shifted my marketing company to working with sustainable, food and beverage brands at this time.
As I dove deeper in to my personal work, I moonlighted and supported in medicine ceremonies. The power of healing in community working with these master plants reconnected me to a different side of myself. The divine feminine healer and priestess in me had awoken. I realized I wanted to weave my many paths together. The divine and the material. The rational and the spiritual. My path started with what was in front of me. In order for plant-medicine to be legal and safe, we needed structure. To house these offerings, I created a company with my business partner Woody van Horn - Sacred Strategic (website coming soon). We advise churches, medicine workers, healers and non-profits to grow and expand in a safe and thoughtful way.
How It's Going
My dream of living remotely was realized in 2021. After finding a $87 one way ticket and going to Peru on whim for my birthday, I found my home. I sat for a seven day straight ayahuasca retreat, with a shaman named Paul Diamond. The retreat was unconventional and coupled medicine work with Buddhist meditation practices that profoundly moved me. I packed up my apartment in California and moved to the Sacred Valley, to deepen myself inquiry. Paul inspired my studies in Buddhism, Hermetics and Traditional Chinese Medicine and helped me reopened many other spiritual teachings that I had forgotten over the years. I also had the opportunity to learn more about the powerful and wise grandfather medicines tobacco and huachuma which both continue to teach me and expand my consciousness. I knew my studies would be never ending between buddhism, spirituality and the plants, and as they became to be a bigger part of my life, I began to plan accordingly. I knew that the commitment to learning and deepening my studies meant that eventually I would be an unconventional teacher, a healer and create my own methodologies.
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With Peru as a cheap, and peaceful home base, I allowed myself longer and longer spaces of working abroad and studying. I began to shift into a non-hustle mindset and give my body and mind space to heal and expand. To date, my travels have taken me all over the world to practice and be initiated in different mystical arts, healing practices, spirituality and to learn about the world of business from a new lens that I have created. My journey the last few years brought me to Nepal and it was there that I began to finalize my plans to live in a more dharma-oriented way, be solid in my own ethics and recreate my world and my work in the fashion that it currently exists. At some points the thought crossed my mind, that I would need to fully leave my business life behind, but that’s not my journey. I needed to find my own balance, my own sustainability and my own path between the worlds of the rational and the spiritual. The healer, and the entrepreneur.
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What’s Next
I have received numerous requests from friends all over the globe to begin sharing, speaking and writing about my adventures, studies, thoughts and experiences as well as recording some of my practices. I have heard to the call to share my voice, my words and my work more widely. I am also sharing my work with sacred medicine Huachuma and Tobacco in my home base in Peru while finishing for my Tobacco Maesteria with Ernesto Garcia Tores. I will be writing my blog, planning and writing two books, hosting retreats and events, as well as looking for opportunities to speak publicly about plant food, plant medicine, business, travel, and the spiritual, mystical and healing space.
I am also planning my first TedX and recently wrapped up a course on it with an incredible teacher named Dan Young. I also took my buddhist refuge vows, and will be continuing my studies with Lama Michael Gregory of Mindfulness Meditation Centers. Last but not least, I am creating a company called Sacred Strategic to centralize my business work, while keeping the personal and sacred work I doin my personal brand. Thank you for being a part of my journey!