Hello! I’m Jess!

I'm a coach, healer, yoga teacher, and entrepreneur committed to helping you be your most grounded and authentic self.

My Story

I grew up in a single-parent home in a small city in Canada called Winnipeg. I’m mixed-race – my mother is Anishinaabe First Nations and my dad is Punjabi from India. I jokingly say that I’m the misnomer and the proper. I’m honored to be a part of both of these cultures. 

I grew up the eldest of four, in low-income housing with most of my younger years on welfare. I dealt with racism, food scarcity, and home scarcity. My grandmother was a residential school survivor. 

I had two different cultural heritages, yet I didn’t feel like I fully belonged to either one. Being only part native, I felt like an outsider and I had no connections to my father’s Indian side. 

I also never felt “Canadian” mainly because of how Indigenous people were treated.

As soon as I could, I left Canada for the UK. 

And by leaving, I ran away from problems, like many people who don’t have the proper tools to deal with life. I numbed with alcohol, drugs, shopping, overspending, over or under-eating, codependent behavior, and more. 

Over the years, I evolved and adopted behaviors I thought would make me a better person. Yet I still felt too damaged. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was because I was often triggered by the world I inhabited.

I didn’t realize moving away from the people who would understand me the most – the Canadian native community – would make me feel like an outsider.  

And so, in this white patriarchal world, I was heavily burdened by not wanting to mess up at any point in all life situations knowing the stigma that the native population had on them. I learned to pass with my Indian last name Sandhu and became more homogenous to be more palatable to those I came across through the years.

I also understood that in order to propel my life forward, I needed to move outside the bounds of what living as a native Canadian meant in the 90s. In order to create something better, I had to leave what felt safe behind. I felt safe with my own family but never in Canada having dealt with racism my entire Canadian life.

The Deep Wound of Racism

There’s this term coined by Pauline Boss called Ambiguous Loss which she calls, “loss that often goes unnoticed, perhaps because it is ubiquitous.”

Ubiquitous means that it’s everywhere. And ambiguous loss refers to loss without closure. 

Racism is an ambiguous loss because it permeates everything. Many people claim they are not racist or that they don’t SEE racism OR they see less of it. It’s gaslighting. 

But racism is remarkably accurate at hitting its targets. Racism is what your parents and grandparents held. The weight accumulates from generation to generation. 

For me, it created a feeling of unworthiness that permeated every aspect of my life. 

I tried suicide twice because of how much unworthiness I felt in 2002 and 2008.

It’s devastating to me that I got to those points, but grateful to be alive today. 

It took a while for me to realize how important I am to the world. And how much of a joy it is to be alive. This is healing happening.

Part of my healing is learning that my trauma is racial discrimination and learning exactly what my trauma response looks like.

This understanding has taken years of work, toil, and making slow and progressive changes to help me heal from the inside to out.

Yoga As My Teacher

Part of that slow shift was when I found yoga in 2001. I remember my first class vividly: I wore heavy clothing, made weird shapes, while other people made even more interesting shapes with theirs, and had a chance to lay down for an extended period.

To lay down and be quiet. I had no idea what savasana was. 

But I loved it. I loved being still, being quiet, and having time to just be in my body. I had never experienced that before.

It was a few months before I made my way to another class…and then another. And with each class and opportunity, I realized that something was shifting within me. I was feeling a release. I was finding relief. I was learning to regulate my body and my nervous system.

I found myself occasionally crying on the mat and noticed I felt really good after it.

Yoga helped me start to release some of the internal anguish, grief, and pain I held in my body.

Over time, I realized I was learning to self-regulate my nervous system with this somatic healing therapy. Yoga is a somatic healing practice. Somatic therapy is a unique form of therapy that focuses on the mind-body connection to help bring about change. 

As I started to feel less frozen, I noticed that I could take bigger steps forward and I unwittingly embarked on a healing journey that has literally changed my life.

Ten years after I came to the mat for the first time, I became a yoga teacher and a health coach in 2012. Ten years after that in 2022, I became a somatic healing coach learning more deeply about the ways to ground and calm myself and others. Gaining a better understanding of how much somatic healing we all need. 

My Healing

For as long as I can remember, I wanted to feel the freedom to trust myself, be free and expansive with who I am, and enjoy life fully and authentically.

It was only when I started to evaluate my own history and lived experiences that was I able to see I was ceding control of my life to unworthy factors. The scars of things like racism towards me, my family and my culture, poverty, and food scarcity were dictating my present-day happiness, and I was allowing it too much power. 

Although the power of it is white supremacy which is the undercurrent of racism. I wanted to learn the truth of how these systems played a role in how I saw the world and how the world saw me. And I wanted to be one of the many people who wrote a real historical account of our history.

It was a messy process to be vulnerable but breaking open multiple times through the years helped me process my grief.

My healing journey continues every day.

In this process, I’ve learned my life's passion is to help others heal from their trauma and live life empowered, with purpose, and have the confidence to be themselves.

I’m helping to usher in a more equitable world where all are welcome and seen. These are the tools to help the victims of racism and other traumas heal. It's not easy work, but I can't think of anything more important.