Wisdom is
crystalized suffering.
Rudolf Steiner
I have designed and developed the content and courses of the Imagine Self out of my own experience, my own crystalized wisdom.
I have worked hard and relentlessly
- to know
myself , - to heal the wounds of a very dramatic childhood,
- and to claim my own freedom and fulfill my destiny.
I have made mistakes, found guidance when lost, forgiven myself for excesses and deficiencies.
I have traveled the bumpy, twisting road from paralyzing anxiety and depression to joyful celebration.
Now in my seventies (born December 11, 1947), I live my life fully – doing what I love to do (most of the time). I am filled with gratitude and possibility. I live most of my moments with resolve and enthusiasm. I have turned my life inside out and found everything I longed for and more than I imagined.
In my sacred conversations, my blog, and my courses, I share a lot about my life – the good, the bad, and the ugly, and the trials, transformations, and blessings.
I have written here about what I love doing and the major influences on my work. I describe the ways you can work with me. I’ve also included some of the personal stuff.
But first a simple statement of my intent in all my work…
Life is short. You are incredibly important. If I can help you heal, expand, understand or transform so that who you are and what you do feels more real, nothing could give me more joy.
If we were visiting personally rather than electronically, I’d fix you a cup of tea or pour you a glass of wine and we would sit down for a great conversation. So why don’t you do that for yourself? Make yourself comfortable. Get ready to entertain new ideas and possibilities. You will find comfort here in my cyber home and you will find many intriguing challenges. I want you to leave my place feeling different than when you arrived and knowing more about me … and more about yourself. If I can do anything to make you more at home, let me know. I do love questions.
If you want to know more: ask. Schedule a complimentary “Connect Call” with me. We will have 30 minutes to explore your needs and questions and the possibilities of entering into a series of Sacred Conversations. Use the button to schedule our call.
Here’s what I do with love…
I accept you & accompany you
through the evolution and strengthening of selfhood, through the process of resolving karma and fulfilling destiny, with compassion and care. I am always aware of becoming and being a good and wise companion and friend. Your inner journey needs warm support.
I attend to your thoughts, feelings, and goals.
with keen listening and observation. Keen listening and observation are what I practice, practice, practice and refine and mature. The central key to my attention is my unconditional openness to all that lives in another — to what lives in you.
I share wisdom
about the mysterious complexity and amazing process of being human and becoming
I am always seeking to make the vague, distinct; the confusing, organized; and the shadowy, luminous.
I research…
the alchemy of being human and becoming I, the realities of spiritual beings, the activity of counterforces and the presence of evil, the nuances of the evolution of consciousness. I am fascinated by esoteric biology, the hidden meanings and interweavings between our own physiology and the inner sense of self — the holistic awareness of I am.
I connect…
cosmic realities with personal realities, material phenomena with spiritual phenomena. I see relationships of all kinds through these connections. I share these connections with a warm, personal language.
I design and organize…
programs to guide others to find themselves, know themselves and become themselves. The designs are organic and reflect the way the human being experiences life. Organization flows with life. Design harmonizes purpose with
Work with Me
Engage me for sacred conversations
- Experience the transformations and the turning points in your life.
- Navigate the rough waters and fierce tides of personal breakthroughs.
- Face dilemmas in your relationships, work life, health, creative expression
and spiritual path.
Let me be with you as friend and mentor to hold you as you
- Free your soul from the limiting matrices of your childhood, central relationships, cultural and tribal narratives, assumptions and expectations.
- Develop spiritual, moral, economic and foundational self-reliance, competence, confidence, authenticity, creativity
and maturity. - Manage your energies and resources with a productive flow between expansion and contraction, between release and restoration.
- Celebrate your existence. Resolve your karma. Fulfill your destiny.
I am most delighted with a long-term client who described our work this way: “Lynn is like a best friend, only more.” My client can’t define the “more” and neither can I. It is the miracle of authentic conversation when something comes alive through the connection of two individuals. I want to connect with you.
Schedule a 30-minute “Connect Call” to see if we resonate. Will a series of Sacred Conversations meet your needs and answer your questions? Click here to schedule.
Participate in the Imagine Self Academy
The Imagine Self Academy offers many courses on finding, knowing and becoming yourself.
Read my writings
Find wisdom and inspiration in my blog and the Inner Christmas messages by joining the Imagine Self mailing list. I also have a number of essays in the library which you are welcome to download.
Engage me for Organizational Consulting
Organizations are mirrors of the human being. I am available to work with your organizational questions, challenges, future, purpose. When I consulted with the board of a residential treatment center for schizophrenics, the executive director gave me a gift. It was an automobile spark plug. He told me it symbolized their experience of my role in recharging their organization. Contact me.
Invite me to speak
If you would like me to give a keynote
Invite me to give a workshop.
I can offer a workshop of 1-4 days for your community or your organization. Please tell me what you are looking for, and I will get back to you with some possibilities and
What Prepared Me For This Work…
Below I share the life experiences provided ways of perceiving, understanding and knowing the mysteries of self and the arts of imagining.
Rudolf Steiner
There is a whole page on my relationship to Rudolf Steiner here. No one has nurtured and cultivated my writings, my teaching, my research, my sense of the human soul and my personal development more than Rudolf Steiner.
The Twelve Steps
The greatest gift my first husband gave me was my engagement with The Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. My grandfather joined AA before I was born, but never took me to meetings. When I married a recovering alcoholic, AA and Al-Anon became a big part of my life. The Twelve Steps are an archetypal process for responsible self-compassion that awaken and develop the individual. The steps also weave together the physical, emotional and spiritual aspects of the individual.
Art History
I have a BA in Art History. Through years of studying the history of art, I learned to attend to nuances of style, the multiple hues of color and shadows of form and the falling of light on the subject of the painting. I learned the sacredness of architecture. I studied how stone and wood can come breathtakingly alive when carved with passion and skill. I can recognize a whole work of art from a small detail and see the forces of culture, religion, politics
My study of art history has developed a perceptual skill to wed parts to wholes, to see history repeated in moments and to attend to nuance and intensity when imagining the soul of another.
My passion for Art History awoke during my sophomore year which was spent in Florence, Italy, immersed in the mood of the Renaissance. The Renaissance began with the hunger of the artistic soul for individuality, perspective, reconnection with mythic archetypes and emotional interpretation of the Christian mysteries. These Renaissance moods live in my soul.
Interior Design
From a very young age, I loved the art of home decoration – the arrangement of things, the aesthetics of placement, the complement of colors, textures,
Twelve years later, and in my third home, I decided to become a professional interior designer. It was very satisfying. I did not have a signature style – you couldn’t walk into one of my client’s homes and say Lynn Jericho was the decorator. Instead, I had clients say they felt their home expressed who they were. I was really humbled at the thought of designing the space in which my clients made love, shared conversations with their friends, fried eggs, and quietly contemplated their lives.
Designing was such valuable training for the soul work of imagining self. Each one of us wants an inner life that is comfortable, beautiful, and meaningful. We want to see how our lives are organized and unfold in ways that serve our purposes. Designing another’s home taught me to let go of my own style. I was not going to be living in the home, so the style had to reflect the client – it had to work for them and their family.
Designing
Midwifery & Birth
I was pregnant with my first child and saw an interview on television with the director of the Birthing Center at Roosevelt Hospital in NYC. Even though I was living over an hour away, I decided that was the place for my child’s birth. It was 1978 and most of my friends and family were alarmed that I was going to see midwives and not a doctor. The birth was great. Subsequently, I worked with a group of mothers in Princeton to start a birth center locally.
Midwives serve the mother and the process of birth. They are guardians of this sacred experience. They do not interfere nor do they impose; yet they are acutely attentive to any possible danger to the child or the mother. In working with clients, individuals, couples, families or groups, I see myself as midwife. Participants in Imagine Self programs are giving birth to themselves – forming a new sense of self, shaping a new relationship, committing to a new future. Just like birth, the Imagine Self process is hard work – often painful and filled with transitions. It is messy and – the outcome is a miracle.
Building a Waldorf School
In 1985, I enrolled my children in the brand new Waldorf School of Princeton. Little did I know I was enrolling myself as a pioneer parent and that my life would deeply change. I became a very active parent and the first development/fundraising director. Not only did I find in Waldorf an understanding of the development of the human soul, but also the challenges of working with
Working persistently and patiently, learning to express new ideas in understandable ways and building an organization that serves the community taught me to consider everything from multiple points of view when seeking to establish a healthy and thriving imagination of self.
When imagining self we must experience very flexible and creative perspectives. Dealing with obstacles, challenges, and resistance to development and growth requires self-compassion and courage. It is also important to set goals and celebrate achievement.
Above all, Waldorf connected me with the extraordinary wisdom and practicality of Rudolf Steiner. He named the body of his work anthroposophy – the wisdom and consciousness of humanity.
Personal Stuff
I live in Chapel Hill, NC, a recent transplant after 36 years in New Jersey.
In third grade, I went to four different schools. The social trauma meant I never felt I fit in.
In 1966, I was one of the students in the first year of Florida State University’s Florence Study Center. I spent 7 months in the place of the Renaissance. On November 4, 1966, the Arno River flooded. I was one of the “Mud Angels”, the American students that worked all over Florence to rescue and restore great works of history. It was a life-changing experience.
In my early twenties I had a job flying in helicopters taking photos of new construction in South Florida. It was awesome and fun. I was an aerial photographer!
The next year I had seven different jobs! The seventh was where I met my husband. We were married two weeks after our first date! It was a great love!
I pulled both my babies out of my body with my own two hands. My touch was their first touch. My eyes were the first eyes that gazed at their existence. This amazes many people. I explain to them that the baby was coming out anyway, I just needed to reach down and embrace her and 3.5 yrs later embrace him.
After having my amazing birthing experience, I cofounded a birthing center in Central New Jersey in 1979. This center brought over 1500 babies into life in an environment of love and one that trusted the mother’s capacity to bear life naturally.
The marriage ended 18 years/ a moon node later. I had succeeded at all the things a wife does: I made my husband very happy. I created a beautiful home. I had two wonderful children. When I got to my second moon node (when I was 37 years old) I met Rudolf Steiner’s work and began to wonder about my destiny. Over the next five years, this question of my destiny grew more intense. My husband cared very little about who I was and who I was becoming. My marriage became very lonely. At forty-two, I became a single mother.
Also at my second moon node, I realized I had been sexually abused by both my parents. This was a painful liberation — a strange truth-telling.
Following my destiny impulses, I found myself leading workshops, writing and began to work with individuals as a spiritual mentor offering comfort, guidance, encouragement and wisdom to others.
In 2001, exactly ten weeks after I had moved into a brownstone in Jersey City with a deck that had a great view of the World Trade Center, I stood on the deck and watched the Trade Towers collapse. I could see dark specks falling from the burning towers. I had no idea these were human beings escaping the burning heat and choosing death by falling to earth rather than burning.
At a conference for women writers 30 days after 9/11, I met a woman who was impressed and curious about my perspective on 9/11. She and I began a conversation that led to “Ground Zero and the Human Soul” which took the experience of 9/11 into the evolution of consciousness. The six audio volumes of this “book” were accepted by Barnes & Noble and Borders. Library Journal said it belonged in every public library. Only a few copies were sold. Spiritually, the experience was invaluable.
Much of my life has been bringing me to an understanding of the hidden presence of the Sophia, the feminine face of God, the balancing Spirit to the Christ. My understanding of the misogyny living in Christianity has grown over the last 30 years. There is so much more to recognize here.
I love being a mother, it is so much more than caring about and for my children. Now I am a grandmother of five and I am certain this is a territory of inner adventure that will take me into places of self I have never imagined.