Origin Story · Lindsay James
The Wild Holiness of Existence
Every life is a story stitched through mystery, memory, and becoming.
The beginning
I was born on the red earth of Oklahoma in the early 1980s.
Back when childhood still happened outdoors.
When kids disappeared on bicycles until the streetlights came on.
When creeks were kingdoms, trees were cathedrals, and entire afternoons could be spent chasing adventure with scraped knees and a pocket full of possibilities.
Before the words
Long before I had words like ceremony, grief work, somatics, ecopsychology, or death doula, I was already listening for something…
A deeper song.
A hidden current beneath ordinary life.
A way of being in the world that felt more alive, more honest, more connected than what I saw around me.
Never a straight line
I’ve spent most of my life following that thread.
Not in a straight line.
Never in a straight line.
Through love and loss.
Through motherhood, marriage, and divorce.
Through heartbreak and reinvention.
Through wild landscapes and dark nights of the soul.
Through classrooms, nonprofit boardrooms, hospital rooms, ceremony circles, birth rooms, deathbeds, forests, kitchens, deserts, and countless conversations around sacred fires.
Each chapter, the same question
What helps human beings come fully alive?
The answer has never been simple. But it has always been beautiful.
The long way home.
I thought I might become a lawyer.
Then a social worker.
Then a special education teacher.
I’ve always been drawn toward those living at the edges of what society understands. The misunderstood. The overlooked. The grieving. The struggling. The extraordinary. The deeply human.
Yet every path eventually led me to the same realization:
I cared less about systems than I did souls.
Less about bureaucracy than belonging.
Less about managing people than understanding them.
Then, in what felt like divine sleight of hand, life rerouted me into a degree in Peace & Reconciliation Studies when I transferred during my final year of Social Work coursework at Colorado State University, to the University of Maine, where my then-husband got a job.
That education changed everything. Suddenly I was immersed in three more years of coursework in ecopsychology, depth psychology, conflict resolution, death and dying, social justice, forgiveness, community restoration, collaborative communication, ritual, herbalism, healing arts, shamanic arts, and the question of what allows individuals and communities to heal and thrive.
It wasn’t simply an academic program.
It was a doorway.
The first place where all the seemingly disconnected pieces of my life began to converge.
For the first time, I understood that my work would never fit neatly inside a single profession.
I wasn’t training for a career.
I was being initiated into a vocation.
Tending the roots
Before finally opening my private practice in 2011, I spent a decade tending the roots of community care — as a social worker, leadership trainer, and facilitator of philanthropic giving, advocacy, and service devoted to collective restoration.
Two decades at the edges
A life spent at thresholds.
Over the last two decades, I have walked alongside thousands of people as they navigated the tender and terrifying work of being human.
I’ve sat with the dying.
Held grieving families.
Guided ceremonies.
Mentored leaders.
Supported couples.
Facilitated healing circles.
Trained practitioners.
Raised three extraordinary children.
Built communities.
Lost things I loved.
Found myself again.
Lost myself again.
What I’ve come to know
And somewhere along the way I realized that most of us are not suffering from a lack of information. We’re suffering from disconnection.
My work exists to help restore those relationships through honesty, presence, devotion, and the courage to meet the full terrain of being human, and a willingness to stay present for what is real.
At the heart of my work is a devotion to right-relationship.
Right-relationship with the self.
With one another.
With the body.
With the land.
With grief.
With the sacred.
With the unseen ecosystems our choices ripple through.
I believe our inner work belongs to the whole. The way we tend ourselves shapes the way we love, lead, speak, parent, partner, serve, grieve, create, and participate in the world. When we carry what is ours with honesty and dignity, something ancient returns. We walk more upright. We become more responsible for our impact. We begin to understand that our healing feeds the greater field.
My work is rooted in this movement from the me to the we.
This is responsibility. Reciprocity. Relational integrity. The ongoing practice of becoming a clearer, kinder, more truthful human inside the living web of all things.
What I Believe
I believe grief belongs in the village.
I believe love is a practice.
I believe community is medicine.
I believe our bodies carry wisdom.
I believe the Earth is teacher, guardian, provider, and Mother.
I believe death has something to teach us about being fully alive, and the passageway through is meant to be honored as ceremony.
I believe every threshold contains an invitation.
I believe healing is rarely neat or quick.
I believe transformation is sacred, significant, and wildly ordinary.
I believe we are here to participate in life, not perfect it.
Most of all, I believe that beneath all of our striving, performing, fixing, and proving, there is something in each of us longing to remember who we already are.
My work is simply to help people find their way back, and then through.
If you’re curious
My Credentials.
Trained & Certified
- Bachelor’s Degree in Peace & Reconciliation Studies
- Certified Death Doula
- Trauma-Informed Somatic Practitioner
- Leadership Trainer & Community Builder
- Breathwork Practitioner
- Energy & Karuna Level II Reiki Practitioner
Founder & Author
- Founder of The Way of the Medicine Woman
- Co-Founder of WildKind Women’s Leadership & Resilience Certification
- Author of Roots & Rites — The Art of Tending Life Itself
Student of
- Ecopsychology
- Depth Psychology
- Conflict Transformation
- Embodiment & Movement
- Sound Healing
- Internal Family Systems
- Emotional Clearing
- Ritual Arts & Earth-Based Practices
- Animism
And, most truly
- Friend, & Beloved to My Man
- Mother of Three
- Keeper of Many Fires
- Perpetual Student of Existence
But truthfully?
The credentials matter far less than the life.
Because the real training has always been the same…
Showing upPaying attentionStaying curiousLoving deeply
And learning, again and again, how to remain fully human.
If you’ve found your way here
This is the Work I Get to Do
Whether you’re navigating love, loss, purpose, partnership, leadership, grief, becoming, or simply the ache for a more meaningful life, there is a place for you here.
Bring your whole self.
The polished parts. The messy parts.
The uncertain parts. The magnificent parts.
I’ll meet you there.