I am Jenny Ann Holden, my Jewish ancestors escaped genocide because they were conditioned by generations of survival instinct. My English, Scottish and German ancestors arrived on Turtle island 400-500 years ago as early settlers. I do not know all of their stories but I have connected with those wise women who spoke truth to power, who tended to births and who I feel in my bones, connected to the earth as sacred.

For this is who I am. I am a dash of neurospicey, feral and relentlessly optimistic, blended with philosophical, open-hearted and courageous. I am more than the sum of my parts and the chapters of my story. I move through the world unafraid to feel the suffering while always keeping my eyes open for the beauty. I praise both because I know they are one in the same.

I was raised in the shadow of a mountain who was named after a Coast Salish warrior who was banish from his community. I grew up on land haunted by colonial violence and religious hatred in the form of a residential day school. I grew up on land still racially segregated by the Indian Act. I grew up on land whose geography tells the mythic stories of the indigenous people who tended the land for countess generations. These realities shaped my psyche and way of seeing the world. My body became a doorway, as Sophie Stand writes about in her memoir, for stories to enter that were bigger than my own.

Like many highly-sensitive children, I became afraid of my own body for it longed to listen to and understand these otherworldly and shadowy stories. And so I closed the door of my body. I did not understand that doing so would also close me from my sensitivity and I quickly became numb and disconnected. I became prey for predatory young men by the age of 14 and soon my body was directly traumatized by patriarchal coded intent.

I drifted further and further from my body and being. Dawning mask after mask in the hopes that invisibility would keep me safe. I found that my mind was the only safe place I could protect. And so I invested heavily in my intellect, pursuing higher education for 10 years. My heart still yearned to understand the world, its trauma’s and it’s most powerful stories of healing. So this is what I set out to do.

I joined protest movements while studying institutional power. I marched, opening my voice to the song in my heart while debating the roots of cultural violence. I cried from deep wells of ancestral grief (I dint have the language or awareness at the time), while tracking the trajectory of women’s social movements across generation. And I burnt out while generating tens of thousands of dollars for work that would inspire future generations to take action on behalf of a more just, sustainable and loving world.

By the time I crashed at the age of 27, I had no idea how I ended up so desperately depleted. I did not yet understand that I had a non-existent relationship to my body and that the 15 years of surviving in an emotionally abusive relationship had (just about) zapped my will to live. As I approached my Saturn Return, my soul intuitively gathered a few tools for the wild terrain ahead. My first underworld journey was initiated after losing my beloved grandmother, the splitting of my heart open by grief of her loss brought with it a creative surge that I had never felt before.

For the first time in my life I wanted to create, not with my mind, but with my Soul. Something inside of my opened to this desire. It pushed against my masks. The tool that my soul had gathered for me was a camera and a pen. I made my first self-portraits in the early spring of 2016. I created a Facebook Album titled Self-Expression Experiment with 21 images and a story that revealed, for the first time in my life, my honest state, that of depression and grief. I received no external validation.

But seeing raw, authentic self for the first time, shifted something. Something came alive. A creative current of self-expression that continues to guide me to this day. For the following 2 years I would continue to make self-portraits and I began posting on Instagram. I gained a small number of followers and I slowly began to share more and more. It took 2 years for the false life I had created to drop out from underneath me but by this time I was so deep in the Dark Night of the Soul that I was no longer afraid of loss. So I surrendered everything. My relationship, my home, my job and career path, and my identity.

I returned home (literally and otherwise)

The next tool arrived in the form of conscious dance and I slowly returned to my body. I began shaking off years and lifetimes of trauma. I was unwinding deep layers of cultural conditioning.

This is when I decided to commit to a creative life and the vision of Infinite Body came through me. A grace, I attributed to my grandmother’s loving presence, carried me through this time as it was not easy as I met so much doubt and fear.

The void I touched in order to bring this vision to life became a dark shroud around me that few felt comfortable to be with. And so much of the time I was alone with myself. But this was a blessing as I had been gone from myself so long. And so I continued to creates images for myself (those above). I began sharing about my sexual trauma. No one around me talked about such things and I wasn’t being influenced by the social media culture that is now present.

The truth poured out of my as natural as the rain from the sky.

I was touching more and more grief and trauma within my own body, largely through the self-portrait practice I was developing (combined with 5 Rhythms Dance). I shared publicly because I trusted that this was apart of the magic that was weaving me back together. I did not try to make sense of it with my mind and instead learned to ride the waves of vulnerability that often left me wanting to crawl into a cave never to emerge.

But I always did. By spring 2019, I officially launched Infinite Body Photography- the first, to my awareness photography business solely devoted to the healing power of images and authentic expression.

I have since worked with 200+ women (across the world), creating tens of thousands of healing images. To this day I continue to unearth and develop this methodology and am now beginning to teach. Infinite Body Studio today continues to honour the power of therapeutic photography, embodiment and nature connection while merging back with my academic work in social movement building, feminine leadership, and collective trauma healing.