ZenJen & Tarot Vision, Neighbor

Energist and Jewelery Designer ZenJen and Intuitive Empath Christine Benedict from Tarot Vision team up to share their viewpoints and visions with Patch readers. They can be reached at zenjen@zenjewelz.com and tarot_vision@yahoo.com.

How Jen became Zen:

How does a typical kid from a conservative family become a jewelry designer and energist, helping her clients’ dreams come true?

Jen Mirman, energist and designer of zen jewelz, also known as “ZenJen,” made this journey.

Says Jen, “My family was very reserved, ‘country bumpkin’ types. I was the only one interested in fashion and making my own statement. I began to notice that I was always a year or two ahead of the style curve, from getting three holes pierced in my ear to wearing clogs and crazy high-top silver shoes to chopping one side of my hair off and leaving the other side long.”

Jen adds, “I was also always drawn to holistic, spiritual approaches to life, especially Native American traditions, and I was always enrolled in some kind of workshop for life transformations.”<br>Although Jen says she was the family rebel⎯ the “black sheep,” as she calls it⎯and wasn’t sure what she was going to do with her life, it was her conservative dad who first suggested she plan her future around her innate love for jewelry design and apply to the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT).

After graduating, Jen worked for a New York City-based designer, and then started her own line of custom jewelry. With her FIT degree and professional experience, Jen was already a jewelry designer by the time she was in her early 20s. But the journey towards becoming an energist was just beginning.

Jen got married and moved with her new husband to California, where she began to study nutrition and healthy eating. She and her husband then moved back to New York and started a family, and Jen applied her interests in and knowledge of health, wellbeing and transformation to her journey as a mother.

“When I was pregnant with my first son,” Jen explains, “I naturally connected with the idea of having a midwife in a birthing center. I labored in a tub with my family around me, and had a beautiful drug-free birth.” Jen also practiced the family bed, which meant her baby never slept in a crib, breastfed her infant for 17 months and made him all homemade organic baby food. Jen’s second son was also born with a midwife as Jen labored in a tub.

Finally, with her third baby she decided her home would be the perfect place to birth.  The baby was born in a birthing tub with a midwife, her family and other sons present, in what she calls the “most beautiful experience ever!”

As a mother, Jen continued to develop herself as a natural and holistic healer. “I practiced Homeopathy, macrobiotics, herbs, acupuncture, any forms of natural healing I could get my hands on,” she explains. “I was always resisting medical interventions as my kids grew up.”

Jen soon realized she was a gifted teacher, and began to share the knowledge she had gained with others. “I began teaching make-your-own baby food classes,” she recalls, “and I became an instructor of the Bradley Method of natural childbirth, started natural mothering groups, and became a birth doula, providing labor support for couples.” Jen even started her own Goddess circle for women to connect on a spiritual level, which is still a group seven years later, even though Jen is no longer part of it.

But then, crisis struck.  “With three babies all under the age of 4, I became severely depressed,” Jen reveals. “I wanted to escape from life.” She couldn’t get out of bed.

In the crisis there was, however, the opportunity of a lifetime.

Jen explains, “A dear friend came to visit me when I couldn’t get out of bed. She brought me an amethyst crystal and a citrine and did some energy work on me. The moment she introduced me to the gemstones, I was hungry for more.”

Inspired, Jen went to a local gemstone wholesaler and stocked up on stones and bought a book that explained the gemstones’ properties. Jen was amazed. She says, “I immediately began creating jewelry from the stones and as I was working with them and wearing them, I could literally feel the energy coming from them.”

Jen learned that gemstones hold energy and that they should be cleansed and charged with the specific energies the wearer wishes to attract. Subsequently, she began to incorporate the Native American practice of smudging⎯a ritual of cleansing energy with the herb, sage⎯into her work.

Newly dedicated to creating healing gemstone jewelry, Jen decided to make some changes, moving to a lake community in New Jersey that, as it turns out, has Native American history.

In her new home, Jen prayed a lot and visited psychics who would tell her to trust her “inner knowings” and inform her that she is a “teacher” on a grand scale. Jen began to create a new identity for herself, not only as a designer of gemstone jewelry, but also as a person known for her incredible intuition and spiritual capacities.

Jen began to realize that she and her jewelry, which were developing an amazing fan base, both needed to have a cohesive identity. Thus, zen jewelz and it’s designer, ZenJen, were born.

Today, Jen designs and sees clients at her studio, where, she says, “I am surrounded with only the most pure, positive energy.” Jen offers her clients gorgeous jewelry, and so much more, with services ranging from “sacred space cleanses” which attract positive energies to places such new homes, offices or baby’s nurseries to “beautiful blessing ceremonies” that honor women at a milestones in their lives.  Jen marvels that customers “come to me for jewelry, and they don’t realize that they are about to reveal their life lessons.”

For Jen Mirman, the culmination of her life’s journeys and lessons come together as ZenJen, the designer of zen jewelz, helping her clients manifest their dreams. And now Jen is manifesting her own dream⎯opening the first zen jewelz by: ZenJen retail store in Pompton Lakes NJ!