About Jane

About Jane Ilene Cohen

Jane is an Intuitive and Transformational Counselor.  She certified as an Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and TimeLine Therapy™ Master Practitioner, and Clinical Hypnotherapist with Dr. Tad James in 1995.  She is the Founder of the "Life is Meant to Work" thought system, and is also an ordained minister.

Jane has a larger vision beyond her counseling practice. This is leading edge work, pushing back the envelope of the human consciousness that has kept us, as humanity, limited in our ability to live fully satisfying, empowered and awakened lives.  This is a very congruently, deeply positive frame-of-reference that she holds in place in all of the work she does and in her writing.  She is currently working on a book describing the vision that is at the core of her work.
 
Jane has had a counseling practice since 1995, currently in Encinitas, CA (San Diego North County), where she works with couples, families and individuals (adults and children).  The power of her work with individuals comes from the transformational NLP TimeLine process and the totally positive "Life is Meant to Work" thought system she developed, combined with her intuitive and empathic abilities.

Jane's articles (as well as poems) have been published in "The Light Connection," "Vision Magazine," "Awareness Magazine," "San Diego Bride & Groom," "SpirialMuse," The Heart of a Woman, The Heart of a Mother, The Heart of the Holidays, and The Heart of a Woman in Business (anthologies compiled by Sheryl Roush), EzineArticles.com, and Selfgrowth.com.  Jane received an Award of Excellence from Mo Bailey and Write4Good Communications for her article "Sexual Energy: Reality versus Illusion."

Guiding Principles Jane holds in place

1) Life is meant to work wonderfully well.  If it appears to not be working, there are limiting decisions distorting your experience of reality, that can be cleared.

2) Underneath people's defense systems the only thing that exists between people is love.
 

History Overview of Jane's Spiritual Path

"I was born in 1945 in Chicago, Illinois. As a child most of life was pretty much a haze, which I had little idea how to relate to. In high school, in the early 60's, the world started changing in a way that I started to feel connected with. A new counter-culture was emerging with protests against the Vietnamese war, the impact of Buckminster Fuller, people beginning to question the established order and experiment with different ways of relating to each other.

After graduating from high school I went to Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa and studied art. There I met and married a journalism student. We joined the Peace Corps after he graduated in 1966, as an alternative to him being drafted into the war, and we served in Peru until 1968. We then moved to Chicago where I went to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to finish my BFA degree.

Being a student at the Art Institute was a huge awakening for me where I met many people I could relate to, really for the first time, and was exposed to many new ideas. I became tremendously excited about life, reading philosophy and anthropology books, among others, wanting to understand the roots of human consciousness. But I was still personally unawake, having almost no self-knowledge and in a very dysfunctional marriage.

I graduated from the Art Institute in 1970, separated from my husband, and moved to San Diego to go to graduate school in art at UCSD. I moved into a "commune," and plunged into the hippie experience, beginning to let go of a lifetime of repression. In 1971, I joined a group that began as an encounter group. It was both a terrifying and fascinating experience, as the facilitator penetrated into the deeply unconscious dynamics between people that were happening under the surface, exposing it all out in the open. I realized I had been hungering for connecting with this usually hidden material that is at the heart of human relating.

This group eventually became a live-in situation because the facilitator's autistic daughter needed 24-hour care. It eventually evolved into a spiritual community. I left graduate school and moved in. I was 26 years old. As the years went by it became an increasingly more stringent, controlled, extreme, pressure cooker experience where celibacy was required, and there was not much contact with the outside world. It brought me to a rock bottom place where most of the ways of cushioning myself against my dysfunctional dynamics were stripped away. I was living in a nightmare fed by my own unhealed issues, intertwining with the dysfunctional issues of the leader and participants in the community. During a period of time in which I was experiencing many dark nights of the soul, I made a deal with God, that if He helped me through what I was going through, I would help others. And it seems, in looking back, from that point on the desire to become a healer, in some form, became a growing passion in me.

The community was not completely dysfunctional. There were many aspects of it that were very enlightened and gave me some deep understandings about following a spiritual path, facilitating and participating in groups, uncovering unconscious dynamics between people, and experimenting with different forms of relating. Because celibacy was required, there was much focus on bringing out into the open the sexual dynamics between people that were happening under the surface. And because life there was such a constant emotional pressure cooker, deep unconscious emotions and dynamics in and between people, that are usually kept under control, were pretty much out in the open.

One of the most important of my experiences in the community was working with the autistic girl. I spent a great deal of time with her, taking care of her, helping her with her communication and other kinds of lessons, being on duty with her at night while she slept. I had to learn how to communicate and relate to a person who couldn't speak, could barely function, was highly suicidal, was frequently emotionally out of control and harming herself, but was clearly a very deep, deep soul. We formed a deep emotional bond with each other. In learning to relate to and work with her, I developed strong empathic and intuitive abilities, and discovered within myself a deep source of compassion. In addition to these experiences, I also participated in many therapeutic and self-growth experiences outside of the community.

I fully participated in all that was required at the community as part of my search for meaning. Much of the philosophy of the spiritual leader was based on the belief that there are good and bad people. And the bad people have to let themselves be controlled by the good ones to save their souls, and to not be wronging the good ones. Most of the participants, including me, were considered basically bad, and so the disciplines required were supposed to be a process of saving our souls. The bad ones were required to give up their own self-interest for the benefit of the good ones. And suffering and sacrifice was considered virtuous.

There were several profound learnings I got from the negative aspects of the experience. Much of the positive and empowered spiritual foundation I now stand on, and through which I am able to help many people, is the result of this learning. I learned how dysfunctional and subjective the idea of good versus bad is, and how much it depends on the perspective of who is defining it, and how impossible it is as a perspective for transformation and healing. I learned how dysfunctional it is to give up your own self-interest for the "benefit" of others. I learned what happens when you give up the control of your life, and your perceptions of reality, to some outside authority. And I learned that a philosophy of suffering and sacrifice is a black spiral, which, in fact, serves no one.

Eventually when I began to realize how dysfunctional the spiritual community was, and that it was no longer a growing experience for me, I decided to leave. I was 48 years old. I rented an apartment, and lived alone for the first time in my life. This was one of the most difficult and transformative experiences in my life. For 22 years I had pretty much been isolated, and in a whole different experience of reality, from mainstream society. And now having realized how dysfunctional the spiritual community was, I had no structure for reality to lean on to orient my life around. I began to have frequently panic attacks. This is when I began my intense study of A Course in Miracles, which was incredibly accurate to my inner experience. I studied it by myself, putting notes all over my apartment, pounding through my unconscious mind concepts that could only be taken in through deeply transforming my consciousness. I eventually developed a very strong, highly positive, spiritual plumb line to orient my present moment experience of life around, as opposed to leaning on an outside structure to define reality for me.

Two years after leaving the community, at 50 years old, I got my NLP Master Practitioner, TimeLine Therapy™ Master Practitioner, and Clinical Hypnosis training in Kona, Hawaii with Tad James, and I began my counseling practice. I began experiencing that in focusing in on my clients' issues, in order to get to the bottom of them, I was able to access a deep source of knowledge, which I had had no idea was there. I thought I would eventually get to the end of this pool of knowledge, but it kept opening up.

In 1997 I re-founded the Healing Network with several other healing practitioners (using the past organization's model), for the purpose of bringing together a network and community with those of like mind. Soon into the process I was leading the organizing of the monthly gatherings and facilitating them. I started bringing into it an increasingly more spiritual focus, beginning to understand the potential of aligned groups in opening up resources and participating in a larger cosmic plan. Each month the gatherings took an enormous amount of courage and effort for me, because I was terrified of public speaking. But I continued facilitating it for over 2 years.

In approximately 1998-1999, I went to a workshop for New Group of World Servers put on by the Meditation Mt. people at Ojai, California. My experience there ignited a much clearer sense of, and a passionate commitment to, the larger cosmic context of the vision that was coming through me. This has been growing and evolving ever since. By then I was basically the sole leader of the Healing Network, as I was clearly on fire with a vision, and in September of 1999, I transitioned it into a new organization called the Conscious Healing Connection, which had a much stronger spiritual focus. I began accessing a deeper level of soul knowledge, as I focused on what I was guided to bring in for each monthly gathering, in the context of the vision that was emerging. I was starting to access information from a larger global and cosmic perspective. I put out a newsletter, writing an article each month describing where the vision for the organization had evolved to. In the months leading up to the new millennium, the CHC put on a series of panels, made up of community new age leaders, discussing and interacting with audience participants about significant questions for this important transition. But the meetings were starting to draw 30 to 50 people. And the alignment of focus I saw to be necessary for the levels of connection between people that would bring about the transformation and evolution of themselves, and the vision that was coming through to me, was clearly not possible in such a large group.

The last gathering was November 1999; the energy for continuing was no longer there. And I was way beyond being out of energy myself. I had been functioning at an energy deficit for a long time, on top of chronic insomnia and fatigue I had developed in the spiritual community. In February 2000, I stopped all outside activities, other than seeing clients and creating a healing environment to live in, with not even enough energy to take a walk. I knew I had to make a major change in my life if I was going to survive. As burning as the vision was in me, I knew I had to make my own well-being an even greater priority. During this period I developed a deep understanding of the vital importance of enlightened self-interest as a part of genuine spiritual process. I did a great deal of writing, and the areas of knowledge I was accessing were expanding. It seemed that wherever I put my conscious attention, in the context of what really mattered to me, that area would open up for me and bring in a deep level of soul knowledge. I started writing articles, a number of which have been published over the years, describing the emerging visions. Since that time I have continued to go through many levels of bringing my focus back to my own enlightened self-interest and well-being, to make a shift into a different paradigm of survival. This has had a large positive effect on my health and energy. Pivotal in this process was my discovering the Abraham-Hicks work, "The Science of Deliberate Creating." For me this brought the extremely positive concept of reality I gained from studying A Course in Miracles, a quantum leap forward.

Having been a very shy, self-effacing person most of my life, My path has been a process of transforming myself to come increasingly more out in the world, becoming a vehicle to express the largeness of my vision."

This history covers my path up until about 2004. I've continued my spiritual journey, and when the time is right I'll write about it.