Peace, Freedom, Clarity, Joy

Jen loves celebrating and encouraging the beauty she sees in others. She's a gatherer and builder who naturally nurtures community and hosts safe environments for meaningful connection. She believes in our inherent wholeness and need for discovery and growth.  

While pursuing careers in dance and design, Jen recognized that she thrived most nurturing people. She spent almost two decades developing and facilitating programmed trips and events for faith-based community with Adventure Unlimited and her church. This included helping develop DiscoveryBound's National Leadership Council servant leadership program for teens as director during some of its formative years. 

As dean of girls at a prep school, Jen heard a calling to nurture the kind of sisterhood that defies current cultural stereotypes and expectations. Honest Heart Journeys was conceived during long conversations about strong, gracious womanhood with a sister friend during the COVID pandemic. She loves exploring topics and questions on women's hearts through blogging and the Honest Heart Podcast.

Wherever Jen's gone, her 'sisters' - wonderful women with whom she’s built teams, programs, and deep friendships - have been steady, supportive companions. This kind of quality sisterhood is woven through the HHJ experience. It encourages others to give time to nurture their spiritual and personal hearts and gently holds them accountable to seeing and living their fullness, which of course blesses others.

Jen and her husband Bill have three grown children and a growing posse of grandchildren. She and Bill split their time between Florida and Colorado...and wherever Jen's traveling with her HHJ sisters!

I first came across HHJ through a dear friend who connected me with this incredible organization. A few texts and a zoom call later, I am over the moon inspired by Honest Heart Journeys. 

I felt that my soul was on fire; I had connected with an organization of like minded and passionate women who want to give, connect, and heal. Truly wow! I leave every interaction with HHJ feeling inspired to continue on this journey of helping women heal inwardly so they can express themselves more fully and authentically outwardly. I thank the synchronicities of life and the will to surrender to this divine connection. 

When I am not life coaching or retreat planning, you can find me immersed in the flow of mother nature. I feel deeply connected to the water and love to scuba dive, outrigger canoe race, standup paddle race, surf..pretty much anything having to do with water. 

Nature is a conduit for me to “come home” to myself and my true nature and experience the power of presence which is why I am so passionate about providing the space for others to heal in nature surrounded by a supportive community of wholehearted women through retreats with Honest Heart Journeys. 

Monnie lives in St. Louis, MO with her husband, Steve, and their three children. She balances an active life raising children, leading experiential programs for middle schoolers, and planning adventures for all ages. For nearly 20 years, she has been engaged with women’s adventure groups, which she started with friends.

A love for children and the outdoors has guided many of Monnie’s experiences. She has been a classroom and outdoor educator for 17 years at experiential education schools in St. Louis, and for five years, she was a class leader for the National Leadership Council for teens. Her outdoor leadership grew through camp counseling and participating in NOLS and Outward Bound courses. She continues to lead numerous outdoor expeditions through the Principia Adventure program.

The horse ranch Monnie grew up on in the Black Hills of South Dakota continues to call her home for summer and winter adventures with her family, and she loves to travel and stay active outdoors with family and friends. Monnie looks forward to adventuring and sharing this passion with women through Honest Heart Journeys!

Originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina, Aileen immigrated to the United States to attend college. She later settled in the San Diego area where she met her husband, Scot, and together they raised their four children, now grown and living all over the world.

Aileen’s passion has been self-development. Her inner journey began as a young teen when her mother introduced her to the writings of Mary Baker Eddy, sparking a passion for metaphysics and inner growth. In her mid-twenties, she became a student of A Course in Miracles, a self-study course where the central teaching is the practice of forgiveness. She studied the Course for over 20 years with a beloved teacher, Dr. Kenneth Wapnick.  

Aileen believes that how we experience the world is directly related to the thoughts and beliefs we hold about it. In 2007 she discovered The Work of Byron Katie. In a short time, through this powerful practice, she began to feel more relaxed, flexible, tolerant, and more deeply connected to herself and others. 

Her desire to support others in their journeys led her to become a Certified Facilitator for The Work of Byron Katie and for the last twelve years she has worked with both individuals and groups, online and in person, to share this simple yet transformational method of self-inquiry. She has offered workshops in the US, Mexico, Europe, South America and Africa.  

Aileen speaks French and Spanish fluently and has traveled extensively, especially in Europe and South America. She is excited to share her passion for travel and inner growth with the women traveling with Honest Heart Journeys. 

Summer Davis is a third generation Angeleno born and raised in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles. She has also lived in St. Louis, Boston, Ecuador, Morocco and Peru and traveled to over 35 countries on her own adventures. She now splits her time leading authentic adventures abroad, sharing LA's hidden gems on food tours and experiences, many of which cross the footsteps of her family's heritage. She and her family live in both LA and Morocco.

Summer began leading walking tours in Hollywood and Los Angeles in 2010, and started her own tour business there in 2012. Since then, she has branched out to organize and lead tours through Ecuador, Morocco, Turkey, Peru, Nicaragua, Cuba, Spain and Portugal. She currently owns and operates tour companies in both Los Angeles and Morocco. 

Fluent in English, Spanish, French and Moroccan Arabic, she values language learning as the key to understanding, connecting with and positively impacting the world.

She is passionate about sustainable and transformative travel and positively impacting clients and the global community. Summer hopes to inspire guests with beauty – naturally dramatic landscapes and peaceful moments – and to encourage them to open their minds in order to allow more love, acceptance and wonder to enter in. Her hope is that the glory of these unique places and people humbles self-righteousness, close-mindedness and fear, and that each guest will let go of any personal strain or stress and fully absorb the love reflected in each moment.

Kerste and her husband live and work in the beautiful Pacific Northwest, in Bellevue, WA. Kerste enjoys hiking, camping, kayaking and trail running every chance she gets. 

While raising her children, she worked to support families as a college instructor in cooperative preschools, teaching both the children and the parents throughout her career. Through the Parent Education courses she’s taught she has loved the chance to work closely with families as they articulate their values and live by them as they grow their families. 

Kerste has always found the outdoors to be the place where she feels most at peace and ready to think hard. Kerste is really looking forward to adventuring with women on the HHJ Growth trips as we enter the next phase of life and continue to deepen relationships with our adult children, our spouses, our communities and nature!

Jess was raised by mountain guides and has been working and playing in mountain ranges across the world her whole life. She has been guiding for more than a decade, both internationally and domestically, and loves connecting people to beautiful and wild landscapes. 

Jess excels at creating spaces in which people feel equally challenged and supported. Connecting women into an incredible outdoor community of like minded individuals is her passion, whether it is set against the backdrop of foreign peaks or in the familiar setting of her home in Colorado. Jess is a seasoned adventure guide, instructor, mentor, teacher and loves getting to spend her time supporting women in exploring elements of themselves that are not as often brought into the light. Her greatest desire is that women walk away from her trips feeling like they have discovered that they are more capable, stronger, and have more sparkle than they originally believed. 

While her career has centered on writing, Ellen’s deeper passion within that is language, the cultural connections and implications, the unfamiliar sounds and meanings, and the surprises. She’d spent time in Western European countries during college and her first time in grad school (an MA in French), but after just nine days in Slovenia in 2012 studying creative nonfiction writing for her MFA, she was smitten with the nascent country. (It had been part of Yugoslavia until 1991.)

She couldn’t get enough of the culture, landscape, history, and gelato, so she designed a month-long study abroad program for college students, which she has led three times. When she returned from her last visit in 2022, she realized that while she was going to miss the country, what she would most miss were the friends she had made in her several visits to their Central European homeland. That’s why she snatched the opportunity to plan an Honest Heart Journey to Slovenia with Jen—friendships.

Since 2015, she’s been trying to learn Slovene (taking both online courses and in-person private lessons in Slovenia), but with little opportunity to practice, she says she’s really just a Slovene enthusiast with a lot of vocabulary and good friends. It’s been through reading literature from other countries—stories mostly from Slovenia and it’s neighbors—that she has learned enough about the history and culture of the region to feel she built and completed her own master’s degree in Balkan studies.

She loves the mountains and is so incredibly grateful to be able to work from her new home in Castle Rock, Colorado, remotely as Principia College’s Writing Center director with a few more roles. When she travels to Slovenia, the only things she misses are her husband, Josh, and her German Shorthair Pointer dog, Bader.

Mindfulness Teacher • Mindful Campus Project

Millie Wright is a mother, lover of nature, gardener, yoga practitioner, and mindfulness meditation teacher. Millie has been meditating for 30 years. She was inspired to learn meditation after going through a period of time dealing with challenges and life changes, which left her feeling anxious and at times ungrounded. She first learned Transcendental meditation and gradually felt a sense of calm, clarity, and ease in her daily life. During the next 23 years, Millie attended many retreats and workshops on different forms of meditation, and in 2012 she started focusing more on Insight/Vipassana meditation.

Millie is a graduate of the 2-year Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program, an intensive training program of the Awareness Training Institute at the University of California Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center, led by Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield. Her core teachers are Jack Kornfield, Tara Brach, and Rick Hanson, although she draws on the great knowledge of many other teachers today - Jon Kabat-Zinn, Sharon Salzberg, Kristin Neff, Joseph Goldstein, and Dr. Daniel Siegel. Millie has had training in Mindfulness Cognitive Based Therapy and Interpersonal Neurobiology.

Millie is a firm believer that the practice of mindfulness has the potential to bring about a more peaceful coexistence in our world today. She believes meditation opens the way to a better knowing of our true nature and creates a foundation for thriving throughout life with all its many challenges and beauty. Awake, Aware, and Alive!