The Ennobling of the Heart is a love letter to the clients and students I’ve had the privilege of collaborating with during the last 25 years. Again and again, I’ve borne witness to their hearts becoming “ennobled”—uplifted and exalted—when they forge relationships with benevolent helping spirits.
Julie was introduced to shamanic journeying in 2000, which enabled her to begin cultivating direct relationships with compassionate helping spirits using natural trance states. While continuing to receive training as a shamanic practitioner and facilitator, Julie began leading workshops in 2003 in order to teach others how to journey into the invisible dimensions of reality and partner with benevolent helping spirits.
Beginning in 2011, Julie expanded her offerings to include long-term trainings with the creation of The Sacred Call of the Healer, a yearlong immersion for healing practitioners across disciplines to collaborate with the unseen world. In 2012, Julie developed The Art and Practice of Shamanic Healing: A Three-Year Professional Training and Initiation, a comprehensive training for cultivating the broad skillset, proficiency, and stability needed to provide professional shamanic healing to clients.
Julie is devoted to training committed shamanic healing practitioners and teachers as a way to contribute to the restoration of spiritual healing to its rightful place alongside Western and Eastern Medicine; Energy Medicine; psychiatry and psychotherapy; and hands-on healing. What distinguishes Julie’s orientation is her emphasis on spiritual healing as a catalyst for personal and collective spiritual evolution. Correspondingly, participants in Julie’s transformative trainings appreciate them for their safety, depth, potency, and instructiveness.
Julie and her wife, Tami Simon, along with their two Spoodles, Raspberry and Bula, divide their time between Vancouver and Cortes Island, British Columbia, Canada.
Countless people who have visited Hollyhock on Cortes Island, B.C., have a “Hollyhock Story” to share that describes a life-altering experience they had there, and I am no exception. In fact, in my case, three events took place at Hollyhock that shaped the course of my adult life: becoming introduced to my helping spirits and the path of core shamanism in 2000; meeting and falling in love with my now-wife, Tami, in 2001; and becoming co-stewards with Tami—as well as a gaggle of lovely humans—of a swath of forest on Cortes Island in 2004, where we have since built our sweet cottage.
After beginning a relationship with Tami, I became a transplanted Canadian living where she was based, in Boulder, Colorado, where my journey as a practitioner and teacher began to unfold. I would like to express my gratitude to the beloved beings who supported and inspired that honing process during the 21 years that we spent in Boulder.
I gratefully acknowledge Sandra Ingerman, whose early encouragement and continued mentorship have been invaluable to me. My studies with you as a little shoot laid the ground for my continued unfolding as a practitioner and facilitator. I continue to be in awe of your generativity, generosity, and capacity.
I gratefully acknowledge Betsy Bergstrom, who provided me with a spiritual vocabulary and framework that served as the foundation for my honing process. The healings, teachings, and initiations that I received from you catalyzed immense growth for me, and I’m profoundly grateful to you for helping me uncover my medicine.
I gratefully acknowledge the living memory and radiant spirit of Malidoma Patrice Somé, whose allyship was and is a precious gift to me. Thank you for naming my evolutionary trajectory in ways that I continually refer to and take heart from.
I gratefully acknowledge Devi Records, my therapist, mentor, and supervisor from 2004–2023. Thank you for consistently demonstrating impeccable boundaries, constancy, and the healing potential of the client/practitioner relationship. Thank you for providing the chalice for my healing, growth, and rewriting for 19 years. I became who I am because of you. I will carry your wise council in my heart for all the years to come.
I gratefully acknowledge Sherry Bauer, my family’s energy healer for nearly 20 years. You are the true embodiment of humble mastery. Thank you for being a boundless well of kindness and compassion.
I gratefully acknowledge my former and current clients and students. You are precious and luminous beings, and I thank you for teaching me about evolutionary soul companionship and giving me ways to share my medicine, which has been a gift beyond measure.
I gratefully acknowledge my benevolent helping spirits, those known and unknown to me, because of whom I am never alone. At some point along the way, teaching became my Teacher. Thank you for inviting me to carry your medicine in the human realm.
I gratefully acknowledge my wife, Tami Simon. Everything begins and ends with you.
In this video (produced by Sounds True, the multimedia company founded by Julie’s wife, Tami Simon), Julie takes viewers on a journey to discover their benevolent helping spirits. She does this by inviting us into a natural trance state through the use of rattling, whistling, singing, and drumming to access an unseen realm of existence. There, we are able to encounter “a teacher, a guide, a wisdom figure or wisdom being” who has particular qualities that can help us fulfill our soul’s purpose. Finally, she advises us what to do after we encounter our helping spirit (or spirits) in order to initiate “a shared, wholehearted, collaborative effort” with them that recognizes us as mature adults with our own inner knowing.
