We had the good fortune of connecting with Jane Rothfeld and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Jane, we’d love to hear about how you approach risk and risk-taking
In July of 2020, my husband told me we had seven weeks of living expenses and then we were broke. He was the main earner in our household and took care of most of the bills, still, the news came as a shock.

It was the summer of the pandemic and he had been job-searching for fifteen months. He had a Masters degree and twenty years of experience in his field: we thought he’d find a job. But after fifteen months of intense searching and applying to jobs for which he was qualified to a tee, he had had no responses. There was complete radio silence from the job world. We were in the midst of what I call a “rug pull.”

Though it was a slow pull at first, nonetheless the rug was being pulled from underneath us. I call it the “rug pull” when the things that form people’s lives and realities are yanked away. That which had formed the underpinnings of our life was disappearing. This is the part of the story where most people want to know the details of what we did. I will get back to that. To answer the question at hand: “What role has taking risks played in your life?” I want to first discuss the inner dynamics of the rug pull and “living the risk.”

In life, we are trained to be right and obedient. We are warned to carefully think through all our choices and not do anything stupid. This conditioning keeps us in fear and we pay a price for this. Fear limits the spiritual and intuitive bandwidth within which we function. When animals feel fear their physical vision literally shrinks and limits itself. A similar thing happens to our inner vision when we operate from fear. We tend to see the same problems and limited options to solve them. We essentially live the same life over and over, an endless retreading.

In contrast, when you take risks and especially when you experience a rug pull, your inner life shifts radically along with your outer life. In life, I believe everything starts within ourselves, including even the rug pull (though it plays out in our so-called outer lives). Taking risks or having, in effect, the risk take you, which is how the rug pull feels, causes the dynamics of our inner lives to profoundly transform. You are in completely unknown territory. You have to find your way.

Whether you feel like you chose the risk or the risk chose you, your spiritual self is throwing down the gauntlet, making a statement: “I am putting everything on the line. I’m willing to walk into the unknown and cross through the barriers, walk through this door and the next and the next. I am no longer willing to let fear stop me. ” This is power. Even though this process can feel uncomfortable and sometimes terrifying – we humans don’t like change – we grow past fear in all its guises and become someone utterly new in the process. In our essence, we humans are beyond fear and all the fearful, judgmental thoughts that usually stop us. That is good news because we are here to grow spiritually and when we take risks we grow like crazy.

Back to the details of my life. It would take many pages to adequately describe everything my husband and I have experienced from July, 2020, until now, but I will try to summarize. To best understand how we were guided to shape our new life and how we made our decisions, it helps to understand three things: 1) it was the midst of a global pandemic and everything felt like it was shifting from the ground up; 2) I had had intuitive hunches about upcoming profound planetary changes for decades and was not interested in going back to a life that resembled the past and 3) my husband had always been the one who fit most comfortably in the world-as-it-is, especially the work world, so when that world would not engage him, it made moving forward into the unknown not only practical, but necessary.

We had lived in multi-unit dwellings for most of our married life (we got married in 1992). When we were able to buy our house and land in northern Colorado in 2012 it was a dream come true. When it became clear in the summer of 2020 that we would have to sell that house, I knew I was not going back to apartment/condo/townhome life or anything like it. We borrowed money to get our house ready for sale and the week we were going to put it on the market, the Cameron Peak Fire in northern Colorado grew 55,000 acres in one day and we had to evacuate. Fortunately, the Cameron Peak fire missed our neighborhood and our house went on sale in November 2020. After what seemed like an endless amount of work we sold it in December 2020.

We wanted beauty, privacy and acreage, so we bought land. We wanted to stay in Colorado or northern New Mexico and would have loved to have a well and the option to be on the electrical grid, but all the land with any amenities like water and electricity was very expensive, so we bought 36 acres of “raw” land (nothing but the dirt and vegetation) in southern Colorado on a Mesa. Neither of us had ever lived off-grid before, much less off-grid in one of the coldest zones in the country.  It was the true frontier!

For housing, we had to stay on a tight budget and timeline – some alternative housing companies had two-year waitlists in the Spring of 2021 – so we ended up getting two 500 sq feet yurt cabins and two woodstoves. We bought a 2020 Silverado pickup – our first truck ever. We bought an RV and one of our cats ended up living in it on a neighborhood street in Cheyenne for 7 months (with one of us) because of cat wars.

The story of what it took to get the yurts put up in an area hundreds of miles from where we were living; how my husband finally found a job three years (!) after searching (that thankfully let him work remotely); the unexpected money that came from out of nowhere when we were running out of everything; how we learned to go to the bathroom in off-grid life and how we survived the first winter in the San Luis Valley is material for a later book. We finally moved permanently to Wild Horse Mesa in San Luis, Colorado on August 31st, 2022.

I have come to call this way of life the Alchemical Bootcamp. I call it that because this pioneering life reshapes me spiritually every day. It does so in using extremely mundane ways and methods. It’s fascinating and also very uncomfortable. I’m a girl from the Jersey suburbs outside Manhattan. I grew up around malls, great restaurants and the arts. When I was very young my Mother used to take my sister and me to Carnegie Hall to hear the Children’s Symphony directed by the one and only Leonard Cohen and then to a lovely Upper West Side restaurant to dine for lunch. Now I live exclusively among dirt, pinon and sage (beautiful pinon and sage) and the closest food source I have is the Dollar Store.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
The main thing I would want people to know about my work story is that it is still very much being written! In many ways I feel my work on Earth has yet to begin. I have always been a spiritual person, interested in realities that are not always part of the collective fabric. This “double life” has been challenging at times and has been particularly challenging in the category of work, but the planet is changing quite radically and I plan to be a wayshower for what is to come. I have always loved writing and telling stories. I searched for years to find a way to express my spiritual truth in a work world that did not necessarily have a space for it. After writing a few articles about spiritual topics and pitching many more, I decided to use the children’s book genre to express my inner vision. Children’s literature is great because it is one of the few places where whimsy and magic are still celebrated. I wanted to write a book where the infinite nature of spirit was part of the world of money which is rife with limitation and conditions. Though not trained as a visual artist, many visions and images filled my mind when I thought of the book, so I decided not only to write, but to illustrate it myself.

The first version of the book was simply called “The Infinite Bank.” Young brother and sister, Omar and Alice, were the main characters. They had a mystical encounter with a lady in an energy vortex who guided them to a magical land where they found the Infinite Bank. The Infinite Bank is place where you can get all the money you want whenever you want it and everyone is welcome.

I did extensive research on publishing options and decided to publish the book myself. After finishing the first iteration of the book, I was reading Mo Willems’ great children’s book “Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!” in my local Barnes and Noble and got chills when I decided to make an animal the main character of my book. We had just adopted our first cat, Lili, and were madly in love with her, so I decided to make a fictional version of Lili the main character of my book and the idea for “Lili the Cat Finds the Infinite Bank” was born.

It became my passion project. However, I struggled mightily with perfectionism and fear. Partly because of that and the fact that 40 hand-painted illustrations took a long time and life threw me a few curveballs along the way, it took several years to publish the book. It was published in the Spring of 2016.

I published the hard copies of the book with a print-on-demand service which was expensive, but I loved the hard copy version of the book. After publishing it, I did several book readings, got the book on the shelves at a few local Barnes and Noble stores, received some good online reviews, but was putting more money into the venture than I was receiving, so I had to pivot and start exploring other avenues. Then came 2020 and my husband and I had to shift our whole reality. “Lili the Cat Finds the Infinite Bank” is still available in e-book form and I have included the links, (1) Nook version at: barnesandnoble.com and (2) Kobo version at: kobo.com and 3) Apple version at https://books.apple.com

Off-grid life on the Mesa takes alot of time and energy, but I still see new work for me in the future. For now, I am in the alchemical bootcamp with my life providing deep transformation through elemental starkness. I have blogged extensively on the different facets of the alchemical bootcamp (see the link to my blog). The shape my future work will take is yet to be determined, but that is because the future of our planet is yet to be determined (though I know it’s beyond good).

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
Well, by now you know I do not live in the city or even near one! I could easily entertain a friend for a week if they loved backcountry camping because that is essentially how we live and what we have to offer. However,  I could offer them a unique and wonderful time for a couple of days. I would have them visit during the summer when the nights are warm. In the morning I would make us coffee and then we’d walk around my land. When it was still early enough in the day – before the sun got too hot – we would sit on the bench my husband bought in Taos, NM that rests in a special spot. We would bask in the beauty of the nature on the land – the pinon trees, sagebrush and pristine air – and enjoy the view of the numerous mountain ranges that surround it, including a majestic view of Mt. Blanca to the north. We’d chat and catch up.

Then we would drive the hour and fifteen minutes to Taos, NM. We would walk around town, go to the Attcity Gallery, browse and say “hi” to the owner, Cherylynn. We would hop over to La Cueva Cafe and eat a late lunch on the patio. Eventually we would drive back to the property for the nightly show of dazzling stars that glisten amidst the Milky Way which runs like a celestial river through the night sky. Can’t get that in a city!

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
My husband, Vyvyan Brunst, an extremely gifted photographer and artist in his own right, has supported me in every way. I could not have carried on without his generous heart and unwavering belief in me. It is tough work to go against the grain in one’s work and to be a spiritually tuned-in person in a spiritually tone-deaf world. He has never doubted the value of my inner truth and my ability to create valuable work. Not only has he been an emotional force of positivity, he also generously helped me with all my digital work, including the digitizing of my children’s book, which was an enormous task. He contributed years’ worth of time and expertise to my project. If I had, had to hire out the work, it would have cost me many thousands of dollars, plus the quality of his work is so high it would have been hard to match it regardless of price. There have been wonderful friends and gifted instructors who have made invaluable contributions to not only my work, but my life. As for business coaches, I searched for years to find coaches who spoke “spirit-to-business” – meaning they used spiritual principles and what I’ll call quantum values to run their businesses. I found two who stood out.

The first was Laura Leigh Clarke, a business coach who has since moved on to new ventures. In addition to other work, Laura wrote a book called “Wired For Wealth.” It guides the reader to clear their inner blocks using unique techniques to create the life they desire. I was introduced to Laura on a webinar in 2012 hosted by another writer. Laura is a quantum physicist by training (for real!). She transformed her life and built a coaching business for entrepreneurs using a technique called The Sedona Method. I was part of Laura’s Entrepreneur coaching group that met on Zoom – before anyone had ever heard of it – and she was a solid uplifting presence in my world, reminding me that wealth really does come from within ourselves, which is the theme of my children’s book.

The last person who had a profound effect on me was Lorna Johnson, a spiritual business coach who created a powerful transformation technique called “Shadow Alchemy.” Shadow Alchemy offers singular methods to identify and clear fear, then establish new “codes” within the practitioner to radically transform their life. Lorna took her dramatic experience of receiving numerous mental illness diagnoses and transmuted those inner states into power using the Shadow Alchemy technique. She also applied Shadow Alchemy to her business and went from being broke and living with her parents to grossing a million dollars within a year.
While I did not follow her dramatic earning arc, her powerful work took my sense of self-responsibility to a new level and allowed me to endure the dramatic shifts that followed in my own life without seeing myself as a victim. This ability to know the truth about our own power is vital and Lorna’s wisdom and magic were exceptional.

Website: https://www.innertools.link

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/janearothfeld/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jane-a-rothfeld-25439740/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JaneRothfeldStarCoach

Image Credits
Vyvyan Brunst Richard Ricchiuti

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