Who am I? Good question.
Depending on the hour, I feel like a woman, a grown-up girl, a mother, a daughter, a dual citizen, a friend, a businesswoman, a writer, a healing professional, and many others.
Below is a summary of the experiences and skills relevant to the moment.
Jen Sonstein Maidenberg, M.A. is a writer, researcher, and dreamworker. She received a B.A. from The George Washington University and an M.A. from the Shaindy Rudoff Creative Writing Program at Bar-Ilan University. Her full professional bio may be found on LinkedIn.
Jen has been independently studying dreamwork and healing for over 20 years. Currently, she is a student of Rodger Kamenetz, learning how to use Natural Dreamwork as a means of self-knowledge and healing.
Dreamworker
Online and in person, Jen guides individuals interested in remembering, exploring, understanding, and excavating their dreams.
Jen supports individuals seeking to engage with their dreams as a way of expanding and deepening their experience with waking life. Together, we focus on healing old wounds, undoing lifelong conditioning, and feeling more deeply. Some clients also choose to explore paranormal or spiritual experiences that arise both in dreams and waking life. (Meeting, in dreams, loved ones who have passed, for example; or remembering a past life trauma.)
Clients choose to work with Jen for a variety of reasons, including a desire to increase dream recall, understand “strange” dreams, heal old wounds, feel more alive and connected in waking life, or mend relationships with themselves, their loved ones, or people who have passed.
Jen personally practices Natural Dreamwork, working her own dreams using this empirical approach, with the plan of becoming a certified practitioner in this method.
Other related areas of expertise, study, or practice include watercolor painting, Jewish chanting, Kabbalah, Chinese medicine, embodiment work, attachment trauma and healing, mindful communication, astrology, psychic and intuitive development, reincarnation, paranormal encounters, and time travel.
Career Experience
Most recently, Jen worked as a content marketing executive in tech in both Israel and the U.S. Previously, she was a journalist and a children’s book club editor. She also founded, in 2007, Mindful Living NJ, a consulting company supporting holistic health and wellness practitioners with marketing, communications, and event planning.
An early blogger, in the late 90s, Jen wrote a weekly column about Buffy the Vampire Slayer for the site ScoopMe, and at the height of the Mommy Blog scene in the late 2000s, wrote searingly honest hot takes on health as “The Wellness Bitch.”
Writer
As a freelance journalist, Jen has reported for multiple news outlets — including The Times of Israel and the Arizona Jewish Post — covering books, literature, healing therapies, science, technology, psychic phenomena, community activism, and cultural events.
While living in the Northern Israel kibbutz community of Hannaton from 2010-2017, Jen studied creative nonfiction and poetry at Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv.
Jen’s essays and poems have been featured in Medium’s Human Parts, Zibby Owens’ Moms Don’t Have Time to Write, Dr. Richard Cytowic’s column for Psychology Today, Proximity, Split Lip, Queen Mob’s Tea House, District Lit, and Silver Birch Press. In 2015, she was named a finalist for the Ruminate Magazine Spiritual Nonfiction Prize.
Jen’s lyric essay memoir (the yet-to-be-published ‘Til I Am) has been named a finalist three times for the Autumn House Press full-length book contest (2016, 2017, & 2020). Two personal essays about her adjustment to life in Israel were included in the 2017 published anthology, Becoming Israeli. As an editor of Scholastic Book Clubs, she wrote three original activity books for elementary-age children.
Jen is currently researching dreams, Jewish mysticism, memory, music, precognition, time travel, synchronicity, consciousness, and the afterlife. Essays on these topics may be found on the home page and at jenmaidenberg.medium.com.
To support this research, please check out her Patreon page.