Who am I? Good question. It depends on the time, day, season, and who is asking.
Below is a summary of the experiences and skills relevant to the moment.
Jen Sonstein Maidenberg, M.A. is a writer, researcher, and Certified Natural Dreamwork practitioner. She received a B.A. from The George Washington University Honors Program in International Politics and an M.A. from the Shaindy Rudoff Creative Writing Program at Bar-Ilan University. She apprenticed for two years with Rodger Kamenetz, founder of Natural Dreamwork, and received certification in this method of dreamwork in 2025. Her full professional bio may be found on LinkedIn.
Jen has been independently studying dreams, psychic phenomena, and alternative healing for more than 20 years. Online and in person (in New Jersey), Jen guides individuals interested in remembering, excavating, and exploring more deeply their nightly dreams. Clients choose to work with Jen for a variety of reasons, including a desire to increase dream recall, understand “strange” dreams or paranormal experiences, heal old wounds, feel more alive and connected in waking life, connect more deeply to their passions or soul, tap into their creativity, or mend relationships with themselves, their loved ones, or people who have passed.
Jen’s training includes using dreams and Natural Dreamwork to support individuals who identify as having experienced trauma, C-PTSD, attachment wounding, relationship anxiety, overwhelm, burnout, or a dysregulated nervous system. She is well-versed in neurodivergence and offers a neurodivergent-affirming container for dreamwork.
She also supports individuals who would like to integrate non-ordinary or mystical experiences, whether those occur in a waking state or a dream state (or somewhere in between.)
See Dreamwork for more information, or read recent posts to learn more.
Related Studies and Practices
Other related areas of Jen’s expertise, study, interest, or practice include consciousness studies, Kabbalah, music, embodiment work, Classical Chinese medicine, astrology, synchronicity, psychic and intuitive development, reincarnation, paranormal encounters, and time travel. In 2024, Jen received certification in Past Life Therapy training with the Weiss Institute, facilitated by Brian Weiss and Carole Weiss. She has independently studied Kabbalah since 2021, with a focus on meditative and prophetic Kabbalah, with a special interest in the Sefer Yetzirah, a foundational text of Jewish mysticism.
Career Experience
Previously, Jen worked as a tech content marketing executive in both Israel and the U.S. She was a journalist and a children’s book club editor before that. She also founded in 2007 Mindful Living NJ, a consulting company supporting holistic health and wellness practitioners with brand identity, marketing, communications, and event planning.
An early blogger, in the late 1990s, 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 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, 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. She received a Master of Arts degree in 2015.
Jen’s articles, essays and poems have been featured in She’s Got Issues, 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, Atticus Review, and Silver Birch Press. In 2015, she was named a finalist for the Ruminate Magazine Spiritual Nonfiction Prize.
Jen’s novella-length lyric essay 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.
Essays on dreams, memory, time and the above-mentioned topics may be found on the home page and at jenmaidenberg.medium.com.
Jen is a facilitator of a Ritualwell Jewish Writers’ Circle, a grassroots peer-led community of writers who gather in New Jersey,