Our Story
My name is Jennifer Johnson Jacobs. I am a Founder and currently the Executive Director at Sol Sanctuary.
Sol Sanctuary began as a dream. In April of 2001, my husband Joe and I began having a shared reoccurring dream. Over the months that followed we set out on a journey that we were unprepared for.
Life as we knew it was in full swing, each with our careers, our combined family of six children, our family dog Luke and Bob the cat. We felt inspired by the dream that continued into the summer months of 2001 and we began taking weekend road trips in search of the place we saw in our dream.
The dream was always the same: we were the stewards of a beautiful piece of land. There was a large Hacienda-style home, and a scattering of little private casitas along the vast landscape. The terrain had a mountainous desert feel and the sky was expansive. We always found ourselves in the same scene, working together in the garden around mid-day when we noticed a trail of dust in the air, indicating someone was coming to visit. We never knew who was coming, we would simply walk to the front gate to greet our newly arriving guests.
The feeling was that this place was a sanctuary for the soul. A place of respite, a safe haven for people to come and simply be in nature, to find what they’d lost or to remember who they are. Some were lost and some were found, some were old and some were young, all from different backgrounds and cultures. Somehow they seemed to find their way to us, as if by magic or some Divine guidance. Although we were an eclectic gathering of souls, we all shared one thing in common: our love of nature, and the healing that our great mother earth provides us.
In September of 2001, just after 9/11 devastated our world, my personal world came crashing down. Joe was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and we set course for a deeper understanding of our dream. As our family grew in ways only great challenges can offer, we also discovered many ways in which the support we needed was lacking. We needed a place of respite, we needed a group of support around us, people to talk with and confide in. We needed to heal and grow through our fears and misunderstandings. We needed guidance from others who’d walked a similar path and when we couldn’t find what we needed, we discovered how to create it for ourselves.
The dream carried us through. It gave us purpose and focus. We believed so strongly in the dream and that our personal journey through cancer was preparing us for the rest of our life work. We spent hours planning and bringing the dream into reality, knowing that as soon as Joe recovered, we had our life course mapped ahead of us. Because of our journey, we now knew first hand what we could offer in support of others who came to Sol Sanctuary.
On April 9th, 2002, Joe passed away. The dream has never died, although it looks different than we had imagined. The place became a space – a feeling, an environment of sanctuary that can be and is created in people’s homes and hearts. The misery of the loss of my best friend and partner Joe in physical form has become my life ministry. I may not have him physically by my side any longer, but on any given day I can still find him in the garden of my heart. He is the one who guides people to Sol Sanctuary. I am the one who greets them at the gate.
Founding Story
Sol Sanctuary was founded as a family run organization in service to the healing of our family and other families in challenge and transition. Our founders are myself, Jennifer Johnson Jacobs, the late Lizabeth Valentiner Johnson, Christopher Johnson and the late Joe Jacobs.
Our Advisory Council Founding Members are Carissa Garrard Konyndyke, Andrew Garrard, Justin Garrard, Megan Jacobs, Anja Valentiner Johnson, Sienna Johnson, and Asher Johnson. We each have personally experienced, as children and as adults, many difficult challenges. We know first hand what support is needed and what actually works to shift from feeling victimized by our circumstances to feeling empowered and able. We have discovered that choosing to meet life’s challenges as opportunities to heal, grow, and remember truly gives meaning and purpose to life and clarity to what matters most.
Sol Sanctuary first opened its doors on the one year anniversary of Joe’s passing. Our grand opening kicked off with an honorary motorcycle ride for Joe, organized by his FedEx work crew. We had a day of festivities following the ride including a kids carnival, raffles, door prizes and live music.
We began receiving referrals from people who were recently diagnosed with a health issue, or a family grieving the loss of a loved one. We immediately began serving their needs by offering private one-on-one coaching, and an array of healing modalities for mind, body, and spirit. We focused on assessing the needs first and then pairing the needs with healing modalities. These offerings included both group and private sessions for developing awareness and offering personal healing. We invited healing artists to offer wellness education to our growing community. We offered massage, energy work, essential oils, meditation, women’s circles, family healing circles, health and wellness retreats, music and art therapy, kid to kid circles, dance and drumming sessions. It was our joy to be offering alternative ways to regenerate lives.
Liz had a passion for life, for childbirth, and for art. As a mother of three children she actively worked to create new ways of supporting mothers, their partners and their children through the birth experience and into early childhood development. Her bachelor's degree in art accompanied with her gifts and talent made Liz a natural at creating and facilitating experiential and expressive art therapies. Together Liz and I created healing circles utilizing drums, music and dance as well as women and children’s art groups. Liz created the curriculum and facilitated art therapy groups for in-patient substance abuse facilities that included drumming as a means to release pain from the body. As founders, we kept our focus on our journey as the mode for learning. By operating in an intentional way we noted what actually worked. Our ability to transform our pain into a greater understanding of our life experiences was the measuring tool.
In 2004 we went through a series of unexpected life storms (learning opportunities as we call them). Liz was stricken suddenly and unexpectedly with mental and emotional challenges. She experienced two years of disorientation and swings in her emotional well being that developed into manic episodes with periods of psychosis. This journey grew us as individuals and as a family. The children grew through their exposure and experience with these unknown waters of mental illness. As an organization we gained awareness and it became instrumental in our discovery of how to help ourselves navigate mental and emotional imbalances. As an organization we matured, educated ourselves, and discovered many alternative healing modalities that worked. We also tried many modalities that failed to consistently offer support and assistance toward healing.
By the end of 2006 Liz was able to bring her body imbalances back into a functional manner and re-establish her life through traditional and alternative therapies. Her journey back from experiencing such extreme mental challenges was something I will always remember. We exchanged many times as friends, and partners in the work of Sol Sanctuary, how Liz’s journey through the world of mental illness brought tremendous wisdom and learning for us. Our abilities as facilitators for experiential understanding deepened. Our understanding of this life journey, as a road toward wholeness grew immensely during this period. We were able to find gratitude for each cycle and expanded our available empathy and understanding for others along the path. We learned and deepened our humility and appreciation for grace, and the practices of self love and self forgiveness that comes with the journey. We were able to see the gifts amidst the trauma that often accompanies unstable health.
Liz’s journey brought many difficulties, and it blessed us. We discovered that our joy and our strength came from our family. We were able to recognize how fortunate we are to have a large family rich in love, caring and understanding. This enabled us to see how important this factor has been in our families ability to heal. Sol Sanctuary is born out of this love.
In 2008 we encountered another set of challenges to walk through, both personally and as an organization. In March, our mother Joanne suffered a stroke that incapacitated her abilities to communicate and she became trapped in her body. We as a family walked through the layers of challenge this creates. Over the next several months her mind continued to slip as the development of dementia took over. She attended her last family reunion just before we made the difficult decision to place her in a home where she could receive the professional care that was needed.
Only a few months later in August, another tragedy. One of our founders, and my brother Chris Johnson, received a phone call from Guatemala. At the time he was the Executive Director of Choice Humanitarian (www.choicehumanitarian.org) . A small chartered plane carrying humanitarian expeditioner's had experienced double engine failure and crashed in the mountains of Guatemala. Liz was on board as the expedition leader along with 12 volunteer expeditioners en route to serve on a village project. The next 24 hours were excruciating as we waited to hear word of any survivors. We soon learned that most had died on impact and Liz died from internal bleeding in the hospital in Guatemala City the day after the crash. This experience devastated our family, and both of our organizations barely survived the loss of Liz. As we began the healing process by putting into practice what we teach, we once again grew in strength, love and understanding that healing from such a tremendous loss was possible.
In January of 2009, four months after Liz’s passing, our mother and grandmother Joanne suffered another stroke that released her to the other side where we believe she has joined Liz, Joe and all of our guardian angels.
It has been our personal walk along the trail of life through challenges to our health and well being that have cultivated and developed the programs and services we offer. What matters most has become self evident. Being well, living well, and doing well are the areas in which Sol Sanctuary has evolved its focus. We know from personal experience what carries us through and what creates lasting health, well being, and supports a quality of life that is meaningful and fulfilling.
Over the past two decades a whole community of individuals and families have participated in our programs and have been supported by our services as they were dealt difficult cards or circumstances to navigate. We have created a ministry from our misery and have rallied around the importance of being well and living well. From the challenges that life has offered, we as members of the community of Sol Sanctuary have made a commitment to create a life for goodness and for growth, one of meaning and purpose and to strengthen ourselves and our relationships by doing our own healing work. We have incorporated and adopted a practice of ever-becoming, and evolving toward a more healthy, happy, whole version of ourselves. When we choose to practice ways of being that improve the quality of life in our day to day, then we are able to inspire and ignite hope and possibility for others. If we can do it, if our family can weather it and cultivate more healthy relationships, so can you and yours. It is our collective dream now, a dream that belongs to the community that continues to grow and gather. We each are able to provide a safe harbor for others as they travel the difficulties and triumphs of life’s road.
With a deep bow of gratitude for the journey that has been my life, and all the ways I am blessed to continue to grow, serve and remember,
Jennifer Jacobs
Founder, Executive Director
Sol Sanctuary
