Meet Jenn Kerns

As a Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor (LCMHC-VT), Depth Psychotherapist (Jungian-oriented, Pacifica Graduate Institute), and Integrative Medicine Mental Health Provider (CIMMHP), I specialize in guiding clients through post-traumatic growth, life and identity transitions, and the very human “messy middle” of personal transformation.

I have been in private practice since 2014, and in the field of mental health for over 20 years.

I often experience my therapeutic work as an evolving arc that goes something like this: first, creating refuge and cultivating self-awareness—the early groundwork of all conscious healing; then entering the alchemical space of transmuting wounds into wisdom, where we learn how to foster the soul and turn love inward; and finally, bridging our gifts to the world—connecting inner transformation to a sense of purpose, contribution, and meaning.

As someone whose work is deeply rooted in the tenets of Buddhist studies and Positive Psychology, I believe that healing comes not only from doing “the work,” but also from experiencing our interconnectedness with all of humanity through giving back and being of service.

My lived and clinical experience suggests that healing is incomplete when it becomes one-sided or overly hyper-individualized, reinforcing self-centering and loneliness. Research shows that part of what moves us toward wholeness, fulfillment, and human flourishing is orienting our lives toward others—through service, community-building, and a felt sense of our shared humanity.

A Lifelong Commitment to Transformation

For more than 20 years, I have immersed myself in the study, practice, and teaching of psychology, neuroscience, spirituality, meditation, and the healing arts.

I hold a BA in Psychology from Saint Michael's College with a concentration in Buddhist Studies, and an MA in Counseling Psychology with an emphasis in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. My undergraduate research took me to Bodh Gaya and Darjeeling, India for four months of independent fieldwork on Buddhist theory of mind, supervised by Georgios Halkias of Oxford University. It was also in India where I began my studies into the Japanese bodywork practice of Reiki natural healing. I completed my Reiki-teacher certification in 2010. My published graduate work, "Degendering Psyche," explored queering Jungian and archetypal frameworks through the lenses of Deep Ecology, Queer Theory, and Engaged Buddhism.

Before entering private practice, I worked across a range of clinical settings, including Latham Centers Inc., the UVM Psychiatry Department, Middlebury College's Counseling Center, and Spectrum Youth and Family Services. My interests in spirituality and contemplative practice have also taken me to India, Sri Lanka, Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia for field study and research.

Over the past six years, my own reckoning with traumatic brain injury and acute/chronic illness has shaped a deep research focus on spontaneous healing and near-death experiences.

What Life Has Asked of Me AND why i do what i do

I am very open with folks that I grew up in foster care and was adopted at age ten, because that fact shaped everything, including how I show up in my work and my interpersonal style. As a kid, I knew exile, displacement, and the particular grief of an orphaned child suffering from severed belonging before I had language for any of it.

By five, I was already being called an “old soul” and asking questions that would organize my entire life: Who am I? Why am I here? What is this all about?

Today, I understand that those questions were not only symptoms of disruption and separation, but the beginning of my own spiritual pilgrimage toward what Carl Jung called psychic“wholeness.”Because of this, I have come to see my life as an arc from the Orphan to Pilgrim archetypal journey: from a foster child on the outside looking in, to a now grown woman who has done the slow, hard, interior work of building a spiritual home inside herself through spiritual reparenting.

My path asked me to learn to foster the exiled and abandoned parts of my own psyche, my inner child, and over time, to “self-adopt” them back in. That is the work I have spent my life doing, and it is the work I now hold space for in others— fostering the soul.

Sports were my first sacred container. Years of soccer, lacrosse, and endurance training gave me a body I could trust, a discipline and structure I could lean on, and a bone-deep understanding that healing does not happen in isolation. Teams and excellent coaches taught me that.

In my early thirties, shit hit the fan after I was blindsided by disabling health crisis left me bedridden for two years, and housebound for five. I closed my businesses and entered a six-year medical sabbatical and deeply painful period of disorienting “identity loss.” That passage stripped me of all of my “plans” and everything I thought I was, and where my life was headed— my work, my independence, my professional and personal identities. Those chapters asked me to discover what remained, if anything, underneath the ashes. What part of me was, and is, unshakeable despite immense catastrophic chaos and loss? And can it be found, and cultivated, in others, too?

Many of my beliefs about healing and renewal were stress-tested during those years, and I am thankful to say that not only did most of them hold up but have been humbly enriched. Those years were not only initiatory, they were deeply spiritual. On a level that was not abstract or theoretical, I was given an answer to the question I had been carrying since childhood which now guides my life’s work.

The people I have walked alongside who have come through their own dark and disorienting passages are often the most alive and resilient souls I know. Thankfully, today, as I emerge from my own fires of transformation, it is clear that one of my life’s purposes is to hold the container for others on that same pilgrimage path. Not to fix or rescue, but to reflect back what is already there but possibly forgotten or not yet cultivated - their light, power, and value.

Outside of the therapy room, I am a youth soccer coach, artist, Buddhist practitioner, gardener, proud auntie, momma to my 3 fur babies, partner, and a lifelong student of what it means to be human. I would be honored to walk beside you as a companion and guide.

On the journey with you.

— JLK

👉 [View Jenn’s Qualifications & Certifications]
👉 [Jenn’s Psychology Today Profile]

In their Words:

Client Reflection