Jayna Cavendish is a guide and mother sending ripples of kindness into the world. Both grounding and full of light, her offerings are steeped in empathy and warmth, something that she is most known for.
Francesca Camporeale delves into the personal journey of healing, the lifestyle shifts that led her to a place of restored alignment and the tools with which she helps others to tap into that healing space within themselves.
I guess my journey started with my passion for dance. I studied ballet and contemporary dance at Rambert and moved into that professionally in my early twenties. It was my full focus and passion. I twinned dance with modelling, which in retrospect was quite soul destroying, but it was serving its purpose of supporting my dance career. It was when I was 22, I hit a proper rock bottom; that’s when everything shifted and I had to really redefine my relationship with myself, my body, my work, my ambition and my relationships.
And that’s how I got into healing work and yoga.
As I got into a deeper connection with myself, I became more accepting of myself. I also started to explore voice and music and discovered it was something so important in my life that I’d definitely been missing.
Whilst living in London I began touring and gigging in a band with my sister, at the same time I was running a yoga studio in my home and retreats in Suffolk. It was a super fun time, but I reached another burnout point. I think it was the result of living that fast paced London life, where we expect so much of ourselves and push ourselves so much.
That’s when my partner and I decided to move to Portugal, which is where I am now. I’ve been in Portugal for 4 years now and can’t quite believe it! I live in a really magical spot: close to the sea, on a mountain, in a cottage in the woods. We had our daughter Rise a year ago so we’re now a little family.
When my period became really disrupted and difficult in my mid twenties, it was so debilitating that I ended up going to a doctor and was diagnosed with PCOS.
I was presented with the very limited options that doctors tend to give for hormone problems, e.g. go on the contraceptive pill and good luck having a baby – it might be difficult! That really shook me, as I always knew at some point I wanted to start a family. I’ve always been seeking ways to live in more harmony and peace so that’s when I really dove into educating myself around hormones and periods, and trialling different ways of living.
My PCOS diagnosis contributed to me becoming aware of that second burnout. On the outside, everything seemed very normal and it was going really well, because it was: my yoga studio was going well, as was my music career. A lot of people asked why I was leaving for Portugal when things were just taking off. But I knew, through looking at my cycle and my relationship with myself, that something wasn’t right. There was also this longing in my being to be more immersed in nature, and for more slowness and space.
When I first came across yoga in London, to me, it was just physical shapes you did on a mat. I really didn’t get it!
When I had my low point at 22, I was really struggling with addiction, compulsion and codependency. I went through a deep process of looking at my childhood traumas of growing up around addiction and how that had affected me.
It wasn’t until then, that I accessed that bliss point that you reach when you move and you breathe and you dedicate your action to something greater than yourself. That was such a lightbulb moment for me; realising there could be a sacredness to moving, breathing and connecting to what yoga truly was.
I think I’ve always been seeking connection with the Divine and yoga was definitely a way into that, a way of giving myself permission for that. In London I found so much emphasis on the physical, there was always this pressure I felt in the city to focus more on the physical than on the sacred. For instance, if you held a sweaty vinyasa class it would be packed, whereas if you held a meditation class it would be pretty empty!
As I’ve moved more into my authentic truth, I’ve realised that sacred practices can be experienced in so many different ways,it’s really exciting to explore those different avenues and see which ones resonate personally; because they all lead to the same place, they’re just different roads.
And as I’ve matured and got older, I’ve let go of a lot of constructs of what I thought I should be, there was a deep longing to be in more stillness,to explore the inner realms rather than the outer physical realms.
I’ve purposefully not looked too much into the theory of light language, because I really want to keep my connection with it pure. For me, it’s the accessing of a space where I can be a transmitter or a channel of an outer, positive energy that wants to move through and communicate with this world.
Light language is a form of energy that moves through you either in voice, in hand gestures, through art, or movement. It speaks to us beyond the logical cerebral brain, and goes straight to our core; straight to the heart and soul, and seems to speak to people on a really deep and profound level.
It’s quite an out-there thing really, and I was pretty surprised when it came into my life as I knew nothing about it! I was working with cacao and sound healing at the time: I was doing a two week tour of back-to-back events, packed with meditation, ecstatic dance and cacao. As a result I was holding space a lot of the time, drinking a lot of cacao, and working with the crystal bowls a lot.
I’ve always used my voice with the bowls; that’s come very naturally to me, and it seems to soothe other people. One day while meditating with the bowls at my mother in-law’s house on Clapham Common (of all the spiritually connected places!) I was using my voice, singing these tones, and then this torrent of a fully formed language started coming through. It really surprised me, and there was an interesting moment when I could feel my judgement and my self perception trying to cap it and push it down.
That’s when the language poured out of me very strongly. I felt a lot of energy moving through my physical body, and then eventually it came to a close, and my body went into this tremor, shaking all over, and I started pouring out tears.
That night, I really felt another presence had come into the inside of my spine. In this liminal place before I fell fully asleep, I had a conversation with the presence, asking what its intentions were. I got the message that it was a positive entity, and there for the good, so I accepted it, and it took me in. I still don’t fully know what that presence is, and I feel like I’m still discovering every time I work with it. It feels like a gateway for other energies to move through – as though there are different messages or presences coming from different places that come through the voice and the words that I channel.
For a while I found it really weird, and I wasn’t sure if I could really bring it in! I feel like my work has always been a bridge between the more relatable and grounded practices, and the more out-there stuff – but this is so out there. As I started to let it move through me in my sound healings though, I realised what a deep and profound effect it had on people. I realised that it wasn’t just to heal me, but that it was also helpful for others. Since then I’ve been continuing to let go of the judgement, and just recognising that for whatever reason this is something that has chosen to visit me in this life, and it wants to be shared.
I really believe we all have gifts and ways of connecting beyond the physical, with the spiritual realm. The world would be such a different place if we just allowed that to be present, and gave ourselves that permission.
I guess doing a lot of singing and work with my voice has really helped this form of light language to move through. But I really do think it‘s something that most people can access. People have been speaking in tongues throughout so many different cultures forever, so it’s nothing new really.
I think it reaches people in whatever way they need to feel it. Some people have experienced full body orgasms just from listening, some feel areas of tension vibrate and then shift, and most often, I get people saying they’ve had the best sleep after, and that their insomnia has shifted from doing the session. I think that speaks to how powerfully this work can drop us down into our parasympathetic nervous system; into fully letting go, receiving, and realigning.
Then there’s the emotional release: some people feel bliss and pure joy, and that they’re being visited by angels. Some people cry and release tears without stories attached, and I think that can be really healing and powerful.
Whether we know it or whether it’s subconscious, I believe we’re all seeking balance, growth, transformation, grounding, and healing.
All we have to do is offer a space for people to do that. Essentially it’s everyone doing their own work – it’s not the light language; that acts as a key, unlocking the space for people to explore within themselves.
I was introduced to cacao at a Kiva, through a Mexican elder who was holding a ceremony one evening in a massive tipi with about 90 people.
Something about it just instantly dropped me into this deep place of meditation and presence; I felt like I could feel my ancestral lineage, both masculine and feminine, rolling back and working through me. I just knew I wanted to start working with it and sharing it with my community.
Cacao has become such a beautiful thing in my life: on a really practical level, it’s replaced my relationship with caffeine! Coffee just spun me up and then spat me out every day, rinsing my adrenals, and I really couldn’t get out of that loop before.
Beyond the physical, cacao has invited sacred space into my home and my relationship which has been so deeply healing and powerful, and it’s also given me this incredible connection to work with people, and to create the space to touch people in a way that has been really beautiful.
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I did the work around the relationship with my cycle before giving birth, which gave me a framework and foundation to take care of myself when right now my sole purpose, as the mother of a 1 year old, is primarily being there for her.
I’m really glad I dropped into getting to know my feminine body before going on this journey into parenthood. My cycle is changing now, but it also feels like it’s a thread, a connection with my past self, from before I made the archetypal shift from maiden to mother, and I feel really grateful for that.
I’m also so happy that I’m not in that chronic place of disconnection and distress with my period that I was before. I wanted to bring this work into the world because I realised that even though there’s now so much more information out there, so many women in my life don’t have that core, fundamental knowledge of what their cycle is and how they can relate to it in a healthy, loving way, and I really feel like this is the foundation of how we live as women.
I think it’s such an important piece for women, and it’s insane that we don’t get proper education around it at school. Also, when I think back to just how disconnected our mothers and grandmothers were from their cycles, it’s no wonder that they couldn’t pass that information down. And that’s how it really should be shared: from sister to sister, and through women. But there’s still a lot of shame around that.
Being an empath is when we live a life where we’re highly sensitive to the environments and people around us – and for me, that involves being able to sense and feel someone else’s emotions even when they can’t feel it themselves. I think we also have the capacity to transmute other people’s pains, and other people’s feelings, which has an upside and a shadow. On the plus side, I think being an empath, you have that connection to your intuition, to your sensitivity and creativity, which allows you to move through life in a very connected way, if you choose to.
It was really my deep dive into codependency recovery that introduced me to the concept of empath, and that also just felt like a nicer way to relate to it than codependency, which can feel a bit like a problem you need to fix. Being an empath feels more like this is just a part of who I am in this lifetime, and something I need to work with. Codependency recovery gave me the tools to navigate that in a healthy and safe way.
When I look back now, I feel like what happened when I was 22 was such a gift; to have a dark night of the soul so early on really helped me change everything and move into a path of service, so much sooner than maybe I would have otherwise. I think I feel life and pain very strongly, and pain, trauma and grief have been some of the deepest and biggest teachers and transformers for me. It’s really nice to be in a place where I can feel really grateful for all that now, and to see how it’s been the shaper and co-creator of my life now as well.
