About Jeanette Holden
Aditi’s childhood was spent across this northern continent, amongst forest, gardens, rivers and oceans on unceded Mi’kMaq, Malecite, Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, the Mississaugas of the Credit, and Lekwungen traditional territories. Her childhood home was hand built by her mothers, passive solar/wood stove heated, which created a strong relationship with nature, the elements and their teachings.
One morning years back, while sitting on the River Ganga at dawn in India, she realized this upbringing was the strong foundation for her own sense of spirituality. She acknowledges above, the ancestors on the lands where she grew up, and also acknowledges her own ancestral lines of Tlingit, Welsh, Scottish, English, Norse and Sami.
Being brought up in rural queer community, in a very conservative area of Canada, lent to an early understanding of what it meant to live outside of cultural norms, to know homophobia via association to community/family, and at a early age witnessed the effects of oppression, later coming to understand it as a root of disease.
Along with a love of travel, and a love for anyone who walked/thought/expressed themselves outside of mainstream norms, she became passionate about Anthropology and cross cultural lenses. Straight out of high school she completed an Honors Degree First Nation Studies/Contemporary Representation in Media at Dalhousie University, and then a Masters Degree in Medical Anthropology (including research in the social/cultural context of disease).
She was urged by her thesis advisor to attend medical school at that time, yet ignored his suggestion and instead chose travel, in an effort to feel more empowered with her sense of responsibility for living in right relation with her home and this planet.
This included years of learning, working, teaching in organic/permaculture/biodynamic/herbal/farming fields, across North & Central America, Europe, India. Completing an 8 month Ecological Gardening & Permaculture course on Cortes Island, BC and co-creating/teaching over 14 medical plant/permaculture workshops with a Sandinista NGO in Nicaragua. Later, her education also included courses in indigenous seed and land sovereignty with Vandana Shiva in India, midwifery/doula training in Peru, many intensives in Ayurveda, and an intensive with Paul Pitchford (author of Healing with Whole Foods). Beyond indigenous perspectives of food, she has a deep passion for medicinal plants Herbalism (she has completed two Herbal apprenticeships), the energetic and subtle medicine of Homeopathy (has studied/worked with teachers in India, Africa and Europe) and Traditional Chinese Medicine (she did an additional 1.5 years of training at the Master’s level of study in Berkeley). She has also trained & done assistant teaching with three different teachers in Cranial Sacral work with 350 + hours, and now holds 13 years of clinical practice in listening to the Cranial Sacral rhythms of the body.
In 2005, a year in chaotically mystical India, changed her life. After completing 500 hours of Yoga teacher training, and spending 6 months in ashram, she was gifted the name Aditi ‘the living dynamis of the mother’. Since none of her Indian friends could pronounce ‘Jeanette’ with ease, the name stuck. From there, her passion for grass roots accessible healing, for plants as food & medicine, for Ayurveda & the Elements, for meditation (she has completed over 10 Vipassana sits), then landed her into the desire to bring all of this together: Naturopathic Medical College, with no less than 4500 school hours in western holistic medical training, graduating in 2009.
Since, she has become Owner and Practitioner at Birdsong Naturopathic Clinic, has written and instructed four years of courses at Pacific Rim College (Homeopathy to Doulas; Patient Communication ((including oppression as cause of disease, trauma support)), Ayurvedic Foundation/Herbal/Nutrition classes). She also spent four years being supervisor/instructor with Boucher Naturopathic College at the Free Family Naturopathic Clinic, Victoria.
