Jen Rusciano
Aspiring Social Worker
Jen Rusciano’s (they/she) path to healing comes through a commitment to uprooting oppression and planting justice. Grown in Detroit’s thriving food justice community, their roots are as a food system educator, youth ally, and non-profit director. A love of spirituality and a dedication to harm reduction introduced them to the world of psychedelic medicine. Now as an aspiring social worker, they are focused on hospice care, values-aligned death, and the application of psychedelics in death work.
Articles
Blog
Grieving the Earth: The Spiritual Technology of Yom Kippur
There’s a gap between knowing a truth and living it. The ongoing climate crisis is one place we experience this, where knowing and acting live far apart. Similarly, there is a gap between acknowledging and truly feeling that we will die. Facing overwhelming impermanence – the elemental weight of sacred change – is an exercise in learning to grieve, to face our planet’s dying and our own.
Yom Kippur is a rehearsal for our own death, creating a ritual container deep enough to hold us as we step towards this reality. We’re invited to turn towards the role of death and loss in our lives – to practice inhabiting this weight and the questions it raises. By doing so, we learn to grieve – to metabolize suffering into insights to inform our futures. Read more here.