Jessi Marino is a guide of deep remembering—a mystic, somatic practitioner, and founder of Wild Essence Mystery School. In this evocative conversation, she shares her journey from the jungles of Costa Rica to the inner landscapes of the soul, weaving neuroscience, animism, and ancestral wisdom into a rich tapestry of healing. With every breath, Jessi invites us to listen—to the body, to the land, and to the ancient rhythm that whispers us home.
How do you define “primal embodiment,” and how does it guide your work with others?
Primal embodiment is the remembrance of the body as oracle. Wise, wild, and innately whole. It’s the visceral, unfiltered knowing that pulses beneath thought, beyond performance, before language. It’s the hum of aliveness in your cells, the way your breath changes in truth’s presence, the ache and the ecstasy of being a body that feels.
In my work, I guide people not into concepts of healing, but into direct communion with their bodies. Where ancestral wisdom lives. Where instinct and intuition root. Where real transformation happens. We don’t just talk about safety or sovereignty. We become it, breath by breath.
Can you share how your time living in Costa Rica shaped your relationship with land, spirit, and community?
Costa Rica taught me to listen again.
The land here doesn’t whisper. She roars. Lush, unapologetic, and unrelenting in her beauty and her invitation. She cracked me open. Made me soft in places I had armored. Gave me the gift of belonging that isn’t owned or earned, but felt. I got to witness firsthand the impact and necessity of community when your survival is one of relationship with land and each other. I also really both appreciated my seasonal changes from my home eco-system and developed a profound kinship with the spirits of a new place. I am a huge advocate for reciprocal relationship and hope that I can continue pouring into the land as she has into me,
In your mystery school, Wild Essence, what role does the cyclical wisdom of the pagan Wheel of the Year play in your offerings?
The Wheel is one of the deepest backbones of our work.
It’s not just a calendar. It’s a spiral map of transformation. It reminds us that we are not linear, and that healing and creativity come in seasons. There are times to rise, and times to root. Times to gather, and times to grieve. The Wheel teaches us how to live with the land and with our own inner cycles.
Inside Wild Essence, we live this through ritual, archetypal embodiment, and seasonal devotion. We don’t just celebrate the sabbats. We let them work on us.
How do you integrate neuroscience and somatic psychology with the more mystical elements like Celtic witchcraft and animism in your teachings?
The nervous system is the gateway. Without safety in the body, no amount of ritual or magic will truly land. That’s why we work with both the science and the spirit.
We bring in trauma-informed somatic practice to rebuild capacity, regulation, and sensory presence. Then we layer in the mystical—invoking archetypes, working with elemental forces, listening to land and lineage. Because once your system can hold more sensation, it can also hold more beauty. More power. More presence. The magick deepens.
This isn’t about escaping the body to reach the divine. It’s about rooting so deeply into the body that the divine starts to speak from within it.
What does it mean to you to “whispersing us HOME,” and how can others begin to listen for that call in their own lives?
Soul whispersing us HOME is the return to the first song.
The one that lives in your marrow and hums through the wind. The one that has always been with you, even before language, even through rupture. It is the breath beneath your breath. The original cosmic HUM of belonging that systems may have buried, but never extinguished.
To be sung home is to feel the veil thin between the seen and the unseen. Between the self you perform and the self you truly are. It’s not a shout. It’s a vibration. A rhythm. A remembering.
Begin by noticing the moments that soften you. The pull in your belly when something feels right. The ache when you touch beauty. The deep exhale when you’re finally safe enough to be real. These are soul signals. Subtle. Sacred.
Listening is a devotion. And the more you listen, the louder she sings.
