Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Sex, Love, and SuperPowers Podcast Show. I am your host, Tatiana Berindei. I am so excited to have with me today my dear friend, Miss Jennifer Cormier. We are going to be talking about how your wedding ceremony matters. This is a very important topic, very close to my heart. I’m very happy to have Jen on to discuss it today. Let me tell you a little bit about her before we dive into this juicy topic.
Reverend Jen Cormier is a ceremonial artist and ordained interfaith minister who offers support through life transitions, grief, and celebrations. Jen’s committed to assisting engaged couples create out of the box wedding ceremonies that are inclusive, heartfelt, and seriously funny. Jen enjoys co-creating highly custom, soulful wedding ceremonies for intellectual and creative couples. She brings years of practice in the visual performing and somatic healing arts, as well as two decades of study with a tapestry of spiritual teachers. This foundation allows her to skillfully weave the depth of ceremony with the lightness of beauty and joy.
Coined a marriage midwife by one of her clients, Jen walks with couples over the six to 12 months leading up to their wedding, offering them a calm presence and deep support. She continues to hold space as needed post-wedding day and remains available for support through births, anniversaries, and all of life’s other milestones, losses, and thresholds to come.
Welcome to the show, Jen.
Awe, thank you so much, Tatiana. I’m so honored to be here.
Yeah, I’m excited you’re finally here. Before we dive in, will you tell our listeners what your superpowers are?
What my superpowers are? I spent a lot of time luxuriating in bed this morning. I just got back to Connecticut, where it’s cold and icy and snowy for the holidays and my superpower, my first one I want to say is sleeping actually. I’m an excellent sleeper. I feel like that is very counterculture to say because I grew up in puritanical New England where it’s like you got to get it done. You’re burning daylight. Get up, Jen.
Yeah, totally.
Early bird catches the worm. I went to college in the south. I lived in Charleston, South Carolina for seven years and I lived in Oregon. Whenever I would come home for family gatherings, the family would say… my aunts and uncles would ask me two questions. It was, “So, how are you doing?” And it was directly followed by, “You keeping busy?” You didn’t even have time to answer how you were doing and it was you keeping busy. The correct answer is yes. You got to keep busy.
So, counter to that, I’ve always been a sleeper. My mom actually had to pull me out of early morning kindergarten to put me in afternoon kindergarten because she couldn’t get me there to school. She couldn’t get me out of bed. I’ve always needed a full eight, eight and a half hours of sleep. I really love those last dream cycles.
I was going to say, knowing you, you’re not just a sleeper, you’re a dreamer.
I’m a dreamer. Yeah. My superpower is sleep because of the dreaming. It’s a dreaming superpower. I’ve been dreaming of journaling for years and years and years. I’ve worked with two analysts one on one therapeutic practice. I love dreaming. That’s a superpower that I have is existing in the dream world. I think there’s some bear medicine there, hibernation.
Then, I was thinking about what’s another superpower, and I think it’s the capacity to see the connection from above, sort of understanding the web of things and how things connect. Yeah, understanding connections where others might not see how two things relate and connect is a superpower that I have.
I want to say breathing. I’m going to keep it really basic. Sleeping, breathing. All the basic human things that we do. Breath has been a real integral part of all my work that I’ve done over the years. Therapeutic Pilates and massage and now with the dream dancing I’m doing and movement practice is always really coming from an authentic place if it comes from a place of breathing first.
Those are a couple things I got for you.
Awesome. I’m tempted to throw in the mix, just-
Oh, you want to throw Jenya? Yeah. My son is four and he says that he’s funny because dad put a little funny in him. I’ve had friends say, “Oh, you know what? Your mom put a little funny in there too.” You’re referring to Jenya, my Russian alter ego, right?
… I think she deserves mention.
Okay. So, maybe I have a dream. One of your listeners, she likes this Jenya on your podcast. Maybe I will do a wedding, okay? Wedding you hire Reverend Jenya. She comes to your ceremony. She does the ceremony and is Russian lady. And we can do a birch stick massage. We do traditional Russian things for your wedding.
I deeply apologize for any Russian listeners that we have out there.
Really sorry. My Russian friends, I think, would all be okay with that, but I do have a Russian sister and I’ve been to Russia and have a lot of Russians that I love so hopefully they won’t be offended by that. It’s my traditional blood lineage from Russia, so I like that.
Okay. We’re getting off track here.
Getting serious here.
Okay. We’re here talking about wedding ceremonies and why they’re important. I think that this is a really crucial topic because, for our listeners, I don’t know if you heard the episode that I did a while back with attorney Frank about your conscious divorce. But something that we introduced in that conversation was how really I think part of why we see so much divorce, especially in the US, is because we don’t have consciousness going into our wedding ceremonies. The wedding is about the dress, about the shoes, about the bridesmaid’s dresses, about the flowers, about the cake, but what are you actually doing when you come together and join your life with another person?
Most people in commoditized wedding culture are spending 15 minutes on the actual joining together of two souls for the rest of your life essentially. This is why I wanted to have Jen on. Maybe let’s talk about why spending a little bit more time on that would be a good thing.
Yeah. Absolutely. I was just flipping through some wedding magazines, The Knot and there’s Domino’s now. They’re looking at different real couples and they go through the photography, the colors, the gifts, and all the different things. In The Knot magazine, out of I think it was 10… it was the California Knot magazine… It was 10 different real weddings and it’s just interesting to see how much energy goes into all of these bits of the party. Then, the trend that’s been happening lately is that folks are just having an uncle or a friend marry them and they’re not really putting much thought or time or money or energy into the actual ceremony.
I was just reading one of the magazines here and it was like, “Oh, the ceremony was short and sweet, held under a minimalist arch,” and they quote the couple, “We completely forgot to write our vows until the morning of our rehearsal and we were so stressed out about it.” Oops.
Folks, we need to talk about this. This is a problem. If the vows are the last thing that you’re focusing on, why are you getting married? This is a really important question. We do have to go on a quick break. We’re going to dive deeper into this question when we get back.
Jen, before we go to break, will you tell our listeners where they can go to find out more about you and the amazing work that you’re doing?
Yeah, absolutely. My website is weddingswithjenn.com. You can hop onto the website to find out more about me and then I also have a free gift for all of your listeners that they can find when they visit the website that’s a quiz, what wedding ceremony type are you. So if you’re getting married or you know someone who’s getting married and you want to know what wedding ceremony type are you, you can take my quiz. It’s been verified it only takes three minutes by actual brides. Very simple quiz.
Awesome. Well, that sounds like fun. Hope over to weddingswithjenn.com. We are talking with Reverend Jen Cormier about your wedding ceremony matters. More when we get back. Stay tuned.
To listen to the entire show click on the player above or go to the SuperPower Up! podcast on iTunes.
Music Credit: All instruments played by Amanda Turk. Engineered and produced by Tatiana Berindei and Daniel Plane reelcello.com
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