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Jenna | Motherhood • Community • Nature

@jenstateofmind

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Whole humans. Meaningful homes. Thriving villages.
🧠 Interdisciplinary Clinician, Educator, and Author
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CAPTION CHANGES AS YOU SWIPE! 👉
Keep checking back to this spot with each swipe because the captions change with each slide and include a little more info on the article and my thoughts now looking back at it.

I’ve published 100+ articles on Substack over the last year and a half, and while working on my upcoming book —The Domesticated Human (surprise, I guess this is the announcement?)… anyways, while working on it, I realized a ridiculous number of them were approaching the same question from completely different directions.

And I definitely didn’t sit down one day like I’m going to write about domesticated humans either— I wrote about parenting, wellness, pregnancy, community, spirituality. loneliness, patriarchy, male status, philosophy, touch, unpaid labor, technology, politics, boredom, child development, generational conflict, and whatever rabbit hole I happened to be in at the time.

Going back through all of it now, I can see that I kept asking some version of the same thing: how much of what we call human nature is actually humans adapting to the conditions we built around ourselves?

So I pulled 15 of those articles together.

They get increasingly weird in different directions, which is exactly why I wanted them in one place for all of you.

If you want the organized version with all 15 direct links + the longer notes on each one, comment ROUNDUP001and I’ll send it to you.

If you’ve never read my work before, start here. This is the article where the whole thing is basically sitting out in the open.

We already understand that environment changes animals. Change their access to food, movement, territory, danger, stimulation, social structure, resources, and of course their behavior changes with it.

But then we look at humans living inside environments that organize almost every part of our lives and somehow stop applying the same logic because we’re the ones who built the environment.

I got really interested in what happens when a species adapts to highly managed conditions for so long that those conditions disappear into the background.

At what point do we stop recognizing the adaptation and just start calling it normal?

I wrote this b taken in Los Angeles, California by @jenstateofmind

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18 days ago

Merch line drops on 5/1! (there are other hat and shirt designs too, I just got too excited to wait to share) by @jenstateofmind

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6 months ago

Today we’re breaking down the second way to dismantle patriarchy as a man and that’s by having an emotional vocabulary. In this video we cover the different points that are brought up when you don’t allow yourself to have an emotional vocabulary. I would recommend following @jenstateofmind so you can see more of her findings from understanding how we all work as humans and how we respond to the systems and culture we’re in. by @jenstateofmind

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8 hours ago

Read the full carousel on my page or comment WEALTH to read my two favorite articles I've written on the topics by @jenstateofmind

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16 hours ago

I keep circling the same uneasy truth: we talk about what children need as if every answer can be bought, scheduled, optimized, or outsourced.

We chase better schools, activities, gear, opportunities, savings, experiences, and proof that we did enough by everyone else’s standards.

Yet a child can have every material comfort and still inherit little of what helps a person become capable, grounded, discerning, and harder to manipulate.

They can have access to everything and still not know what their family stands for, what adulthood asks of them, how to carry grief, how freedom is earned, how responsibility changes relationships, what money cannot touch, what their body is for, who they want to become, or where they belong when the internet goes quiet.

This is why I keep stretching the word wealth far beyond bank accounts and investment portfolios.

I’m interested in what actually moves between generations: habits carried in the body, stories told in kitchens, skills passed down during chores, and how a family makes sense of the world together.

Money can support some of it… but most of it cannot be purchased. And this is where initiation comes into focus.

Initiation asks adults to notice when a child is changing and take that shift seriously enough to teach, gather, witness, mark the moment, and hand over real trust. It also asks us to stop treating childhood like a holding pen before “real life” begins.

I also think many adults are grieving the same absence. We crossed huge thresholds with barely a word to mark them. We became adults through mistakes, bills, heartbreak, consequences, peers, advertising, work, porn, breakups, illness, debt, death, and whatever algorithm got to us first.

But this doesn’t mean we’re SOL… it just means becoming more deliberate about what we pass on from here.

📲 Comment WEALTH for the full article and companion toolkit about the 13 Dimensions of Wealth.

🙇 Comment CONSULT to apply for my private consulting waitlist which will reopen in 2027 to new clients again for the first time since becoming a mom.

❤️ Follow @jenstateofmind for more on family culture, initiation, seasonal living, and the systems shaping our lives by @jenstateofmind

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A lot of my work as I’m writing my book— The Domesticated Human— keeps circling the same question: how much of what we call “human nature” is actually a story we were taught about human nature?

We took a flattened version of Darwin, added the mythology of the dominant alpha male, and used it to make hierarchy feel biological.

Men compete. Men dominate. The strongest rise. Women choose winners. Power belongs at the top. Blah blah fuckity blah.

Eventually, an entire political and economic order begins to look less like something humans built and more like something nature demanded.

But when you start pulling at that story—through evolution, anthropology, animal behavior, cooperation, kinship, caregiving, the enormous diversity of human social arrangements—it becomes harder and harder to pretend patriarchy is the inevitable expression of a man’s biology.

Domination is part of a much larger story about hierarchy, enclosure, scarcity, competition, control, and the systems we eventually began mistaking for nature itself.

And men are trapped inside that story too.

Because if masculinity has to be continuously proven through dominance, money, sex, status, emotional control, and victory over other men.. then there is never actually a point at which a man gets to arrive is there?

There is only another rung of the hierarchy and another person he is supposed to stand above.

Dismantling patriarchy is bigger than being a nice guy or reposting a few feminism posts—it means interrogating the entire story of power we all inherited, including the one that told men domination was their nature in the first place.

Comment ROUNDUP and I’ll send you my top 15 essays on patriarchy, Darwin, hierarchy, domestication, masculinity, relationships, and the systems underneath all of it. by @jenstateofmind

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4 days ago

I had to limit myself to 12 slides 😂
What else would you add? (swipe all the way to the end for the etymology)

Note: “patrix” isn't an official word in ancient language like “matrix” is (I semi-made it up before seeing that a few others have also made the connection) but that kinda seems even more fitting?

Regardless, this metaphor will be a huge part of my book— The Domesticated Human— follow me @jenstateofmind for more posts like this and to watch the whole thing come together!

📲 Comment MATRIX05 for the link to read the full article + bonus toolkit by @jenstateofmind

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4 days ago

If matrix means womb or mother, why are we so hellbent on escaping her?

We’ve come to use “the matrix” as a name for the system: the grid we live inside, the structure controlling us, the plastic and fake aesthetics, the thing we’re supposed to wake up from and escape.

But matrix comes from the Latin mater, meaning mother, and originally referred to the womb or the place in which something is formed.

So I’ve started calling the thing we’re actually trying to escape the patrix.

By patrix, I mean the rigid father-grid built over the living world: a social order organized around hierarchy, extraction, domination, and separation. It teaches us to separate from the body, the land, the village, the mother, and eventually one another, then calls that separation freedom and progress.

Follow along, there’s lots more where this came from.

💋 @jenstateofmind by @jenstateofmind

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6 days ago

This one makes talking about “the system” way less convenient.

It feels good to imagine the system as this giant machine operating somewhere above us that we’re all stuck inside. The problem is that systems also live through completely ordinary participation.

We need jobs, housing, food, transportation, childcare, healthcare, money, technology, belonging.

Sometimes participation is coercive. Sometimes it’s habit or convenience or status. Sometimes you know perfectly well you’re participating in something you dislike and there simply isn’t a functioning alternative available to you.

So I stopped being very interested in “why don’t people just opt out?” and got much more interested in what can actually be withdrawn, what can’t, and what would have to exist before opting out became materially possible.

That distinction ended up mattering a LOT for my book —The Domesticated Human— because there has to be somewhere between “everything is your individual responsibility” and “individual humans have absolutely nothing to do with reproducing the systems around them.”

There also NEEDS to be somewhere between modern science and ancient wisdom. We will not see a balanced future without that balance as well.

🫶🏽 Follow @jenstateofmind for more posts like this + to follow along on my journey writing the official ‘The Domesticated Human’ Book Series.

📲 Comment MATRIX05 for the link to read the full article + bonus toolkit by @jenstateofmind

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12 days ago

Okay this rabbit hole was SO GOOD— A huge amount of the “alpha male” mythology people throw around like biological law traces back to observations of unrelated wolves living together under captive conditions.

Wild wolf packs are generally family groups.

That does NOT mean dominance magically disappears in nature. Animals compete, establish rank, fight, all of that.

The interesting part is that the story humans turned into proof of “natural hierarchy” was itself coming out of an environment that had already altered the animals’ social conditions.

Then I stopped caring nearly as much about winning the wolf argument because the bigger question was better.

If confinement, scarcity, forced proximity, and disrupted social structure can change animal behavior, what else are we calling “nature” after watching organisms behave inside conditions that are changing them?

That question is all over my book- The Domesticated Human.

🫶🏽 Follow @jenstateofmind for more posts like this + to follow along on my journey writing the official ‘The Domesticated Human’ Book Series.

📲 Comment ALPHA04 for the link to read the full article + bonus toolkit by @jenstateofmind

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13 days ago

Seasonal balance means noticing what the season is already doing to you, then deciding whether you need more of that quality or less.

In Vedic Philosophy, like increases like and opposing qualities restore balance. So when fall gets colder, drier, lighter and more erratic, the answer is often more warmth, moisture, weight, rhythm and rest.

Western science has its own language for part of this: homeostasis and allostasis. Your body is constantly adjusting to temperature, light, sleep timing, activity and environmental change to keep you regulated.

That changes the whole idea of most modern wellness system’s approach to “seasonal living.”

You’re meant to be reading the qualities around you, noticing what they’re doing in your own body and life, and be responding accordingly… not matching it 😬

I’m unpacking all of this in a 13-part fall series on Substack, alongside a greatly enhanced hardcover and full-color print version— The Alchemy of Autumn: Rites, Rituals, and the Elemental Art of Seasonal Living.

Subscribers on Substack (link in bio) will get a discount on the book so watch your emails + follow me @jenstateofmind for more seasonal tidbits throughout the year 🫶 by @jenstateofmind

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This is still one of my favorite things I’ve written because “dismantle patriarchy” sounds extremely straightforward until you start asking where everybody is supposed to live afterward.

Patriarchy isn’t only a collection of beliefs about women and men— it got built into money, labor, childcare, property, inheritance, family structure, healthcare, employment, relationships, and the practical question of who depends on whom for what.

You can completely disagree with the logic of a system and still wake up tomorrow needing the infrastructure that exists inside it.

That’s why I wrote the whole thing through divorce.

Leaving something is not the same as deciding you no longer believe in it. There are dependencies, assets, routines, grief, fear, bargaining, and the gigantic question of what you’re building on the other side.

My book -The Domesticated Human- will take this much further, but this is where I really started working through the difference between rejecting a system and actually being materially capable of leaving it.

🫶🏽 Follow @jenstateofmind for more posts like this + to follow along on my journey writing the official ‘The Domesticated Human’ Book Series.

📲 Comment DIVORCE03 for the link to read the full article + bonus toolkit by @jenstateofmind

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