How I Got Here: Jodi Harris
Despite growing up in a small town in Texas, I always knew I would live overseas. I was the kid staring at maps, spinning globes and looking out at the field behind my house wondering what would happen if I just started walking into the horizon.
My husband and I first lived in Japan during our first year of marriage, teaching English in rural Yamaguchi prefecture from 1999-2000. Since that time we’ve lived in Northern Ireland, the Dominican Republic and Madagascar. And, of course, now we’re back here…and we’ve added three children to the mix.
It is a gift and a blessing to live around the world. I am daily humbled by the experience of being outside my home culture. The opportunities to grow, to see and to completely immerse myself in the unfamiliar are life changing. And, sometimes it’s hard. Life goes on back home whether we’re there or not.
This realization – that living a life overseas is filled with the constant duality of love and uncertainty, home and far away – is the guiding force that prompted me, in 2013, to shift my career as a psychotherapist into something more portable and to begin my practice as a coach, mindfulness teacher and writer supporting individuals living outside their home cultures.
With World Tree Coaching, I have one mission – to help people find home, no matter where they were. I believe each of us has the brilliance, the insight and the strength to go looking for and to find, exactly where we’re supposed to be.
As an expat myself, I share that journey. That’s why I felt so lucky to learn about FEW from a friend within a month of moving here in 2015.
I immediately knew this was a group I wanted to be a part of. And, when I think about my own personal and professional history, it’s not all that surprising to see why I have so enjoyed being part of the FEW community. FEW creates the very thing I hold most dear – a place to explore, to create, to connect and, ultimately, to find a sense of home.
Find out more about Jodi’s life coaching and mindfulness training at worldtreecoaching.com! And you can find her book, ‘The Expat Activity Book’ at Amazon here.