Meet Jennifer Axcell
Founder, Champion of Rest & Recovering Workaholic
Jennifer has been married to Scott for 13 years, and they live in Denver with their 19-year-old chihuahua, Lola. After studying business and fashion design in college, she first became an entrepreneur at the age of 24 when she built an image consulting and fashion styling business, Beyond Black. As a philanthropist and entrepreneur, she has now been a part of the development and growth of two nonprofit organizations and currently serves as Program Chair on the Board of Directors for This is Jane Project.
Jennifer is a plant-based vegan, who loves travel, listening to worship music, gardening, enjoying time outside in nature, design, reading, and investing in people and activities that fill her energetic cup. She has been practicing yoga for 20 years and has been teaching yin yoga since 2018. She is a certified R-YFYT yoga teacher who specializes in faith-based yoga, which she received through YogaFaith, accredited by Yoga Alliance. She was trained in meditation facilitation by Collette Patricia of Love Culture.
Jennifer has been leading small group Bible studies at the churches she’s attended through the years and has a heart for helping people know and experience the love of God more fully.
Jennifer’s Yoga & Meditation Journey
I'm originally from Colorado, having moved to California in college to study fashion design at the Academy of Art. It was there, in the early 2000s, that I found my heart for design and beauty, my passion for wellness, and my faith in God.
While working and finishing school, I started taking yoga classes as a way to add balance to my fast-paced life as an entrepreneur and student. I owned a fashion styling and image consulting company in San Francisco. I loved that work because it stoked the fires of my passion for beauty, creativity, and design. Yoga was a tool for me to breathe and decompress from the hustle of entrepreneurship.
After a bad car accident in 2009, I found myself turning to yoga as a recovery tool, bringing movement back to my injury-filled body. And moving back to Colorado with my husband. It was then in my healing journey that I started to appreciate the mental and spiritual aspects of my yoga practice.
Yoga had such a profound impact on my well-being that I became a registered YogaFaith Yin Trainer, in 2018. The first classes I ever held were part of a small group I started at my church that same year. I had been practicing yoga for over a decade at that point and had yet to find a yoga studio where I felt I could speak openly about my love for Jesus. That planted the seed of desire in my heart to create beautiful moments of delight to worship God through movement with other believers.
It wasn't until I found myself with a severe case of burnout in 2020 that I started adding meditation into my yoga practice as a way to self-regulate my nervous system. And I have my trauma background to thank for learning about this tool.
My nonprofit work with TIJP supports the healing of women and non-binary trauma survivors. I have been very lucky to learn a lot about what it means to be trauma-informed, am regularly exposed to many different healing modalities, as well as being provided opportunities to hold safe energetic spaces for others. It is through this work that I was first introduced to Stephen W. Porges, Ph.D.’s polyvagal theory, and the potential for nervous system regulation through breathwork, yoga, and meditation. Which now informs my understanding of so much of the way I experience my life.
My burnout recovery journey since 2020 has been filled with challenges, big changes, surprising revelations, facing difficult truths, hard conversations, alternative medicines, therapy, boundary setting, self-care, yoga, meditation, and a whole lot of Jesus.
It's truly a pleasure and an honor to be taking what I have learned from my own experiences and healing journey, and through Loto Wellness Collective, support others in their healing through experiences of sacred rest in spaces of beauty. In 2023, that now includes hybrid yoga and meditation classes in a combined format, as a way to help my students learn to self-regulate their own nervous systems. And I’m excited to be offering virtual classes and our first retreat later this year.
I am excited to continue learning, exploring, and experiencing more paths toward healing, and am excited to be bringing the essence of those into my wellness classes, workshops, retreats, and community.
I hope you will join me.
In Him,
Jennifer
