Finding Our Worth at Every Stage of Life: an evening with Steph Jagger

Finding Our Worth at Every Stage of Life: an evening with Steph Jagger

Presented by AdventurUs Women & Roundabout Books

This is a ticketed event requiring a $5 fee or purchase of a book. Fees and books can be purchased through Eventbrite here.

Join Steph Jagger for an evening talk/mini-workshop about the cycle of female initiations and the use of nature to bring them alive.

Many of us have heard about the trilogy of Maiden, Mother, Crone, but have we learned how to move from myth to modern day meaning and momentum inside our lived experience? Have we learned how to apply the deep rumblings of each archetype to bring a sense of aliveness and expansion to our ordinary lives? And do we know what nature has to teach us about the themes inside each phase—the identity carving of Maiden, for example, or the creative power of Mother.

Steph Jagger has spent well over a decade of her life wrestling through, and writing about, her own initiations, all of which have taken place in nature.

Her first book, Unbound: A Story of Snow & Self Discovery details her Maiden voyage by way of a world record breaking ski journey set in a year of endless winter. Her second book, Everything Left to Remember: My Mother, Our Memories and a Journey Through the Rocky Mountains, guides us through the Mother archetype as Steph and her own mom, who had just been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, set out for a road-trip through the National Parks of the American West. Each story offers wisdom, more than a handful of laughs and examples of real-life initiation.

Join us for an evening, learn the how-to of connecting our real-life experiences to the bigger picture of our ongoing evolution.

 “It is a call to rise from the half-sleep of our existence, and take up our part in the great unfolding of the world.” –Sharon Blackie 

Unbound: A Story of Snow and Self-Discovery

Five continents, four million vertical feet, and one woman in search of herself.

“A Wild-esque memoir of adventure and reflection.”—Self

Steph Jagger had always been a force of nature. Dissatisfied with the limited roles she saw for women as she was growing up, she emulated the men in her life—chasing success, climbing the corporate ladder, playing by the rules of a masculine ideal. By all accounts, she was living “The Dream.” But it wasn’t her dream.

While skiing with friends one day, the universe caught her attention with a sign: Raise Restraining Device. Steph had seen this ski-lift sign countless times, but the familiar words suddenly became a personal call to shake off the life she had built and start a search for something different—something more.

Steph decided to walk away from the success and security she had worked long and hard to obtain. She quit her job, took a second mortgage on her house, sold everything except her ski equipment and her laptop, and bought a bundle of plane tickets. For the next year, she followed winter up and down the mountains of North and South America, Asia, Europe, and New Zealand on a mission to ski four million vertical feet in a year.

What hiking was for Cheryl Strayed, skiing became for Steph: a crucible in which to crack open her life and get to the very center of herself. But she would have to break herself down—first physically, then emotionally—before she could start to rebuild. And it was through this journey of body and soul that she came to understand how to be a woman, how to love, and how to live authentically.

Electrifying, heartfelt, and full of humor, Unbound will inspire readers to remove their own restraining devices and pursue the life they are meant to lead.

Everything Left to Remember

BETWEEN TWO KINGDOMS meets WILD in this inspirational memoir about a woman and her mother, who is suffering from dementia, taking a road trip in the Rocky Mountains and revisiting the memories that made them who they are.

Steph Jagger lost her mother before she lost her. Her mother, stricken with an incurable disease that slowly erases all sense of self, struggles to remember her favorite drink, her favorite song, and—perhaps most heartbreaking of all—Steph herself. Steph watches as the woman who loved and raised her slips away before getting the chance to tell her story, and so Steph makes a promise: her mother will walk it and she will write it.

Too aware of her mother’s waning memory, Steph proposes that the two take a camping trip out to Montana—which her mother, on the urging of Steph’s father, agrees to embark upon. An adventure full of horseback riding, hiking, and “tenting” out West quickly turns into one woman’s reflection on childhood, motherhood, personhood—and what it means to love someone who doesn’t quite remember the person she spent her lifetime becoming.

A staggeringly beautiful examination of how stories are passed down through generations and from Mother Nature, Everything Left to Remember brings us the wisdom of who our memories make us, under the constellations of the vast Montana sky.

Steph Jagger is a sought-after mentor and coach whose offerings guide people toward a deeper understanding of themselves and their stories. Her work, including speaking and facilitation, lies at the intersection of loss, the nature of deep remembrance, and the personal journey of re-creation. Steph grew up in Vancouver, Canada and now lives and works on Bainbridge Island, WA.