CO-FOUNDER STORIES
Jenn & Julie share the journeys that led
them to start Meditation in Motion
Jenn Yoo
Jenn was raised in a family that deeply prioritized knowing God and cultivating spiritual life. While it was a blessing to have known and loved God from a young age, there was also a lot she had to unlearn. For many years, she lived under a mindset of earning her keep, staying busy and preoccupied so as to ignore the shame that stalked her like a shadow, ready to loom large at any opportunity.
After college, Jenn moved to the city that never sleeps, and neither did she. The silence that precedes sleep was prime time for shame to make itself heard: You’ll never be good enough. Just look at you. There’s no hope for you. You’re unlovable. So instead she filled the silence with hours of digital content, letting it fill the space until she was drop-dead tired.
When Jenn finally found herself in a moment of nonthreatening silence at the end of a yoga class one day, she heard a gentle nudge: Do you know that this is the first time you’ve been silent long enough that I could get your attention?
More than a decade later, Jenn was inspired to explore embodiment as an integral part of developing a prayer life. Inspired by the Scripture, “Early in the morning, when it was still dark, Jesus went to a solitary place to pray,” she often walked to a hilltop garden to pray as the sun rose over the San Francisco skyline.
An innovation consultant and design researcher by profession and freshly unemployed due to the pandemic in early 2020, she pursued training in both spiritual direction and a 200-hr yoga teacher training. She has a certificate in spiritual direction from Nuos Formation and is a member of the Evangelical Spiritual Directors Association.
Julie Barrios
Julie’s spiritual journey began when she was still in a car seat and asked her mom if trees prayed. Her mom wisely said yes, creating the foundations for a deep and rich theology of prayer that followed Julie into her adulthood.
Entering teenage years in the 90s, Julie found herself bombarded with the body ideals of Kate Moss and heroin chic, prompting new struggles with how to live well in her body as it was. Remembering that trees pray simply by wiggling their leaves with the wind, she started to form a deeper spirituality of her own body. She started asking God the question: What does my body naturally want to do, as the wind of your spirit blows through it?
In response to the question, the first answer was: Pay attention. As she paid attention, she noticed prompts to act, moment by moment. She remembers a time years ago when she couldn’t sleep, and she felt a gentle nudge to turn over and be on her knees in child’s pose. From that new posture, her body led her mind and heart to surrender anxieties to God from a deeper place.
From that experience, she has grown to increasingly trust those fleeting nudges and engage them with confidence that her physical body may know things the conscious mind does not--about God, about herself, and about the world around her. Engaging the body has helped her more fully participate in the way God is at work in and all around her.
Fast forward a number of years, and Julie found many of her intuitions confirmed through the study of the history of Christian spirituality. She graduated with an M.A. in spiritual formation and soul care from Talbot School of Theology and subsequently completed a certificate in Ignatian spirituality at the Loyola Institute. She eventually founded Nuos Formation, a consultancy that supports deep flourishing for individuals, companies and organizations.
Julie has been a spiritual director for the last 15 years. She practices spiritual direction, the clinical supervision of spiritual directors, the training of spiritual directors, and retreat facilitation out of San Francisco.