Jess King knows the importance of loving and nurturing all aspects of one’s self — mind, body, and spirit — and continually works to incorporate this concept into her life and work. While she’s now found enormous success as a personal trainer and Peloton instructor with a heartfelt and energetic style, King started her career as a professional dancer who’s appeared on So You Think You Can Dance and toured with Cirque de Soleil. These days, she’s also a certified life coach, working DJ, and mother of two.
King says she was initially reluctant to transition from the world of dance into the fitness realm. But after an opportunity arose to work with Peloton as an instructor, she says many things in her life began to fall into place. The career shift opened her eyes to the idea that she could love and embrace new endeavors and challenges without giving up other passions.
“I don’t live in this caged approach to what’s possible for my life,” King says. “If you look at all the things I do, they all speak to each other, they all go hand in hand. They all are rooted in my core values and my life’s purpose, which is ultimately to heal myself. I’ve always been on a journey to heal, to really let go of small stories or past experiences that are still painting color onto my current landscape and my relationships, and really wanting to unravel and unpack that. That’s the journey that brought me to wellness on a deeper level, that brought me into life coaching, that brought me into starting Mindfull3.”
Mindfull3 is a wellness program King developed over seven years ago that focuses on “food fitness, physical fitness, and spiritual fitness.” The transformative three-month program is designed to help give people a jump-start on the road to physical health and mental wellness. As its website states, “Change can be beautiful, but it’s messy,” so King and her team are there to lead folks through it. The 90-day program includes intimate group chats with King and other participants, a customized nutrition plan, virtual one-on-one fitness training sessions, and “no bullshit life coaching.”
Jess King (photo by Brian King)
King explains that going through some difficult times in her own life led her to start thinking more about wellness and mental health and its relation to physical fitness.
“I had come to this really dark chapter in my life where I hadn’t been dancing, I hadn’t been working, not moving, running, nothing. I hadn’t said hello to my body. In fact, the opposite. And when I decided to come back to myself after going through a really horrible breakup, meaning to heal my heart, I knew that I wanted to move my body again. I knew that I needed to eat and nourish in a way that was going to heal a lot of the really rough damage I’ve been doing to myself over the last few years.”
That’s when King says, “It started to click. My life started to change. Peloton started to become the powerhouse that it is in my life and in others. I fell in love — my wife and I have now been together for 11 years. We have two kids.”
King says the wellness tools and practices she teaches in her work have also truly helped her get through challenges and new experiences in her own life, like pregnancy and childbirth.
“I think something that caught me by surprise was how little I cared about the changes in my body,” she says of her motherhood journey. “Maybe that’s a testament to a lot of the work I have been doing over the last decade or two to learn how to love myself, to learn what surrender means, to learn to connect or think deeper about my body, less about the reflection and more about what it can do or more about the magic and the miracle inside the healing power.”
While many aspects of childbirth were spiritually magical for King, she does admit some of the physical changes were jarring. “I think the hardest part for me was breastfeeding and the boobs and the schedule and the boobs — just so much boobs!” she says with a laugh. “I don’t think anybody could prepare me for the relentlessness of becoming a mother. But as it relates to the body, I just had this approach of surrender. I could surrender to whatever was happening, whether my body was growing or doing something strange or something I wouldn’t want it to do otherwise. I did a home birth because I was like, Ah, let’s see what this is all about. Like, I want to feel it all. So [I used] that mantra of just surrendering to the process of something that was just out of my control.”
Jess King and her beautiful family gather for a portrait. (photo by Brian King)
In addition to Mindfull3, King created ThoughtFULL “to connect more deeply with her community.” ThoughtFULL is an online platform that offers small-group life coaching sessions via Zoom designed to provide “a safe and supportive space for self-discovery, meaningful connection, and lasting transformation,” as its website states. It consists of two individual programs, ThoughtFULL 101 and Habits & Healing, both focused on emotional healing and developing personal empowerment.
King also recently launched On The Record, an online space dedicated to amplifying the voices of underrepresented groups in sports, such as Latine, LGBTQ+, and women.
“I have this opportunity, this platform, to really highlight diversity, diverse creators, individuals who don’t really fit inside of the box like myself,” she says. “I’m a lot of things – I’m queer, I’m Latina, I’m a woman, I’m a female in sports. You know, I think we’re all multi hyphenated. I think we’re all multipolar. I just wanted to be able to highlight my people and in a way that was deeper than a social media conversation when that really could spotlight their talent, their expertise, their perspective, their stories.”
Jess King is our cover star for the spring issue of The Advocate's sister magazine, Health PLUS Wellness, available for free at doctor's offices and clinics nationwide. CLICK HERE to read the complete issue online!
