Sudbury resident Jeanne Denney brings together somatic therapy and a lifelong exploration of what it means to be human through her new book, The Nature of Being Human: How Body and Consciousness Change Together (self-published, 2026). The book also explores her own life and the world of nature to help answer big questions about how to improve how humans relate to one another and our natural world as we live, age, and die.

Her book focuses on humans going through life stages, with an emphasis on how attuning ourselves to the rhythms of nature and to the energy we share in relationships and in community can help us live healthier, more fulfilled lives. Her own experience working in both birth settings and hospice have taught her that “mortality awareness” allows us to become “more human.”

Deeply grounded in research, the book is both memoir, and as Denny describes it, “a living poem” written in a fluid and accessible style as a shared exploration of life-changing ideas. Diagrams and illustrations provide visual interpretations of the text, and each chapter ends with a summary of key points and guiding questions for self-exploration.

Bridges to bodies

Before becoming a therapist, teacher, and author, Denney spent two decades as an engineer in New York City.

“It was an age ago,” she says. “I spent 20 years designing bridges in NYC — moving bridges. They are complex bridges to design and to fix. It taught me a lot about how to think logically and physically. I learned how to watch energy move. I worked with people of all different types to get things done in the physical world.”

She describes the experience as grounding and as an important “initiation into the world of men, she says. “I was really grateful for it and I could not spend my whole life doing it.”

Her transition to a very different career began in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, and the death of her mother. Motherhood had already prompted her to explore the relationship between mind and body, particularly after the birth of her twins. She earned a master’s degree from the Institute for Transpersonal Psychology (now Sophia University) and trained in reiki and other forms of healing. Her subsequent studies and work moved across disciplines and stages of life: birth doula work, death and dying, consciousness studies, hospice, somatics, and human development.

“In me germinated a desire to craft a fuller story of human life,” she says, and that desire eventually became the foundation for her first book, The Nature of Being Human.

Life as a whole circle

At the center of Denney’s work is a challenge to the way contemporary culture separates life into discrete categories: childhood and adulthood, health and illness, usefulness and decline, life and death.

“Life and death are not oppositional states,” she argues. “Changing our understanding of death can also change our understanding of aging, relationships, illness, and even community. How might our understanding of childhood, adulthood, aging, and dying change if we viewed the entire life cycle as a circle or as a spiral rather than separated stages?”

Rather than seeing aging and dying as a series of losses, she sees them as part of a continuous process of becoming. Relationships are central to that process. Denney believes the body is continually responding to relationships, even before conscious thought catches up. The effects of relationships on our bodies can be profound.

“You can get ill or heal through relationships. Our body responds to having them, not having them, and to the health or ill health of them,” she says.

In her chapter, “Adult Relationships: Quest for Maturity,” she writes, “When we manage to foster mutuality in a relationship, it seems to hold both divinity and the truth of our deepest nature in it.”

The school of unusual life learning

Denney developed what eventually became the School of Unusual Life Learning, or SoULL. What began organically as a way of teaching her ideas grew into an educational community that has operated in New York, Wisconsin, the San Francisco Bay Area, online, and Europe.

“It evolved without an overt vision. It was like being pregnant and being curious. The school was a manifestation of my teachings,” she says.

In 2018, she began formally calling it a school as more teachers joined. The word “unusual” is deliberate. SoULL treats death not as the opposite of life but as an essential component of the ecology of life. Now comprising nine teachers, it is “a school for personal transformation and professional development for adults,” and an official training organization of the US Association for Body Psychotherapy.

For Denney, the community created by SoULL was as important as the curriculum itself. Teaching the material allowed her to observe how people changed when they encountered these ideas together.

She emphasizes that human beings cannot be understood solely through individual relationships.

“What I know as a therapist is that one-on-one is often not enough. We live in communities, not dyads. We need to feel safe in a group.”

Denney also questions cultural ideas about productivity, usefulness, and decline. She sees these ideas reflected in technology, institutions, health care, and the ways people understand themselves.

“The perfection motif and the useless/disposable motif are built into our computers and so much of our technology,” she says. “This is the same template that goes into informing our children about who they must be.”

She contrasts the linear, segmented way people often organize life with the rhythms of biological systems.

That difference, she believes, has consequences for how society treats people during periods of transition.

“We don’t give people the time to grieve, to acknowledge what has been learned and offered,” she says.

Her alternative is a more relational understanding of human development, which allows people to transition, grieve, learn, and change without being immediately categorized as successful or unsuccessful.

Writing for ordinary mortals

Denney wrote her newly published book for a broad audience rather than exclusively for scholars or practitioners.

“I wrote it really for ordinary mortals. I tried to find a voice for those who have deeper questions. I wrote it for anyone to understand,” she says. At the same time, she hopes the book reaches people working in medicine and somatic practice.

One of her goals was to restore connections that academic disciplines often separate for the sake of study.

“We categorize so we can study — but it doesn't bring the connections we need to spark between people. To do that, we need a new language.”

For Denney, that language is already present in the body: “The language of being human is the language all our bodies are speaking.”

She sees embodiment as something that crosses cultural boundaries. People may have very different histories and traditions, but all experience birth, illness, relationships, aging, and death.

“Our bodies are experiencing shared processes. We can learn to see each other across cultures more deeply through our shared vulnerability as human beings,” she says.

A human future

Perhaps the most striking theme in Denney’s work is her insistence that human beings are part of something larger than themselves. Asked what she hopes readers will notice after reading her book, she offers a simple answer: “That they are part of a larger pulsation and that they are being carried.”

Belonging, she says, remains a human need and she does not position herself outside that struggle.

“I am working with everyone else as another human,” she says. “How do you have belongingness without the rest of the world?” Her view of humanity is simultaneously wounded and hopeful.

“I experience the world in myself as wounded, and full of the capacity to heal by restoring human rhythm. The good news is our bodies know how to do this. It doesn’t take much to remind ourselves that we already know this language. We just need to heed the invitation to recognize what we already know.”

For Denney, that recognition begins with being together.

“Being with people — I just feel the promise of humanity. I get disappointed — with myself too — that we don’t use this resource of humanity to its maximum. I’m a student with everyone else.”

A new neighbor in Sudbury

As a new resident of Sudbury, she is interested in sharing that process of learning with the local community. “I followed my divining rod to move to my home in Sudbury,” she says.

This move has brought her into a community she finds unusually aligned with her interests.

“What I have enjoyed about living in this area is that this is the healthiest community in which I have ever lived. I study about community, I teach about it, and what I find here is an astonishing number of people using their community skills. Sharing values and intent. Especially around the value of nature in people’s lives and the health of people.”

The landscape itself has become part of Denney’s vision for her work. She hopes eventually to transform a meadow on her property into a contemplative movement space, inspired by a dream in which her late teacher invited her to “listen and hear the pulsation of life.”

For someone whose work asks people to pay closer attention to relationships, place, nature, and the rhythms of life, Sudbury may prove to be a fitting place for Denney’s next chapter.

Jeanne Denney works with individuals and occasionally with groups, especially those in the local area. You can contact her through her website, https://www.jeannedenney.com, or by email at [email protected].