Meet Jordan Bower

As the rest of my website is about marketing myself as a professional, I want to make this section explicitly about who I am as a human. I’m going to focus more about how I got here and where I (hope) I’m going without dwelling too much on my professional accomplishments. I’m doing this to give prospective clients and connections a deeper sense of what I care about and what motivates my work. Besides, I’m an early millennial, and I really, really love writing. Be forewarned.

Who I Hope To Be

Rather than starting from what got me here, I’m going to eat my own dog food and jump right into my vision of the future. When I peer twenty or even thirty years ahead, I see a version of myself who is compassionate, loving, grounded, and wise. This vision orients everything I do as both a professional and a personal — each day, I ask myself how I can be more like my future self. Sometimes, I can even successfully achieve some of that.

By intent, those words are fluffy and abstract. Though I pride myself on my sharpness and intelligence, I am consciously guiding myself towards emotional and nuanced terrain. For me, “compassionate” does not just mean nice: it also means holding a deeper level of understanding. It means seeing myself, other people and the world from a wider and deeper perspective, rather than just reacting to how things appear on the surface. “Loving” motivates me to be a helpful host, and to appreciate people’s needs on their own terms. “Grounded” keeps me from getting too excitable or chasing after the next shiny thing, which has been a past habit. And what it means to be “wise” is among the most interesting questions I’ve ever asked.

Together, these four words are pulling me somewhere. I see my work today as allowing myself become, bit by bit, the person that one day I will eventually be.

How My Experiences Have Shaped Me

Nothing has shaped my life more than the experience of independent travel. The first time I ever travelled on my own, I was 18 years old with a couple of days to kill while I was in Europe. I was heading by night train from Prague to Switzerland, and somehow along the way I woke up in an empty train carriage in Stuttgart by a slightly bemused Deutsche Bahn mechanic. It was an early lesson in being open to everything.

At 19, I spent a summer backpacking in Australia, and at 20, I island hopped through Southeast Asia. At 22, I studied abroad in Hong Kong, and at 23, I took a job with a travel company operating luxury tours all over the world. After spending several years learning how to communicate with contacts ranging from Argentina to Vietnam, at 26, I quit my job to backpack alone in India. I ended up spending the next three years traveling back and forth to the subcontinent where, in every sense of the word, I fell head over heels in love.

Shortly before my 30th birthday, I somehow found myself walking alone down the West Coast of the US, from Canada to Mexico. I traversed nearly 2,000 miles on foot along beaches and through forests as I reckoned with my past and try to imagine myself into a brighter future. Once the trip was done, it was back to India again — followed by a few small towns in Western Canada.

Finally, around the time I turned 33, I realized that phase in my life had come to an end. On a whim, I moved to a small coastal city in Western Canada, where I put out my shingle: storyteller. In retrospect, I had no idea what I was doing. But it turned out that the most important thing I’d learned from traveling was how to navigate uncertainty and chaos, and entrepreneurship is nothing else if not that.

Slowly, I began a new journey that has led me from there to where I am today.

How I Learned to Be a Storyteller

“Storytelling” can seem like such a buzzword these days. It often seems to me that all it takes is a social account and a phone, and—ping—you qualify as a storyteller. Which is great, in its own way.

At the same time, it can be easy to forget that storytelling is not just an action, but an art. And the art is rooted in something that goes much deeper into what it means to be human than simply photographing whatever you’re eating for dinner. (Which is great, too, if that’s what you’re in to.)

For me, my experiences through travel were what first got me interested in storytelling’s deep roots. Having the luxury of traveling through so many cultures and perspectives was what first got me thinking about the power of narrative — where stories come from, what perpetuates them, and why certain ones endure. These are the things you think about when you stand in front of Angkor War or Notre Dame or on the banks of the Ganges River, watching dead bodies burn. You start to realize that when you dig beneath the surface of things, it’s story all the way down.

My fascination was always with the mythic elements of storytelling. Over the decades, I have read voraciously from a wide range of psychological and anthropological influences. Jung, Freud, Joseph Campbell, Margaret Mead, Mircea Eliade, Jean Houston… I’ve read about the world from the colonial, the anti-colonial, and the post-colonial perspective, driven by a deep hunger to understand — and, even more importantly, to feel. This backdrop has grounded me in an appreciation that storytelling is about something much more important than entertainment. It is literally our lifeline to the unseen. Even in a professional context, I constantly keep in mind the reality that storytelling is magical — though I probably won’t put that on my RFPs.

Even in a post-literate world, I still read voraciously.

But my greatest initiation to storytelling came shortly after I started my business. At the same time that I was marketing myself, designing content, delivering workshops, and closing the sale, I also through myself into writing a book. My travel experiences had changed me profoundly, especially my solo walking trip across the country. I passionately believed that my story could impact others, and I naively believed that there were still readers out there who would care enough about my coming-of-age story to plop down twenty dollars. As I said above, I am an early millennial, and therefore, I was just as affected as everyone by the explosion of Eat, Pray, Love. Like many, I believed that the purpose of the social media age was to share our everything with the world, and I dreamed of putting myself out into the world just as vulnerably — sharing not just who I met and what I saw along the journey, but also a much more raw and visceral account. Sex, drugs, and everything.

Motivated by my inner passion, I threw myself into the task. I spent pretty much the next decade writing endlessly. You know how some people say they’re writing a book and never get started? I wrote for hours upon hours. For the first couple years, I worked to hone my experiences into a narrative; for the next couple years, I worked to make the narrative more accessible. I wrote the book from start to finish—no exaggeration—about thirty five or forty different times. By the end, I could write the whole story from start to finish in just two solid weeks of fervent, caffeine-supported typing. Pumping out hundreds of thousands of words each time, I would relive my experiences viscerally as if they were still happening in real time. To this day, if you name any town or beach on the West Coast of the US, I can tell you exactly what the weather was when I was there — who I met — how it fit into my larger narrative. I honed and I polished, and I refined and I rewrote. I sought guidance from mentors and editors.

Somewhere along the way, I turned into a storyteller.

And, something else was also true. I never published the book.

Looking back, I can see many things I chalk up to my “failure”. (Not that I think about it like that.) For one thing, the #metoo movement shifted the nature of my narrative immensely — I think #metoo shifted how we think about coming of age for a man, and I still think that, from a North American cultural perspective, we are still grappling with the consequences. Then, during the pandemic, the memoir market shifted substantially as marginalized voices were elevated to center stage. Publishing’s interest in navel-gazing straight white men declined precipitously. And, personally, after writing the book so many times, eventually, I started to get sick of it. I started to think that my attention was better spent on a different kind of story. So, eventually, I put it down.

Right now, the only place you can read is in my Google Drive. (Just a few people have read it — one is likely Google’s Gemini.) Maybe I’ll get back to it. Maybe not. Frankly, it doesn’t feel like a failure. It just feels like another, essential step along my journey.

My Attitude Towards Spirituality

Travel, entrepreneurship, and storytelling have been among the major themes informing my life. At the root of all three of them is spirituality. I am a very devout person, and I am dedicated to my lack of dogmatism. If you ask me what I believe in, I will likely look you dead in the eyes and say “I don’t know.” Those three words are holy to me.

Yet, if pressed, I would admit that there are some things I do know. Since I was very young, I have dedicated my life to asking big questions of myself and of others. My journeys have educated me as I’ve moved along my path. Now I still aspire to see and feel the bigness in everything: the potential, the mystery, the connecting ties that bind us all together in ways we can scarcely imagine.

What I know to be true is that there is something more to life than eating, mating, and getting rich. Long ago, I rejected materialism. My life continues to be oriented around my unfolding relationship with that abstract thing called soul. Soulfulness is one of my life’s orienting qualities.

I believe that there is a point to my life, even if I can never and will never be able to define it. To me, more important than the point is the point of the search. Each day I wake up motivated to be different, to learn something new, to experience something I’ve never felt, to see some novel and unprecedented perspective. I see that process as inseparable from my life’s journey, not just something I do to be nice. Perhaps I should have named this quality of soulfulness way back in the beginning — but I love that it popped up spontaneously here. I am craving to surround myself with more soulful people, and I know from my conversations and explorations that there are many others like me who are craving the same thing. I don’t long to be a guru or to run a cult or any such thing, but I do yearn for a deeper relationship with meaning.

I think this detail, more than anything else I have written, is what shapes me most as a human.

A Few Final Notes of Potential Interest (Maybe to No One But Me)

• Ultimate Frisbee. I freakin’ love it. I often carried a frisbee with me during my travels around the world — I literally carried a frisbee with me while walking across America. (I would throw it up into the wind, like a boomerang, on lonely beaches when I had no one else to play with.) Over the years, I have been fortunate to compete with teams at the national and international level. I’ve been on two different teams that have won the silver medal at the World Championship (in 2017 and 2022). In recent years, I have volunteered as a head coach of a local club team. Way back in 2008, I volunteered for three months with a development program in India using ultimate frisbee as a tool for peacemaking between sectarian communities. I can throw a frisbee something like 30 different ways, when you count different release points, flight paths, etc. It continues to be is among my favorite obsessions.

• 5Rhythms Ecstatic Dance. A couple of years ago, I was introduced to 5Rhythms, an “ecstatic” dancing practice. Now I am a regular. 5Rhythms is a little hard to explain; unquestionably, you’ll probably think it is woo-woo. It happens on Wednesday nights. A bunch of people get together in a church, and spend 90 minutes dancing together to music. There’s no talking on the dance floor. People get pretty weird. I’ve found it remarkably liberating — it has helped transform how I relate to my body even more than how I dance, helping me move through a lot of the chauvinistic shit I learned about men and movement from when I was a teenager. There’s 5Rhythms communities in many cities around the world — I highly recommend giving it a try.

• Burner Culture. Way back in 2011, I discovered Burning Man, the massive, notorious art fair that happens in the Nevada Desert every August. For a time, it took changed my life. I loved so much about Burning Man culture, though to be clear I was much more interested in the difficulty of the experience, the expression of creativity, and the exploration of the esoteric than the rave scene that you might see on Instagram. Back then, Burning Man was the closest thing in the US that approximated what I’d experienced in India. Over the next decade, I went too many times to count, during which time my relationship to the thing transformed immensely. I am still awed by the force of maker-culture, and the dedication to creating transcendent, ritualized experiences — something I don’t think we take seriously enough in this part of the world. And, at the same time, I have watched the thing become, in some ways, a parody of itself. The last few times I went, I saw more and more people who were trying to imitate Burning Man based on what they had once seen on Instagram. As I ebb into my mid-40s, my appetite for throbbing bass music in the middle of the night has undeniably diminished. But I am forever indebted to Burner culture for lighting the spark. I still have a bin of dusty costumes hidden in a closet somewhere…..