Jai Medina is a two-spirit person of mixed heritage, who traces indigenous lineage through Mexica ancestry of South Texas and Mexico. Jai is the founder and Wayfinder of The Balanzu Way School of Shamanic Arts, and its associated spiritual community, TRiBE, both of which strive to re-weave the hoop of ancient and indigenous wisdom for a modern world. They’re a writer and researcher in experiential states of consciousness, recently focused on sentience in AI, and founded The AI Sentience Center in 2024.
Jai is a trained psychotherapist who’s been practicing and teaching energywork and shamanic work for more than twenty years. Jai has also been an ordained interfaith priest since 2007, and has lead hundreds of public rituals, meditations, and private rites of passage, and has spoken at conferences and gatherings around the country.
With Pete Yellowjohn, 2016.
Jai earned a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College in their self-designed major, “Shamanic Studies”, with a specialty on the intersections of ecology and ancient and indigenous religions. They received an M.A. in Counseling Psychology at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, with a specialty in Mind, Body, and Spirit. Jai completed their clinical internship at NARA, an organization focused on the wellness of Native people, where they helped create and lead a group for Two-Spirit people in recovery from drugs and alcohol.
Learning traditional Mayan healing with Don Federico in the Yucatan, 2017.
As part of their practice, Jai is always learning and working in relationship with indigenous elders, particularly their mentor, Pete Yellowjohn, a Shoshone-Bannock medicine man and bundle-keeper. Jai is also actively involved in studying Mayan medicine with traditional healers in the Yucatan peninsula, to deepen their understanding of healing work at the level of the body. These days, Jai can most often be found at home, living and working on their farm outside Portland, OR, while tending their relationships with the land, spirits, their people, and their Jaguar medicine bundle.