Choosing Restorative Justice After a Horse Riding Accident with Jennifer Love

Jennifer Love was sitting in a wheelchair when a nurse asked what she wanted to wear. Six days earlier, Jennifer had been thrown from a horse at a ranch north of Santa Barbara. The accident crushed three vertebrae in her lower back. After people at the ranch lifted her from the ground without her consent, she realized her legs were not working. Doctors later told her she had a 10 percent chance of walking again without surgery. Later that year, she would turn down a lawsuit and choose restorative justice instead.

By the time the nurse asked that ordinary question, Jennifer had endured an eight-and-a-half-hour surgery. She had two titanium rods and eight screws in her back. Her bowel, bladder, and sexual organ function and sensation was lost. She could not stand or walk, lift her arms overhead, or extend them in front of her. So when the nurse asked what she wanted to wear, Jennifer’s first thought was essentially: Who cares?

Then she got quiet. Jennifer could hear the critical voice inside her, but she also recognized a choice. She could focus entirely on everything that had been taken from her. Or she could decide how she wanted to meet what had happened. For Jennifer, that small moment became part of a much larger shift in how she understood healing and her own life.

That decision eventually shaped how Jennifer thinks about money, relationships, justice, identity, and what it means to live your legacy. It also led her somewhere she never expected. Instead of suing the ranch, Jennifer eventually returned to sit face-to-face with the people involved in her accident. She wanted something different from them, and she wanted to understand what the accident had done to them too.

Jennifer joined us to share the story behind that decision and the life that came before it. Jennifer is a legacy maker, speaker, trusted advisor, and founder of LivWeal. She has spent 30 years building companies and projects as a five-time entrepreneur, holds a master’s degree in psychology and is a certified financial therapist, applied mythologist, and health coach. She is also pursuing a master’s in financial planning and certification in conflict resilience coaching.

Before the Accident, Jennifer Had Already Started Over

Jennifer’s story did not begin with the horse accident. In 2014, she was running NibMor, a successful wholesale chocolate company. The company had reached the top of its category two years in a row. From the outside, Jennifer had achieved the kind of entrepreneurial success many people spend years chasing. Inside the company, something felt very different.

Jennifer remembers walking out of a boardroom after resigning as CEO. She spent three hours in Grand Central Station with her journal. The way people around her were relating to money had become something she could no longer accept. Her business partner and lead investor would get into screaming matches, and Jennifer felt increasingly disconnected from what they were building. “This is not my legacy,” she remembers thinking. “This is not the way that I want to live.”

That distinction stayed with us because Jennifer had reached visible success while feeling emotionally bankrupt. What looked like a peak from the outside felt like rock bottom to her. Leaving the company also meant leaving an identity she had built around achievement. Jennifer described the period that followed as a massive identity crisis.

Vipassana as Emotional Surgery

Afterward, she attended a ten-day silent Vipassana meditation retreat. Jennifer described the experience as emotional surgery with a very sharp scalpel in a safe environment. The retreat became part of a longer practice of turning inward and listening to herself. She eventually moved to Santa Barbara and continued working with entrepreneurs, helping them think differently about business, money, and legacy.

Long before the accident, Jennifer had started questioning the way we usually talk about legacy. We often imagine something left behind after a person dies. Jennifer was becoming interested in what happens while we are still here. For her, learning to live your legacy meant paying attention to how she actually wanted to experience the life she was building.

Seven years later, that belief became intensely personal.

The Accident That Changed Jennifer’s Relationship With Pain

In 2021, Jennifer was riding a horse with a client when she got bucked off. She landed on the ground and immediately turned inward to assess what was happening in her body. She could tell something was seriously wrong. When people at the ranch offered to help her up, she said no.

They asked three times. On the third attempt, despite her “no,” two men lifted her anyway. Jennifer’s legs were not working, so they placed her back on the ground. She was rushed to the hospital and learned that she had crushed her L2, L3, and L4 vertebrae. She also had cauda equina syndrome, which made the situation a medical emergency.

Jennifer underwent an eight-and-a-half-hour surgery. Afterward, she spent six days in the hospital with severe muscle, bone, and nerve pain. Even with narcotic medication, she described her pain as a ten. Yet one of the most important parts of that experience, for Jennifer, was what happened when she stopped trying to push the pain away.

Welcoming the Pain

She began focusing her attention on wherever the pain felt most intense. Instead of fighting the sensation, Jennifer remembers telling it, “You’re welcome here.” Sometimes she would stay with it for hours before passing out. She felt the physical pain begin to open and move, while old emotional pain surfaced alongside it.

Jennifer connected some of that experience to her childhood. Her mother had been seriously injured in a car accident when Jennifer was eight. Jennifer watched how that injury affected her mother’s life and knew she wanted to respond differently to her own. She did not want what happened on the ranch to become the defining identity of everything that came afterward.

That was the context behind the moment with the nurse in rehabilitation. Jennifer could not control the fact that she had been injured. She could not know exactly how much function she would regain. What she could decide was where she wanted to put her attention.

Jennifer set a goal to leave rehabilitation walking, off narcotics, and with her pain at four or below. Fourteen days later, she walked out. At one point during her stay, a doctor came into her room and told her he did not know what she was doing, but she should keep doing it.

Jennifer does not present her recovery as a formula for someone else. It was how she experienced her own body, history, pain, and healing. In fact, she told us something that initially sounded almost impossible. She considers the accident one of the best things that has happened in her life.

For Jennifer, the injury did not feel like rock bottom in the way leaving NibMor had. She described it as an opportunity to know herself without all the extra layers.

“I accessed my power fully,” she told us. “I got to know me.”

In her experience, the accident became an unexpected homecoming.

The Butterfly That Followed Her Through Recovery

There is another thread running through Jennifer’s story, and it began before her injury. Butterflies had appeared at meaningful moments in her life for years. She remembers the death of a butterfly at Hendry’s Beach in Santa Barbara, California. Another year, while observing the traditional Gaelic seasonal festival Beltane outdoors, a monarch caterpillar crawled onto her journal and stayed with her.

Then a friend brought Jennifer an orchid while she was recovering. Attached to it was a chrysalis. The butterfly emerged on Jennifer’s one day off from rehabilitation. She sat in her wheelchair for five and a half hours watching it, the longest she had managed to sit upright.

Jennifer connected the butterfly’s transformation to what she felt happening inside herself. The symbolism stayed with her as her recovery continued. More than a year after the accident, she returned to her surgeon because she felt ready to remove the hardware from her back. Her surgeon agreed, and Jennifer asked the hospital to give her the titanium rods and screws afterward.

She took the hardware to her friend, artist Shani Clark, who turned it into a butterfly light sculpture. The metal that had once held Jennifer’s injured spine together now represented something entirely different. “We can take our pain and turn it into truly something beautiful,” Jennifer told us.

The sculpture did not erase the injury or everything it cost her. Instead, it gave physical form to the transformation Jennifer believed she had experienced. That idea became inseparable from the way she had started to live her legacy. Her legacy was not waiting somewhere at the end of her life. It was taking shape inside what she did with the life she had now.

What It Means to Live Your Legacy

Jennifer talks about legacy differently than we usually hear it discussed. We tend to connect the word with an estate, inheritance, monument, or what people remember after someone dies. Jennifer became interested in another possibility. What if legacy also describes the way someone lives while they are here?

Her own life had already complicated the relationship between achievement and fulfillment. Jennifer had experienced professional success while feeling emotionally depleted. Years later, she experienced devastating physical loss while also feeling deeply connected to herself. Those contradictions changed how she understood wealth.

For Jennifer, money matters, but it does not tell the entire story. She thinks about wealth through relationships, emotions, physical wellbeing, and finances. She also considers the quality of the relationship she has with herself. When any conversation about wealth focuses only on dollars, she believes something important gets left out.

That is why “live your legacy” became more than a phrase during our conversation. It connected the seemingly different chapters of Jennifer’s life. Jennifer was living her legacy when she left a successful company because she disliked what it was becoming. She was also living her legacy when she decided how she wanted to meet her injury. Then it surfaced again when everyone around her expected the next chapter to involve a lawsuit.

Why Jennifer Chose Restorative Justice Instead of a Lawsuit

Jennifer had plenty of attorneys around her after the accident. Her brother had been an attorney before becoming a judge. Her partner at the time also had many attorneys in his world. Litigation would not have been difficult to pursue, and people who loved Jennifer believed she deserved compensation.

While she was still in the hospital, however, Jennifer did not want to talk about it. She told everyone they could research and discuss the legal options without her. She promised to return to the question later that year. At that moment, she wanted all of her attention focused on healing.

When Jennifer revisited the decision in November, she still felt a clear no. She knew she did not want a lawsuit, but that created another question.

If money and litigation would not make her feel whole, what would?

Jennifer pictured herself sitting in a circle at the ranch. She imagined the owner, the people involved in the accident, her former partner, herself, and someone facilitating the conversation. Jennifer wanted them to understand how the accident had affected her. She also wanted to understand how it had affected them.

At the time, she knew little about restorative justice. After describing what she wanted to people in her community, someone connected her with a facilitator. The facilitator began communicating with the ranch, although convincing everyone to participate took time. Jennifer was even willing to promise she would not sue them so they could have the conversation without that fear hanging over it.

What Restorative Justice Looked Like at the Ranch

Eventually, they sat together for three hours. Jennifer explained the impact of the accident and what happened when the men did not honor her no. She talked about the safety implications of moving her after such a serious fall. Then she listened.

The people at the ranch had heard that Jennifer lost her ability to walk. She learned they had been deeply haunted by that possibility. They were also struggling financially and feared a lawsuit could end their business. Jennifer had never wanted another group of people carrying the accident in that way.

She ultimately made three requests. Jennifer asked the ranch to introduce riders to horses before they rode them. She wanted the staff professionally trained on safety protocols and honoring women’s no. She also asked the ranch to make a donation to her nonprofit foundation.

By the end of the conversation, everyone was hugging and smiling. They went outside and spent time with the horses. One ranch hand told the group that the experience felt like therapy, although he had never been to therapy. For Jennifer, the process felt deeply cathartic.

Her decision also came with significant financial consequences. Jennifer described the accident and medical care as roughly a million-dollar injury. She estimates that it affected about five years of income. She does not pretend that loss was insignificant, but she also did not believe money would provide the kind of wholeness she wanted.

Jennifer was careful to distinguish her decision from a universal position on lawsuits. She has recommended litigation to others when she believed the circumstances called for it. Restorative justice was simply what felt right in her situation. Her story is not about what someone else should do after being harmed. It is about what Jennifer discovered she needed after her own accident.

The Relationship Between Money and Wholeness

During our conversation, Jenna used the phrase “made whole” while talking about financial compensation. Jennifer immediately picked up on it. The words went directly to the heart of what she had been questioning for years.

“Does money always make us whole?” Jennifer asked. For her, the answer was no. She described money as a mirror rather than the thing that makes her complete. That belief now shapes the work she does with people facing major transitions.

Jennifer works mostly with high-achieving people at inflection points in their lives. Someone might sell a company, retire, lose a spouse, or experience another major transition. The identity that carried them through one chapter may suddenly stop fitting. Beneath the practical decisions, Jennifer often hears a much more personal question:

Who am I now?

One client story she shared brought those ideas together. Jennifer works with a retiring professor whose wife died from ovarian cancer three years ago. Before her death, his wife used retirement funds to support botanical research related to ovarian cancer. After she died, he found himself responsible for a project that had mattered deeply to her.

At the same time, he was retiring from his own long career. He came to Jennifer wondering whether the research represented his wife’s legacy, his legacy, or both. Jennifer worked with him to separate those identities before deciding what he wanted to carry forward. He eventually chose to continue supporting the project while setting financial boundaries around that commitment.

The work involved far more than deciding how much money to spend. It included grief, retirement, identity, purpose, and the shape of his next chapter. Jennifer understood those questions because her own life had forced her to ask versions of them. For her, to live your legacy means engaging with those questions while there is still a life available to experience.

The Conversations We Avoid

As Jennifer described restorative justice, Jenna kept returning to the power of sitting face-to-face with another person. It can feel easier to express anger from behind a keyboard, an attorney, or another layer of protection. Sitting across from someone creates a different kind of encounter because both people have to experience the humanity in the room.

Jenna recognized that dynamic from her own years working in litigation. She remembered cases that consumed enormous amounts of money, time, and attorney fees. Sometimes the people involved had barely spoken directly to one another. Then a court-ordered mediation would finally put everyone in the same room, and the real conversation could begin.

Jennifer believes some of our deepest needs during conflict are relational. People want to feel heard, seen, and understood. She experienced that herself at the ranch. Hearing the other side did not change what happened, but it changed what she carried away from it.

That experience now intersects with Jennifer’s training in conflict resilience. She has become interested in what repair can look like as people grow and change. Sometimes one person’s growth changes a marriage, friendship, business partnership, or family relationship. Jennifer does not believe every relationship needs to continue in its original form, but she is interested in how people leave those moments with greater wholeness.

For Jennifer, the conversation often begins internally. She had to ask herself what she actually wanted before she could sit across from the ranch owner. That pattern has stayed with her. The conversations she describes having with money, purpose, life, and other people all begin with being willing to hear what is actually there.

Learning to Create Without Returning to the Hustle

Near the end of our conversation, we asked Jennifer what life is teaching her now. Her answer brought us back to the ambitious entrepreneur standing in Grand Central Station years earlier. Jennifer talked about yin and yang, surrender and action, and her continuing effort to create without returning to the relentless pace she once knew.

In her twenties, Jennifer sometimes skipped sleep two nights each week and drank two pots of coffee daily. She knew how to work hard and make things happen. Her current edge is different. She is interested in whether she can continue building a business while staying openhearted and connected to her natural rhythm.

Jennifer also talked about control as something she continues to explore. She loves beauty, organization, cleanliness, and discipline. Those qualities are not inherently problems for her. The question is whether they come from genuine pleasure or from expectation, obligation, and performance.

There was something fitting about ending the conversation there because Jennifer did not present herself as finished. She did not tell us she had reached some perfect place where every old pattern disappeared. Her life has repeatedly asked her to reconsider success, control, money, pain, identity, and relationships. She is still inside that process.

Live Your Legacy While You Are Here

Jennifer’s story stayed with us because so many parts of it resist a simple conclusion. The successful company was also a place she needed to leave. A devastating accident became, in her experience, an unexpected homecoming. Walking away from litigation cost her financially, yet the conversation at the ranch gave her something money could not provide.

Even the hardware from her spine became something else. Two titanium rods and eight screws became a butterfly. The object did not erase what happened, but it represented the meaning Jennifer had made from an experience she never chose.

Maybe that is why live your legacy feels so different from simply leaving one. Jennifer is not talking about polishing a final version of a life. She is talking about inhabiting a life while it is still changing. For her, legacy lives in relationships, choices, money, repair, pleasure, purpose, and the conversations she is willing to have.

Jennifer’s story does not tell anyone else which road to take. She said that clearly when we talked about her decision not to sue. She only knows what felt right for her and what she found on the other side of that choice. For Jennifer, learning to live your legacy has meant finding her own version of wholeness while she is still here to experience it.

Listen to the full episode: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube

Connect with Jennifer:

Website: www.JenniferLove.com 

Instagram: TheJenniferLove

LinkedIn: Jennifer Love