Happy New Moon and Spring Equinox!

... a time for planting metaphoric (and, perhaps, literal) seeds and honoring changes.

Truth? Change comes. Whether we welcome it or not.

And each time we face change, we’re being invited to re-devote ourselves to our values, to what we say matters to us, to how we say we want to be in the world.

If we can do that, our perspective might change, our capacity might be challenged, but deeper truths of who and what we are might also be revealed.

This is what it means to go through an initiation.

Our ancestors knew initiations and had cultural processes for going through them. In today’s world, our rites of passage are often stripped of deeper meaning and devoid of properly initiated elders to help us go through them and come out the other side changed, but intact.

Most of the people who come to see me are grappling with the ‘trauma’ of an incomplete initiation. Something happened to you and you dealt with it the best you could, but weren’t able to come out the other side whole.

It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that my service to the world is to help you complete your initiations, to help you integrate the big life change or the peak spiritual experience. To help you reclaim your innate wholeness.

It also deeply matters to me that we change culture around this.

That’s part of why I started my podcast and part of why I’m so excited to announce today’s new episode - an episode that explicitly explores and models a complete initiation.

Dr. Christen Scott is one of my first spiritual teachers - we met through yoga back in 2009ish and I did my yoga teacher training with her and her husband, Preston, in 2013. Over the years, she’s become a deeply meaningful soul friend.

In November of 2021, the day after Thanksgiving, Preston passed suddenly and unexpectedly throwing Christen into an initiation she didn’t ask for and certainly wasn’t expecting.

While she spent most of the first year in shock, and she says, is only just beginning her grief journey, what I believe you’ll see/hear in this episode is a story of a human who through one of the hardest things she ever faced, continued to ask: what’s left when all else falls away? And continued to commit herself to her highest value of Love, even when it took new and unfamiliar forms.

If you watch this episode, you’ll see tears (hers and mine). You’ll also hear so much laughter. You’ll hear the story of loss and the treasures that you can find afterwards.

And you’ll hear:

• how the wilderness of bereavement makes it impossible to go along with the aspects of society that run counter to full humanity and aliveness;
• sacred and ancestral approaches to grief and loss;
• how Christen learned to tend her grief and some ways we, as a society, could support grief better;
• the inquiry - what if loss, although challenging, isn’t a wound or a problem? What if we are, in fact, perfectly designed for it?… and more

You’ll hear a story of a complete initiation.

I think I speak for both of us when I say: may this conversation move you as it moved us. And may it change how we, as a collective, approach loss. May it shift how we hold ourselves through our challenging initiations.

May it bring us again around the fire.

(As always, listen wherever you usually find your podcasts, or watch it on YouTube or Spotify).

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With deep love,

Kate

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P.S. If the idea of life as a series of initiations speaks to you, and you suspect or know some of yours to have not received the proper support, leaving you fragmented rather than intact; or you’ve been through a spiritual awakening or peak experience (like a retreat or plant medicine ceremony) that feels like it’s leaving you a little shaky as you try to integrate back into life; I have some spots available for new 1:1 clients and I’d be happy to explore whether we can shift that for you, together. Respond to this email or hop on my scheduler for a free exploratory chat.