We were lucky to catch up with Kate Powell recently and have shared our conversation below.
Kate, appreciate you joining us today. Over the course of your career, have you seen or experienced your field completely flip-flop or change course on something?
We’re in the middle of a U-Turn in the field of wellness right now. For a long time, we (in the industrialized West) have tried to separate and compartmentalize the different aspects of being human. Soul or faith over here. Physical over there. Our mental and emotional wellness in another corner. Humans separate from the Earth and all the life on it. Our communities separate from our intimate relationships which are also separate from our own personal care.
And yet we’re finding ourselves in an epidemic of disconnection, loneliness, depression, anxiety, and plenty of other physical symptoms. And while at least some of that can be traced to experiences and wounds from our personal lives, much of it has its roots in disordered culture.
While the health and wellness world is both slowly and rapidly embracing more holistic or ‘alternative’ modalities and approaches (yoga, meditation, breath work, shamanic/ energetic/ indigenous wisdom traditions, cold plunges, plant medicines, somatics, hypnotherapy, etc – the list goes on and on), we’re also seeing how when we approach many of these ancient and ancestral practices with our modern mindsets and cultures, many of them lose their potency or even become dangerous.
We, both the practitioner and the client, need to be willing to unlearn and profoundly shift how we approach our wellness (and even what we understand that word to mean), in order to move beyond ‘sustaining’ and into something alchemical, transmutational, regenerative, and more hopeful for the future of our species and the wider planet.
One of the major shifts I see needing to happen is to bring heart, soul, and animism back into our foundational world and wellness views. This means unlearning human and mental supremacy to come back into connection with our bodies and the wider web of life. It’s only through honoring the numinous mystery, present in every moment and with everything alive, that we can combat our sense of isolation and the deep fear we feel at our human frailty. This means dropping excessive analysis in favor of mystery *and* discerning trust. This also means taking a relational approach to healing, not power-over. We need to trust the wisdom inherent in our clients – lending our trainings and experiences in support of their inner knowings about themselves.
We also need to slow down and unlearn “more-faster”.
We have to recognize wisdom and experience over performance and charisma, and apprenticeship over quick-turn around trainings. We need to tune into the energy of “how we do something is what we’re doing”.
And we have to know when 1:1 support is necessary and when we need to tend collective wounds in community. We have to gather, together – outside, with good food, and around the fire when we can. We have to pay attention to the stories we tell and how they influence our visions of the world. And we have to invite heart back into how we be with each other, how we listen to each other, how we care for each other.
The tide is shifting. Are we helping or hindering?
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I was always a bright, smiley kid, but looking back at pictures of me, you can see the light leave my eyes at around 8 or 9 years of age. I don’t think there was one specific causal moment, but more the cumulative toll of being a ‘canary-in-the-mine’ human; which I define as someone wild and sensitive, with an ability to see and feel the unexpressed, and a propensity to seek deeper truths by asking probing questions. Someone who seems to feel and express the ills of society through their bodies faster than others might.
By the time I was a teenager, I was deeply depressed and disconnected from my body and the people in my life.
What started to help was reading Eckhart Tolle after graduating college and then stumbling my way into a yoga class where I began to learn I was more than my thoughts and move my body in ways which brought me out of deep freeze and emotional overwhelm. And that helped, massively. But I still found myself falling into old patterns and dynamics, still wasn’t thriving or fully embodying my values.
The deeper shift came when I found my way into a three-year training in Integrative Energetic Medicine and Coaching (with Dr. Fernand Poulin and Tammy LaDrew), a more animistic and indigenous-based modality. The entire first year was spent working on ourselves before even learning protocols for working with clients so we could come to embody a different way of being and relating – one rooted in the frequency of love. Through this and in subsequent years, I have come to realize that those hours spent being with others in what amounted to a different culture was the missing key. It gave me permission to be intuitive, in my body, in touch with the mystery, in relationship with the beyond-human world so I would always have a sense of belonging, to view challenges as initiations and to know how to move through those thresholds… and so much more.
When I started my work though, I had this idea that I was there to help. To tend people’s wounds. Then through conversations around cultural appropriation and privilege in wellness spaces, and my curiousity about ancestral wounds and traumas, my focus began to widen to tending collective wounds. But this idea of needing to help everything and everyone who hurt led to burnout and reminded me that we need to keep at least one eye on more generative visions.
And so I’ve come to see my work instead as culture-change work: a paradigm shift from head to heart; from cynicism to wonder; from power-over to connected-with. I would say I support shifting inner and outer cultures to be more wild, natural, vital through land and body-based, animistic healing arts; stories; and ceremony. Asking the question: in dehumanizing times, how do we be more human? and how can I be more in service to a culture of beauty, justice, and love?
Right now, I mainly do that through 1:1 sessions over Zoom; tarot card readings; and my podcast (the Wild Sacred Journey podcast).
I also just started an online monthly membership gathering – Sanctuary – a time for myth and storytelling, quiet reflection, community, and soul nourishment.
And as a semi-nomadic human, I like to keep my regular work online, but I’m missing being with people in-person and outside, so I’m aiming to slowly grow into more of a hybrid format with retreats of varying lengths, including fire circles, story tellings, and ancestral crafts to deepen our sense of kinship with soul, life, and land. Plus then, workbooks and pre-recorded courses and a book of my own writings.
I’ve always been curious and hated people telling me what to do. I learn best by listening to others experiences, playing the game their way, and then figuring out what works for me and writing my own rulebook by trying and failing… a lot.
And so most of the people I work with tend to be other ‘canary in the mine’ humans who are at a threshold or big transition in their lives or who have had a loss, big awakening, or other initiation and know things can’t continue as they are or want help fitting the fragmented pieces of themselves back into a new, powerful and purposeful, normal. They’ve been playing everyone else’s game and it’s not working and they want to be more themselves and to love themselves as they are and be happier, healthier, and better at their relationships and jobs because of it. Being human is not a cookie-cutter endeavor.
In those moments, I guide them deeper into the truth, heart, and essential wholeness of who they are. I support them unlearning head-based cultures and remembering heart-based ones. If there was a trauma or something that opened them wide but left them incomplete feeling, we can tend that (even if it was from a past life or is an ancestral trauma which they inherited!). And one of my big passions is helping people come deeper into their instinctual bodies and intuitive senses.
My proudest moments, the ones which feed me and keep me going, are when something clicks into alignment and awareness for a client and they report back later: “that was the missing piece and everything is changing”. Or in a session when they say: “I’ve never been able to share this out loud before, it feels so tender and shameful, but I’m so glad to have somewhere I can share it.” Or when they say: “I look back on where I was a year ago when we started working together and I couldn’t have imagined then that I would feel this way or be this way now. I almost don’t recognize myself. But it feels so good and I can’t wait to see what’s next.” And I love hearing stories about how it’s supporting more open, loving, humane relationships with their partners, their children, and their friends, collaborators, and community.
Other than training/knowledge, what do you think is most helpful for succeeding in your field?
When I was going through my yoga teacher training, one of my teachers said: “The words you say, the poses you call… all of that is only somewhat important. Who you are when you teach is what you’re actually teaching.”
Later on, my teachers in my energetic/ shamanic training would always say: “Presence is primary.”
Those quotes have stood me in good stead because it’s so easy to get caught up in needing to know more or have more trainings and expertise. And while those are certainly important and having too little of those can get us and our clients into trouble, what we often forget is our hearts. Our presence. The fact that people are constantly paying attention to not just what we say and do, but also how we leave them feeling. And that’s the part they’ll remember most.
Children learn through observing, through example. Adults do, too. If we are hoping to guide or support others, whatever industry we’re in, we do well to rely less on how much we know and more on modeling and embodying what we’re hoping to pass on, how we’re hoping to leave the world, what values we hold dear for ourselves and the people we care about.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
All through the long school hours and years, in our sports teams, or when trying something new and scary, most of us have heard a lot of overt and subtle messages which boil down to “mind over matter.”
And when I began running a business, that same idea came with me. I would always be trying to fit more into the day, to discipline myself to sit still longer so I could get out one more email or cross off one more task. I would push myself to reach out here and say ‘yes’ to this there. I would demand consistency from myself, regardless of how my body was feeling, how my creativity was that day, or what else was going on in my life.
And then I would wonder why I would frequently burn out and be acting as though I were in a toxic work environment (complaining about how your boss treats you like a machine and doesn’t cut you any slack hits different when you’re the boss).
With my background in nervous system repair and trauma resolution work, I realized I was being invited to bring more of that knowledge and understanding to bear on myself and my work patterns.
So I promised myself and my own body that I would listen and honor. For a little while, this meant taking a huge step back and working a lot less (scary when finances are tight and you’re solo-preneuring it!). It also means I work fewer hours in the day. And when the to-do list gets huge (when isn’t it???!), I discern what are the two most important things to do that day to help me move forward and feel some satisfaction and I take the pressure off everything else. I celebrate small wins more. And when I’m stretching myself by reaching out with a pitch, I honor the fear in my body and schedule time to move and release pressure when I’m done. It means I take lots of small movement breaks during the day and if I do end up in a hyper-focused state one day, I let myself move slower and do less the next day. It also means I work slower and focus more on trusting organic growth – I’m not pushing myself to the point where I self-sabotage and contract back quickly, but rather making moves when I feel ready *enough* or have the capacity for more risk that day.
It’s an ongoing unlearning but it’s part of how I live my values in the world. I know if I want my clients to trust me and my business to support them in their tenderest moments, I have to be supporting myself in the same way. There’s a strong possibility they’ll sense the lack of coherence otherwise and won’t trust me. After all, “do as I say, not as I do” is another one we grew up hearing and internalizing which won’t help us in the new world we desperately need to be building.
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Image Credits
Kate Powell, SMBerry, Misty Higgins