We were lucky to catch up with Katharine Hargreaves recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Katharine, thanks for joining us today. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.

I’ve taken many leaps of faith over the course of my life – and these risks have more often than not become the initiations I needed to open the next chapter of my growth and development. There are two big risks I’ve taken that come to mind, because they are deeply connected.

The first was leaving my job as a successful UX Designer back in 2018 to go on a personal spiritual pilgrimage and pursue “the call of the wild” – an urge in my soul that I couldn’t quite fully articulate, but that inevitably led me to encounter the West African lineage of shamanism that, two years later, I was officially initiated into as a stick diviner (someone who channels information on behalf of the elemental beings and ancestors in order to bring about healing.)

The second risk was much more recently, in late 2022. I had gone back to the tech world to teach design because my business had ground to a halt in the pandemic and frankly, I was out of money and options. I had promised myself that I wouldn’t run back to tech, as it was no longer aligned for me to be working in this role and I knew it in my bones. But desperation makes you do funny things, and so there I was, fully employed in a job teaching design that I used to love – yet I was deeply unhappy and could barely make it through each day, My colleagues and students sensed I wasn’t really present and my performance was suffering. I couldn’t muster the energy to care.

This led to a situation that spiraled out of hand, to the point where I was “cancelled” by my class for an instructional action on my end that a student took personally – leading them to spread harmful and hateful rumors about me that led to ongoing harassment and hostility due to my spiritual beliefs and practice. It was grueling to show up everyday in a workplace where I no longer felt welcome or respected. I decided to stick it out, but my lesson was made brutally clear.

So when I completed teaching the 12-week cohort, I made the commitment to fully step into my spiritual work and not look back. I “came out” as a medicine person to my family and my community and launched my new practice, Wild Alive, which supports and guides people through spiritual awakenings and significant life crossroads as well as offers psychedelic integration coaching for anyone on the healing path. It’s been nine months since I made the decision and while I’m still growing my client list, I’m happy to say that I made the right choice. My life feels as a whole feels more aligned – and more fully MINE.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My life has never been normal – far from it. I am someone who craves adventure, who seeks out opportunities to grow and expand, and who learns best when engaging with contrasting extremes. This orientation to life has led me to have a lot of powerful, impactful, and transformational experiences that have tested me and taken me to the edge of my comfort zone, time and time again. I’ve lived multiple lives in many different cities, traveled the world, and enjoyed several different successful career paths – most of them quite unexpected.

As a result, much of my experience and skill mastery is rooted in navigating change and supporting deep transformation. Learning how to effectively empower and enable transformation is a core skill that is necessary to navigate our future. We are living in a highly disruptive and dynamic world, and knowing how to stay adaptable and pivot is the key to resiliency.

I have many roles, depending on the context in which I’m working: spiritual mentor, ceremonial guide, medicine woman. But I often describe my work in the world as helping people understand and use spiritual and energetic technology to change their lives. So what does this look like in action?

I’m often supporting people to turn their breakdown or rock bottom into a breakthrough, unravel core patterns and limiting beliefs that are keeping them stuck, how to disrupt intergenerational or ancestral trauma, how to integrate powerful plant medicine experiences or spiritual awakenings, and how to cultivate their inner gifts and become more powerful so they walk with purpose and confidence.

Because of the nature of my work, I attract a lot of people who are at significant life crossroads and in the midst of a powerful transformation that is rearranging their entire life. Clients often find me when they are realizing that they have big spiritual gifts starting to wake up inside them, and they’re freaked out or don’t know what to do. I also work with a lot of healers and practitioners who are struggling to believe in their gifts and want to establish businesses to better support them living in service.

I believe that a huge reason people work with me is that I bridge the ordinary and the extraordinary with deep authenticity and groundedness. I live a very wild, wondrous, and weird life, but I’m not “woo”. I’m just as confident and comfortable leading a workshop for 100 Google middle-managers as I am guiding people on a vision quest. (Been there, done that!)

I’m also RARELY thrown by what you’re experiencing – almost nothing is TMI for me. Believe me – I’ve seen weirder. I think this normalizes a lot of what people are feeling and going through, which helps them accept and orient to their experience and start working WITH it instead of resisting it. I like to joke that I’m a tour guide for your wild, wonderful life. People want to work with teachers and mentors who have successfully overcome and integrated the problems they’re currently struggling with. I teach what I know, and because I live that truth and love my life, people trust me with theirs.

Have you ever had to pivot?

I’ve had to pivot MULTIPLE times. This isn’t a bad thing – because the reality is, life is constantly evolving and so are you. The person I was at 22 who launched a literary magazine is not the same person I am today. The person who became a UX Designer at 25 and worked in Silicon Beach is definitely not the person I am now. The idea of a 5-year plan is and has always been laughable to me, because the world you live in will change dramatically in that time. Embracing that reality and mentality has ALWAYS served me, even if people around me have judged otherwise. The Industrial Career Path of “find a job and stick with it until you die” is not only obsolete and unrealistic, it also seems hella boring.

In the 37 years I’ve been alive, I’ve started four businesses. They were all successful, in their own way, even if 3 of them had to “die” at some point. This doesn’t make that time or investment a loss – far from it. I take the view that you initiate new jobs and careers in your life to LEARN something valuable that you then take with you into the next chapter. What you do in one chapter will be translated into the next, even if on the surface it looks completely different.

I used to give inspirational talks to a lot of mid-career professionals who were pivoting into new career paths and experiencing a lot of judgment that they were “starting over” at a certain age. Who cares? Find your through line and own it. Mine is technology – I started off as a technologist in the very literal sense. And while people might look at my leap into the spiritual work as a total deviation, I don’t. Why? Because my ability to understand and engage the invisible mechanisms that support and drive change is still at the heart of what I do. My tools just have new applications. I’m no longer designing digital systems for big corporations (ew) but rather, supporting incredible people in creating the systems of belief that empower their best selves to live boldly in a time of uncertainty.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

My whole life, people have taken it upon themselves to tell me that most of the things I wanted to do or felt called to do were wildly unrealistic, if not impossible.

For instance: I’ve always been very creative, and a skilled writer and artist. But when I was applying to universities and decided to investigate art school, my uncle (who is himself a fine artist) discouraged me, saying that “I would never make a living being creative.” How ironic that my creativity has been one of my greatest skills and selling points. Since then, I’ve been hired by major companies to do very creative work. Maybe it didn’t look like what I originally expected, but I’ve managed to get by JUST FINE and made a profitable living while doing so.

I remember a more recent experience, back in 2021. I decided to launch a “miracle mastermind” which was teaching people how to design their reality using tools and techniques I had learned while working as a technologist. I was enrolling clients in the program and one week away from launch. I remember my boyfriend at the time telling me that “I wasn’t ready” and that I should “just forget the whole thing.” How ironic that this mastermind became one of my most successful launches, even in the midst of a national pandemic!

If I had listened to all the naysayers who loved telling me that I shouldn’t do things, I wouldn’t be living my fullest life. In retrospect, all this pushback and negativity helped me develop my courage and resilience. In the same way that trees actually need wind to grow tall and strong, one can also gain energy from challenge. I’m a master of transmutation so I’ve turned those No’s into the fuel I needed to go farther and do more than I ever originally dreamed.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.wildalive.co/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/katakhann/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1363153644426799
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/magickat/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/wildaliveco
• Other: https://linktr.ee/katakhann

Image Credits
Cami Rose Olson Wendy Chang