Some Foundational Concepts for This Space and Any Time We Spend Together:

The Foundation and Four Pillars of a Well Culture:

I’m coming to suspect a culture built on this foundation and these four pillars is what will guide and support our humanity, aliveness, and capacity for relationship in good ways.

I aim to align this business and its offers with this foundation and these pillars.

Furthermore, it’s helpful if you can agree with me on these premises:

• Animism: the world is alive and sentient. And humans, as a species and as individuals, are one small part of a much larger web or ecosystem of community, collaboration, conflict, and kinship. As a species, we are not the pinnacle of evolution, nor the most important center of the Universe.

• Our long-ago ancestors were sophisticated, making beauty and grappling with many of the same questions we grapple with today. As they lived less removed from Nature and the land, and believed themselves to belong to it more than most modern humans, the cultures which arose from the places where they lived held key guidelines for how to live in good intimacy and relationship with those places. When we engage with those cultural memories, they often ask us to unlearn certain modern understandings of the world (which are actually forgettings). If we are willing to do that, we might find ourselves more human and more alive.

• The approach itself is the actual teacher and knows more than us.

• We’re not here to navel gaze or be enamored with our own inner worlds and psychology. Whatever ‘healing’ work we do is meant to ripple out into all areas of your life. Your inner world is not the whole world, but we start there because it’s where you have the most power. 

• Everything is energy and there’s more to the world than meets the physical eye and other senses. We are spirit and matter.

• That there are multiple ways of knowing (the logical brain being only one), and more is possible than meets the eye.

• We don’t need to villainize the brain, but our aim is to live from our hearts.

• There’s a price to our own becoming, and often it asks us to grow beyond our current comfort zone.

• We live within the paradox that we are inextricably interconnected, and also each responsible for ourselves. I can’t “heal” you, though I can offer guidance, support, attunement, and mirroring. 

What This Approach Is and Is Not

In a day and age of more, faster, easier… an animist and ancestral approach is not that. In fact, it’s power as an antidote lies in the fact that it’s not that.

If you want to recover from burnout by using a more-faster-easier approach, you’ll most likely be unsuccessful because the circumstances and underlying motivations which led to burnout in the first place haven’t changed.

In order to sustainably and fundamentally shift the outcome, you have to change the input - you have to change not just what you’re doing, but how you’re doing it. So we take the right amount-right timing-right effort approach (which, in contrast to the over-stimulation and hyperactivity you’re accustomed to may initially feel too little-too slow-too hard).

We consider external and internal forces, we look at present day and ancestral or past-life patterns of behavior which have led to where you are now. We hold the truth that anything worth doing is worth doing beautifully and in the times it takes.

I get that it might feel defeating to read that. I get that something needs to change for you… like, now. Or maybe even yesterday. But I’m not here to lie and promise quantitative results in a specific number of easy steps when, in my experience, and in order to honor the approach itself and the specific cultural rupture that leads to burnout, it’s just not true.

In my experience, burnout takes longer to “recover” from than we would like and most likely won’t happen if we try to continue doing things as we’ve always done. It asks us to take radical and loving responsibility for ourselves and our presence in the world. It tests how serious we are. It asks us to make changes - at least in how we approach our lives as well as in whatever circumstances we can.

The animist, ancestral approach we take (which has it’s own presence and wisdom) asks that, to the best of your ability, you drop willful agendas and bring what my teacher, Tammy LaDrew, calls “the 3 C’s,” forward: courage, curiosity, and compassion.

We look at things holistically here - understanding that the inner and outer reflect and influence each other. Imbalances, diseases, and ruptures at a systemic and collective level will influence you, an individual.. and vice versa.

The approach doesn’t subscribe to some abstract idea of perfect health. There is no such thing as ‘perfection’ - in individuals, or in health and bodies. Messy nuance, paradox, pain, and even death are part of the sacred beauty of aliveness. This approach doesn’t promise to ‘cure’ you. Instead, it can help you be most fully alive in the body you have, in the life you have, for the time you have.  

In a more animist and ancestral framework, “healing” is about coming back into alignment with the five principles of Beauty, Aliveness, Intimacy, Discernment, and Rhythm; and includes playing your part in the harmony of the three spheres of existence: Self, Collective (including beyond-human beings), and Spirit or Otherworldly.

The approach is not purely analytical either - it’s not about seeing patterns as if removed from them. It’s not about mental understanding and diagnoses (particularly diagnoses that become identities).

It may feel worse before it feels better.

It’s experiential and intuitive and leaves room for miracles and mystery.

It’s often an unbecoming, which strips us back and asks us to remember who we were before the world told us to be something else. Ultimately It’s about the life-long journey of becoming wise, not just becoming knowledgeable.

I don’t say all this to scare you, although this isn’t for everyone and it’s a kindness to figure that out sooner rather than later.

I say all this to impress upon you that to say ‘yes’ to this is to step over a threshold and onto a journey which may take you to unexpected (and sometimes uncomfortable) places.

I say all this to set us up for success, as best as possible.

Because while the approach isn’t necessarily more-faster-easier, it does seem to get you further than more modern approaches because it gets to the root of the issue. 

So I know you’re already feeling overwhelmed and exhausted. I know you can’t add one more thing to your plate. But I hear from right-fit clients over and over again that this is the thing they added which unlocked the results they’d been seeking and missing. This was the missing puzzle piece. The total game changer. They find the results more sustainable. They feel like they have tools and skills which will serve them for the rest of their lives. Instead of fragmented, they feel centered. Instead of feeling small or overburdened, they feel empowered. Instead of disengaged and alone, they feel reconnected.

So if you feel excited (in addition to maybe being scared) by the idea of this journey of unlearning and unbecoming; if you feel motivated by your burnout to carve out space to go within and do some work; if the premises outlined on this page resonate in a deep way or feel like someone is finally saying something you’ve been so hungry for you could cry… welcome.

The next step is to begin.

Where are you called to begin?

I recommend starting with:

Designed to help you figure out if my work is for you, the Starter Kit also supports an intentional, ceremonial beginning to the journey; assessments to orient you and your patterns in a more animist and ancestral framework; and a mini library of guided meditations and practices to offer some basic tools and skills you might find helpful at this moment in the journey.

When you’re ready, these are the types of offers I have:

Kate and Wild Sacred Journey are committed to creating a safe and confidential space for any and all who want to walk this path of healing. We believe that each client is already whole and is capable of and responsible for their own healing. We commit to continuing to study and heal our own wounds so that we may better hear and honor yours. We simply facilitate the space while honoring your truth and your timing as we listen in to your unfolding with integrity, honor, and compassion.

**Nothing offered here is intended to contradict diagnosis, advice, or treatment of and by your doctors and physical/mental healthcare team. Energetic medicine is a different and complementary scope of practice, offering support through a different approach.