Your body is more creature than machine. You know it. You just might struggle to live it in the face of a society that pressures you to be less and less human, until you crack.

Let’s explore how to let the natural world and animist and ancestral wisdom guide you back to being a living, breathing, feeling, cyclical spirit-creature again.

If you’re asking any of those questions… you’re probably either ready to start or to deepen your journey away from a world that wants humans to be like machines. Returning instead to a deeper remembering of when humans were creatures - more spiritually-nourished and more solid in their felt-sense of belonging.

Part workshop, but more oral culture-style transmission (ie experiential, not theoretical), this “remembering” is designed to help you start and deepen that journey.

With an intention to explore how ritual, ceremony, initiations, and culture can help us stay human; we’ll practice animism as we go; bringing our questions, messiness, and struggles to the wisdom of the Otherworld to see what new ways of being and perceiving become available to us through the tending of relationship with them.

We do this as an antidote to epidemics of burnout, loneliness, disconnect, and purpose anxiety.

We do this as a way of becoming more vibrant and rooted in our connection to our own humanity; and as a way of practicing our belonging to the World.

In the face of increasingly dehumanizing and spiritually empty societies, this is a quiet revolution on behalf of something deeply vital for our essential natures. A choice to align ourselves with beauty, connection, and the messy-but-juicy prospect of being alive.

So bring your burnout, bring your emptiness, bring your overwhelm. Bring your send of being lost and disoriented and without the guidance you sometimes wish you had. Bring all the ways you had to make it up as you went, and the resulting mistakes and successes. Bring your grief. Bring your anger. Bring your hunger, your desperation. Bring your curiosity. Bring your courage and your compassion.

Bring all of you to the altar and we’ll see what we can do to start fitting those pieces back into something that feels like Home.

Our Practice

Over the course of 90min, we’ll use animist and shamanic practices, story, and ceremony; to get us out of our heads and into contact with the Otherworld -

the Otherworld- a place of Spirit, relationship, memory, and initiatory forces. We’ll lay our modern questions and struggles at their feet and let them teach us, remind us, call us back to the wisdom of initiations and the protocols for being human, all in service to a world where Life, where Aliveness itself, thrives.

Whether indoors or outdoors, we’ll gather around altar and flame -

they say it’s the land that initiates us. And I suspect it’s because the land is one of the biggest stakeholders in us being human in a good way. Ancestors around the world have always practiced some form of animism - the belief that everything has a consciousness. So whether we gather indoors or outdoors (or even online), we’ll use altar and fire, as a way of inviting our beyond-human kin to join us and to receive the benefits of our practice alongside us.

We’ll leave room for mess and Mystery -

these are not workshops you passively receive. They’re living transmissions and an opportunity to actively witness, engage, and be changed. We can’t guarantee specific outcomes (transmissions are always co-created and somewhat out of our control); or even that you’ll always walk away feeling “good” (becoming more human can be messy and emotional); but you’ll most likely leave feeling soul-nourished and with a deeper sense of connection… and probably even aliveness.

(if you would like Kate to offer a Workshop/ Remembering for your community, either in-person or online, please get in touch)

(and if you would like to explore or attend Kate’s deeper 3hr Ceremony offerings, you can check those out here)

Upcoming Workshops:

“It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”   ― Wendell Berry

For many years, Kate tried to be a machine - tried to fit in and play by society’s rules. And it left her feeling numb, broken, disconnected, and caught in cycles of burnout. Turns out that someone frequently called an “old soul” and a “witchy-healer-person-thing”; whose presence reminds people of being near standing stones or a community holy well, is probably going to thrive more on “Team Creature”. 

So guided by teachers and mentors (both human and beyond-human) and with plenty of trial and error, she found herself on an initiatory journey towards something like what Martín Prechtel calls the “indigenous soul of the world”. 

And while the journey never ends, Kate now has a rough map and an ability to guide you, if you know or suspect you’re also a failed machine; if you yearn for meaningful connection and a juicy life (even if you’re secretly afraid your creature self might be gone forever and won’t come back). 

Using an approach that weaves together animist and ancestral traditions, shamanic wisdom, movement, storytelling, and deep nature connection; Kate is known as a wise, potent, and compassionate guide. One who is perfect for when you’re on your own initiatory journey to recover your spark, ground your spirituality in everyday life and relationships, and become the beauty you're yearning to see in the world.

** a quick note on my use of the term “shamanism”: as a term it’s a tricky one - it’s both erasive and appropriative and either comes with a lot of preconceived notions, or, what it means or is so vague it’s almost meaningless. It’s a term indigenous to Siberian indigenous wisdom practitioners and used by western anthropologists to invoke any indigenous or ancestral wisdom tradition practitioner and medicine person, regardless of the land they live on and what those people would’ve called themselves in their own language. I acknowledge the harm within that. Now, it’s often used as a pan-tradition, new-agey catch-all for almost anything mystical and akin to “indigenous”. There’s potential for harm in that, too. I’ve gone back and forth on whether to use it or not and you’ll see me often say “animist” and “ancestral” more than, or alongside, “shamanic”. When and where I do use it, I use it to invoke the role and practices of bridging this world with the Others which run parallel to this one; standing for greater harmony and aliveness within and between individuals, communities, and between us and our beyond-human kin, including those whose souls live in the Otherworld. For me, “shamanic” also implies a marrying of the journey of being human and spirit - not to transcend, but to be more deeply human and here. Shamanic practices come from and operate on behalf of the land, as much as anything else.

Shamanic practices do not need to supersede or supplant other religious beliefs or lineages you ascribe to or practice, however, you will feel more comfortable with my work if your beliefs allow for a sense that all life (including the natural world) is sacred kin and conscious elder, and that to be here and engage with the pains and ecstasies of being human is one of the greatest responsibilities and most precious gifts we could ever receive.