Somatic and creative currents that sing the heart and soul alive
Hello Dear Human,
Welcome. I’m happy you have found your way here. in the midst of all that is challenging, some attuned, Kind, and creative accompaniment can make a great difference.
I am an Art Therapist, Somatic Psychotherapist, Playful Movement Therapist, Consultant, Trainer, Multimodal Artist, and Group Facilitator.
I am interested in how we tend and heal the harms that have unfolded through time, and are still active in our collective. I am interested in how we deepen our sense of our inherent belonging in Life. I’m interested in how we heal after trauma. I’m interested in how we grow our capacity to be supple, sturdy, and regenerative in the midst of the stressors that we can not change. I’m interested in weaving change in the places where we can bring our courage and our creativity together with one another’s magic.
How do you, I, we grow a thrivingly lush relationship with our aliveness even in the midst of the horror and danger of the times we live within? How do we re.source our relations with Earth, with the infinite presence, and with brave community where we can be as we are?
I rest in the knowing that our life matters, that we can recreate ourselves again and again, and we can tend the impacts of harm together in ways that are beautiful and vibrant and magically generative.
Poets and Mystics agree that we are a part of a rippling current of Life. We are Life breathing, groundswell rising, rivers flowing, wind dancing - Earth-dwelling creatures with warm hearts who thrive in kind places.
I’d be happy to walk alongside you in a creative capacity that offers you nourishment, inspiration, and encouragement.
Welcome, and may you find some meaningful nourishment here.
Within all life there is a generative inner rhythm, a living current that supports healing, growth, and transformation.
It is true, that stressful life events, profound grief, collective traumas, systemic oppression, and ancestral wounds have a cumulative impact. Sometimes we are overwhelmed by these forces. Sometimes we are pulled into the undertow and lose touch with our center and our ground. Sometimes our nervous systems are frazzled and tangled, our hearts heavy. We may doubt our belonging. We may hide even from ourselves.
Indeed, our modern culture can be very alienating, isolating, and disheartening. We can feel disconnected from our depths and disconnected from a kind-hearted collective.
And even then, our inner rhythm of Life force, healing, and transformation remains alive at our deepest center, like a drum beating, or an ember glowing. This is an unextinquishable current.
Despite all the forms of stress or injury we may have suffered, this generative inner current is a flow that can nourish us and support our healing. This hum of the murmuring deep can reconnect us to our wisdom, our creative instincts for adaptation and regeneration, vibrant and whole, here and now.
“Joy is not meant to be a crumb.”
Mary Oliver
Your life force is worth listening to. Your life force is worth protecting, learning about, and caring for. We can evoke and strengthen this wise inner healing current. We can move through what is tangled and distorted and tend deep places of injury from experiences of cultural denigration or interpersonal harm. We can restore strong and supple roots, and unfurl sturdy and flexible wings. We can weave ourselves into collectives of solidarity, innovation, enlivenment, and joy.
Voyager, there is no time like the present to re-member who you are, and you do not have to travel alone.
Since ancient times, humans have gathered together to come alive through communion with improvisation, song, music, dance, poetry, the soundscapes of nature, dreams, embodied storytelling, and images.
Running through all of us are deep creative currents of wisdom about how to live in a way that feels right to our own hearts, bodies, minds, spirits.
And yes, there are indeed malevolent and oppressive forces that are focused on tearing down anyone or anything that is unfamiliar, inventive, genuine, whole, atypical, free. The dominant cultural paradigm is narrow, and ridicules those who are playful, divergent, colourful, oddkin, Indigenous, Magical, Queer. Experiences of denigration can be subtle, insidious, and corrosive…and harmful.
I am interested in challenging the things we have been taught to accept that cause deep harm and suffering - things we have been taught about ourselves, one another, and about how we should live our lives. I am interested in exploring the impact of culture in our psyches, interested in clearing through the oppressive forms of gaslighting that we have been told represent reality. I am curious about your deeply held truths.
My work is a blend of creative arts, somatic psychology, embodiment arts, neuroscience, relational ecology, mystical wisdom traditions, a pedagogy of nonviolence, and decolonizing feminist generative social justice praxis for the project of personal and collective healing and liberation.
What are you longing for in your life? I’m interested.
We are living in times of profound stress and change, when climate dangers are amplifying, Earth is suffering, and life is changing. We are living in a time when oppressive cultural paradigms are being deeply challenged and culture is shapeshifting, even as forces of domination, fascism, and hate scramble to reassert themselves and solidify their fraying position.
Our personal lived experience is situated within socio-cultural realities of oppression, war, genocide, and climate stress, as well as the multigenerational currents of collective trauma running through family lineages, communities, and societies.
Contextual factors run through our psyches, our personal and collective embodied nervous systems, and our relational experiences.
Yet, our context is alive with lineages of creativity, resistance to domination, revolution against oppression, and the tending of gardens that welcome bees and butterflies. We can also sense into and listen to the call of aliveness and beauty magic that is Life itself, the current that flows strong and true beneath colonial power-hungry shame-based narratives.
Who is the life that flows through you, actually?
We, together, are able to question and move outside the box of narrow expectations of how to be; we can unmask and find our supple way of being - with ourselves and with heart-kin; craft fertile gathering grounds where we weave nourishing ways of being together and tend the aching places we have been carrying in our hearts and spirits.
Psychotherapy can be liberation praxis.
Because culture is composed of and by people, we are not simply recipients of experience, we are also contributing shapers of experience. Participants in Life. Life is movement and flow. Our innermost is infinite.
“The land is the real teacher. All we need as students is mindfulness.” - Robin Wall Kimmerer
"The dance of renewal, the dance that made the world, was always danced here at the edge of things, on the brink, on the foggy coast" Ursula K. Le Guin
"The telling of stories, like singing and praying, would seem to be an almost ceremonial act, an ancient and necessary mode of speech that tends the earthly rootedness of human language." - David Abram
“You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves" - Mary Oliver
“The result of being colonized is the internalization of the need to remain invisible.” ― Lee Maracle
“The land is the real teacher. All we need as students is mindfulness.” - Robin Wall Kimmerer "The dance of renewal, the dance that made the world, was always danced here at the edge of things, on the brink, on the foggy coast" Ursula K. Le Guin "The telling of stories, like singing and praying, would seem to be an almost ceremonial act, an ancient and necessary mode of speech that tends the earthly rootedness of human language." - David Abram “You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves" - Mary Oliver “The result of being colonized is the internalization of the need to remain invisible.” ― Lee Maracle
Specializing in Magic, Improvisational Artistry, Ecological Context, and Celebratory, affirming support for folkx who are Queer, Trans, GenderQueer, Fluid, NonBinary, Neurodivergent, Disabled, Indigenous, Black, People of Colour, women in the most spacious sense of the word, men seeking to understand structural power and privilege and to tend their way of practicing masculinity, white folkx unpacking whiteness, those wanting to become more engaged in transformative social justice and decolonizing, folkx reweaving wholeness, therapists seeking mentoring, depth, personal growth, restoration and playfulness. I work folks of all ages.
What is the current that needs tending, dear Heart?
Let’s find the no-rush rhythm of your own breath, to accompany your heart, your longings, and what is emergent for you.
I will be standing in a simple truth: that you belong, inherently, in Life.
You are alive, and life is movement, creative energy longing to flow.
Let’s listen to your own living, find what is tangled and support unfolding…
renewal
I help people metabolize trauma, find ground and center, unfold meaning and purpose, and weave creative responses to challenging contemporary circumstances. I also provide creative experiential training and generative mentoring for therapists and practitioners.
I love accompanying and supporting the deep flow of regenerative, creative, innovative life force. I weave this passion also into group leadership, offering workshops and retreats and providing talks and experiential events.
“Katrina's enthusiasm and joy for fostering community and healing is a gift unto itself.
She offers gentle guidance to your own unfurling, creating space for you to blossom in your own time and in your own way.
Leading by example, she illuminates an approach that celebrates aliveness, interconnectedness, sacred stillness, and the wild wonderful reaches of the self."
— J., an Artist
“Katrina is a bright and inquisitive woman committed to an inviting and caring approach, an avid learner with deep integrity. A body storyteller, sensitive photographer inspirator, and life singer.
She embodies a practice of healing restoration that integrates a belief in deep connection and belonging to ourselves and each other.”
— Laia Jorba, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Faculty
“It is with great pleasure I introduce to you my good friend and Colleague Katrina. I was blessed to meet Katrina over twenty years ago, when we participated in and completed a two-year Hakomi training program. In all my years I have never met someone so present, someone that can sit in the silence of the moment.
Katrina has the ability to create and hold a safe space while honouring the sacredness of each individual she works with. She has a beautiful way of building relationship and establishing heart felt trust. I hold deep respect for the healing work she does.
As a proud Indigenous Woman, Mother and Kokum, I have always felt “seen” and validated by Katrina.”
— June Graham, Registered Clinical Counselor
My approach is a weaving of a myriad of lineages:
dance, movement, art, theater, song, poetry, play, and somatic inquiry
Earth Wisdom - ecological philosophy and psychology, Indigenous Truths shared by generous Indigenous Feminist Elders
arts-based therapies
somatic psychology - Hakomi and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy
polyvagal neuroscience theories
cross-cultural, transpersonal, wisdom perspectives
immersions in Radical Dharma and Embodied Social Justice
Queer-feminist pedagogy and praxis
solitary time with forest, ocean, and mountains
Accompanying people in healing and growth over the past 25 years I have learned beyond a doubt that each one of us is a profoundly complex, tender, & magical life-force, an important, valuable part of the whole. I’m curious to learn more about your voyage and to accompany you, along the way.
“The most important thing each of us can know is our unique bundle of gifts and how to use them in the world….in order for the whole to flourish, each of us has to become strong in who we are and carry our gifts with conviction, so they can be shared with others….In reciprocity, we fill our spirits as well as our bellies”