Katherine is a stargazer, wind-lover, bone-huntress, and solo backpacker. She’s also a scholar-practitioner of nondual Śākta-Śaiva (Śakti-Śiva) tantric traditions, postpartum doula, therapist, ritualist, and ceremonialist with specialized training in perinatal mental health, child-centered play therapy, and somatic-concentric sex therapy. Katherine has been on a spiritual journey as an aspiring aesthetic connoisseur of reality (sahṛdayā) from ashrams to academia for decades. She holds a Master’s degree in Religious Studies from Naropa University in Boulder, CO, where she focused on the study and practice of Indian and Tibetan Buddhism, Hindu Tantra, Yoga, and the Sanskrit language. Katherine wrote her honors thesis on the tantric practitioner’s ritual encounters with yoginīs for the aims of supernatural power, supernatural experience, and liberation in nondual tantric traditions during India’s early medieval period. In this work, she mapped ancient rites of passage onto modern practices (like vision fasts) for those seeking transformative experiences. She is particularly drawn to transgressive practices and countercultural movements.

Katherine recently graduated with an MA in Clinical Mental Health Counseling (Transpersonal Wilderness Therapy), also from Naropa University, which helped her contextualize the transformative potential of spiritual exploration in a therapeutic setting. She currently works as a psychotherapist at Emotion Alchemy Collective in Colorado. Katherine shines brightest in the liminal spaces where Transpersonal and Depth Psychology, Deep Ecology, and Ecopsychology intersect with Mythopoetics, Narrative Therapy, rites of passage, mythology, folklore, spirituality, and ceremony/ritual. She’s also curious about the subjectivity of the non-human animate/spirit world and indigenous cosmologies/languages/oral narratives/imaginaria. Having grown up hunting, fishing, horsepacking, backpacking, and speaking with nature beings in a small mountain town in rural Wyoming, Katherine is passionate about communion with the natural world, deep relationship with place, and reciprocal relationships with animist spirits.

Her diverse background includes active duty military service as a Korean linguist and extensive travels in Asia (India, Nepal, Thailand, and Malaysia). Katherine has been meditating and practicing yoga for over 20 years, teaching for 10, and delights in exploring and pushing the boundaries of her ability to handle multifaceted levels of intensity while cultivating a sense of expansiveness in letting go—a modern psychonaut. She spent six months in Peru at Paititi Institute working with sacred plant medicines (Ayahuasca and Huachuma) and supported the development of an off-grid permaculture project with that community. In Thailand, she explored the power of Kambo (poisonous secretions of the giant monkey frog, or Phyllomedusa bicolor), Iboga (Ibogaine is a psychoactive alkaloid naturally occurring in the West African shrub iboga), water fasts (up to three weeks), and a darkroom retreat (soundproof/lightproof solo retreat for a week) as visionary portals into the spiritual exploration of non-ordinary states of consciousness.