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Meet Kaatje (She/they)(pronounced Katia)
I am here to disrupt the ways that people experience themselves and the world around them. I help you heal your way free of societal and ancestral wounds. Together we imagine a new self and a new world so visceral that the body and the nervous system believe it is possible. Then we express that new self and new world into being. I celebrate each new reality - large or small - that transforms its way into physical form.
Finding Voice Movement Therapy
The more I heal myself home, the more I realize that I’ve always been a bridge, a translator, and a guide. And my primary tool is my imagination. It doesn’t matter where I was in life; my soul always craved to create, and longed to understand the creative process. I could never resist learning about the behind the scenes making-of features of movies or the creative habits of my favorite authors. As a child, I built fairy houses in the backyard and created complex fantasy worlds populated by plastic animals. I was a theater kid through middle and high school and studied music, starting with classical piano and switching to voice in high school. I have always written stories, from the time I was very young until the present day.
In college, my studies honed my curiosity through cultural anthropology, to understanding what made societies and cultures what they are. From there I pursued a masters in Visual Anthropology, adding cinematic storytelling to the ways I explored human worlds. Eventually, I found Voice Movement Therapy (VMT), combining my creativity and curiosity with a form of healing that made full use of my imaginative gifts and added in the extra dimension of embodied voice. This modality allowed me to come more fully into my authentic self, and stoked my desire to help others do the same.
Magical Living
Life has taken me in some truly unexpected directions, all of which have nudged me towards becoming someone who can hold space for the inexplicable, the unpredictable, and the downright scary. I have fought in the trenches of self-discovery, walked alongside my shadows in the Peruvian Andes, and gotten my hands seriously dirty during five years living solo in an RV. I have navigated sketchy alleys in Paris in search of tango and learned valuable life lessons from a homeless man living under a bridge in Spain.
I’m not afraid of your demons - in fact, I might even be able to coax them into joining us for a cup of hot tea and sharing why they’re so scared. The dissociated middle schooler that I once was would never have believed that clawing my way free of crippling social anxiety would lead me to one day act as a translator in Spain for a gathering of indigenous elders from around the world. Or try ayahuasca with a Shipibo family in the depths of the Peruvian Amazon, with the incongruous beat of a tiny town’s discotheque pulsing alongside exotic jungle birds.
Whoever you are, when you sit in front of me, we are collaborating to reshape the story of your life. You can learn to move your body, amplify your voice, and elevate your energy so you don’t feel controlled by the experiences happening around you. Stepping into embodied sovereignty in this way allows you to feel more connected than ever to your nervous system and its needs, so where you want to go becomes more possible.