ABOUT WHOLE BODY DECISION MAKING
Whole Body Decision Making is having access to the wisdom in every part of you: your brain, your body, your history, your spirit, your energy field. The more fully you are connected to that, the more present you can be to your priorities for how you spend your time and energy. And the more effectively you can discern and filter which resources and support you may need at any time. There are many ways to communicate with and honor all the parts of you so that you can make decisions that are informed by your body and your brain, your intuition and your intellect, your feelings and your thoughts. They all start with curiosity and a willingness to listen.
We do our best decision making when we have access to the intelligence of both our brains and our bodies. These very different kinds of wisdom can support one another when one of them gets stuck but each is also fully capable of disconnecting from the other or engaging in a battle for your attention.
Brain is logical and linear and gets shut down or overwhelmed by too much emotion or sensation. Our bodies can beautifully and efficiently process feelings and sensations when the appropriate resources and support are available. When body is stuck in a loop of sensation or unable to let go of the story, brain can be helpful with facts and overall perspective. When there is communication, harmony and balance between brain and body, we are operating at our fullest potential.
It has been my life's work to teach this concept. As a manual Physical Therapist, I help people release blockages in all the systems of their physical bodies but also in their energy fields, thoughts and belief patterns. I endeavor to help them understand how their nervous system deals with overwhelm and stress and trauma and how this affects their behavior and outlook on life. And I consistently defend the value of both brain and body intelligence.
After more than 20 years of working with clients, individually and in group settings, and teaching various forms of manual therapy, I developed a curriculum called Whole Body Decision Making. In these classes, you experience how to listen to your body and brain with curiosity and respect. And you learn ways to interpret these messages from within and to balance them with the ever widening chorus of information around us. The goal is to become a more efficient filter so that we may honor all of the wisdom within us while recognizing and accessing the resources that are most useful to us in each moment.
I use this philosophy in all areas of my own life. I developed these classes as I was navigating a divorce with 2 small children. I found support and safe outlets to honor my feelings and was then able to feel grounded and clear to negotiate the many decisions related to finances and our children’s welfare. These tools helped me stay true to my conviction that each and every member of our family could come out of the divorce better off than when we started. And more than 10 years later, we all agree that this is so.
Over the past 8 years, I have been open about my journey of living with the gene for ALS. When I learned that I had it, I had already lost my father and the youngest of my 5 brothers to this devastating neurological disease and my next oldest brother had just been diagnosed. I was so deeply grateful for all I had learned about honoring feelings and supporting my brain and body as I made decisions about how to handle the many questions I now had to face.
I have decided to love the ALS gene and to accept that it has come into my life to teach me. Breathing into and releasing the shock, terror and grief (and so many other feelings) and noticing how they affected my body and my brain was the hardest journey I have ever undertaken. It was also the most valuable learning experience of my life thus far. I have let this learning inform all parts of my experience and watched as it has deepened my compassion and my ability to stay present.
This was so valuable when the third of my brothers was diagnosed with ALS. He rapidly sickened and died in 2021. As I continue my journey, I am filled with gratitude that I can continue to operate with clarity, compassion and efficiency as I help my children navigate all of this, embrace my own journey to be healthy and share what I have learned with my clients and students.
ABOUT KATE
For over 30 years, I have used CranioSacral Therapy as the basis of my approach, trusting that each body knows what it needs and will communicate that in its own way. My treatments aim to clarify the root causes of problems and are very efficient because of the deep interconnection of all the systems in the body.
I am also trained in Brain Technique, Visceral and Viscero-Vascular Manipulation, Lymphatic Drainage and a long list of other physical and energetic therapies. I combine my experience of Chinese, Ayurvedic and Shamanic medical approaches with a deep and current understanding of anatomy. This allows me to offer my clients many avenues to understanding their bodies as a part of their whole selves.
I don’t remember the details of how I ended up in a class on CranioSacral Therapy (CST) in Vancouver, British Columbia in 1993. At the time, I was recently returned from 2 years in West Africa as a Peace Corps volunteer, which was a crash course for me in letting go of everything I thought was true…about pretty much everything. I was finishing up a travelling Physical Therapist assignment in Seattle and I had plans to move to the UK to join my boyfriend in a few weeks. I heard of CST from a colleague and I clearly remember thinking ‘that sounds ridiculous’. I found myself on that class by following the same vague but insistent instructions from somewhere inside that had sent me to the Peace Corps office in 1989, a few months after my father died, asking to be sent to Africa.
I worked my way through the CST curriculum as I built a new life in England. In each class, we were introduced to the therapy through lecture and demonstration and then we partnered with other students, trading places as therapist and client. This was the beginning of my journey of learning to listen to my body after a lifetime of using food, alcohol, sex, running as an athlete, lying, sarcasm, contempt, risk-taking of all kinds and just plain running away, to avoid having to do just that. What my body had to tell me was, at first, almost unbearable to hear but, as I stuck with it, it got easier and made so much sense. It was such a relief to stop running away from myself.
From there, I learned to listen to my brain and to coordinate respectful conversations between it and my body. As I sought out more trainings in other manual therapies such as Brain Technique, Visceral and Vascular Manipulation, it became clear to me that my body was an Ecosystem and there was wisdom in every part. As I embraced the deep interconnectedness of all the physical parts of me, I became aware of how I was also connected to all the layers of my electromagnetic field and to what I, as a very lapsed Catholic, know as my spirit. I also embraced what I now call my Historical Ecosystem, the connection between who I am now and all the people I have been.
Working with all of this eventually brought me to an endless well of compassion because I could know and feel with absolute certainty that, at every moment in my life, I had been doing the very best I could with what I had and what I knew at the time. This informed all of my relationships and inspired me to do the hard work of reconnecting with my family of origin. Now I and my sons are part of a much larger family which is transforming into something softer and more beautiful as we navigate a whole range of challenging experiences with a grace that I never knew we possessed.
