Surviving Illumination Breaking through Crisis: A Memoir & Teachings from a Kundalini Rising (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780996150903)

Kathrina Peterson was trained in Buddhist monasteries in Thailand, Burma, Sri Lanka and Nepal. She is a holistic healer and teacher helping others realize their authentic selves. She offers integral body-mind approaches based on the integration of western psychology, eastern philosophy, somatic and energy medicine to assist transformation. My life orientation is deeply rooted in awareness training. I bring at least 25 years of body, mind and spirit exploration with the ability of the heart to make change at any age. The medium I use are awareness, touch, sound and movement. In working with babies to elders, I have come to witness what human development looks like and what it can be given the right direction. My teaching style focuses on how each student can flourish. My interest in the body-mind-spirit connection has its roots in my childhood. My mother was a natural healer in the Philippines and as a child, I often was around watching and assisting during her treatments. Having parents from two cultures was fertile ground for my perceiving of differences, similarities and connections. At the age of 21, I let go of a doctoral appointment in medical anthropology at UCLA after working in Calcutta, India with Mother Teresa. Facing death opened an existential angst and propelled me to look at life not from a 21 year old perspective, but from a fast-forward 80 year old woman looking back at her life, and choosing to live a life that made more sense. I spent the decade of my twenties living as a contemplative in the Buddhist monasteries in Asia. I graduated with a Masters degree in East-west Psychology from CIIS. My focus was consciousness transformation and spiritual emergence. Having drenched myself in the study of the psyche from both psychological and spiritual dimensions, I felt a somatic approach was needed to complement my investigations. I continued my explorations with even more experiential modalities that were more meaningful making for myself. My professional training became more meaningful with my own personal experiences with loss, spiritual emergence and chronic pain. When life unfolds unexpectedly, we learn to swim with grace, or otherwise we sink. These "dark nights of the soul" (yes, there is more than one in a lifetime!) have guided me into cyclical individuation and a deeper clarity and acceptance of the dynamic stability inherent in life.