Presenters: Heeding the Sacred Call Out of Separateness
September 17-21, 2023
Kristina Kyser
Greetings! I am pleased to have the opportunity to introduce myself to you. I’m a Registered Psychotherapist practicing in Toronto since 2010, having previously done a PhD and taught university courses in English literature. I’ve done advanced training in many therapy modalities and am also a Certified Forest Therapy Guide.
I have supervised and taught therapists as well as running workshops and being part of an international research study. Many of my patients are healing from complex trauma. More recently, I’ve been moved to integrate my work as a therapist with my spiritual practices, including Buddhism and Earth-honouring shamanic rituals. I have received all seven Rites as a Chacaruna (bridge between worlds) by Flying Eagle Medicine Woman and am currently training in mediumship.
It is my belief that the foundational traumas of colonialism and materialism must be faced in all of our healing journeys. This includes addressing our separation from the natural world and fostering the innate gifts we all
have that enable us access to the web of interconnection and the living nonhuman and nonphysical beings that surround us.
I’m tremendously excited to partner with my beloved colleague Sue Guttenstein at this pivotal moment in our history on this planet that we might facilitate a coming together in service of healing, expansion, and the greatest good for all beings.
Sue Guttenstein
My life has been a series of invitations. And I have said yes. Yes, to a deepening spiritual life. Yes, to love and loving and, along with this, an ever-present vulnerability. Yes, to knowing hard truths about myself as a privileged, white female with a secure place in the dominant culture and to recognizing the requirements that come with this awareness. Yes, to a growing experience of my embeddedness in the “natural” world – a small player (with outsized impact as a human) in a magnificently intricate, interwoven reality of beings within an astoundingly beautiful universe.
What has accompanied me all along the way is a sense of the work I am to do, to offer – it is to help people heal, enabling them to step into their lives more fully, living into their gifts. I was a trauma psychotherapist for 25 years. During that time, I was introduced to somatic healing work, some 20 years back. I continue to offer it, with an ever increasing sense of its relevance as we face the challenges to be who we are called to be. In addition to clinical training, I have studied Guided Self-Healing, developed a practice called ADIEWA, trained with the Enneagram Prison Project, in The Narrative Enneagram and the Somatic Enneagram, the latter two being accessible paths for profound healing and spiritual growth.
This moment we are in together asks us to grow into loving, into being vulnerable, into daring to care. It asks us to be courageous, to be honest, to take risks, to take up our place, imagined anew, in this turbulent time. It asks us, as humans, to take our appropriate place in our relationships, through our listening and through our actions in support of the thriving of all beings and all life. Inherent in this is a spiritual reconnection with ourselves and our planet and all that is, each an intimate expression of the Divine.
I am delighted to be working with such an inspiring colleague, Kristina Kyser.