Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, EcoSomatics, Expressive Arts, & Improvisational Play
hello, dear human
There is no time like the present moment to step into ‘here and now.’ Life never happens elsewhere.
And, this moment is fraught. These are times of danger and uncertainty and it makes sense to feel stress, anxiety, fear, and grief. We are witnessing the suffering of beings all over the world, admit escalating climate change from human destruction of Earth’s life systems. To be present in this moment requires making depth in us, requires breath and back body and strengthening the supple river of our life force.
In such times it is valuable to weave into generative relations with one another, where we can learn and practice methods for deepening and strengthen our supple presence in relation with with Land, Ancestors, and our own vital and creative place within the collective. You are necessary, and you are sufficient. You are part of the Whole.
The present moment is where we can tend our own aliveness. So much of our conditioning keeps us tight and narrow, keeps us shrunken, keeps us disconnected from our selves, our bodies, and one another. Patterns that repeat: Isolated and Tight. Reactive and fearful. Angry and Inflamed. Alone and collapsed. Whether from family wounds, collective traumas, or the grinding impact of domination culture, this binding limits our life force in oppressive and soul-squashing ways.
Let’s not acquiesce to that. We do not have to accept a shrunken experience of Life. You do not have to travel alone.
My name is Katriona Ilsedóttir O’Curry. I want to help you claim your life as yours. I want to help you release what binds you. I want to help you feel the potency of your life force as a reliable, creative, generative, magical, and supple river that can take you places that excite and interest and warm you.
“The most important thing each of us can know is our unique bundle of gifts and how to use them in the world….in order for the whole to flourish, each of us has to become strong in who we are and carry our gifts with conviction, so they can be shared with others….In reciprocity, we fill our spirits as well as our bellies”
— Robin Wall Kimmerer
Within all life there is a generative inner rhythm, a living current that supports healing, growth, and transformation.
It is true, that stressful life events, profound grief, collective traumas, systemic oppression, and ancestral wounds have a cumulative impact. Sometimes we are overwhelmed by these forces. Sometimes we are pulled into the undertow and lose touch with our center and our ground. Sometimes our nervous systems are frazzled and tangled, our hearts heavy. We may doubt our belonging. We may hide even from ourselves. We may collapse into old constrictions.
And even then, our inner rhythm of Life force remains alive at our deepest center, like a drum beating, or an ember glowing. This is an unextinquishable current.
Despite all the forms of stress or injury we may have suffered, this generative inner current is a flow that can nourish us and support our healing. This hum of the murmuring deep can reconnect us to our wisdom, our creative instincts for adaptation and regeneration, vibrant and whole, here and now. We can find this place in us through relational ecology.
I rest in the knowing that our lives matter, and that our movements can have generative impacts beyond what we know and can measure.
I rest in the knowing that we can tend deeply to the places that ache, places where we have been compressed or harmed and those where we have caused harm. Healing and repair are possible. We can bring our kindness to the places that need mending, releasing, grieving, celebrating, strengthening.
Indigenous Elders teach us that reciprocity is a fundamental relational current, that we are part of Earth. When Earth is suffering we suffer as well. We hold response-abilities to care for the Whole.
Humans have created many oppressive systems that are exploitative, harmful, and painful, systems of domination and brutality. We are a species who are deeply traumatized and reactive from the many violent battles we have waged against one another through time.
Yet, we are also Life breathing, groundswell rising, rivers flowing, wind dancing - we are also Earth-dwelling creatures with warm hearts who thrive in kind places. We are also carriers of immensely beautiful wisdoms, and creative practices, who can heal, together and make meaningful magic.
I am interested in how we deepen our wisdom and supple-heartedness with each other, how we repair the torn fabric of our relationships. I am in interested in how we nourish our own vitality and aliveness, and strengthen our collective capacity for loving, creative responses, with one another and Earth, in the midst of the serious danger of the times we live within.
And these times are deeply stressful and frightening. And many of us are exhausted. And creativity, embodiment, play, and our relations with Earth offer wild, wise pathways for restorative care, invigorating magic, reconnection with Ancestral Wisdom, and personal and collective liberation.
I walk alongside the folks I work with. I’ve been practicing as a somatic, movement, and arts psychotherapist for over 25 years. I love this beautiful work that I weave with those I accompany.
I offer my creativity and my embodied knowledges as nourishment for y/our longings and y/our living.
The folks with whom I work report feeling strengthened, inspired, softened, more responsive, free-er from conditioned ways of being, free-er from internalized shame from oppressive impositions, more connective and connected, more known to themselves, more loving towards themselves and others.
Folks report feeling much more clear and more practiced in their capacity to say No and Yes in the places they wish to do so, more able to set their boundaries with firm wisdom, more embodied, more in touch with their own sources of inner wisdom and inner power, more able to follow the creative calls they feel, more able to love, to participate, to contribute.
“Katrina's enthusiasm and joy for fostering community and healing is a gift unto itself.
She offers gentle guidance to your own unfurling, creating space for you to blossom in your own time and in your own way.
Leading by example, she illuminates an approach that celebrates aliveness, interconnectedness, sacred stillness, and the wild wonderful reaches of the self."
— J., an Artist
“Katrina is a bright and inquisitive woman committed to an inviting and caring approach, an avid learner with deep integrity. A body storyteller, sensitive photographer inspirator, and life singer.
She embodies a practice of healing restoration that integrates a belief in deep connection and belonging to ourselves and each other.”
— Laia Jorba, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Faculty
“It is with great pleasure I introduce to you my good friend and Colleague Katrina. I was blessed to meet Katrina over twenty years ago, when we participated in and completed a two-year Hakomi training program. In all my years I have never met someone so present, someone that can sit in the silence of the moment.
Katrina has the ability to create and hold a safe space while honouring the sacredness of each individual she works with. She has a beautiful way of building relationship and establishing heart felt trust. I hold deep respect for the healing work she does.
As a proud Indigenous Woman, Mother and Kokum, I have always felt “seen” and validated by Katrina.”
— June Graham, Registered Clinical Counselor
What is the work I’m immersed in?
As Faculty for Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute and The Kutenai Art Therapy Institute, I cocreate learning communities rooted in honouring of interbeing, relations with Eairth, creative arts improvisational approaches, the pedagogy of cooperation, embodied listening methodologies, and decolonial feminist social justice praxis.
I provide creative somatic experiential training and mentoring for therapists and practitioners, helping people deepen improvisational suppleness, sturdiness of courage and voice, helping folks grow capacity to share what they are here to share.
As a psychotherapist I help people metabolize trauma, tend relational injuries, and challenge and push against the impacts of systemic denigrations, helping folks find ground and center, unfold meaning and purpose, and weave creative responses to challenging contemporary circumstances. I help couples and families tend and transform their relations with one another.
I offer mentoring for folks to go deeper into their own creative currents, their own Improvisational Artistry, their own embodied leadership practice.
As a group leader, movement artist, movement therapist, and facilitator of improvisational dance, weaving with expressive arts methodologies, I help people connect with and strengthen the flow of regenerative, creative, innovative life force that runs through us all.
I’m interested in the creative hum of the murmuring deep. Ancestral Wisdoms. Relational Ecology. Decolonial Feminist Liberation work. I weave this passion also into group leadership settings, offering workshops and retreats, and providing talks, conversations, and experiential events.
I believe we can recreate ourselves again and again, together and as a collective, as we listen with each other and learn more about how to move with loving kindness with one another. We can tend the impacts of harm in ways that are vibrant and magically generative. We can innovate together a myriad of loving and sustaining alternatives.
I cocreate en-couraging, affirming support for folks who are Queer, Trans, GenderQueer, Fluid, NonBinary, Neurodivergent, Disabled, Indigenous, Black, People of Colour, women in the most spacious sense of the word, men seeking to understand structural power and privilege and to tend their way of practicing masculinity, white bodied beings unpacking whiteness, those wanting to become more engaged in creative decolonial social justice practices, those reweaving wholeness, practitioners seeking creative rivers, mentoring, depth, personal growth, restoration and playfulness. I work with folks of all ages.
My approach is a weaving of a myriad of lineages:
dance, movement, art, theater, song, poetry, play, and somatic inquiry
Earth Wisdom - ecological philosophy and psychology, Indigenous Truths shared by generous Indigenous Feminist Elders
arts-based therapies
somatic psychology - Hakomi and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy
polyvagal neuroscience theories
cross-cultural, transpersonal, wisdom perspectives
immersions in Radical Dharma and Embodied Social Justice
Queer-feminist pedagogy and praxis
solitary time with forest, ocean, and mountains
Accompanying people in healing and growth in psychotherapy for more than 25 years, I have learned beyond a doubt that each one of us is a profoundly complex, tender, & magical life-force, an important, valuable part of the whole.
Since ancient times, humans have gathered together to come alive through communion with improvisation, song, music, dance, poetry, the soundscapes of nature, dreams, embodied storytelling, and images.
Running through all of us are deep creative currents of wisdom about how to live in a way that feels right to our own hearts, bodies, minds, spirits.
And yes, there are indeed malevolent and oppressive forces that are focused on tearing down anyone or anything that is unfamiliar, inventive, genuine, whole, atypical, free. The dominant cultural paradigm is narrow, and ridicules those who are playful, divergent, colourful, oddkin, Indigenous, Magical, Queer. Experiences of denigration can be subtle, insidious, and corrosive…and harmful.
I am interested in challenging the things we have been taught to accept that cause deep harm and suffering - things we have been taught about ourselves, one another, and about how we should live our lives. I am interested in exploring the impact of culture in our psyches, interested in clearing through the oppressive forms of gaslighting that we have been told represent reality. I am curious about your deeply held truths.
My work is a blend of creative arts, somatic psychology, embodiment arts, neuroscience, relational ecology, mystical wisdom traditions, a pedagogy of nonviolence, and decolonizing feminist generative social justice praxis for the project of personal and collective healing and liberation.
What are you longing for in your life? I’m interested.
We are living in times of profound stress and change, when climate dangers are amplifying, Earth is suffering, and life is changing. We are living in a time when oppressive cultural paradigms are being deeply challenged and culture is shapeshifting, even as forces of domination, fascism, and hate scramble to reassert themselves and solidify their fraying position.
Our personal lived experience is situated within socio-cultural realities of oppression, war, genocide, and climate stress, as well as the multigenerational currents of collective trauma running through family lineages, communities, and societies.
Contextual factors run through our psyches, our personal and collective embodied nervous systems, and our relational experiences.
Yet, our context is alive with lineages of creativity, resistance to domination, revolution against oppression, and the tending of gardens that welcome bees and butterflies. We can also sense into and listen to the call of aliveness and beauty magic that is Life itself, the current that flows strong and true beneath colonial power-hungry shame-based narratives.
Who is the life that flows through you, actually?
We, together, are able to question and move outside the box of narrow expectations of how to be; we can find our supple way of being - with ourselves and with heart-kin; craft fertile gathering grounds where we weave nourishing ways of being together and tend the aching places we have been carrying in our hearts and spirits.
Your life force is worth listening to. Your life force is worth protecting, learning about, and caring for. We can cocreate conditions that support supple responsive being.
We can evoke and strengthen our relations with our own wise inner healing currents and root into our embodied ancestral wisdom.
We can move with and through what is tangled and distorted and tend deep places of injury from experiences of interpersonal harm and cultural denigration.
Together we dear human beings can cocreate collectives of solidarity, innovation, enlivenment, and joy.
Voyager, there is no time like the present to re-member who you are, and you do not have to travel alone.