The knowing was always there. My life taught me how to work with it.

When I was four years old, I told my sister the dark circles beneath her eyes were there because she wasn’t eating enough green food.

Apparently, I came into this life with opinions about health.

But another kind of knowing was present too.

When I was 13, my father left for work one evening and dread moved through my entire body. I knew I would never see him again.

I ran from window to window, watching him walk down the porch steps, get into his car, and pull away. Then I raced upstairs, dropped to my knees, and begged God to spare him.

The following morning, we learned that my father had been killed in a car accident.

I couldn’t explain what I had known. I only knew that I had known it.

The body became my first doorway.

As a teenager and collegiate long-distance runner, I became fascinated by the relationship between body, mind, energy, and performance. Before I had language for visualization or embodied practice, I was using both to prepare for races.

I went on to earn a degree in nutrition and dietetics.

In 1997, as a young mother with four small children and very unhappily married, I began practicing yoga for a less polished reason.

I was trying not to lose my shit.

Yoga gave me a way to remain inside a life that had become difficult to inhabit. It taught me how to become quiet enough to hear what was happening beneath the noise.

In 2001, I began teaching.

Something unexpected happened when I taught. At times, a voice that wasn’t my ordinary thinking voice would come through. It knew what to say. It sensed what a person or the room needed.

I didn’t have language for it, and I certainly didn’t advertise it. I simply noticed that when I became quiet enough, something wiser could move through me.

Then the life I had built came apart.

By my mid-thirties, I was a single mother raising four children while managing 150 employees as a government department head.

At 42, I crashed.

My heart rate dropped dangerously low. I experienced episodes in which I lost consciousness and sometimes couldn’t speak. Medical testing offered little explanation.

Years of stress, overwork, depletion, restrictive eating, relentless exercise, and using stimulation to extract more energy from an exhausted system had caught up with me.

I couldn’t force my way out of it.

Recovery taught me that everything mattered. Food. Movement. Thought. Environment. Relationships. Energy. The way I spent myself and the ways I attempted to manufacture energy I didn’t have.

During this period, I apprenticed with a shaman who taught me practices for calling back energy I had scattered or given away. Those practices became an important part of my recovery and remain part of what I teach today.

At 45, I was involved in a severe car accident. The following day, my heart stopped. The shaman I was studying with was beside me and worked to call me back.

While I was out, I experienced another world, one utterly unlike ordinary reality.

I had perceived the unseen since childhood. Now I had experienced something beyond the body directly.

Perception is not the same as mastery.

My recovery led me deeper into therapeutic movement, subtle practice, and Ayurveda. Ayurveda brought together so much of what I had been studying: food, movement, daily rhythms, herbs, consciousness, philosophy, and our relationship with the natural world.

But an encounter with a client changed the direction of my work again.

He had lived with debilitating anxiety for more than 20 years. As he described when it began, I felt the sensation I had experienced while outside my body.

I knew there was something different about what he was describing. Its source didn’t feel biological, cognitive, or emotional. It felt otherworldly.

Later, I became aware of a non-corporeal presence connected to what he was experiencing. It frightened me at first. Then I directed it to leave.

At our next appointment, without knowing what I had perceived or done, he told me his anxiety had disappeared.

I believed him.

I was also wise enough to know that one extraordinary experience didn’t make me qualified to work casually within someone else’s spiritual field.

I needed training.

A trusted massage therapist introduced me to another shaman, and I apprenticed with her for three years. She taught me how to enter sacred space, practice strong spiritual hygiene, journey safely, communicate with what surfaced, retrieve separated aspects of being, and work responsibly within another person’s subtle field.

What had once seemed inexplicable began to reveal an order.

I learned to discern what belonged to the person before me and what did not. I learned that not everything disruptive was an enemy. Some patterns and presences carried protection, information, or unfinished purpose.

Some needed to be understood.

Some needed to leave.

And sometimes, something essential was ready to return.

This is the work I do now.

For 25 years, I have taught yoga and worked with women at the intersection of body, energy, consciousness, lineage, and soul.

My work draws from therapeutic movement, Ayurveda, Vedic wisdom, embodied perception, subtle-body practice, ceremony, journeying, spiritual clearing, soul retrieval, and decades of direct experience.

I work with what belongs, what doesn’t belong, what has been lost, and what is ready to return.

I offer two distinct ways into this work.

Private spiritual sessions allow us to work precisely with what an individual soul and subtle field are ready to reveal, clear, retrieve, or reorganize.

Lineage + Legacy, my yearlong spiritual mentorship, gives women a guided path into subtle perception, lineage, identity, reclamation, and embodied change.

Neither is a prerequisite for the other. Each is a complete doorway into the work.

What I mean by healing

I don’t believe people are broken.

When I use the word healing, I don’t mean fixing someone or promising that a medical or psychological condition will disappear.

I mean that something shifts deeply enough that a person experiences herself differently.

She may recognize that a burden was never hers. She may recover access to a part of herself that had been unavailable. She may no longer organize herself around the same fear. She may discover that she can remain present in situations that once caused her to contract, disappear, or leave herself behind.

From that different experience of herself, different choices become possible.

Sometimes, a different life becomes possible.

I didn’t set out to become someone who worked in the unseen.

I spent years learning how to understand and responsibly work with what I had already been perceiving.

Now I help women explore what may be waiting beneath the limits of ordinary explanation.

Kat Hammonds

Vedic Counselor • E-RYT 500 • Ayurvedic Wellness Consultant
Spiritual and Subtle-Body Practitioner