In the newest edition of MysticMag interviews, we sit down with Catherine Ewing, a therapist and coach, who shares her journey from grassroots women’s issues to integrating energy work and spirituality. She discusses her coaching program focused on healing and personal growth and highlights the importance of individual healing work in creating a more compassionate and equitable world.
Who is Catherine Ewing? What can you tell me about yourself and your professional background?
I have Master’s Degrees in Social Work and Divinity. Early in my career, I worked primarily in grassroots women’s issues, including domestic violence, sexual assault, child sexual abuse, and community organizing. I expected that I would do similar work for my whole career.
However, in 1993, while on maternity leave, I started getting called in another direction. It was like spirit was guiding me toward going into psychotherapy practice. I was very reluctant because I had never wanted or prepared to become a psychotherapist. I had, in fact, stayed away from any clinical work. However, the calling was very strong, so I followed it and started working in a private practice. This was in the mid-90s.
Because of my background, I was working with a lot of clients with significant trauma. I realized that the traditional talk therapy of the time was not effective in getting to the root of presenting problems or creating the deep healing that I thought my clients wanted and that I wanted for them. Remember, we didn’t know a lot about trauma-informed work then, and neuroscience or epigenetics weren’t being talked about in the psychotherapy world.
I decided that I have to find other ways to work with my clients. Since I wasn’t clinically oriented, I went down a path of energy, work, spirituality, and alternative modalities. I became trained in a lot of energy healing and studied spirituality, metaphysics, epigenetics, and neuroscience. That’s also when I got my Master of Divinity. I began integrating all of these different techniques to work below the level of the conscious mind, focusing more on the subconscious mind and the emotional and energetic bodies.
In 2006, I learned Tapping (Emotional Freedom Technique). Tapping is the perfect bridge between talk therapy and energy work. It allowed me both to talk to my clients and to dive into what was going on in their subconscious and their energy bodies. It allowed us to work on trauma memories without retraumatizing my client, which is critical.
That has really been my work for the last almost 30 years now. I blend the basics of therapy with influence from energy work, spiritual practices, tapping, brain science, and nervous system regulation. We now understand the connection between the cognitive brain, the brain in our heart, and the brain in our gut, and how that’s all connected through the Vagus Nerve.
Later in my journey, on 9/9/09, I became activated to speak light language. I receive activations and attunements from higher consciousness that help remove blocks, reorganize people’s energy fields and activate DNA. Over the years, my intuition and ability to channel have also increased. I feel grateful to have a large, very diverse toolbox to make available to serve the highest good of my clients.
What ideas and principles are your coaching based on?
Both my therapy practice, which I’m moving out of, and the coaching practice that I’m building, are based on the same principles. First, you’re not crazy. People get labeled, they get diagnosed, they’re given a lot of medications, etc. Maybe sometimes those things are necessary, but my belief is that we just adapted to situations that may have been crazy, traumatizing, or dysfunctional, or have not been provided what we needed in utero, in infancy, in childhood. Therefore, our adaptations might not be really healthy, but that doesn’t mean we’re crazy.
Second, you’re not your story. You didn’t create the things in your environment, in your upbringing, or in your early life, but you did adapt and adjust to them. You are a spiritual being walking a human journey. You are more than your personal history.
Third, you didn’t intentionally create the circumstances of your life. You adapted to the conditions that you were born into and grew up in, including family, ancestry, religion, culture and social environment. Your adaptations helped you survive, but probably aren’t serving you any longer.
Fourth, you can heal and grow. If you want to change your life, it is your responsibility to do the work, to learn how regulate your nervous system and heal those traumas, so that you can be who you really came here to be. Your Soul, the essence of you that is connected to spirit, has always existed.
What does your 9 Month Individual Coaching Program include and what can people hope to achieve through it?
The name of the nine-month program pretty much says it all right. It’s called “Heal Your Heart and Birth Your Brilliance”! It’s like a guided Dark Night of the Soul, journey. Think Wizard of Oz or Indiana Jones. It’s Emotional Archaeology and spiritual guidance all wrapped up in one. There are basically seven steps that overlap.
The first one is an assessment of where the person is right now and what’s going on in your life right now. What have you tried before? What’s worked, and what hasn’t worked? We lay the groundwork. Then we spend some time creating a vision for what they would prefer, what they would like their life to look like.
We then do something called the sacred inventory. In my experience working primarily with women, we tend to downplay our accomplishments, our achievements. I think it’s important to take clients through a process of literally listing out everything they’ve ever accomplished, all of their achievements so they can appreciate all that they are!
Then we start the deep dive into the work. As in archeology, we take our time very carefully, very thoughtfully, to unearth the broken parts, the wounded parts, the unhealed parts. We dust them off and take a good look at them, tell their story, and understand their origins in that process. The client becomes much more compassionate, accepting, and understanding of themselves, and maybe even of people who have hurt them.
There’s a lot of healing in that process, and in the healing, we come to trust ourselves and our intuition again. One of the most insidious byproducts of any kind of abuse, mental, emotional, psychological, or sexual, is that the person who has been the victim turns down the dial on trusting themselves or their intuition, so when we do this work, they learn that they were not wrong when they were saying that something doesn’t feel right. They learn to trust themselves and their inner knowing.
The whole time we’re doing this, we’re raising the person’s vibration. Everything is energy, and every emotion is energy in motion. Every emotion has a vibrational frequency. When we start to move out of shame, despair, despondency, guilt, blame, resentment, etc. and we begin to do the healing work – we move. We’re able to move up on that vibrational scale into things like acceptance, joy, appreciation, gratitude, and love. Then we begin to attract to ourselves the things that are more in alignment with our higher vibration. This is the law of attraction.
At the end, we rewrite the story of who we are and what we want to create in the world. The client becomes the author, the authority of their new story.
How does Rapid Trauma Relief work?
Rapid Trauma Relief is a catchphrase for two or three different modalities that I’ve been trained in to work specifically with people who have had complex trauma. Maybe they’ve been veterans, first responders, or people who have been severely abused. These processes help to relieve the impact of the trauma from their nervous system to their cellular memory. It even helps to rewire the neural pathways and create new, healthy neural connections.
We work through imagery, we unwind that nervous system, and we rewire the neural pathways. This is not to minimize the severity of some of the things that people go through, but when we do this work, people may not even remember what they were so upset about or can’t even clearly grab onto the details of that experience anymore. These are really fascinating ways of helping someone manage their traumatic memories and nervous system.
What is, in your opinion, the most important advice that women who are looking to turn their lives around should follow?
I would refer them back to the first four beliefs. You’re not crazy. You’re not your story. It’s not your fault. You can change it. On top of that, I can give a few additional pieces of advice.
The first one would be to stop comparing yourself to everybody else. Your experience is your unique experience, and you came into this world as a unique soul with your own gifts, with the lessons that you wanted to learn. Comparing yourself to anybody else is not useful, and it’s usually harmful.
In that same way, stop looking for answers outside of yourself. This sounds so cliche, but it’s a cliche because it’s true. The answers are within you, your higher self, your inner knowing, your connection to higher guidance through angels, guides, ascended masters, God, Spirit, Source, or whatever you want to call it. You have access to that information when you can quiet your mind enough to tap in.
The next thing I would say then is to learn tools to regulate your nervous system so that you can get out of the fight or flight or freeze response, which is what our nervous system defaults to. Learn to switch into the parasympathetic, the rest and relax part of your nervous system, rather than the sympathetic. When you’re in the parasympathetic state, you produce a lot of the chemicals that help calm the body, like serotonin and dopamine. If we’re not relaxed, if we’re not sleeping, our body isn’t producing the chemistry that helps us to stay calm and happy.
This all requires taking time to listen to your inner knowing, to learn to trust yourself and the guidance that you’re receiving. Practice self-care. Our bodies, our earth suits, are temples that our souls have chosen to be in to be on earth at this time, so it’s important to practice self-care in a consistent way.
Women, in particular, feel selfish or guilty if they take time out for themselves or if they put their needs or their wishes ahead of other people’s. That’s a mindset and a pattern that just depletes us and wears us down. It’s based on a patriarchal belief that women’s role and value is in serving. That’s just nonsense and is extremely unhealthy for women.
Last, but certainly not least, I would suggest practicing gratitude and appreciation. These are two of the highest vibrating emotions, the highest energies, so the more we can practice gratitude for everything, the more we raise our vibrations. We know from Bruce Lipton, from the Study of Epigenetics that when we hold a certain thought that creates an emotion for as little as 17 seconds, it literally changes the chemistry that’s running through our body. Therefore, 17 seconds of dropping into your heart and being grateful for something, can begin to switch the chemistry that’s running through your body from the harsh chemistry of adrenaline and cortisol that’s wearing down your system and aging you, to dopamine and serotonin chemistry that’s actually sort of anti-aging and supports your DNA, your telomeres, and your organs.
Is there anything else about your work that you would like to share that we haven’t covered?
I would like to add that I believe we’re in a very powerful time in humanity where it looks like everything is falling apart and the world is in crisis. That’s because it is this period of things falling apart is going to allow us to build something new and more equitable. I believe that it will be a kinder world where the masculine and feminine energy is more balanced, where the healing of the feminine, all the wounds, all the repression, all the oppression of the divine feminine has got to be healed so that we can come into more balance and create a world that’s more compassionate, more intuitive, and more equitable for everyone.
This divine feminine energy has been coming in since about 2000, and it’s coming stronger and stronger. It’s really important for all of us, men and women, to work toward our own healing. When we do our individual healing work it affects the whole collective. Every bit of that work is adding to creating a collective that’s going to be a better world for all of us. I call it creating Heaven on Earth.
To learn more about Catherine and her work, you can visit her website at sacredheartalchemy.com or socials:
Facebook: www.facebook.com/catherine.ewing1
Instagram: www.instagram.com/sacredheartalchemy144
TEDx: youtu.be/2TiRhydTdEc
Free Purpose Meditation: www.sacredheartalchemy.com/purposemeditation
