For Spiritual Orphans and Recovering Christians looking for a place to call "home."
FREE 5-Day Experience with Kate Fontana, M.Div, christian-pagan priestess and mentor for the spiritual fringe
Re-Belonging:
Basic Skills of Good-Enough Relating to a Complex World
(Or "How Not To Join a Cult)
Learn simple body-based skills and a valuable framework for relating in a 'good-enough' way with others while being grounded your own strong center.
This Live Training Takes Place daily, April 3-7th, 4pm PST . Save Your Spot Now!
We won't send spam. Unsubscribe at any time.
Are you tired of feeling like a spiritual outsider?
Have you struggled to find a place to “belong”?
Do you long to feel more at home in your own body?
Do you long for more depth in relationships and ritual in life, but are disillusioned or estranged from traditional ‘church’ (and also don't want to accidentally join a cult)?
Have you invested ALL the time and energy in various community efforts, only for them to ‘blow up,’ ‘fall apart’, or leave you disappointed, unsatisfied, or seemingly worse off than you were?
Or maybe you’re a big-picture kind of person and you...
…are concerned with the ever-increasing polarization of our world…
…worry that we might never learn how to actually ‘come together…
…have you witnessed too much abuse of power to believe that healthy spiritual community is actually possible…
I hear you. I have felt all of those things at one time or another (and sometimes still). It has led me on a lifelong quest for something I didn’t always have a name for: BELONGING.
When we're able to cultivate a foundation of BELONGING - no matter what's happening around us - so much more becomes possible. In my opinion, it's the missing link to creating the inner trust you are longing for and while being an active change-agent in the world.
Yet, it's so rarely talked about or taught as skills that can be practiced and learned (rather than an external commodity we "get given" or have to "earn")! Until now...
In this FREE Training, I help you cultivate the subtle yet transformational power of belonging in your life and to the web of life - so you can tap into the strength, connection and resilience of "home" wherever you are.
I believe that everybody wants to belong, that it is a basic survival need and a universal desire.
However, I also have observed and experienced that the absence of a felt sense of belonging, feeling like an orphan or an exile, blocks our ability to truly thrive. In lieu of being able to connect to our own sense of belonging, we often outsource this basic need on to others, often through unconscious, unspoken expectations in a way that can be extractive and unsustainable, particularly in group settings.
I’d like to propose to you that belonging isn’t something anyone or anything can give you.
It is your birthright, your original blessing as part of a creature on this planet. It’s the thing that’s never not there.
Ok. So if that’s true, what’s the problem?? What does “belonging” actually mean?
In this 5-day experience, I will guide you through an exploration of themes and practices designed to support spiritually-seeking people who long to live with more balance, connection, and agency in a complex, polarized and ever-changing world.
This might be for you if:
- You feel disconnected and isolated, longing for healthy community and culture
- You feel paralyzed or powerless in the face of personal, national and/or global crises
- You want to feel more at home in your body
- You want to feel more ease and less anxiety engaging in relationships and group spaces
- You want to be of service and share your gifts rooted in physical place and community
- You want accessible skills for plugging into your own sense of belonging and reciprocity within your own body, community, ecosystem and the land
In this experimental/experiential practice, we will explore together some basic skills of good-enough relating and what I consider to be the pre-requisites to all other group and culture work:
Nurturing one’s own felt sense of belonging.
Here's what you'll get:
Belonging Basic #1
A simple framework to navigate the common pitfalls of group spiritual process in collaboration with OR outside of organized faith traditions (without joining a cult!).
Belonging Basic #2
Simple body- and earth-based practices for strengthening and supporting resilience in your nervous system
Belonging Basic #3
Simple, culturally respectful, (and FREE!) ways to nurture your own inner sensing, navigation, choice making, grounding, and experience of belonging, right where you are.
Belonging Basic #4
Reflective space to share personal insight, create intentions, and give and receive support.
Belonging Basic #5
Clarity about your own personal and ancestral dreams and longings, and the next right step in alignment with them, suitable to your specific context.
"I would absolutely recommend working with Kate. I have been able to get some grounding, answers and opening in some areas that were always so tender and wounded and have a grounds to do healing work around them, supported by Kate and a greater community. I had been searching out something for so long and when I worked with Kate, we found part of it and began a healing process with it. It was actually life-changing. Or life-illuminating....... Or some other wondrous adjective like that!"
Beth S.
"Kate’s unique spiritual background brought the perfect touch to our ceremony. We sought her out because we are non religious but wanted to express our respect for all living creatures and native peoples of the planet in our spoken ceremony and her perspective was exactly what we had been looking for."
Cindy and Miranda Ortega, illustrator and coffee maker
"Working with Kate allows me to connect more deeply, on a more intimate level, with my spiritual work, my guides, the earth. Having connection to the circle and Kate's journey has opened up my own path, strengthened, and challenged me."
Heather Evans
"Kate is deeply wise beyond her years...She has an incredible gift of guiding you to your own wisdom and discovering the resources within your own body. She has deep knowledge about somatics and healing trauma in the body, in addition to her deep commitment to anti-racism work. [Working with Kate provided me with] incredible support to develop trust and strength in my own intuition and deep knowing."
Anonymous
HI! I'm Kate Fontana.
I've been where you are: feeling like there must be something more than the daily grind, but unfulfilled by traditional 'church’...wanting to make a difference in the world, but often barely keeping my own head above the water. I'm here to tell you that you can change that and I can help.
I’ve been a wandering spiritual orphan for almost two decades. After coming out as queer and leaving my Catholic faith, I got deep into the Goddess tradition of Kashmir Shaivism, where I had my first real experience of my own innate god-ness–of being made in the 'divine image'.
I received the unexpected call to be “priestess” in 2013, and then in 2015, even more unexpectedly, Jesus came back into my life--not as triumphant victor, not as dewy-eyed shepherd, but as a tender lover. I could not have been more shocked (or annoyed!).
The path has not been linear (I bet yours hasn’t been either): through major mental health crisis, job loss, seminary, psychic school, activism, SO much therapy, somatic animist apprenticeship, and a slow return to my body and earth-based rhythms, I have been attempting to make sense and live respectfully in the confluence of these strange intersections of lineages and modalities. Can you relate??
Until recently, I was on a formal ordination path with the Roman Catholic Women Priests. I desperately wanted structure! However my guides informed me that no outside authority names one a priest--rather, that office is given by those whom the priest serves, the land and the stewards of the land.
So I withdrew from the RCWP and expanded my own offerings to support my fellow spiritual fringe-dwellers in accessing and living life by their own innate connection to Source/Spirit/Earth/Gaia/God/dess.
Over the last 15 years teaching and facilitating, I have had the privilege to support hundreds of people come into deeper relationship and alignment with their own body, spirit, ancestors, human and more-than-human allies, their personal power and the Earth.
My clients are folks who are deeply immersed in service to our world, attentive to social, systemic and ancestral patterns of trauma and discord, needing sustenance for the long road: therapists, social workers, parents with small kids, educators, activists, care-providers. I've helped these anchors of community well-being live from that deep center of wisdom that connects us to all of creation.
I know firsthand how lonely, confusing, and uncertain a life on the spiritual fringe can be.
I also know that belonging is your birthright
You are a citizen of the earth. You have a direct line of communication and connection to Earth/Source/God/dess/the Cosmos. All it takes is a persistent commitment to removing the blocks and allowing your organic intelligence to speak.
As we find ourselves on the brink of global collapse, with crises mounting on every front, I believe now more than ever we need to find our way back home to ourselves and in the diverse and interdependent web of creation. If it feels right to you, I hope you’ll join me in this endeavor.
A deep bow of gratitude to my many guides, teachers and allies of the visible and invisible realms.
I have been greatly shaped by the animist somatic work of Tada Hozumi, Dare Sohei, Larissa Kaul, the now dissolved Ritual as Justice School, and many friends and collaborators in that field; the sacred activism of the Roman Catholic WomenPriest movement; New Monasticism and interspirituality; and the earth-based cultural-spiritual traditions of Ireland and South Asia; the ancestral lands of the Coast Salish peoples, and its abundant and exquisitely powerful elemental forces: the rain, nettles, and turkey tail mushrooms, to name just a few.
It is with gratitude to each of them, all my teachers and guides, and all of the stewards of the wisdom traditions worldwide, known and unknown, and to this sweet earth that I make this attempt to respectfully hold, share from, and evolve my small piece of the puzzle. May it be one small offering of restoring/returning my Christian lineage back to the composting earth.
Now it's your turn.
Right now in these turbulent times the world needs you navigating from that deeply rooted place. It is my intention that this free experience will help you rediscover and nurture the divine wisdom that comes from your innate connection to all things, so that you can be one more "island of sanity" in a rapidly disintegrating world.
Sign me up!