About Karen

I have been getting women above their own lives for as long as I can remember. Long before I had any language for it, before I called it space holding or altitude or a gift. It was just the thing that happened around me. Women would start talking, and somewhere in it they would get quiet, and they would see something about their own life they had not been able to see a moment before. I did that everywhere I went, in every season, no matter what was happening in my own life. It took me an embarrassingly long time to admit that this was not a side thing. It was the thing.

Because for most of my life I was busy building. I spent thirty years in wellness, regenerative health, meditation, leadership, and food service, and I built and ran successful businesses the whole way through. I am an entrepreneur at the root, practical and direct, someone who knows how to make a real thing stand up in the world. That part of me is not separate from the rest. It is why I am no good at floating wisdom at a room from a safe distance. I want to build something that holds.

What I was slow to notice was that I had built a life the same capable way I built everything else. For everyone else. One yes at a time, until I looked up and could not quite find myself in it. And just as I was slow to lose myself, I have been slow to find my way back. There was no single morning the lights came on. It has been a long, slow returning, through years of courses, therapies, honest work on myself, and through holding space for women in front of me the whole time, each of them quietly teaching me what I was actually here to do. I am still in it. That is not a thing you finish.

I have done the work I ask of a room, the unglamorous repetitive kind. I have also walked 800km across Spain alone and sat in ten days of silence, which taught me that you cannot hear your own life until you get quiet enough and high enough to actually see it. That is what I do now, on purpose, having finally turned toward the gift instead of treating it as the thing I did on the side. I get above a life, see its whole shape, the roles and the patterns and the dropped thread, and I bring the woman up there with me so she can see it for herself. What a woman sees for herself she can never unsee.