In my search for answers, for ways to get better, I began to realize that my physical issues were not just physical. It became clear that they had roots in who I am as a person, and in how I dealt with stress or toxicity. So I began to look for modalities that would help me understand more about what had shaped me and how I could possibly heal.
I tried a lot of different things, but the day I found the Rosen Method was the day my stuckness began to shift. It is the foundation for everything that I do, and for how I live my life. It is deceptively simple and deeply profoundly life changing.
The core concept behind Rosen is that when we resist our feelings and emotions because they hurt or are scary or dangerous, we build protections around us that are useful when we are young, but become limiting when we are adults. They have become habits that we are not even aware of. We are continually re-enforcing our armor and that action uses up much of our energy for living and blocks us from knowing who we really are.
My name is Katarina Wittich, but I have been known as Kato since I was a child. I am a certified Rosen Practitioner, Yuen Practitioner, Family Constellations facilitator and Conscious Dance facilitator.
My journey toward helping others learn how to nurture themselves into wholeness began with my own fragmentation, starting with my struggle to find health. I grew up poor, in NYC, without proper medical care and from the age of two I broke bones frequently and had numerous surgeries and infections. I became stronger as I grew older, but then in my thirties I became quite ill again and had to step out of my career in the film industry.
When a Rosen practitioner approaches that armor with touch and words and resonant connection, we begin to bring it into consciousness, to feel ourselves holding on, and then it becomes possible to access what is under the armor. Often we have forgotten why we even needed the armor in the first place.
Once we become conscious of where we are holding back, in the safe container provided by the Rosen practitioner, then often whatever we are trying to avoid feeling can come up and be completely felt. And once that happens, then the protection is no longer necessary, because our unconscious self no longer believes it is a survival necessity to keep ourselves from feeling ourselves fully.
A Rosen practitioner is a midwife for the emerging self that we can be when we are no longer keeping ourselves in a state of constant resistance. And that self is always much more joyful and alive than the self who needs to hold on so tightly.
Rosen as a practice has been a huge source of joy for me. I feel honored to participate in so much unfolding, to help people do the deep detective work of finding out who they really are!
As I did my Rosen training, most of it with Marion Rosen, but also with many wonderful other senior teachers, I began to be able to handle my illness with more ease and life started to improve. However, I was still quite sick. So I started to explore various forms of alternative healing for my body. And my deeply rational scientific approach to life was challenged by multiple experiences that were concrete and felt very real, but were not explained by any existing science and therefore did not fit my belief systems.
Now I avoid interpretations and belief systems as much as I can. I trust only what I experience directly, and I am aware that my rational brain is not capable of comprehending many aspects of human existence that science has not yet been able to fully explain. As I have become a facilitator for modalities like Family Constellations, which create deep healing movements which seem impossible scientifically, I have stopped focusing on questioning why and how, and instead I find great joy in the beauty of the shifts that happen, even if we do not understand how they happen.
Both Constellations and Yuen method are ways of tapping directly into whatever it is that connects us all, that transcends time and locality, that is always accessible when you allow yourself to experience it. I call it the “field” so that I have a way to talk about it, but I do not define it because I do not know what it is. I only know that it can bring amazing insights and tremendous healing for those of us lucky enough to experience it.
These practices allow us to uncover the deep allegiances we have made with our family belief systems, the epigenetic currents running through us, and the ancestral wounds that we are unconsciously shaped by. Both modalities feel like magic, although I am certain some day science will be able to explain them. But for me it is enough to know that people can walk away from sessions with their lives opened up and new possibilities available through using these modalities.
I feel so much gratitude to have found these modalities which have changed my life, and to be able to make those sorts of shifts possible for others. Rosen has given me a groundedness in the power of touch and open ended enquiry to allow the parts of ourselves that had to be hidden to emerge and unfold. Yuen method is incorporated in to my Rosen practice, and I use it whenever there are issues that arise in a Rosen session which are directly ancestral.
We have an active nurturing Family Constellations community in Los Angeles that was gathering regularly before Covid -- and will again. Go to the link for Family Constellations to find out more about this beautiful and eye opening phenomenological group practice.
The final piece for me in my own journey of becoming stronger and more whole is conscious dance. There is nothing more joyful and more healing than gathering regularly to dance your heart open and your body into fluidity in a room full of loving community.
We didn't have enough dance on the east side of Los Angeles, so I initiated Friday Night FUNk, a conscious dance gathering that is now community run and provides a weekly online dance gathering with music that is curated to bring you in to your body in a funky grounded delightful safe experience of community joy. FNF is a donation of love by the fantastic DJs and you can dance with us for free.
Come join us by clicking on the conscious dance link.
I look forward to meeting you!
Training:
B.A. History of the Arts and Letters, graduated Cum Laude from Yale University.
M.F.A. from NYU Graduate Film and Television.
Certified Rosen Method Practitioner. Trained primarily with Marion Rosen as well as with senior teachers at the Berkeley Center, the Southwest Center and the Open Center. 20 plus years of practice.
Certified Yuen Method practitioner, studied with Dr. Kam Yuen
Certified Family Constellations facilitator from Constellations Healing Institute. Studied with Gary Stuart, Roberta Atti, Stephan Hausner, Franz Ruppert, Martha Thorsheim, Francesca Mason Boring, Vlado Ilic and others.
Other modalities include but are not limited to: EFT, Reference Point Therapy, Infant Reflex Therapy, Reset Meditation....
Life studies:
Hospice care/ Death doula for my beloved mother, sister, sisterfriend and others has taught me how to remain present and heart centered through the worst of storms.
Birthing assistant at a number of home births has helped me to develop trust in the body and its astonishing capacity to produce new life.
Director and First Assistant Director in the film industry for many years gave me a solid foundation in the practice of how to sink in through chaos and find the core stability under the noise so that communal cooperation can be woven into the power to achieve almost anything.
Writer/Screenwriter has been my greatest teacher in getting lost and listening to the story and characters as they emerge, a practice that is shared in Constellations.
