“The goddesses put themselves between my stimulus and my response.”

Kat came to this work at the end of a year she describes as “filled with academic pursuit — gathering and becoming and learning.” A 200-hour teacher training, a meditation teacher training, “a metric ton” of others. What she didn’t have was a practice of her own. “I tried it on my own, but I wasn’t being successful in setting up something I could stick with.”

And life was about to ask more of her: a wedding, a career change, making a home in Bali, and — in her words — “coming to terms with things I was recovering from emotionally. I knew that my ways, my tendencies, my habits weren’t going to cut it.”

She entered the year-long Mahavidya journey — roughly two months with each goddess, beginning with Bhuvaneshvari, the goddess of space. Within weeks she had designed herself a ten-day personal retreat around that single concept, examining her relationships, finances, and history through it.

Each goddess after that became a different lens, matched in conversation to what her life was presenting at the time. What surprised her most was the register of the work: “People think, ooh, fearsome. But Kali, out of all of them, seemed to be the most gentle.” The practice itself is simple and daily — yantra, mantra, meditation — portable enough that it comes with her anywhere.

The change she names first is structural: the gap between stimulus and response. “The Mahavidyas have put themselves in the middle of my stimulus and my response. There’s a slowness, a grace, a compassion for myself and for others that wasn’t there before.”

Fear didn’t disappear — it became workable: “I see it coming, I let myself feel it, and I know what to do with it.” Her relationships have “completely enriched”; her creative output is measurable — a book in progress, new Yoga Nidra scripts written and delivered.

Two years in, she isn’t finishing. “I plan on going around again — probably for the rest of my life, honestly. There will always be levels to it.”

And she is clear about who she is in this tradition — and why that matters:

“Let me be very transparent about something. I’m Black, I’m a woman, I’m from the United States. This is not a tradition or a body of work that is usually associated with someone like me. This is something I had to come to Bali to find out about — and that is a damn shame. There is so much gold to be mined in doing a practice like this.”

Asked who this is for: “Someone who’s working on themselves — maybe there’s some therapy, some other modalities — and they’re looking for a daily practice. It’s amazing for feminine empowerment, whether you’re a man or a woman. And it works in relationships.”