Embracing Your Inner Home

Dr. Katherine Newburgh explores the power of enlightenment

By Wendy Swat Snyder  »  Photos by Emily Seabold

On a mission of self-discovery, Dr. Katherine Newburgh plots a course through France and Scotland searching for the key to an untethered existence, free of societal expectations. The trek across ancient lands takes her to a place in the heart for the answers she’s seeking. Her latest book, Finding Home: A Mystical Memoir, shares this personal journey, revealing how, through her travels, she found a pathway to the essence of true self. When we sat down for a chat, she shared her unique take on Western culture and Eastern cures, therapies and healing.

You have a Ph.D. in education. You’re a sought-after leadership consultant and research professional. Describe the shift that sent you on your present esoteric path. 

The books I’m writing are my soul calling. I had been doing a lot of questioning, and there was this moment when I had a spiritual awakening. It was December 2018. I essentially woke up a different person. I felt like I couldn’t relate to the person I’d been. It was very disruptive. At that time, I was working in a school district in Vail, Colorado, I had one of those jobs your mom loves—security, a retirement plan—living that life that a lot of people would be satisfied with. But I wasn’t completely satisfied. I never seemed to tap into what was truly nourishing to what I’d call my soul’s purpose—that something only I could do. But I didn’t understand what I needed to be satisfied. What ended up happening was I received a really powerful embodied experience where, suddenly, all the ambitions I had, the lifestyle I had, the addictions I had, no longer had any appeal for me. I stopped drinking, I went inward for a long time. It actually took about five years.

You write about shamanic healing, how it transformed your journey.

I was on a very inward journey, trying to make sense of what was happening to me, and that’s when I discovered shamanic healing. My research on teacher burnout prepared me for some of these questions. I realized there’s so much more happening at so many levels—a deep existential questioning that couldn’t be addressed by the traditional healing modalities of the Western world.

A lot of what we do, therapy for example, is we manage the symptoms. I define true healing as an irreversible transformation where the symptoms never come back.

Essentially, my spiritual awakening moved my focus of consciousness from my head to my heart. I naturally began seeking out those healing modalities that worked with those heart centered ways. There’s a lot of research that the collective of humanity is moving into a heart centered way of being—which I first wrote about in The New Eden: Paradise Retold. 

Your second book, Finding Home: A Mystical Memoir, documents your dual journeys—inward
and outward.

I traveled to specific sites in France and Scotland, looking for answers, and that led me to lots of different healers, and the modalities of Kabbalistic Dream Work, reversing, and heart imagery. When you become open and transparent the miracles come floating in—grace doesn’t have a limit—helping your life to flow and change, to live beyond the expectations of others. To return to the time before the fall, reversing the trauma, communing with earth to create a state of unconditional belonging, knowing that you are worthy.

The holiday season can be magical, but not for everyone. Your thoughts on dealing with that dynamic?

There’s this pressure to belong somewhere, to someone, to something. The secret to really enjoying the holiday season is rooted in having a deep sense of self-worth—you have to love yourself first. And having discernment. You must be able to say, is this life-giving to me? In the face of all that’s going on, it takes a lot of courage to be joyful right now.

Your message—if you were going to say one thing to someone—what would be it? 

The whole point of everything I do is to orient you to living your most natural life and I call for different practices to make that possible, to bring it down to something practical, actionable. 

I believe there’s nothing that can’t be restored, on a personal level as well as a collective global level. The way to that restoration is through the voice of the heart—and trusting that.

There’s nothing that can’t be redeemed—the heart knows how to do it.