Soulwave Institute, Inc

Sarah Alexander: Katie, darling, before I ask you about the new trainings and the changes in your work, could you explain again how the whole motherwave/soulwave phenomenon started?

Katie: Well, going back to the beginning: I was (still am) the daughter of British physicists who were drafted during World War II to help work on the bomb, to stop Hitler. After Hiroshima, my mom and dad were appalled at the huge destructive powers they had helped unleash, and started campaigning against nuclear weapons. The English anti-nuclear movement started in our living room.

Katie: Well, who knew, at the time! There were posters of mushroom clouds and skulls on the walls, and the general atmosphere was a pessimistic certainty of impending doom.

Sarah: That’s pretty funny considering that you now teach “radical optimism!”

Katie: Well, exactly, and I now teach a positive, liberating process called the “Meltdown,” which sounds a bit nuclear too, as someone pointed out recently.

Katie: The “Reader’s Digest” version is that by the time I was in college, despite being raised in the atheist faith, I lifted off into a spiritual ascent. I met an Eastern spiritual teacher and spent most of my twenties as a monk, traveling around the world on his behalf, helping spread the message about meditation. I meditated for hours a day, for about 12 years, and did service the rest of the time.

Katie: Yes, and I’m here to say that in these times, that isn’t the complete answer––at least, it wasn’t for me. When I emerged back into the world at around 30, I was a mess, emotionally and physically.

Sarah: How come?

Katie: Well, I had been going “Up, up, infinitely up!” as my then-teacher put it, jumping over my body, my feelings and emotions––and even my rational mind––to merge with a transcendent experience of divine light. It was a classic “spiritual bypass operation,” and the parts of me that had been bypassed eventually rebelled and demanded my attention.

Sarah: In what way?

Katie: Oh, the usual suspects: illness, chaotic emotions... feelings and symptoms that I couldn’t ignore. So where before I had lifted off, I now plunged into an exploration of my embodied, so-called “lower” selves. Instead of an “ascension,” I now found myself in a process of descension. And what I found by truly entering the domain of my own body and feeling self was––amazingly––as divine and infinite as the upper realms of spirit. If not more so.

Katie: I explored pretty much every system of psychological, spiritual, physical and personal growth that was out there. Like: Rebirthing and other forms of breathwork; hypnotherapy (I developed and taught my own system of Creative Hypnotherapy for many years); accessing and channeling spiritual guidance; enlightened movement systems like Alexander technique, yoga, martial arts, and Continuum; various systems of mental management like NLP and Avatar (which I taught for 5 years); wonderful New Thought and abundance teachings; various healing modalities like Reiki and Hawaiian Huna... you name it, I tried it, and if it worked, I became a certified practitioner of it.

Meanwhile I combined what I was learning in my private healing/consulting practice, which was booming; I had more clients than I could see, so I started seminars... I was quite successful until it all fell apart in 1994.

Katie: I hit a hard, opaque wall. I had a minor surgery and couldn’t recover, and lay in bed sick and broke, for nine months, too exhausted and dispirited to practice any of the stuff I knew. And of course, the 9 months were a gestation. One day, the whole universe changed for me: I melted down.

Katie: Yes. I found myself dissolving in an ocean of waves, which told me to call it “motherwave.” I was shown how everything is made of waves––my body, thoughts, emotions, breath, even my spiritual self. I later discovered chaos theory and other new science research that completely backed up my experience. It was an awakening into what I now call “dynamic intelligence.”

Katie: Yes. And more. I had experienced bliss and samadhi and enlightened “states” before, especially in my hyper-spiritual twenties, but this meltdown wasn’t a “state,” so much as a movement. I realized the truth of the idea that “movement is not what we do, it is what we are.” Physicist David Bohm says that the universe is made up of only “undivided wholeness in flowing movement,” which just about summed it up.

The waves carried me into my own source, and then back out again, so that I realized the pathway to ascending and descending, dissolving and creating realities, rather than an “awakened state” that I would then lose when I fell back to my “normal state.” The experience lasted a few days, and I downloaded a huge “packet” of information that was eventually unravelled as a practical “how to” teaching. How to teach others to experience this meltdown, and to access this spontaneous wavy ecstasy, and apply it to all areas of life. In other words, the 7-level Motherwave Trainings that have been taught for ten years.

Sarah: I’m curious about the changes in Motherwave. How come the name has changed to Soulwave and what else is going on?

Katie: Well, the motherwave experience I had in 1994 changed my life completely––at least so I thought, at the time. But it turned out there was more––much, much more...

Last year in 2004, the “shift hit the fan” for me, through my former marriage, hopes and dreams disappearing, along with other stuff. Oops! Everything changed again, even more completely, if that’s possible. It was one of those “growth opportunities” where you lose everything, go through chaos, and eventually emerge in a new place.

Katie: I’m emerging as we speak! It seemed as if the universe had cleverly conspired to close all the doors to the places where I used to get my happiness and sense of identity and safety. So, after some resistance, I had to go deep into myself again––even deeper actually––looking for a real doorway to ultimate freedom and peace. By the way, these words are easy to say, but the actual experience was more like swimming through peanut butter than some exalted awakening. The only thing I could do was surrender to something higher to get me through. And what I discovered is that there IS something higher!

Now, I know that may sound obvious: I’ve been on a spiritual path since I was 18... but as I mentioned, I’m the daughter of physicist atheists and I think deep down, despite many experiences of grace and expansive consciousness, part of me thought I was kidding, and that God or Goddess or whatever we call it was something I should believe in because it is scientifically proven to be healthier than not believing. And I always did pray, and as I said I was even a monk in my twenties, but I always made sure that I worked my butt off to make things happen, as a back-up.

Now I found myself in a place where no amount of work could change anything, so I experimented with really, really surrendering, day by day, and often breath by breath. I checked out all kinds of different paths to feel better, but I kept coming back to two things: total surrender and the same practices that had already come through me as Motherwavework––except that now the feeling of the wave was different.

Katie: It was deeper, more personal, more conscious. Before I would often have an experience of that feeling I called the motherwave, moving through me as waves of energy and breath, yet it was often more like an energy than a presence, and the most present consciousness might still be my mind, thinking, scheming, trying to figure out how to manifest what I wanted in life.

Now that I was surrendering my busy control-freak self more and more, I found a new presence making itself known within and beyond the wavy experience I had been having. It was more soulful, and real. I began to realize that it was me, the real me, my soul! And I was driving down Highway 101 one day and suddenly I heard the word “soulwave” in the same way I had heard the word “motherwave” ten years before.

Sarah: When you say “soul,” do you really mean spirit?

Katie: No, not exactly. As the experience grew and began to download its information into my brain (in the way that this tends to happen for me), I realized that my soul is like a portal to spirit, a doorway––and in fact the ONLY doorway, through which I can access the greater reality on a permanent basis. I may be able to jump over my own soul for brief experiences of cosmic consciousness, but I will always land back in a limited experience of my ego if I don’t actually do the real soulwork.

Katie: Well, of course, many people are doing their soul work. I would say that it has to do with really contacting the desire for service, so that your real service can manifest––your true soul purpose, rather than some egoic fantasy. But what I now understand as the real soul work is also this: to live 100% as your own soul, in your human body!

Katie: Well, I know I have had many entities living in my body alongside my soul––and I don’t even mean ghosts and all that! My body has been host to all kinds of identities and subpersonalities, and where I thought that I was embodying my higher self, it was partly a persona that had been created from a deep, deep, deep feeling of separation from my source, which I had been carrying for eons. As I’ve been through my recent dark night of the soul, a lot of that has fallen away as I’ve been contacting what really matters, what can really heal and love me, and that comes to me through my soul.

Katie: Well, that’s the other thing: I realized that the soul is a wave. What happened for me was that the waves of energy I had been surfing for years through the motherwave changed frequency. It was as though they became more intense and real, like a close encounter with my source, and I began to realize that I was accessing the wave that is my soul, which is an expression of the soul of the universe. I can hear myself sounding rather woo-woo as I say all this, but I’m talking about something rather miraculously ordinary and real that anyone can experience.

Katie: Yes, exactly! They contain much of the skeleton and “Best of” my former Motherwave Trainings, because I have found that the same structure is still what works best in most cases. But there is a new radical, intense presence that the work is designed to awaken, a soulful presence.

Katie: I feel excited, inspired, and in a way quite detached. The work is pouring through me at 4 am almost every day, just as the original motherwave trainings did. So I’m just going with it, and offering it to anyone who feels drawn. I have lost my need to convince or enroll anyone, although I’m still an enthusiastic type.
We’ll see how it all unfolds!