On this shorter episode of The Curious Empath, Catherine welcomes healer, poet, artist, ritualist and mother Katia Wallace. Katia has more than ten years of experience reading tarot and lives in the UK, though she's originally from France.

Katia shares how her Italian grandmother's tarot reading and her other grandmother's visits to healers shaped her path. She also describes how becoming a mother led her into womb healing and ancestral healing. She explains why she tells clients she isn't a fortune teller and walks through her nine-card pyramid spread. She also explains how flower therapy (communicating with the spirit of plants) differs from flower essences.

In this episode:

• Katia's family roots in tarot and energy healing
• Womb healing and ancestral healing after her daughter's birth
• Tarot as a mirror: what's leaving, what's ongoing, what's coming in
• The nine-card pyramid spread
• Destiny as co-creation rather than fate
• Flower therapy vs. flower essences, and noticing the plants that keep showing up for you

Resources mentioned

• The Rebel Heart Tarot by Alice Grist
• Linda Howe (books on the Akashic Records)
• Juliet Bryant (Juliet's Kitchen, ships to the US)

My favorite Tarot & Oracle Decks (aff links)

• The Good Karma Tarot
• The Neoteric Tarot
• The Wild & Sacred Feminine Oracle Deck
• The Medicine Woman Oracle Deck

Connect with Katia - Website - Instagram

Connect with Catherine - ⁠Website⁠⁠ - ⁠⁠Substack - Sacred Wild

In this episode, Catherine sits down with Teda Kokoneshi, a licensed mental health counselor and self-published memoirist, to trace her winding path from immigrating to the United States at 18 through a green card lottery, to studying continental philosophy in Boston, chasing a publishing career in New York City, and ultimately finding her calling in clinical mental health counseling. Teda opens up about the disorientation of adapting to a radically different culture, the burnout that brought her back to Florida, and how discovering Carl Jung's analytical psychology became a turning point in understanding her own mind. She walks through how she uses active imagination, dreamwork, and art therapy with clients, and shares why she believes true social justice work has to be rooted in personal healing. Teda also talks about her memoir, Living to Tell the Story: A Memoir and a Map of Reconstruction After the Dark Night of the Soul, and the writing projects — poetry, short stories, essays — she has percolating next.

Connect with Teda - Website - Instagram - Substack

Connect with Catherine - ⁠Website⁠⁠ - ⁠⁠Substack

Prentiss Hemphill Podcast

"You can't change your voice without your life coming along for the ride." — Barbara McAfee

What if your voice already knows what part of you needs attention — you just have to make the sound and listen? In this episode of The Curious Empath, I sit down with Barbara McAfee: singer, songwriter, voice teacher, author of two books on voice work, and the leader of a "comfort choir" of volunteers who sing for people who are dying, sick, or grieving.

We start at the threshold — literally. Barbara talks about the retreats she leads on music, death, and dying, how she stumbled into death doula work at her father's bedside at 31, and why she believes grief and joy have always lived in the same room. We talk about a grief ritual she helped hold for hundreds of people at a singing camp in Iowa, and the collective grief so many of us are carrying right now.

From there we go into Barbara's Five Elements Framework — a way of understanding the voice through Earth, Fire, Water, Metal, and Air, each with its own archetype, gift, and shadow side. We talk about the parts of our voices that go "offline" under trauma, culture, and gender norms; how reclaiming a silenced part of your voice is really a form of soul retrieval; and how Barbara can often hear someone's deepest gift — calm under pressure, seeing the future, cutting insight — just by the way they talk.

This is a conversation about sound, grief, gender, gifts, and what it means to let your whole voice — and your whole self — come home.

Connect with Barbara - Website - Ted Talks - Instagram - Patreon - "Oh For Crying Out Loud" Song

Connect with Catherine - ⁠Website⁠⁠ - ⁠⁠Substack - Soul Retrieval

I'm Catherine — counselor, mystic, and neurodiverse adventurer living on the Emerald Coast of Florida. I help people define their neurodiversity, trust themselves, and live fully connected to Self and Source. I’d love to hear from you and walk alongside you on your journey.

With a full heart,

Catherine