KATIE
CAVALLO
Katie began traveling to the Holy Land twenty years ago on a pilgrimage similar to the ones she now leads. She quickly fell in love and returned every summer to live in Bethlehem in the West Bank. She lived with Palestinian Christian families, taught music to local children, spent a summer living with nuns and caring for people with special needs, and studied Arabic, the local language in Bethlehem. While she was there, she watched thousands of groups traverse through Bethlehem, passing by local Palestinians and spending only an afternoon in the West Bank. She had the unique opportunity to sit in the homes of Palestinian Christians and discuss this phenomenon with them. The message was always the same: They wished that groups would get to know them, that travelers would listen to their stories, and that pilgrims would stay in Bethlehem longer. They felt ignored and hurt by American tourists who were seeking to step on the holy stones, but not caring about the living stones. These conversations planted the seed for Katie's future pilgrimages over to the Holy Land.
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Katie studied Music and Middle Eastern Studies in college, gathering as much information as she could about the people groups living in the Holy Land, the history of the area, and the current political climate. She began her career in liturgical church music and music education, leading as an instrumentalist and vocalist and conducting school and church choirs. At first she led individuals back over to tour the Holy Land on her summer breaks, but soon she found herself leading various church groups over, eventually opening Harmony Pilgrimages.
In 2021 Katie and her husband were both diagnosed with chronic Lyme Disease after a decade of worsening symptoms. It was during this season that she understood the tremendous role Internal Family Systems (IFS) can play in our healing journey as humans, not just emotionally and spiritually, but physically as well. Daily using IFS to connect with her own system kept her grounded, centered, and calm as she traversed the challenging prolonged season of treatment, caretaking, loss, and grief.
After six years of using the IFS model with her own parts and witnessing the profound impact IFS had in her life, relationships, and healing journey, she decided it was time to become a practitioner and share this powerful psycho-spiritual model with others. With a compassionate and intuitive approach, she helps guide clients in understanding and harmonizing their inner parts, leading to profound personal growth, emotional well-being, and deep transformational healing. Her clients often express a newfound sense of inner peace, self-awareness, and resilience and she is honored to walk with them in their healing journeys.
She now brings together her skills as a liturgical musician, pilgrimage director, and IFS-informed practitioner to provide immersive trips that focus on compassion, understanding, and peace. Believing that the root cause of external conflict is internal conflict between our own parts inside of us, Katie actively leads travelers into a relationship with their own conflicted and polarized parts allows them to move into a place of compassion, beginning inward and then moving outward to loved ones, other travelers, and even those we may view as our enemies. Katie promotes self-reflection through retreat, dialogue, and internal work throughout her trips and hopes that these pilgrimages will provide a type of homecoming for her travelers, a homecoming into Self.
Katie lives in San Diego, California, with her husband of fifteen years, Patrick, and her Yorkshire Terrier dog, Finley. She continues to split her time between IFS sessions and music, allowing creativity to flow from increased Self-energy in her sessions into her musical work. In her free time she studies Arabic, conducts a community choir, sings in a cover band, takes way too many pictures of sunsets on the beach. Oh, and she's always on the hunt for good queso dip.
For more about Katie's Internal Family Systems work or to learn more about IFS, head to www.HarmonyIFSCoaching.com
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