What Excites Us!
Episode 32 :Yin Yoga for Sexual Health with Katherine Zitterbart
Katherine Zitterbart is my guest for this conversation. We discuss her latest project and offering A Felt Sense of YES: Yin Yoga for Sexual Health, beginning with what yin is, some Taoist principles, what dantian are, how she works with these elements and so much more.
Katherine's life's work is to hold supportive and inclusive space for neurodiverse and LGBTQIA+ individuals living with chronic pain and illness, through somatics and sound in a sex-positive framework.
You can learn more about her at kayteezee.com TikTok as @thekayteezee
Instagram @katherinezitterbart https://twitter.com/kayteezee
http://www.youtube.com/c/KatherineZitterbart
Transcript:
Ep 32 - Yin Yoga with Katie Z
[00:00:00] Gwyn: Hello and welcome to What Excites Us, the podcast that discusses sex and sexuality through a lens of acceptance and healing. I'm Gwyn Isaacs, a certified sex coach and educator who believes that we all have the right to feel good in our bodies, and that by taking steps towards that, we increase our capacity for joy, which in turn helps other folks believe they can too. And slowly but surely, we can all feel better as a collective.
My guest today is Katherine Zitterbart also known as Kayteezee. Katherine's life work is to hold supportive and inclusive space for neurodiverse and LGBTQIA plus individuals living with chronic pain and illness through somatics and sound in a sex positive framework. Having recently come out of breast cancer with a mastectomy, she has an even deeper understanding of what this work can do than she had before when she had just, said in quotes, chronic pain. We talk about the vibration of sound, Taoism, her approach to working with folks in person in Pittsburgh and at a distance and more.
If you enjoy this highly edited chat of two folks with ADHD, I invite you to visit the show's Patreon. At patreon.com/what excites us, or you can find the link at whatexcitesus.com because our raw conversation is so fun. Normally, these raw conversations are members only, but I'm gonna release this one to anyone who wants to listen because it has more value than I could pack into this episode and is entirely worth it. Hi Katie. Welcome to What Excites Us.
[00:02:00] Katie: Hi I'm always happy to have conversations about pleasure, so, if I have time in my calendar, it's almost always a yes. Plus I've been wanting to talk to you cuz our paths, keep doing this on the onlines. I feel a resonance there. So this'll just be nice for that as well.
[00:02:18] Gwyn: Yay. Speaking of resonance I know this isn't exactly where we were talking about, but you've been doing sound healing, bathing
[00:02:28] Katie: weirdness.
[00:02:29] Gwyn: weirdness
[00:02:30] Katie: Yeah, but it is weird. I have been I'm not sure I would qualify these as baths. These are like, these are sincere, like energetic interventions meant to liberate stress from the body. So, I'm a classically trained musician. From the time I was three, I was playing the piano, singing, dancing, ballet. My father was a professor at Carnegie Mellon in the music department. I just had so much access and then I put it all at like 14 . I was like fuck these people, puberty. And so, I've been in involved in other arts, and then the primary intent I held during my treatment for breast cancer that I got to do right at the beginning of the pandemic was that I would come out of it with some synthesis of whatever the former caterpillar was. After the, like, I, I, I went into my treatment as though I was a spiritual initiate and not a warrior. So what I'm channeling and holding and how I'm working with the sound is that is much more like, that is fully esoteric, totally in the woo. I mean, I can, you know, measure the hertz and frequencies and know that I'm in a moment. But yeah, so I'm, I'm really doing that and I'm helping people who have experienced really significant trauma and are deconstructing religious trauma and working through early childhood sexual abuse. And I am not the trauma specialist. I appear to be very useful in assisting with the bottom up factor, with the embodiment piece, because I'm able to use pressure and vibration and tone for folks, because trauma is a form of neurodivergence. Your brain is wired differently, especially with complex trauma. So yeah, so that's been really fun and fascinating and, and interesting and, because you know why, this whole narrative about warriors and life-threatening diagnoses means only there, it's like Highlander. There can be only one. And the cancer is a death process. That's literally how it operates. Treatment for cancer is also a death process. That's literally how it operates. And so I was like, I'm Inanna I'm going into the underworld. I worked on my mother wound the whole time. There's so many ways to and here we, we maybe shift back into pleasure, but there's so many ways to use different arousal states to assist with you know, with the trauma. Folks like to call expanding the window of tolerance or just have in general, more space, more capacity. And so, yeah. The two ways out were through or off.
[00:05:43] Gwyn: The image of Innana going into the underworld, shedding, you know, first her jewelry and then her skin by the time that she comes through it, that's such a powerful, so I studied Innana, so that's a very powerful,
[00:05:55] Katie: but yeah, that, that kind of transformation and to my mind, that's very much what radiation and chemotherapy are. And then you're also just kind of like stripped. It's such liminal space to receive a life-threatening diagnosis. And to know that any decision is gonna result in discomfort of some kind. And then the whole distinction between the quality of an experience and the measurement of the experience and western medicine is so much about the measure. And that is not what complex realities even a bone break, but certainly something like childbirth or cancer or even like chronic illness, chronic pain, it's just not set up to support quality. And so there's a factor of dehumanization and objectification that even despite people's best efforts was really difficult not to experience.
[00:06:59] Gwyn: Yeah. And we're trained to just blindly trust the doctors, and not feel as though we have any autonomy once the gown goes on. They don't see the humanity they see the problem
[00:07:11] Katie: Yeah. It's how medicine is set up. Western medicine is set up like a factory.
[00:07:16] Gwyn: Did this set you down the path towards the embodiment work that you're doing or were you doing that beforehand?
[00:07:22] Katie: I've been working with bodies and breath for more than 30 years. Yeah. So I, I had like a dual path of after grad school tech, actually I was really early at Yahoo. And then information design, enterprise application integration, and then y2k. And then I kind of pivoted to sadly Bikram Yoga because he's a rapist. The form is great, but he's not. And then, so that was about 23 years ago, I guess. And all through that now I've been in and out of tech and startup environments. Mostly with compliance and helping executives make sure that they're not gonna get popped by the feds. Weird word to use, but okay. That's what they use. And then BDSM education and activism and the embodiment. And so it's actually the process of my parents dying has been just so, like I would say like the last seven years I've been in this kind of like in and out of death processes and now I'm in a more synthesized position when I'm working as far as not making so many distinctions. But yeah, it's all work I've been doing for many, many years.
[00:08:41] Gwyn: It sort of all came together during these past few years for you in a really distinctive way that I don't think anybody would have at all ever predicted or seen.
[00:08:53] Katie: There were two options, literally, life or death. Because had I gone to war, I would've been having to win, first of all, bad. Going into a transformative process. All I know is it's gonna be different, better. Right? And we can throw menopause in there. You know, I'm 53, so we have like midlife stuff, global pandemic, like all this. I'm not thrilled with the context of all of this, but it is what it is as they say.
[00:09:25] Gwyn: Right, and here we are. And now you're using all of this to help other folks find their pleasure and embodiment and tell us about that.
[00:09:36] Katie: The framework is Yin Yoga for Sexual Health which is just the best phrasing I can come up with right now. I, And so, what I'm doing is with embodiment work, I'm combining sound healing with tantric practices from China that predate acupuncture that I learned from a living master with yoga practice, breath work, pranayama. I'm in two lineages there. I'm in the Kushmacharey lineage and the Gosh lineage from India. With all of my special interests in particularly polyvagal theory and the current research in fascia, and how connective tissue is being perceived in certain parts of the science community as a sense organ. And as a kinkster as a person who's neuro divergent and there's so much crossover with hypermobility and neuro divergency. And I just see a lot of it in my practice. So the fascia is really important to me to understand. And then the fourth component is just like, let's fucking tear it down.
[00:10:44] Gwyn: Is that the Gen Xer in you?
[00:10:47] Katie: So, I try not to be like, too, like in people's faces, but I assume people need accommodations. I do not assume anybody's pronouns or gender. I queer everything, even the tantra, and the Taoist system is fantastic for this. Because you're able to make a distinction between identity and biology in a way that isn't just translate everything to the way it fits you. Like you can really engage with the material on these practices in a way that's fully in alignment with identity, without having to do a trick I'm not sure that the traditional Taoist Masters would approve, but that's okay because Taoism is like, it's an idea. It's not really codified in a lot of ways.
[00:11:38] Gwyn: I don't know a whole lot about Taoism. I've read the Tao of Pooh that's sort of my extent. I wanna ask is, is the polarity, the binary, which is I think, an illusion in reality? So is that something that comes up in Taoism?
[00:11:51] Katie: it does. And you know, it's something that gets in my opinion, bastardized by Western facilitators. So Tao is a non-binary system. It's non-dual and it very frequently gets reduced to yin and yang or yin and yang. And then those become lists. This is yin. This is yang because yin and yang describe something, they don't define it. So this is also my perspective on power exchange. The way of Ds. But so where and when something is, determines whether or not it's masculine, feminine, dominant, submissive or whatever. And I like using the example of temperature. Then I'm in Fahrenheit, it was 70 degrees in Pittsburgh yesterday. That is very yang in January. That is very hot for January. 70 degrees in August is, it's pretty normal. It's kind of like middle of the road, so, the 70 degrees isn't inherently yin or yang. And so something that's always been fascinating to me is when people learn some of these concepts of, oh, polarity, oh, yin yang, like there's this then also assumption that you're going to have it be this way, which puts them in opposition. And a non-dual system says that things are in relation, which is also the function of connective tissue in the body. [00:13:23] Gwyn: Interesting. Tell me more about the fascia studies and how we're learning about what fascia holds.
[00:13:29] Katie: Oh my gosh. I just, I'm going by memory. So if I make, if I share a memory of something, I think I know, and it's not fully accurate, it is because I'm going by memory. I feel like I wanna really qualify that.
[00:13:44] Gwyn: Disclaimers are good.
[00:13:45] Katie: So you know, generally you would say that fascia is all the connective tissue that encapsulates like a muscle it innervates everything. So every cell, every tissue, every muscle, every organ, it is everywhere. It is mostly made of space. It acts as shock absorbers. And there are several major pathways of huge, big, giant fat pieces of fascia throughout the body that can be impacted and disrupted with injury and illness, surgeries and whatnot. And so there's a lot of looking at fascia and pain and fascia and feelings. And then , you get like lymph and cerebral spinal fluid in there too. But, I've spent less time with those materials than I have with the fascia and the vagus nerve.
[00:14:38] Gwyn: And tell us more about the vagus nerve.
[00:14:40] Katie: Vagus nerve often called the wondering nerve. So it's the, what is six or seventh cranial nerve. And it goes throughout your major organs and then it has more dendrites returning to the brain than it does leaving. So I hear people referring to it as your gut feeling. And vagal tone has a pretty significant and direct impact on the functions of your body that you don't ask it to do called autonomic functions or parasympathetic functions. And so if you've heard of the fight, flight, freeze, appease cycle of stress and trauma, that is all physically manifested in this theory. It's physically manifested through the vagus nerve. And it is a theory, polyvagal theory. But vagal tone, regardless of whether or not a person subscribes to polyvagal theory, vagal tone impacts all of that. But it also impacts emotional regulation. So the tantric practices that I teach, they center the vital organs where your vagus nerve goes through . You begin the tantra with regulating emotions. One of the functions of the vagus nerve is to let us know that we're like hungry or have to pee. That's called interoception. Another is nociception, which has to do with how we perceive pain. Proprioception, how we understand where we are in space. And the more dysregulated or out of balance a nervous system, the more difficult it is to achieve homeostasis in those different "shins", right? So doing anything to support the vagus nerve can be beneficial in those ways. The popularity of the Wim Hoff method, and you see folks doing all the cold dip stuff, that is assisting the vagus nerve. And it's also, you know, related to sexual health and the, just the sexual response cycle. Particularly stress and pain, which a lot of people experience around sex and intimacy.
[00:16:54] Gwyn: Yeah. So how what does coming to you for help with this look like?
[00:16:59] Katie: Online, it looks like we have a conversation about, what is up? A lot of my online work right now is assisting folks who are confronting gender and like new disability, like long covid. And just chatting, do a little chat. And then for the embodiment and the emotional regulation, I can facilitate from a distance standing, sitting on the floor, lying down. And I'm also able to give opinions. I'm not a therapist, so like, somebody who was referred to me and she's like, I've just remembered my father assaulting me as an infant. I was like, let me refer you to somebody. So now we're having the embodiment conversation. And then I do, I'm starting to do more for clinicians where folks are calling to have conversations like trauma specialists especially who don't understand how BDSM might not be continuing to encode trauma responses. And, to go back to the polyvagal theory and the vagus nerve, my theory is it's because of what one researcher calls the social engagement factor where we have social engagement, like we recognize each other as safe and secure and it's play. And I'm like, yes, this is why BDSM would not be traumatic because it's engaged socially, even if you're challenging stress and pain and sensation and, duration or whatever. I just lost the train of your question. I'm sorry.
[00:18:40] Gwyn: The question was, what does it look like to come and work with you?
[00:18:44] Katie: It's, it's, yeah, it's online instruction on conversations. The tantric practices are fantastic especially for folks with chronic pain and illness, so that like, you don't have to leave your h you don't even have to leave your bed. I was facilitating from bed a couple weeks ago because I had a covid infection and then a sinus infection, and then my hip went out and I was like, I'm not getting out of bed. So we're just gonna do it on the bed today, on not under the covers. That's a different class. . Yeah. I don't have some like coaching program or formula I'm not that way. I'm, I'm very much about creating the custom whatever it is that a person needs. And then using all the stuff that I know from somatics and embodiment and, sound and sex BDSM and power exchange. So I guess I'm like a, a center expert and your kinky, best friend. And I do not have any answers. So my job is to create and hold space in a way that's makes it safer, cuz it's never fully safe, safer for my students and clients to explore, discover, and be. Like, I'm support. I am not the reason, I'm not the purpose. [00:20:08] Gwyn: So, when you say tantra which is another buzzword that is taken extremely out of context. Tell us what you mean.
[00:20:17] Katie: I know, first of all, I will say I do not capitalize yin or yoga or tantra. I do teach capital Y yoga, but I'm using these like Xerox and Kleenex, not the actual Xerox. So tantra as I understand it, tantra is a type of text, it's a format of text, like a sutra but also tantric yoga in the Vedic framework has to do with connection. And tantra in the Taoist framework also has to do with connection. So when I say tantra, what I'm talking about is connection and transcendence, but not transcendence through ascension. Transcendence through depth. So yeah to transcend the, you know, like the waves at the top of the ocean and be able to really kind of sit in depth and sitting in depth creates space, breath, stability, groundedness. And for a lot of us, especially certain neuro spicy, you know, neurotypes we need that. We need that much more than the ascension.
[00:21:37] Gwyn: And it's not something that our culture prioritizes or really even allows space for to just sit.
[00:21:46] Katie: It's radical. The work I do is radical. It is, it's been so so yin yoga most often in the US is you get on the floor, go into a stress position, hold it for a period of time. It's wonderful. I love it. I'm there for it. But it's not yin, right? Because yin describes something. So for the framework of yin yoga, for sexual health, I'm expanding yin to mean yin within the, like as a Taoist concept and yin moves. There's a whole set of Tai Chi practices called Tao yin that move. You know it's a yin leaning thing to slow down your movement, to be more introspective, to describe rather than measure. And these kinds of skillfulness that one can cultivate with this mindset, this approach to embodiment makes you a better communicator of your own experience so that when you do come into a moment with somebody else, you have language. So to be also encouraging this kind of depth, this kind of presence, this kind of certainty in self disrupts the bypassing that can occur with 'I'm so high' vibe, , like, "that's beneath me or that's not spiritual." It, I sometimes use the metaphor of the mud in the lotus. You know, that a lotus flower only grows in mud. I'm about the mud. And a lot of people in my space are about the flower. I'm about the mud. Not shadow, not something being blocked that we don't know. I'm about like the darkness, right? Inanna! Yeah. So the whole cancer thing really like in me solidified it. It's difficult for me to verbalize, but it is very much where I'm coming from and it's so helpful for people who feel gaslit and powerless and wrong. And it it's not great for everybody, but to my knowledge, I haven't harmed anyone in 20 years. But who knows? I may have and they didn't tell me. I'm pretty conservative when it comes to how I'm like getting in there with somebody. And I think because I have a lot of trauma history and I don't know about you, but it's so much nicer when it's just a slow melt. You know, like ice in the sun and not flame thrower to a cube. Yeah. Just like a nice slow, gentle burn
[00:24:27] Gwyn: Giving the person the time to be able to integrate what is happening for them in their bodies instead of it being like, boom.
[00:24:35] Katie: Yeah. And you know I'm encouraging people towards subtleties that most of us never are even informed you could experience. So like two nights ago, I taught a public class and, you know, my, rules are always like, you have to breathe. You're in charge. So like if we're, if I say we're here for five minutes and you're like, fuck that shit, I don't say that in that context. But if, if the answer is no, then don't do it. And it is fascinating how people in, because you go to the embodiment space, yoga space, you know, whatever, to receive guidance in like how to get better. But we're okay, first of all, we're not doctors. We're not physical therapists that is so outside of the scope of practice, but also I don't know what's going on with people. I'm not in their body and like forcing or obligating somebody to stay still, if they have chronic pain, if they have neurological stuff, if they're sensory processing stuff. If they're just like not thinking, why, why would I then come in and say, no, no, no, no, we're gonna make this difficult for you. This yin, this relaxing, this softening. And that softness and opening, that's where the room for pleasure starts to show up. You kind of need space for it.
[00:26:00] Gwyn: And I bet a lot of folks have never had that type of permission before.
[00:26:06] Katie: It seems not to be the case. So like, and when I talk about arousal, also, I'm as mindful as I can be to, to qualify it. Like we're not just talking about orgasms. It's also, and so arousal energy, orgasm energy in the framework that I'm in is seen as wholesome and necessary it's sex positive. This is like a fully sex positive approach. But it also says that arousal, like back to the emotions and the vagus nerve, arousal is anger, it's happiness, it's fear, it's joy, it's forgiving, it's resisting. And Tao puts this in the organ. So you become skillful at alchemizing your own feelings. Pain is arousal. Chronic pain puts us in a constant state of something. Everything that is going on in the environment, but also playing outside, going to a museum, BDSM that's not intercourse, art, games, collage, like all of that. And so one therapist was like you know, how would you make the distinction? And I'm like, it's all arousal. And am I going to offer it for sex? Am I gonna offer it for something else? But it's, arising from that same place. And, and Tao first wants to temper it, first wants to get the waters calm and smooth. And then you start doing the up and downness of the Kundalini rising. But it's very, it's tempered in a really lovely way.
[00:27:49] Gwyn: Yeah Do you enjoy what you're hearing? Would it warm your heart to help support this work? It would certainly warm mine if you did. There are a couple of easy ways you can do that on the podcasts website. WhatExcitesUs.com, you can click to buy me a coffee or you can opt for a recurring contribution by clicking on the Patreon button if you choose Patreon it also comes with perks for you starting at just $3 a month. You can listen to all the episodes ad free and early. When I get them done early. You also get all sorts of random bonus bits going all the way up to private chats with me. So please come visit me at whatexcitesus.com oh, and you can talk back to me there too in catch episodes you might have missed. Let's make this a two-way conversation at whatexcitesus.com. Thanks.
[00:28:55] Katie: So let's try the smile. So the first tantric practice is called the Healing Smile. And you can close your eyes or open them. I'm gonna, my eyes just close. And so just take a couple breaths in through your nose and out of your mouth. If your eyes are open, see if you can just rest them gently on something. And after you take a few breaths here, rest the tip of your tongue on that ridge behind your upper teeth. Try to keep your jaw soft and relaxed and bring a gentle smile to your lips, and let's send it to the heart. So if you bring your hands over your heart, your actual beating muscle, smile towards your heart, your literal muscle and the emotions that live in the heart are joyful, love and hate the sound that balances it is ha h a a a a. So the way we would do this with this attitude of this inner smile is to breathe in joyful love and let go of hatred with the sound. Ha. Two more. Breathe in. I'm letting go of hatred. And one more joyful laugh and hatred. We can let that soften come to a regular breath. When you're ready, open your eyes. That's the work.
[00:31:11] Gwyn: Lovely.
[00:31:12] Katie: Nice, isn't it? it
[00:31:13] Gwyn: Yeah,
[00:31:15] Katie: You can see where the doing and the describing are vastly different experiences. How are you feeling right now?
[00:31:21] Gwyn: Delightful.
[00:31:23] Katie: Yeah?
[00:31:24] Gwyn: Yeah,
[00:31:25] Katie: The other nice thing I like about it is no feeling is seen as morally superior to another. And yin and yang are not seen in terms of right, wrong, heaven, hell, mine, yours. There is none of that. So anger comes to the liver and it is balanced with forgiveness and the sound is SHH. And you might say that anger shows up when something needs to change. But if we're enraged, we can't really affect change. But forgiveness for us, recovering people pleasers, we can be too forgiving. Even though you might say that forgiveness is an affirming positive emotion. So this, just puts it all into the neutral space and these first exercises with smiling and just practice the breathing, get us on a map, one way to map the body. And because it is liver, kidney, spleen, and not Shiva, Buddha, white light, it can be more accessible for folks who have a difficult time like understanding or tuning in. And, it's not because people don't possess the ability, it's because they're not taught. We're literally taught to ignore our bodies.
[00:32:52] Gwyn: Yes.
[00:32:53] Katie: So if I'm working with somebody at a distance, we might do the smile and the sounds and there's a circuit of energy called the microcosmic orbit where you start to pay attention to inner pathways. Some people feel things right away, some people never do, and that's all good. There are also paths for solo practice, for partnered practice. And I will tell you, these breaths in particular got me through chemo. And the working slowly in this yin way, particularly with connective tissue, has helped me resolve a lot of the pain that I'm still carrying from my mastectomy. So it can be therapeutic as well.
[00:33:42] Gwyn: Yeah. The word that's coming to mind is balance.
[00:33:46] Katie: It's about balance. It's about homeostasis. Oh, can I tell you about balanced masculinity and femininity in this framework?
[00:33:53] Gwyn: Yes please..
[00:33:54] Katie: Cuz you know the whole story about toxic masculinity and then toxic femininity. So chakras where you have the rainbow going up, the center of the body, the energy centers in this are different. They're called dantian and they're like open vessels. They're cauldrons cuz you do inner alchemy in them. And so there are three main ones. The head, the heart, and the belly. Belly, earth, heart people, head, cosmos. I mean it's very similar. And so shen, or cosmic life force energy is seen as yang. And yang out of balance is that kind of domineering, restrictive forceful leadership. Which is completely against the philosophy of Tao. Like half the Tao Te Ching is dedicated to governance, to leadership. And nowhere does it say to control. So in balance, balance masculinity is just consciousness. It's still open consciousness. Every flipping form that has made its way west. Almost all of them, and especially the ones that have been studied are emptying practices. They're yang balancing. Jon Kabat-Zinn and what he's doing with mindfulness-based stress reduction, every mindful, mindful, mindful, mindful, mindful, all of that is to create this kind of awareness. And so that is balanced masculinity. But if you're feminine in nature, that's not gonna help. If you have trauma, then that's not gonna help. But as much as balanced femininity, which is much more fluid and flowing and in flow, but not storming, right? The balanced feminine is able to create and procreate and make and transform without, you know, going all Kali wrath on folks. But the, really important thing is that the heart, the heart is the inflection point. And so they come together through the heart center, which is where chi, which is prana, life force energy, you know, this is where this exists and it's through here that we're able to create culture and context with each other from a place of compassion and kindness and freedom and liberation and not a lot of the shit that we're seeing these days. The chakras are vortices, they're so active, they're, they're spinning and spiraling. And so balancing a chakra has to do with like turning it on that is not yin, that is yang
[00:36:38] Gwyn: oh, that is fascinating.
[00:36:40] Katie: So for yin yoga, for sexual health, we're going to use dantian as the frame.
[00:36:45] Gwyn: where does dantian come from?
[00:36:48] Katie: Tai Chi, China. Taoism. Sorry.
[00:36:51] Gwyn: No worries.
[00:36:52] Katie: Dantian operates much more like this. This is their space. This is my current favorite bowl. So within this framework and then with these, these become places to like do things in the internal landscape. So these are so active which is ironic, right, because I'm saying yin yoga, you like literally can flip the water and fire elements in the body, create steam in the lower dantian in the horror and steam your organs internally. There are these practices are like,
[00:37:29] Gwyn: Wow.
[00:37:29] Katie: I'm not teaching that stuff, but bone marrow chi gung. So, to tune into through this smile through different kinds of movement to tune into your literal actual bone marrow, to support immune function. And I am very science minded. But even if, it's just placebo, it works for people. So and how are you gonna hurt yourself breathing? So, yeah. So the Dantian are this and very different than spinning vortices.
[00:38:02] Gwyn: Right. So I just wanna say that, it's a bowl. It's an absolutely gorgeous sound bowl that you are holding up.
[00:38:08] Katie: I'm so sorry. I thought this was gonna be
[00:38:10] Gwyn: No, no worries.
[00:38:11] Katie: But yeah, so and this, that's like another place where this distinction between gender and genitals makes sense because you can be yin in essence and identify and be fully cisgender. Like Madeline Albright is a yang leaning, cisgender woman. You know, heterosexual as far as we know or whatever. And so there's just so much room to explore and to expand. And it encodes this kind of, safety and security in self that a lot of us don't know. We haven't had. And I'm also able to put the bowls on people and play them. Right. So like, like on a chest and vibrate there. So frigidity, right. Or people who haven't experienced vulvular sensation I'm able to like put a heavy bowl on the low abdomen and it's broad and wide enough that it's not like a fully focused vibrator, but, you can have the experience of feeling something in your pelvis without it being like fully sexual. And and that's been really interesting to see how people respond to that. And then I'm able to to use rhythm and tone to induce people into trance. Which is where we get into the ethics. I want to say. So I have a supervisor through AASECT the association of educators, counselors and therapists. It's aligned with the American Psychological Association. I have a ethical mentor. I have an Asana check. And then I also, there's a trauma specialist that I, I check in with as well, with my work. It's re it's so important to me.
[00:40:01] Gwyn: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense.
[00:40:03] Katie: Yeah.
[00:40:04] Gwyn: Yeah. thinking about the vibrations for someone who is so disconnected from that region of their body I think a direct vibration would be harmful. So the idea of it filtering through the slightly
[00:40:20] Katie: You're fully clothed. You, you put it on yourself. You can choose the weight, you can choose the tone. You can. You can strike it yourself. We cannot use it at all. I'm able to put them underneath people. So I have one client who cannot take any, nothing on the body, nothing close to the body. There's, it's, we're we're hair trigger, right? So I'll use like a zero gravity chair where I can put you back in a zero gravity chair and put bowls under the chair, and then you get the vibrations coming up. And that's nice. You know, and I'm incorporating light touch, so I don't wanna say reiki, I'm tuned but it's not something that I, I really resonate with. So it's, I would just broadly say energy work. I mean, I'm in these esoteric systems and as it turns out, I'm working very much the same way that people who do cranio sacral work are working. Because again, I'm communicating with the subtle part of the body. So in distance work, we can't do that. I mean, I can send good vibes, but we're able to do things like, just if you're looking to get some understanding of like subtlety in the body, just with your hands. You can practice like one, putting your palms together touch one hand to the other, receive the touch from one hand, move, you know, rubbing your arms. I mean, there's just so much you can do without disrobing, without going into erogenous zones and without force.
And, you know, I mean, I'm celibate right now and I'm working in this, there's so many ways to engage with arousal energy, and if we think about arousal energy as just activated, then we get to be like, do I wanna be activated here? Is this where I wanna, you know, I mean, as long as we're not triggered, of course. There's so much agency in this framework. So you're taking clients online and it sounds like you're working with people in person as well. Yeah. So I'm in Western Pennsylvania. I'm doing more and more of the sound, which is really fun. I'm partnered with a sex therapist here, Dana Kirkpatrick. Her practice is Calm Pittsburgh. And so I'm now going to be there a couple times a month with sound healing and with sex ed. And then I'm teaching the embodiment in person. Yeah. The online stuff, I'm just very much wanting to do more of, I just have the limitation, of course, with the bowls, but there's so much more we can talk about. And then don't forget, I'm a 30 year expert in BDSM, so for folks who are looking to explore different kinds of power exchange I'm a good touchstone for just having the conversation about how you might do that. Just because like you, I've just been in it for so long,
[00:43:21] Gwyn: I really like how it's very clear that you come across as someone who will start with a person wherever they are.
[00:43:30] Katie: I will only be with a person where they are.
[00:43:33] Gwyn: Yeah. And that's lacking in this field, in any helping field whatsoever. Our tendency, especially those of us who tend to be mentally based, is to impart impart, impart, impart, and why aren't you caught up yet?
[00:43:48] Katie: Oh, I'm, I have those thoughts, please.
[00:43:51] Gwyn: But you're regulate them,
[00:43:53] Katie: I was teaching Wednesday and I'm like, if the world would just do what I want it to do, we would all be much happier. But I am able to, there are many things I'm not good at. Teaching is not one of them. I am, this is, a gift that I have. It is something that I'm born into. Both of my parents are teachers, we've got teachers and musicians going back generations on both sides of the family. I've been so fucking lucky that not only have I been able to witness them, because they were music teachers and I saw them working with people. While they were alive, I was in conversation with them the whole time they were alive about teaching My piano teacher, who I had from the time I was three, I quit when I was 14. 53, still friends with her, still talking about teaching as craft. You know working outta grad school for an international management consulting company, running trainings on leadership. Like I just have, and I soak it up and I notice how people are working with folks. It's an aptitude, and the talking about it, I can be very confusing. I acknowledge that. The doing of it, people seem to be be less confused. Talking about it is like, just defining love. You can't, it has to be experienced.
[00:45:24] Gwyn: Right.
[00:45:25] Katie: my affect changes, whether I'm describing or instructing is as I was acknowledging that. That my voice as a, a teacher is very different than my voice as a subject matter expert because they're, it comes from different places, head and heart.
[00:45:42] Gwyn: Well, it comes across, just in talking to you, I definitely have the sense that as a student I would feel very comfortable
[00:45:50] Katie: Thank you. Ya know, going back to teaching after the disruption of breast cancer treatment and covid and finding my, like literal voice in this new state has been so interesting. One of the primary intentions I held with treatment was that it was gonna burn the fields. We were just burning the crops, right, burning it down to zero. So I was like, anything I don't need gets burned off. All the good stuff is in that fertile soil is seeds. I'm sure I wasn't a hundred percent successful, but I, just really had to trust that as my body became better able to just exist after so much trauma I've also been able to sit in whatever this new state is, which has been really nice.
[00:46:44] Gwyn: Yeah. That's wonderful. In wrapping up, what would you like people to know most.
[00:46:51] Katie: I would like people to know most, that everybody is worthy and valuable just by the fact that we exist regardless, regardless of our struggles. I believe everybody deserves housing, food, healthcare, leisure time, third spaces. Connection with the divine community, access to food, all of that. I want people to know that I am not safe for white supremacy. And I want people to know that I hold folks able. Meaning I'm always looking for where's the yes? Where can we find yes. Sometimes I say like, it's about your felt sense of yes. So rather than that's not working, I'm always like, well, what can we do? And not in a toxic positivity way, like truly in a, we are complex beings. We have complex histories. Nobody has all the answers. I am not here to solve your problem, so let's explore and have fun and see what comes up. And then, you know, do with that what we will. [00:48:02] Gwyn: Beautiful. And if people wanna work with you, how do they find you?
[00:48:06] Katie: I'm the only Katherine Zitterbart in the world.
[00:48:09] Gwyn: That's amazing!
[00:48:10] Katie: Well actually I'm probably not, but I'm, I'm the only Katherine Zitterbart that you will find online. And then the handle that I'll use sometimes is K A Y T E E Z E E. KTZ which I thought was clever, but it only makes sense if you look at it so, because Katherine Zitterbart's a lot of syllables,
[00:48:30] Gwyn: It's true. And it's a lot of places to get the spelling wrong.
[00:48:34] Katie: Right. So but yeah, KTZ, Katherine Zitterbart, K a t i e Z. I try to make it as easy as possible for folks and yeah, and I love to connect with folks who are experiencing chronic pain, chronic illness and just wanting to have that not be okay, but not have to make it wrong, cuz it's not gonna go away.
[00:48:58] Gwyn: Right. Finding a way to live with it and live well enough.
[00:49:03] Katie: Yeah. And you know, that idea of radical acceptance that, now that I've had cancer, we're at a point where friends are like, we've been walking a mile, are you done? I'm like, oh just about. I had autoimmune shit going in. I've got stuff coming out, but I'm not gonna, rather than try to fix it. It's Frank, my pain is called Frank. He's an asshole. I'm just gonna, like, Frank is here and like Frank is being very loud and obnoxious today. Frank is quieter today and also, enjoy having a body enjoying the parts of enjoyment that I can.
[00:49:38] Gwyn: Yeah,
[00:49:39] Katie: Yeah,
[00:49:40] Gwyn: So I, I like to end podcasts with one final question, which is what excites you?
[00:49:47] Katie: That's a big question.
[00:49:49] Gwyn: It is, it doesn't have to be a big answer.
[00:49:52] Katie: No, I know. I well, I'm just like feeling it first. I get really excited when I am in a context where I don't have to hide how neuro divergent I am, honestly, Where my weirdness, my hyperlexia, my interrupting, is met with very similar, same, or completely different. And the conversation is much more about how do we exist with our neuro divergencies and not how do you hide it. And that also with just friendships in general, like just, I'm really loving where I'm at with finally making adult friends with, similarly, it's, it's just been hard without a partner or a babies and, you know, whatnot. So that makes me excited for sure. You know, like my yin, can I just share like this? Okay. Here's a specific example of something that made me excited. Yin yoga for sexual tantric yin. It's supposed to be slow, supposed to be on the floor, supposed to be quiet, supposed to be all this shit. I bring my bowls. What happens this one day, not a single mat, was in alignment with another mat. Somebody in the back of the studio is doing her own like completely quiet power yoga class. My friend who was with me had a hip thing and was in some sort of suspiria witch woman. Like, I don't fucking know what was going on with her. Her son's like snoring. Somebody else is journaling. And that is, I'm like, yes, yes, yes. So that's what I really like. As it relates to the conversation we've had today.
[00:51:44] Gwyn: If you enjoyed this conversation and you would like to work with Katie or even just witness how someone can live unapologetically after a mastectomy, please visit her website at kayteezee.com. That's K A Y T E E Z E E.com. On TikTok, she is @thekayteezee spelled the same way, and if Facebook or Instagram are more your jam, she is Katherine Zitterbart. Katherine is with a K.
And I would ask that if you enjoyed this conversation, please subscribe so that you can hear all the other great chats that we have here. And if even one thing struck you as poignant or interesting, consider talking about it with a friend. Having more of these conversations will help reduce the stigma around these topics, which I believe will help the world in general.
What Excites Us is produced, edited, and hosted by me. Gwyn Isaacs, our podcast host is Tickle.Life. The music is used under the Creative Commons attribution license. The opening song is The Vendetta by Stefan Kartenburg, and this is Quando by Julius H. If you are a musician and you would like to send me some music that you think would be great on the show, please do so. I invite you to visit our website at whatexcitesus.com. You can also record a message to me there either anonymously or not, and catch up on episodes that you haven't heard yet. And one last thing. I appreciate you and not just for listening, but for existing. Thank you. Bye.