Introducing: Peggy Elam
Tennessee, USA

I started my professional career as a journalist in Mississippi. Eventually my curiosity about why people did the kinds of things I wrote about, plus my having found psychotherapy and counseling personally helpful, led me to pursue graduate studies in clinical psychology in Tennessee in the 1980s and become licensed as a psychologist in 1990.

I have long appreciated the importance of the mind-body connection and how physical and emotional/mental health are connected. I wanted to be able to tie it all together in a unifying theory and approach to health, wellness, and quality of life. As I studied the sociological and biological bases of behavior along with personality theory, statistics, experimental design, and other psychological topics in graduate school, I mused at one point, “There ought to be a physics of psychotherapy.” Psychology considered how chemicals, genes, social issues, interpersonal dynamics, and various psychological factors affected both behavior and the body (through the mind-body connection), but where did it consider the physics of the mind and body?

It was kind of ironic: Mainstream psychology aspired to be a “hard science” like physics— could even be considered to have “physics envy,” as one speaker at a conference I attended in the late 1990s joked—but it was 19th century physics it wanted to emulate. At the time, I thought of the question as “Where does physics fit into the equation?” Later I understood the question to be more about energy, spirit, and consciousness.

On my own, I studied many healing and spiritual modalities and practices, both mainstream and (increasingly) alternative/holistic. My clinical work with adult survivors of various kinds of trauma, and with people with the fragmented perceptions of self found in dissociative disorders, made me even more appreciate of the importance of integrating disparate aspects of self and experience as part of the healing process. Along the way I went through formal training and additional licensure in massage and bodywork in order to deepen my knowledge of the body and to have a professional license whose scope of practice allowed hands-on work when that was appropriate.

Although for many years I operated within the mainstream medical/mental health model, I still felt then as I do now, that all healing is self-healing, and that the individual’s personal perspective and authority is the most important part of the process.

When I was first introduced to ascension teachings in the late 1990s, I immediately resonated with the concept of expanding one’s consciousness to incorporate multi-dimensional aspects of self. It wasn’t until I found Keylontic Science and Kathara in 2001, however, that I realized I had found the detailed, unifying theory I had been seeking—with practical applications in the form of techniques (meditations, exercises, etc.) that facilitated change at one’s very core level of being, all within a spiritual and philosophical framework that promotes personal empowerment and freedom.

While I facilitate individual Kathara sessions, as well as continue a small counseling and subtle bodywork practice, I have from the beginning been most interested in teaching Kathara as the ultimate self-healing practice. As the saying goes, “Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime.”

I am excited to be able to offer instruction in the Kathara Bio-Spiritual Healing System through the Kathara Team.