S2 EP 16: What does it look like to leave behind a high-paying tech job & follow a spiritual calling

What does it look like to leave behind a high-paying tech job, follow a spiritual call you can’t quite name, and end up becoming an initiated medicine woman?

In this soul-deep conversation, I’m joined by the luminous Katharine Hargreaves —shamanic practitioner, psychedelic facilitator, and ancestral healer—for a powerful exploration of what it means to trust your path even when no one else understands it.

We talk about:

✨ Taking leaps of faith when the path isn't clear
🌱 Recognizing the difference between self-help and self-healing
🌀 The power of somatic repair and ancestral rituals
🌍 What happens when the spirit world speaks—and you answer
🧠 Letting go of “five-year plans” in favor of embodied time and wisdom
📿 Reclaiming your intuition in a world that taught you to override it

Whether you’re navigating burnout, craving meaning, or feeling like an outlier in your own life—this conversation is a deep breath and a quiet yes. You’re not alone. You’re not broken. You’re just remembering who you are.

Following the Call of the Wild

Today’s episode is a big, golden-goose-nugget of an hour. 🐣✨

I’m joined by Katharine Hargreaves — a woman whose work has personally supported me and whose path is a living permission slip for anyone who feels like the outlier, the weirdo, the one who never quite fit the script.

Meet Katharine

• Shamanic practitioner

• Psychedelic facilitator

• Initiated medicine woman in the lineage of the Dagara people of West Africa

With over 12 years of designing, curating, and leading transformational experiences, she offers:

• Ancestral healing

• Spiritual mentorship

• Rites of passage

• Psychedelic journeys

for both individuals and groups.

People come to her when they’re:

• At a major life transition or crossroads

• Trying to envision a more expansive reality

• Ready to create a roadmap for their healing and evolution

• Defining a new path forward in a world that keeps trying to pull them back into the old one

In this conversation, we talk about what it actually looks like to follow a wild, non-linear path — and what it costs and gives back.

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From Tech to Medicine Woman: When Your Soul Won’t Go Back in the Can

Seven years ago, she was working in the tech world as a designer:

• Well-paid

• Creatively challenged

• Doing “everything right” by capitalist standards

And then 2017 happened.

She went to Peru for a deep ayahuasca experience… and came back fundamentally changed. Something cracked open that would not go back into the can — no matter how many salary reviews or cool projects she had.

She realized:

“I care about the planet. I care about people.
Designing better online experiences so we can sell more things is not in alignment with my core values.”

What followed was not a clean, Instagrammable “pivot,” but:

• A two-year passage of self-discovery

• Multiple leaps of faith instead of one tidy bridge

• What she calls “walking the plank” of her life: quitting her job, leaving her apartment, and choosing to go on spiritual Walkabout without a clear plan

She had about nine months of savings and a lot of people in her life thinking she was out of her mind.

But she trusted the part of herself that had always been the outlier.

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Finding the Lineage: Sticks, Spirits, and That Bolt of Lightning

For context:
for years, on mushroom journeys in nature, Katharine kept finding sticks that would “talk” to her.

She assumed it was just the drugs.

Fast-forward to an initiation party in the Bay Area, for someone entering the Dagara lineage. She goes in with an open mind, no idea what to expect.

She sits down in front of a man, picks up a stick…

…and the stick starts telling him things about her.

Cue full-body lightning bolt moment.

“I recognized this.
I knew this technology in my bones, even though no one ever taught me this in my white Western life.”

Downstairs, she’s drawn to sit next to another man, who turns out to be Mark, the head elder of the lineage in that space, who would later become her teacher.

Within six months of working with this medicine:

• Her scattered, fragmented life suddenly had gravity

• The lineage, rituals, and community served as a field of coherence

• She felt seen and chosen by a 20,000-year-old lineage that recognized her gifts when Western culture did not

A year and a half later, she was formally initiated. Since then, her path with this work has continued to deepen — including a recent new initiation just before we recorded this episode.

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What Is Divination and Ancestral Healing, Really?

Most people have never heard of divination in this context.

In her work Wild Alive :

• She sits with a client.

• She connects to the spirit world through a divination shrine and natural objects (like sticks, stones, shells, water).

• The spirits speak about what’s really going on:

  • Ancestral wounds

  • Lineage patterns

  • Energetic blockages

  • Crossroads and timing

And then — this is key — the spirits prescribe rituals:

• Practical, embodied actions you take to open the way

• Ways to clear blockages, feed neglected parts of your life, and repair relationship with the seen and unseen

This isn’t mindset work or a “change your thoughts, change your life” formula.
It’s a living conversation with the more-than-human world.

She shares stories of:

• People with lifelong depression rooted in religious and ancestral trauma

• Clients who, after doing their rituals, write her letters saying they feel a way they’ve never felt in their entire lives

And she’s clear:

“I don’t take credit for that. I’m just the vessel.
The medicine and the wisdom belong to the lineage, the spirits, and the earth.”

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On Colonization, Lineage, and Ethical Psychedelic Work

We also talk honestly about:

• How many of us in the West come from broken lineages, through colonization, enslavement, migration, and forced religious conversion

• The spiritual responsibility of repairing and re-rooting our lines

• The problem with people facilitating psychedelics with little to no training or relationship to any living tradition

Katharine now works as a psychedelic facilitator with mushrooms, but she’s clear that:

• Her ability to hold that medicine safely is built on years of shamanic training with earth, water, fire, stones, and spirits — without a sacrament

• We cannot keep perpetuating colonial patterns by carrying unrooted medicine

• Ethical psychedelic work means being in right relationship with the land, the lineages, and with our own level of readiness

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Trust, Time & the Body: Kairos vs. Five-Year Plans

A core theme of this conversation is trust:

• Trusting your own weirdness when no one around you validates it

• Trusting your body over the stories your mind tells to keep others comfortable

• Trusting that your life is speaking to you, even when you don’t yet have a name for what’s calling you

We explore:

🌱 Two kinds of time

• Chronos – chronological, linear time

  • “Five-year plans,” career ladders, timelines

• Kairos – right place, right time, right readiness

  • The moment the conditions are right and time “begins” for a particular path

“When the conditions are right, time begins.”

Instead of forcing ourselves to sprint from start to finish, we can:

• Tend the conditions of our life like a garden

• Trust that when the soil, water, light, and nutrients are right, growth will happen — in its own rhythm

🌀 Repairing intuition & coming back to the body

We talk about how many of us — especially women and marginalized folks — were deconditioned out of our intuition:

• Religious fear

• Cultural and family expectations

• Self-help and productivity culture that treats us like broken machines to optimize

Katharine’s reminder:

• The mind will rationalize anything.

• The body never lies.

Reconnecting with intuition isn’t instant. It’s a repair process:

• Making space (sometimes literally quitting or stepping back)

• Letting parts of you “die” so they can be reborn in truer form

• Expanding your capacity to sit at your growth edge without collapsing

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Media & Practices That Nourish the Wild Self

Instead of another stack of self-help books, she offers a different kind of resource list — one that feeds the imaginal, poetic, and ancestral parts of us.

✂️ Collage as ritual

• Low-pressure creativity

• You don’t need to “know how to draw”

• Grab magazines, scissors, glue, and let your subconscious arrange images and words

• Helps free associate, connect new dots, and loosen rigid thinking

🎧 The Emerald podcast

Hosted by Joshua Schrei, The Emerald:

• Takes ancient, mythical, ancestral concepts

• Weaves them into the modern world

• Explores archetypes like the trickster, and what they mean in times when the status quo is cracking

It’s a rich, story-driven podcast that helps resurrect “ancient future” wisdom — the idea that the future we need includes the old ways of right relationship with the earth, each other, and the unseen.

📖 Secrets of the Talking Jaguar – Martín Prechtel

Katharine calls this one of her favorite books.

It follows Martín Prechtel, a man of mixed ancestry, who:

• Ends up in a remote Mayan village in Guatemala in the 1970s

• Is recognized by a local medicine man as “the one I’ve been waiting for”

• Spends about 20 years immersed in the community, becoming a medicine man and leader

Why it matters:

• It shows a living example of being taken into a lineage, not just “trying on” a spiritual aesthetic

• The language is wildly poetic and blessing-filled — closer to Rumi than a typical memoir

• It reminds us that the way we speak about the world literally shapes reality

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For Anyone at a Crossroads (Corporate, Creative, or Completely Lost)

This episode is especially for you if:

• You’re in a 9–5 and your body is quietly (or loudly) saying, “I can’t do this forever”

• You’ve already left something “safe,” and you’re in the terrifying in-between

• Your path doesn’t match what your family, religion, or culture says is acceptable

• You feel called to medicine, spirituality, psychedelics, or healing work and want to approach it rooted, ethical, and decolonial

We talk about:

• Leaving and coming back — how you can step away from corporate, recalibrate, and, if you choose, re-enter on your own terms

• Celebrating the leap: why quitting or pivoting deserves a party, rest, and recovery, not just panic and pressure

• Throwing away one-size-fits-all rulebooks and strategies that don’t honor your actual design

Closing: Your Permission Slip to Go a Little Wilder

If there’s one thread running through this whole conversation, it’s this:

You are allowed to honor the part of you that doesn’t fit.
That part might actually be your medicine.

Take a moment to check in with your body:

• Where are you forcing yourself into a shape that no longer fits?

• Where is life quietly inviting you to follow the call of the wild — even if it makes no sense on paper yet?

You don’t need a five-year plan.
You need space, trust, and the next small step.

If this episode spoke to you, I’d love to hear:

• What landed?

• Where are you at in your own “plank-walking” or lineage-healing journey?

Leave a comment, share this with a friend who’s at a crossroads, and if you feel called, check out Katharine’s work — and keep listening for what your own wild path is trying to say.

Until next time,
keep going, keep feeling, and keep trusting the part of you that refuses to shrink. 🌿

🪶 Connect with Katharine Hargreaves:
🌐 wildalive.co
📬 Wild Alive
📸 @katakhan on Instagram

💌 Loved this episode? Forward it to a friend who’s navigating their own wild call.