I suppose that one way or another, the story has to be told. But we can skip past all the details of how I ended up here, and focus instead on what we’ve been up to since arriving. But first, a little more on the who on the other side of this screen.
I’m Katie Lesko, mother to Wiley, daughter of Dana, granddaughter of Sybil, and a long, magnificent motherline that traces far back through Wales and Scotland, Denmark and Norway, Europe and Persia. I was conceived in Jerusalem while my mother and father traveled, and was born in December at a hospital in Phoenix, Arizona. My Mormon mother and her family were among the first colonists to set-up in the red desserts out West – but before that they lived throughout Appalachia. In many ways, coming to these hills felt like coming home.
Home is a difficult thing for a nomad to describe, especially to anyone who’s never felt trapped in a place. In my youth, movement was what helped keep me alive – but after finding a certain level of inner knowing, stillness and deep roots were all that I craved. When I consider how long my family has been running West… well it seems inevitable that I should be the one to go East. And so, after a darling love story, and an agreement that a city should be as far away as possible, my husband and I eventually searched for home, and stumbled into sleepy Appalachia Maryland.
Finding Home
Nature has always been Home. After I lost my mother to cancer when I was just 5, life was brutal. The large pine tree in the backyard was the one safe and quiet place I knew, until we moved when I was 8. Then, the mountain preserve behind our suburban neighborhood became a refuge from harm and abuse at home. After years of travel and backpacking across Europe I found myself a. hyper-motivated premed student in Northern California. I was on a fast track toward emergency medicine when I realized I was in an abusive marriage. After the escape, rock-climbing and ecospiritual practices helped me navigate the recovery — but it wasn’t until a doctor failed in diagnosing a pregnancy that I ultimately lost my faith in Western medicine.
As many women can relate, after the abortion I considered my life and recognized I was reliving childhood traumas through my decisions and relationships. Like many women do, I got to work rewriting the narratives that had shaped my path to that point. What was surprising, and what ultimately inspired me to pursue my PhD, was that my abortion experience was quite like a psychedelic experience. Out of body, spiritual in nature, immensely cathartic — with rich visual, ancestral metaphors that qualified as a textbook mystical experience. It didn’t make sense.
What was surprising, and what ultimately inspired me to pursue my PhD, was that the abortion experience was quite like a psychedelic experience. Out of body, spiritual in nature, immensely cathartic — with rich visual, ancestral metaphors that qualified as a textbook mystical experience. It didn’t make sense.
Well, nothing in life made sense after that, so I redirected my med school plans for a path dedicated to holistic healing and peer support instead. I attended the California Institute for Integral Studies instead, a school founded by Eastern mystics who hoped to build a bridge between intuitive and physical sciences. It was, for a time, home, and there I built my skills in facilitation and holding space for others’ processing. I focused on sustainability and ecology coaching with emerging startups in the cannabis industry, helping power-hungry CEOs recognize the plant as a being, not a commodity. We made great progress in those fields as I continued to stitch together my life on the other side of trauma.
I found support through plant medicines and ritual, herbalism and ecotherapy. I cultivated a spiritual practice built in relationship with the natural world, and it sustains me in the face of the chaos, and beauty, of this existence. My practice is my own, and that is the norm in Ecotherapy – to develop our own personal, unique approach to wellness based upon our lived experiences in relationship with the natural world, and consequently, ourselves.
Modern mental health seeks a one-size-fits-all model. But, that’s simply not how modern humans work. Ecotherapy, instead, offers a customizable approach to wellness, bringing personal, physical, spiritual, and communal impacts of wellbeing into it’s frameworks and methodologies.
Ecotherapy nurtures resilience, the mindset that makes it possible to get up and live on even the worst of days.
Mountain Mage Wellness
Today, home is Mountain Maryland. My dozen acres of forested hillside, and the neighboring families, farms, and ecosystems I’m cultivating here. I arrive with a wide skillset and techniques honed through years of peer support and education, and an intuitive empathy nurtured through a lifetime spent navigating insurmountable grief.
My message is simple: we can get through anything, if we choose to. I cannot make that choice for anyone else, but, through my skills and work, I can help make that choice to stay and live an easier, simpler one.
Through One-on-One sessions and Group Work, I can help bring my clients to a place of peace where they can work to decide the next steps in their transition. This work is essential, and that’s why it’s offered on a sliding scale. The Mountain Mage Shop helps to offset the cost of outreach efforts, so whether or not you are seeking personal support, you can still participate in the mission to restore womben’s health to it’s rightful place and priority.