compassionate space for belonging & becoming
Come home to Love, Come home to yourself
WORK WITH Kate
Spiritual Direction
Take a long, loving look at your life and find God loving you in the midst of it.
workshops & Retreats
Explore who you are becoming through community groups, personalized retreats, and formational reading groups.
support for spiritual directors
Receive 1:1 supervision and/or find communal support with other directors.
spiritual direction
discover god playing in the midst of your everyday life
Spiritual direction offers companionship on the pilgrimage of life. It offers a contemplative and compassionate space to attend to the reality of your life, step more fully into your beloved identity, and discern actions with intention. It empowers you to live by your most cherished values rather than succumb to the currents of culture and Empire.
Spiritual direction is not about teaching you about God, or giving you advice about what you should do, but directing your attention to the God of your understanding, deepening your awareness of God’s presence within and around you, and inviting your authentic participation in the dance of life.
Learn more or book a free consultation.
community
grow with like-hearted people
workshops & retreats nurturing belonging & becoming
Journey with others through workshops and retreats, including reading groups, examen prayer groups, and more.
join a cohort of spiritual directors growing together
If you’re a trained spiritual director and are looking for ongoing community support and training, consider our Emerging Directors’ Cohort.
meet kate
Hello!Welcome, friend! I’m Kate Laymon, a spiritual director and soul care advocate, as well as a recovering good girl and passionate Sicilian descendant. It is my delight to accompany others as they pursue a deeper and more authentic life with God. I am passionate about creating spaces of true belonging where every voice (and every part of the self) is heard and honored. I am a stubborn advocate for radical self-care and love because we can’t give from an empty well. And I delight in the flourishing and becoming our fullest and truest selves.
As one who has wrestled with God through relational and religious trauma, depression and anxiety, loneliness and disillusionment, I welcome the questions, doubts, and struggles as an inherent part of growth. I have spent my whole life trying to earn God’s love and approval and I can tell you it doesn’t work. When I experienced post-partum depression nearly 15 years ago, I couldn’t perform goodness anymore. It turned out to be the best gift of my life because I learned that as we face our messiness and vulnerability, we can experience the radical love of God in a transformative way. It’s from this place of being loved that we naturally become people who have acceptance and compassion for ourselves and others. No striving required. It is from this stance that I hold compassionate space to explore the messy, mysterious, sometimes frustrating, and beautiful experience of life with God. My hope is to cultivate the space you need to experience the love of God more deeply and experience freedom and delight in being yourself.
reflections from working with kate
“Kate did a wonderful job of cultivating a place where we could share and wrestle with ideas and questions and be accepted. It was also not a space where we needed to find an answer or come to a conclusion, which was refreshing. The exercises and prompts Kate provided were powerful and helped me look at myself and the world around me in different and refreshing ways. ”
— Tim V.“Kate has a gift for creating safe, sacred spaces that welcome honesty and vulnerability. I learned more about contemplative practices and I felt well heard when I shared. My presence was not only welcomed but honored. She helped me focus on being present to God and aware of God’s presence in me.”
— Tricia H.“Kate is such a supportive listener. She made it easy to delve into things I didn’t even know were bothering me. She helped me take a very surface, unclear relationship with God and deepen it so that it flowed into my daily activities, even in something as ordinary as meal planning.”
— Tania L.writing
Land acknowledgement
We acknowledge the Nisenan People are still here among us today, though they are nearly invisible and their story continues to be excluded from history. We understand that we are on Nisenan Land that was never ceded and the Original Tribal families have yet to recover from the genocide of their People. As a resident in Nisenan Land, we support the Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan Tribe in efforts to stabilize their People, as well as the campaign to restore Tribal sovereignty through federal recognition.
For more information and to support the NCR Nisenan Tribe, visit huswej.org