Kathryn Pallakoff

Practicing since 1994, Kathryn Pallakoff has over 3000 hours of education in advanced bodywork and the healing arts. She’s traveled the globe to study with master practitioners of each respective specialty. Like music, the body is an endless exploration. Kathryn attends myriad continuing education courses each year so she can offer her clients the most up to date advances in body-mind healing.

Kathryn is a Certified Rolf Structural Integration Practitioner from The Guild for Structural Integration, where her teachers were Dr. Ida Rolf’s original students, including those Dr. Rolf personally asked to teach her work. She studied Craniosacral Therapy with both Hugh Milne, D.O. (Milne Institute) and The Upledger Institute. With Dr. Benjamin Shield, she went deeper into the specialty of pediatric craniosacral therapy.

Although she has extensive training in several modalities, Kathryn believes effective healing is not about applying techniques so much as cultivating the subtle art of listening through one’s hands and intuition; cultivating silence and stillness within oneself so that one can hold space and patiently wait for another person’s unwinding, without judgment or projection. This is an ongoing practice.

A mystic at heart, with a scientist’s nagging penchant for wanting to understand how it works, Kathryn is particularly interested in the nexus of ancient healing systems and modern science.

Her approach is both structural and energetic. She uses Chinese Medicine, Meridians (subtle-energy pathways), fascial release and sound to interface the body’s connective tissue matrix (fascia) with the energetic matrix that science has begun to verify and all ancient healing systems speak of (meridians, chakras, electro-magnetic field, Earth’s gravity field). The intention is to help clients ground energy in their structure and simultaneously untangle structural knots that prevent experience of energetic flows. Recent studies show that Meridians run through fascia and Kathryn has observed that structural and energetic alignment go hand in hand.

Her Visceral work draws from both Chi Nei Tsang, an ancient Taoist Qi Gong practice, and Visceral Manipulation, developed by French Osteopath Jean-Pierre Barral (who incidentally was inspired by the therapeutic success of folk healers in the French Alps who manipulated organs). With Gilles Marin, founder of the Chi Nei Tsang Institute in Berkeley, Kathryn learned a Chinese Medicine, psycho-spiritual approach to unwinding the viscera. With advanced Rolfer Liz Gaggini, she learned detailed organ anatomy and movement patterns as they relate to structural integration.

She sees the body as a map of consciousness. A skilled practitioner learns to read and follow a person’s story as told through their body. The body unwinds in layers on a non-linear path. Healing is not only about symptom relief but about achieving increasingly higher states of health. Pain relief is one of many joyful side-affects of releasing blocks in our physical and subtle bodies.

Kathryn’s passion to understand the nature of healing has led her to investigate healing systems in myriad cultures. In the process, she has synthesized the common truths they share. Every ancient culture worldwide has a tradition of energy healing. And now Bio-energetics and Vibrational Medicine are at the leading edge of 21st Century medicine. Science has begun to verify the non-particular, energy wave nature of reality that mystics described thousands of years ago.

Her experience is that the anatomy of the energy body is as real and mapable as the physical body. She approaches both with the same specificity. The physical and energetic bodies are a continuum along a spectrum, just as musical pitches, colors and light are various frequencies along a spectrum. Some frequencies we can hear and see and some we cannot. What we see, touch and hear is intrinsically the same as what we don’t, and all are inextricably linked.

We don’t see sound, yet we feel it in our bones. Kathryn began exploring sound in the womb. Her dad is a jazz pianist and she grew up playing piano and learning music theory. She writes songs on guitar. The main instrument she plays and tunes is the human body.

She has taken Acutonics classes through level VII and is completing certification. Acutonics combines sound and Chinese Medicine. She’s studied vocal overtoning with Wayne Perry, chanting and Nada Yoga (ancient Yoga of Sound). She’s also exploring cutting-edge sound technology that uses computer voice-mapping and healing with specific tonal frequencies.

In the world of Energy Medicine, Kathryn spent a month in the Amazon Jungle of Peru with Shaman Don Augustin participating in traditional ceremony. She lived in Chiang Mai, Thailand for two months to study with Thai Massage Master Pichest Boonthumme. She’s completed all three Reiki levels (although chooses not to use the title of “Reiki Master”). She’s practiced Medical Qi Gong, Kundalini Yoga, Hawaiian Huna Healing and studied with Rosalyn Bruyere, PhD. (a clairvoyant whose skills were scientifically validated in a five year UCLA Rolfing Study 1972-77.)

Kathryn became a Certified Massage Therapist in 1994 and her teachers were/are advanced rolfers: Michael Murphy, Art Riggs, Rosie Spiegal.