Faculty Spotlight: Kate Wolf-Pizor
Love for Love & Marriage
Kate Wolf-Pizor began her career at the Institute 10 years ago teaching a Marriage and Family Therapy class and immediately noticed something special about the structure of the school. "I was so deeply impressed with the cohort model. The faculty and students cared about each other... this loving community of people who cared so deeply about what they were doing." Subsequently, Kate was asked by the administration to help to grow and develop a full-fledged Marriage and Family Therapy training program, which has evolved into the 2 Residential MA programs existing today. Kate has developed hands-on training that prepares MA students to enter into internship situations with the skills needed to work with clients in all kinds of clinical settings.
Kate's obvious specialization is her extensive knowledge in the field of Marriage and Family Therapy. But she is also a practicing pagan and has served as a guiding force in educating the Institute community in earth-based spiritual traditions. She teaches a course on Wicca, and has served as the faculty advisor of Circle Round, an on-campus organization that hosts community rituals celebrating the sacred days of the Wheel of the Year. As part of her pagan belief system, Kate believes that we must recognize and value the Divine Feminine. She has served, since its inception, on the Advisory Committee of the Center for the Divine Feminine, which is closely affiliated with ITP and supports education, research, and programming that honors the sacred feminine in world religious, spiritual, and psychological traditions.
She is also an expert in systems theory, which is an integral aspect of both her professional and personal lives. "I believe that systems theory and earth-based spirituality go hand-in-hand: the idea that the cosmos is a self-regulating system. And that as we look at the individual—the smallest unit of society is family—if we look at the individual family as an echo of all other systems in the universe, we begin to see that we are part of both the destruction and the salvation here, right now. It's not an intellectual pursuit. It is a physical, spiritual, everyday pursuit. I want us to think more about applied spirituality."
As the Chair of the MA programs, she gets to know the students from the very beginning of their educational journey. "I really love the ITP students. They come to ITP with a mission." She calls our students "trailblazers" and notes that these students "have a personal calling and want to make the world better." Her valuing of the cohort model has not diminished over her time at the Institute, but is, as she notes, one of the most important aspects of students' education: the cohort model creates a process that takes a group of individuals and, through their time at ITP, they learn how to care for one another and then model that sense of the communal interconnectivity of humanity out into the work that they each do in the world. "They get to see each others' souls, and it matters a great deal."
As an educator, Kate views systems theory as a deeply transpersonal paradigm in that it enables developing clinicians to look beyond the individual to the greater contexts in which we all live. She is also a strong advocate of self-care for clinicians, which she seeks to continually teach her students.
Kate most would like to instill in her students that their own spiritual and professional development is the crux of their success as future clinicians. "I tell my students that they are luckier than most clinicians because they already have a spiritual practice. Having a spiritual practice means that you have faith that things will continue. And I hope that my students will be able to sit and hold their own faith in the rightness of life while their clients are fighting with that idea... I want them to believe in themselves and know what good mirrors for others they can be."
In closing, Kate acknowledged how special the Institute has been for her. "I feel very blessed to be here. The rivers of my life have run together at ITP. To be able to say that my spiritual life is probably important to some other people, and that my clinical training is important to some other students, and that my belief in the educational process of the school helps students. I feel blessed to be able to be my whole self here."
You can find Kate's faculty profile page here.
