Kara Vangen
Kara Vangen, LSW, CHTP, is a Teacher in the Tradition of the Divine Feminine, a practitioner of Healing Arts with expertise in mindfulness, meditation and recovering from traumatic wounding, and is a Holistic social worker specializing in Mental Health at Touchstone Mental Health where she combines traditional social work practice with her work as a founding member of Touchstone Healing services team which provides acupuncture, Healing Touch and mind - body medicine to adults with serious and persistent mental health problems. She was a founding member of the Healing Services Consortium which brought practitioners from mental health and the healing arts together to collaborate on mental health treatment. She also mentors Touchstone's Intentional Community.
Kara co-founded The Cauldron Studies Program and has been affiliated with The Powderhorn Phillips Cultural Wellness Center for eight years. Kara's work, while inspired by the tradition of the Divine Feminine, is deeply imbedded in Buddhist and Sufi teachings, most notably as a student for the past decade in the Ridwan School or Diamond Approach method. Kara has extensive experience in the practice of self- reflection and inquiry, and has been a devoted practitioner of meditation for over 15 years. She continues to travel to Wisconsin, California and Colorado at least five times each year to study with her teachers in a retreat setting.
Kara's early spiritual studies centered on developing intuition as a vehicle for healing self and others and spent many years developing these ways of knowing under the guidance of her teacher, Michelle Mayama of Lightsmith, These studies resulted in her participation as a ritualist and energy channel in many large public healing events in the Twin Cities. In the mid 1990s Kara was the ritual director at Lake Harriet Community Church. During this time Kara published many articles for Twin Cities Wellness and The Edge newspapers about the nature of energy work and healing. Kara has many years of training in the Healing arts in modalities such as Reiki, Flow Alignment and Connection, Cranial Sacral and is a Certified Healing Touch Practitioner. Kara has provided Healing Touch at St John's Hospital to patients with cancer and was a member of the Healing Touch team at the Integrative Medicine Dept. at Abbott NW hospital. Kara has augmented her energy bodywork training with studies in body-centered psychotherapy and healing from traumatic wounding through the Hakomi institute and the Institute for sensory motor sequencing.
In 2005 Kara completed advanced Professional Training through the Center for Mind Body Spirit Medicine in Washington D.C. and is currently teaching mind-body medicine to groups and individuals in her private practice. Kara is passionate about doing the "deep inner work" required to show up authentically in life and community and that our value as exoteric forms arises from our ability to mirror and illuminate the inner life.