Last Monday, my dear friend Katherine Woodward Thomas peacefully passed after a long bout with ovarian cancer. My Power of Eight® group had been holding weekly intentions for her healing, and for a while it looked like she was rallying, but after she’d maintained strength for visitors in the last few days, including for her partner Michael’s birthday, she finally and gently transitioned.
Last night, the family held a memorial for her. A packed roomful of friends and relations present, plus the 165 people on Zoom, including me, provided a visceral testimony to her contribution to the world.
Katherine was a licensed psychologist and therapist and an amazing thought leader, who’d written the bestseller Calling in the One. For many years she was known as a spiritual relationship counselor who also trained many coaches in her processes.
What you may not know was how many hurdles Katherine had to overcome in her 69 years: healing a difficult childhood; battling breast cancer during the writing of one book after the breakup of her marriage; and then being hit with ovarian cancer, which arrived just after she’d signed for her final book What’s True about You.
She wrote that book – a culmination of her life’s work – while she was receiving chemotherapy. And when the book was released, Katherine galvanized all her remaining energy to speak at a book launch, holding court until late into the evening. Such was her unbreakable resolve and such was her power.
And it was she who had come up with the term ‘Conscious Uncoupling,’ which became the title of her other bestselling book, a term that was appropriated by and incorrectly attributed to Gwyneth Paltrow.
Katherine had an amazing intellect and a deep insight about relationships and love in general – both for finding ‘the one’ and then what to do when love dies.
And Katherine lived her own experience. After an earlier life of never finding love or happiness, of constantly being left behind, she worked on healing her early difficult childhood, ‘called in the one,’ had a child at 43 and completely turned her financial life around.
After her marriage to Mark broke up, she wrote Conscious Uncoupling to help others apply what she’d learned through her own breakup.
There are so many Katherine quotes about love and also about the need for growth when love ends that here are just a few of my favorites:
From: Calling in the One:
“To give up having to be right, having to prove someone else wrong, having to have the last word, having to be understood – that is the mark of a person who is capable and truly ready to create a loving relationship that will last and flourish over time.”
Or these from Conscious Uncoupling:
“In a nutshell, a breakup is nothing short of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have a complete spiritual awakening. One that catapults you to a whole new level of authenticity, compassion, wisdom, depth, and—dare I say it?—even joy.”
“Every way that you’ve given away your power, denied your own deeper knowing, put someone else’s feelings and needs before your own, stayed embedded in a victimized story, or settled for less in life—all of it is now up for review. You have nowhere to hide. Life has broken you open and it is violently, mercilessly forcing you to evolve, to develop, and to grow.”
But the Katherine I got to know best had a deliciously mischievous side. We were both members of the Evolutionary Leaders, and I’d met her when we were attending an event in 2009. We’d had an immediate connection that deepened during an EL retreat in 2016, which was meant to be a spiritual retreat with silent breakfasts and deep meditation in the high desert at Ghost Ranch.
I’m a great Georgia O’Keefe fan and the idea of visiting where she lived and to see the inspiration for so much of her work firsthand greatly appealed to me.
I bumped into Katherine at the meeting point in northern New Mexico where a bus was to take us up to the ranch. Before we headed out, she popped into the general store. She returned with a bright red floppy hat but also, half hidden inside her large tote bag, a bottle of wine poking out from the top, which she was planning to smuggle into the retreat.
From that little act of rebellion, I knew we’d be great friends.
As it happened, her room was next to mine and we spent most of the trip cutting short some of the long meditations, heading off to a cafeteria when we were meant to fast, taking a Georgia O’Keefe tour to see for ourselves the spectacular vistas that had inspired her paintings, and on a few nights, sneaking off like a set of naughty twins to treat ourselves to a glass of that smuggled-in wine.
We forged a wonderful connection on that trip. Over the years, we met frequently on group chats on Zoom but never in person again. One planned meeting in 2022 got cancelled and she was too ill to meet for lunch when I was in California last January.
Katherine had many facets – one (unknown to many of us) a bestselling album she’d released called Lucky in Love, which went to Number 1 on Jazz Charts in 2019. But her real genius was transmuting her own painful experiences into the deepest of wisdom, providing in her final book a compilation of everything she’d wanted to pass on.
Her great work was complete, her love for her family and friends so tangible. ‘Even after all this time, the sun never says to the earth “You owe me.” Look what happens with a love like that. It lights the whole sky,’ she wrote.
Katherine, you are and forever will be ‘the great’ to me and countless others.
