Katyna Truval

I’m Katyna — a woman, wife, mother, naturopathic physician, investigator, sensualist, creator, and endlessly curious student of life. Curiosity is one of the strongest forces in me. I’m a systems thinker, problem solver, and optimizer who is always looking for patterns, connections, and the why underneath the why. I love pulling apart complicated things and discovering how seemingly unrelated pieces belong to the same story. Give me a mystery, a rabbit hole, or something that doesn’t quite make sense and I’m probably going in. More than anything, I am fascinated by people. I want to know what makes someone come alive — what they love, fear, hide, long for, what has shaped them, and what happens when they feel safe enough to stop performing and actually be seen. I’m endlessly interested in the stories we tell about ourselves, the ways we protect ourselves, the contradictions we carry, and all the beautiful complexity of being human. I’m also a deeply sensual person. I experience life through my senses and through expression — fashion, dance, movement, art, sex, touch, music, beauty, and deep conversation. I love passion, creativity, and play. I love the moments when we stop standing outside of our lives and actually inhabit them. One of my absolute favorite things is watching someone geek out about something they love. I don’t care whether it’s coding, painting, building, cooking, dancing, medicine, or something I know nothing about. There’s a moment when someone starts talking about the thing that lights them up and you can almost watch their spirit enter the room. Their eyes change. Their energy changes. They forget to edit themselves. I fucking love that. There is something sacred to me about watching someone create — witnessing that collision of imagination, intelligence, instinct, passion, and ingenuity that allows a human being to bring something into existence that wasn’t there before. My fascination with people has deep roots. Long before I learned about humans through medicine, I learned about them through life. I grew up without knowing my father and with a deeply wounded mother struggling with addiction, instability, abuse, and neglect. We lived in poverty and moved constantly, through communities and cultures where I rarely felt like I belonged. I learned early what it felt like to be the outsider and the underdog. Life also brought me intimately close to suffering. I survived violence and sexual trauma as a child. I’ve loved people through addiction, homelessness, and mental illness, and lost people I loved far too young to suicide and cancer. At 21, I became the legal guardian of my younger brother when my mother could no longer safely care for him. Later, as a mother, I encountered a different kind of vulnerability when my son arrived suddenly at 26 weeks and we entered the world of having a micro-preemie in the NICU. Those experiences don’t define me, but they absolutely shaped me. They left me deeply curious about what happens inside of us. Why do some people move through unimaginable things and remain open while others disappear into addiction, violence, isolation, or despair? Why do we hurt the people we love? What allows someone to find their way back to themselves? And what becomes possible when we don’t have to do it alone? Naturopathic Medicine became one expression of that curiosity. It has given me the privilege of sitting with people in incredibly intimate places — their bodies, relationships, fears, shame, grief, sexuality, illness, hope, and stories. I find myself continually wanting to understand what lives underneath the surface — underneath the symptoms, the armor, and the ways we’ve learned to survive. But I’ve come to realize that understanding suffering isn’t actually what I care about most. I care about what becomes possible on the other side of survival. I don’t want healing simply so that we can hurt less. I want us to feel safe enough, connected enough, and alive enough that we have room to create — to dance, build things, make art, make love, play, take risks, follow curiosity, become fascinated by ideas, and pour ourselves into something simply because something inside of us says, *this matters to me.* I want people to know their suffering without becoming their suffering. I want us to have a relationship with thriving that is every bit as intimate as our relationship with pain. That is part of what draws me so strongly to community and process work. Some of the most alive I have ever felt has been sitting in circle, breathing together, witnessing another person tell the truth, or being witnessed while telling my own. I crave spaces where embodiment, honesty, intimacy, play, grief, sexuality, creativity, and shared wisdom don’t have to exist in separate rooms. I’ve spent much of my life being the person who holds things together — the caretaker, mediator, problem solver, advocate, doctor, mother, sister, daughter. Community has given me something I didn’t realize how deeply I needed: places where I don’t always have to be the one holding. I can simply be another human in the circle. I’m coming to CRT because I want to learn how we create and protect more of those spaces — spaces strong enough to hold suffering without becoming consumed by it, where we can witness one another without rescuing one another, and where all of it gets to belong: the beautiful, wounded, erotic, ridiculous, grieving, raging, creative, tender, brilliant, still-figuring-it-out parts of us. I’m here to learn, to witness and be witnessed, to get uncomfortable, to laugh, to probably cry, to fuck some things up, to own them when I do, and to keep becoming more fully myself alongside other humans doing the same. Because ultimately, I don’t just want us healed. I want us alive.

Member since

2026