Kristine Cassady · Founder
Founder’s Note
I did not set out to build my own methods, or a system of any kind, but rather found myself trying to explain something I kept seeing and realizing through my work.
I was seeing patterns.
People have come to me over the past eleven years looking to get unstuck in one part of their life, understand a pattern they could not seem to change, or resolve something they could feel but could not necessarily name. The circumstances were always different, but the longer I worked with people, the more I began to notice what appeared on the surface was rarely enough to explain what was actually happening underneath it. Where someone might see a collection of unrelated experiences, I was seeing patterns, and where an existing system supplied an explanation for those patterns, I was less inclined to jump to conclusions or create a diagnosis because I could feel there was a bigger picture being overlooked. The whole “missing the forest for the trees” thing.
I had started my own seeking four years earlier, diving into astrology, Human Design, energetic practices, and older traditions attempting to explain the parts of human existence we cannot necessarily see. I became an avid student of many of them, partly because they gave me language for things I had already sensed and partly because they showed me structures I had never considered. I still find many of these systems extraordinarily useful, but my work with actual people kept showing me the limitations of allowing any one methodology to become the only explanation. Something could make perfect sense according to a model and still not adequately explain the life experiences of the person sitting in front of me.
And then I realized I could see.
Around the same time, I rediscovered a familial gift of clairvoyance I had suppressed much earlier in my life. I realized all I had to do was ask to see or connect to the field, and images would begin to fill my mind I had no conscious way of creating on my own.
At first I did not know what to make of it, so I approached those images much the same way I approached everything else in my work: I paid attention to what appeared, asked questions about it, and shared what I was seeing with the person in front of me. As people repeatedly confirmed details I had no ordinary way of knowing, the accuracy became hard for me to deny. I began to recognize the significance of my gift to see what was happening in an energy field, and not just see it, but interact with and modify what the field was holding or how the energy flowed through it.
If you asked me, and many people have, I still could not tell you exactly how my seeing works. I know what it is like from my side of the experience and can tell the person I am working with what I am seeing in the moment, but how it works is a mystery I have learned to live with and simply appreciate for the information it provides.
Maybe we stop investigating too soon.
This process of working with the field is what eventually led me to describe myself as a forensic energetic practitioner. I observe both the seen and unseen structures beneath repeating patterns, watching what repeats, asking where it might be held, and following the evidence across the different layers of a person’s experience until those layers show a coherent picture of the structure underneath.
we are trying to fix
is not actually
the problem?
Sometimes what I find is connected to an experience or decision. Sometimes it appears to belong to family or lineage. Sometimes it is better explained by the person’s natural mechanics or architecture, and sometimes the investigation reveals the thing we thought needed to be fixed was never actually the problem.
And it is this last possibility which has really caught my attention lately and become a central part of my work.
Our society has a tremendous number of ideas about what a healthy, healed, regulated, successful, spiritual, productive, or fully functioning human being is supposed to look like. Some of those standards may be useful or even necessary, but others have become so automatic they get applied without anyone stopping to question whether they are accurate for the person involved. Maybe it is trauma. Maybe it is avoidance. Maybe it is what we have learned to call people pleasing, poor boundaries, or even narcissism. Sometimes those explanations are exactly right, but sometimes I think we stop investigating too soon.
Maybe it is an old energetic structure still exerting influence long after the circumstances which created it have passed. Maybe it is a person trying to operate from a framework they do not have the energetic formation to sustain. Maybe the person has simply spent years trying to correct something because they were taught there was something wrong with them, when really they were operating according to their own framework the whole time and should have been asking:
What if we haven’t gone back far enough?
This is why I could never find a single method or instrument to answer all of the questions I had. We are multifaceted beings with layers of experience and energetic information a single system can’t adequately account for. And I became increasingly interested in one particular area I couldn’t find accounted for in any of the systems I had been working with: the period in which we were first formed, the time before birth while in the womb.
So much of our understanding of who we are begins at birth and moves forward through childhood, formative experiences, relationships, trauma, and the choices we make along the way. I began wondering what we might be overlooking by beginning there. What if some of the structure we spend our lives trying to understand was already taking shape before we were born?
NiZu
Formation.
This is how I came to develop my own understanding of another pattern I believe we have overlooked. I call it NiZu, from the ancient Sumerian words Ni, yourself, and Zu, to know.
Through my work, I have come to believe our time in the womb forms a structure underneath the other layers we accumulate throughout life. It is our formation grid, and within it are places where our own structure is less available to us, gaps we can spend our lives trying to fill in order to create balance and wholeness.
NiZu gives me a way to understand this formation, including where we are designed to start and where the gaps exist in our own structure, so we can stop repeatedly trying to operate from places where we do not have the structure to sustain it. It also gave me an explanation for something I had watched happen over and over again: people could learn an enormous amount about themselves through astrology, Human Design, therapy, energetic work, or any number of other systems and still eventually hit a wall. The pattern would return, they would get stuck again, or there would remain a persistent feeling something was still missing. I began to wonder whether, in at least some of those cases, we simply had not gone back far enough.
No map gets the final word.
None of this means I believe I have found the singular explanation for how a human being works. Quite the opposite.
The longer I have done this, the less interested I have become in asking one system to explain an entire person.
No map gets the final word about you, including mine.
I have no interest in convincing anyone the unseen exists, either. I am much more interested in what becomes possible when something which has confused a person for years finally makes sense, when an experience they have interpreted as a personal failing can be looked at from another angle, or when we discover the question they have been asking is not actually the question needing an answer. There is a particular kind of relief which comes from finally understanding something you have spent years fighting, and I have had the privilege of watching this happen enough times to remain fascinated by what we might find when we look, and excited to keep doing this work every single day.