Katie Kay | When Doctors Say 'We don't know' Podcast | Episode 102
In this episode of the "When Doctors Say We Don't Know" podcast, host Eva Vennari interviews spiritual coach, astrologer, and tarot reader Katie Kay. Katie recounts her decades‑long health journey that began with a persistent cough, misdiagnoses, and a recommendation for family therapy, leading her to explore acupuncture, Chinese medicine, and a naturopathic approach after conventional doctors suggested lung surgery for middle‑lobe syndrome (bronchiectasis). She describes how listening to her body’s bio‑feedback guided dietary changes and long‑term management of mucus and infections. Parallel to this, Katie’s spiritual path emerged, integrating intuition, prayer counseling, and study of figures like Edgar Cayce. She explains how she uses astrology as a “blueprint” to quickly assess a client’s strengths, challenges, and life purpose, and tarot as a “selfie” that tells a story about the present moment. Her coaching philosophy centers on transforming fear into strength, leveraging belief systems, and aligning with a higher “faith” that transcends organized religion. Katie also promotes her monthly Zoom program “As the Zodiac Turns,” which offers astrological weather updates and spiritual tools, and the Dream Fair, a community wellness and psychic event. She shares contact information (spiritplays@gmail.com, dreamfairla.com) and advises listeners to keep searching for answers that feel right, test them, and seek multiple perspectives, emphasizing self‑advocacy and body communication.
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Welcome to the show. My name is Eva Vennari, founder of the Elevate Institute, and I'll be your host for today's podcast. When Doctors Say We Don't Know is an inclusive conversation. So many are craving to share their stories and experiences. Today's guest is no exception. Today's honored guest is Katie Kay. Katie is a spiritual coach, an astrologer, damn good tarot card reader. Firsthand experience can tell you that, and teaches meditation to live a life along spiritual lines. Katie, welcome to the show.
Hi, Eva. It's a fabulous day being here with you.
Fabulous. Yeah. Yes. We've had a few conversations before, a few, just a few. Yep. And I want to know, everybody wants to know, what inspired you to be a part of this conversation on When Doctors Say We Don't Know?
I was very intrigued when you told me you were doing this podcast series because many, many years ago, a doctor— I was coughing a lot. And the doctor, I said, me and my kids are coughing after we eat. And he looked at me for a few minutes. And he says, well, I'm going to recommend a family therapist.
Oh, nice.
I was like, Excuse me?
For coughing?
Yes. You don't believe me? That was many years ago. But he, he was a good guy and delivered my baby, my second child. But I just decided to look around. And I looked around and somebody said, I go to this Chinese doctor in this funny little office in this funny little neighborhood. And I've been wanting to choreograph and dance But the doctors, the regular doctors said I'd never do it again. And this Chinese doctor said, "Well, I'll try these acupuncture points, and if they don't work, they won't work. But if they do, you will." And she, and it did. So I tried this, this, this guy, and there's handwritten signs on the wall: twenty dollars cash. And I. Went to him and he told me, you have a genetic inability to digest certain foods.
Who knew?
Yeah, right.
Well, how did he determine? Did he just— he looked at you, that was it?
Oh, oh yeah, that. And that was another thing, you know, he looked at my fingernails, he looked at my tongue, I think he looked in my eyes, you know, none of the normal medical take your clothes off, let me listen to your You know your heartbeat or anything like that, and and that's what he said within just a few minutes. And he's and he told me the kind of foods I shouldn't eat, and he said red wine was one of them. So I took the mature approach and switched to vodka, which turned out not to be the best idea. But I believed him. Yes, and he asked me. He said. Your family history might have some indication about this. And I said, well, I don't think so. My dad got his gallbladder out. My mom died of colon cancer. And he told— I told him that, and he looked at me with his little head going sideways. And I went, oh my God, maybe they're related.
Hmm.
And that was what started me off many, many years ago.
So what happened to the cough?
Well, the cough didn't get immediately better by switching from, from red wine to vodka. Yes, I must admit that was an experiment. And that's part of the journey. But what happened is, eventually, it turned out really bad. I was living in Michigan, and we went to a team of doctors at the University of Michigan. And I remember very distinctly them all sitting around and saying, well, we could cut out part of your lung.
Wow.
And I, and I just sat there and my husband at the time was excited because we're young and we have insurance. And I was not quite so excited. And because they called it the middle lobe syndrome. One of the other words for bronchiectasis that I have scarred bronchi, and the natural mucus just hangs out there. Okay, lots of big things. So but instead, we voted on tetracycline. So I took a number of tetracycline and that ended up giving me Candida, which again is a difficulty with sugar foods and mucus.
Yes. More of the same. Thank you.
More of the same. Thank you. And of course, it was many years before that information became clear. Let's put it this way. I ended up with pneumonia and it was horrible. I didn't like it. But I learned how to deal with that, and then I started going to a naturopath, and I went to her for like 30 years. And with food sensitivity tests and elimination, I have learned to live with it, and I'm better.
Well, I don't, I don't hear you coughing.
It's, it's like a— thank you very much. It's like a sensitivity. I mean, Sometimes, and this over many years, I will eat something and I'll cough and I'll go, now what did I just eat? Because it's just a natural— our lungs naturally have mucus. That's how they move things around. And they naturally have cilia. So if there's a little scarring, if there's a little dead cilia spot, then it sort of sits there and it's very susceptible to infection. So with this COVID going around, I've been You know, I have a pre-existing condition. I've been very careful, but I've been careful for 30 years about this.
Well, in a way, you— this is a bit of a blessing because you know for certain what your body's communication is.
Yeah.
Every time you come into contact with something, your body says, nope, I don't like that.
Exactly. It's an amazing biofeedback. It's irritating at times, but Yeah, but I do. I have learned an awful lot to pay attention to my body. And that's why I've lived. I'm still breathing, I think, and still feel pretty healthy. In fact, I feel healthier than I did in my 40s or my 50s. Don't tell anybody I'm older. But yes.
No way. So at what point in, in this journey did you— did you already know? So I have 2 questions. Did you always have a proclivity to the spiritual spiritual side of things, or did this develop along the same time as this journey of learning about how to listen to your body?
You know, I— that's a good question. I think it did, uh, happen about the same time. I also got in recovery at that time, and so I learned a lot through that process about my emotions, my fears, and my spiritual life, if you will, having a lot to do with how my body handled life, how my fears and affected my body. So there was an awful lot of integration of those disciplines, if you will, that have really helped me a lot. I, I have been taught as a, as an intuitive healer, and a prayer counselor and all that kind of stuff. So I have heard and seen and studied, you know, from Edgar Cayce and shaman and before, So they're really inter— intersected, both those disciplines.
Well, and you've got quite a few things, disciplines going— not the spiritual coach, I feel like, is an umbrella over being astrologer, a tarot card reader, and the meditation. Does that sound about right?
That's exactly right. I use those tools as assessment or update tools, or just as an access tool. Some of my clients like the tarot as a picture kind of story. Some of them are more I usually use astrology instead of a questionnaire for coaching because I can see after 30 years' study a little— pretty much very quickly— of their assets, their liabilities, their challenges, their weakness, and their tender points.
And so how do you use knowing that to help a person to live along their spiritual line?
Well, you know, I just studied an awful lot of spiritual systems. And this— we are a combination. My theory comes from— we're a combination of the spiritual world and the human world. We are going to die. And something else is bigger than that. It just is that simple in my, in my view. The other thing is fear is a part of being human. But fear, if it goes out of balance, can really screw up our bodies. And that is where I believe a lot of dis-ease comes from. And there's a lot of theories about that from Louise Hay. If you, you, you're an icon on that, you know all about that. So the combination is very important for braiding our lives together. So astrology is a story about what you wanted to play with in this life. So with my clients, there's a partnership, there's a— does that sound right? Oh, yeah. Okay, well, then let's let's, let's use this energy. Instead of being afraid of this, let's make friends with this fear and use it, this strength, for something else. And so that's how that kind of stuff works. And I also believe that faith is stronger than fear, but you don't have to have a God or a religion. Faith statements that I use in my clients is, tomorrow's another day, it'll all work out. I'm good. I'm good. And that goes back to quantum theory, that as we believe, so it happens, and the observer necessarily affects the outcome of the observed. So that every single bit of our life really comes from our belief systems. And that might have been a tangent. So I hope I answered your question.
Well, it's a perfect tangent. One of my hobbies is, of course, The natural law, Hermes Laws, and you just mentioned the very first principle, which is all things are mental.
Exactly.
Yeah, so I mean, you know, we can geek out on that all day long.
Another whole podcast series.
Yeah, seriously, it can be. Um, but I, I— that really stuck out when you said about discovering and asking the person that you're talking to that question, what do you want to play with because I think a lot of times we experience a conflict much like your cough and think, oh, that's it. That's the end. I've got a cough. There's nothing I can do about it. It's just, you know, it's going to be part— I guess that's my life now. I'm going to wake up every day coughing, instead of asking the deeper questions and allowing for a container of more information to come in to guide us and ascertain what actually we should be doing about it. So, it's a huge stretch and I—
Mm-hmm.
To say a cough can turn into this type of thing, but that's what happened for It really was.
Yeah. And I also met practitioners, healing practitioners. And there's so many of them out there, including MDs and ODs and the regular profession. But they listened to me. And they said, try this, try this. How does this work? How does this work? And so from that very— that gentleman who got me off with his acupuncture, You know, it sounded right. It felt right. And to this day, you know, I've moved from here to there, and I have to get a new practitioner. And when they say something, it will resonate with me or not. You know, and as an aside, we didn't talk about this, but I did work with School of Medicine and cancer research companies in my Clark Kent days. And And I know how they're trained, and, uh, I've done a lot of forgiveness work of recognizing that that's how they're trained. So I go to people who are trained with a little bit more of the theory that our emotions and our spirits affect our body, both coming and going. We can heal that way, and we sometimes are in a state of dis-ease that way.
Well, and now I'm very curious about astrology in and of itself. Is there something that is evident in astrology that can point back to the what do you want to play with in this life and the possibilities for, um, what illnesses might present themselves if we don't live in alignment with spirit? Like, can that be seen in astrology?
Oh, there are some amazing medical astrologers. It, it is something that I work with on the periphery because I go from the spiritual idea— what are you doing here, what's your calling, and where are your triggers? Triggers around not feeling loved, not feeling appreciated— that's a Venus. Venus aspects, I have one. So if I don't feel appreciated, then I'm judging myself. That deadens my immune system. I wonder how many people who are depressed have more of a tendency to be sick because our immune system is trying so hard. But if our whole emotions say, I don't like me, that doesn't work. Mars is energy. If Mars is affected badly, sometimes the energy has to be accessed or practiced in a different way. There's so many ways that it can be seen in the chart. And the energies are like weather. They're going to happen one way or another. But it could be sunny. I could, I could walk out with an umbrella because it's sunny, or I can walk out with an umbrella because it's raining. I could like rain. I could stay in if it rains. It's still choices of how we, how we take that turn in the path towards where we want to go. And the path is always happening. It never gets lost.
It's, it's very— it sounds very dynamic in its nature.
Exactly.
And, and I'm, I'm thinking about too, while you're talking about this, is the astrology that we've come to know, you know, page 99 in the back of Miss Magazine or whatever it is, uh, you know, it's, it's misguided and indulgent in a way. It's not really serving us, in, in my opinion, after hearing all of this.
Well, it's, it's a very limited view, and there's a lot of ways to use it. But if you take a picture of where you were born and where the, the local solar system was in the moment you took a breath, that is very much also like the Hermetic philosophy, as above, so below. It is a reflection of what you chose. That's the theory I go with. So, you know, I work with clients and I said, how does this sound? And they go, God, that's so familiar.
Hmm.
You know, and then we go from there, because when they get triggered, I go, oh, well, I can see it's all this Capricorn and Saturn stuff that's going on. Do you feel like you have to struggle? Well, maybe. And so it's not a fear of money or not having enough money, it's a tendency to struggle. And so we reformulate to, well, you got a couple good soldiers here inside of you, go make them dig ditches instead of—
Mm-hmm.
Struggle. We just re— like reformat and reenergize. Because, again, I'm short and have curly hair. Now, I ironed it as a kid, but I don't iron it anymore. But I still have curly hair. I've learned to live with it. So it's, it's just, it's appreciating ourselves the way we are and finding a way to live in this world that way. And that's a big question these days.
And it sounds like it's leveraging your strengths rather than looking at the weaknesses, saying, how come I don't have—
Exactly. And it's— and that's— it's all about us, you know, just looking at our beliefs from a different viewpoint too.
Cool. Well, and then now I'm curious again. You can see how this goes. I get curious. So I mean, being, being a fellow tarot card reader, um, how do you use tarot Also, and because they're, they're two— astrology and tarot are two different methods for tapping into spirit.
Yeah, they are very different. I see the astrology chart as like a blueprint of what you wanted to play with in this life. Now somebody born right next to you can play with it completely different. It's endless free will. Okay, but tarot is like a selfie. Tarot is like, uh, what is it gonna look like tomorrow? And so the tarot tells a story. But I have clients who love to see that story after we do a coaching session, and it, and it usually invariably reconfirms what we've talked about.
Funny how that happens.
Yes, it does. And you know this too. And I also like reading, like I say, tarot at the side of the road. So I, I never asked the question. It's between the cards and the person I'm reading for. I will read what I see and then I'll go, does that sound familiar? And the empowerment of people going, wow, yeah, I, I didn't see it from that point of view, is very exciting for me because it just offers a different way to see the life story and more options, more color, more, oh, I didn't see it that way. And that's what I like.
It's getting the, the nuances and the juicy bits that maybe you couldn't see by being the driver of your own car. You need the You need the passenger seat person to look for you and see what's going on.
Right. Yeah, just looking in the mirror doesn't do it. Sometimes people say, well, the mirror looks great, but there's something here that you didn't catch. So yeah.
Yeah. Um, and, and with that, again, it's like the knowing what could be based on current circumstances. Um, I don't want to ask a leading question. It's more like In coaching somebody, uh, do you ever do a before and after? Not just an after, but a before and after to see if the tarot cards actually show a new storyline?
Oh, interesting. Um, well, I'm not sure about that. I mean, I use tarot regularly, but it's more of a, uh, and today's news is today.
I got it.
Um, I have enjoyed, uh, with long-term clients us recognizing how the reforming of their strengths from a barrier to a support system has worked. That's, that's really rewarding for both of us to see how a new storyline has helped. So I've seen it a little bit more with long-term clients for astrology than tarot.
Okay, got it. I mean, because you're seeing And changes over a course of time, and that weather, if you will, it shows a history of how it's affected them. Okay.
Well, it also— it also— their strength, for instance, starts out as a barrier. They believe in struggle, you know, Capricorn, Saturn, struggle, got to, had to, blah, blah, blah. And then after a while, when we work with these elements and energies, then it's like, oh, this is— I can do if I choose to. But I don't need to have that strength as a barrier, as a struggle, as I'm not good enough unless I struggle. But the, the, the tarot is just a really enjoyable, colorful story about what's going on right now and a different look at it.
And again, and it can provide some advice that possibly you couldn't see on your own.
Oh, definitely. It's like another layer. It's like just peeking beyond the veil of this life to another idea.
Yeah. So, so what other applications? Are you working only with individuals, or are you bringing this to groups? How, how are you using this in, uh, in real-world applications, Katie?
Uh, I do a monthly program on Zoom called As the Zodiac Turns.
I love it.
I know, it's really fun. I talk about the— a little bit about the real astrology weather for astrology people who are following that kind of thing for the month ahead for the zodiac. We're in Scorpio now, for instance, and I give spiritual tools and suggestions for handling that weather. Mars is retrograde, there's a lot of anger going on.
Don't we know it.
Yeah, Mercury's retrograde. There's a lot of internal emotion going on. And after the first of the year, there's going to be a moving forward because all the planets have been bumping around like ricochet rabbit, construction destruction this year, are going to all start splitting up and moving forward. And they're going to stop bumping into each other like a bad pinball machine.
Well, I look forward to that. Yes.
As the zodiac turns would help, I have a tarot, a regular tarot monthly drop-in, and this month it's going to be at the Dream Fair, which, you know.
Oh, would you tell more?
The Dream Fair. Everyone listening at home, uh, you and I are co-producing the Dream Fair for the 3rd time on Saturday, November 14th. I'm not even sure if this will be Uh, shown before then, but it's a beautiful combination of wellness and psychic. We're benefiting mental health, how we can bring all these holistic ideas with our spirit, with our mind together to really help anyone and everyone who's listening.
I like it. Well, obviously, because we're— well, and, and I learn so much every time we produce one of these because the, the new— the vendors that come in provide a speaker series or even some sort of a class. And we— I get exposure to things I didn't even know existed. And it's the same thing, you know, being with you guys on this show. I hear more stories that you think that one awakening story is similar to the next, and they're all different. They're all different and amazing.
Yeah.
And everybody who goes through this wants to bring service, and that's where the Dream Fair comes into play. It allows all of us to come together, wrap our arms around each other, and say, we are a community that wants to be in service. Let us show you what we've been through and how it can help you.
Exactly.
Yeah, it's very, very cool. So, um, yeah, I'm debating the date on when we can get this show out because that would be fortuitous and timely to get it out for this, this Sunday. So maybe, maybe that's what I'll do since I'm producing this myself and I can make decisions.
So, love that.
Yeah, yeah, done. Um, so as people are listening to you and they want to get in contact with you, they've got the As the Zodiac Turns monthly meeting, and of course there's the Dream Fair at dreamfairla.com. How else can they reach you and connect with you?
The best way is to send me an email to spiritplays@gmail.com, S-P-I-R-I-T-P-L-A-Y-S, and I will answer. I'm offering a half hour as an introduction to how I do spiritual coaching with astrology for anyone who chooses and listens to the sound of Eva's beautiful voice.
Why, thank you. That was Very generous. I appreciate that. And, um, I will put that information on our show notes page. So if you're driving and can't click on anything right now or write it down, just, you know, I'll have that in, in the show page. So final question, Katie, you know it's coming. What do you feel is the most important thing to remember when searching for answers?
When you're searching for answers, just keep on searching till one feels right, till one really makes sense. And then try it out and get another opinion and find somebody who has a story about trying the same thing. Listen to that story. It you know there's a faith in ourselves that is inviolate, and it will work for us. And if it doesn't, we'll try it again in the next life. But it is it is this that is what worked for me. My story was when that gentleman said you have a genetic inability to digest certain foods. I went, oh, and then that brought me on this healing journey, and I feel so much better than I ever did back then. Thank you very much.
Wonderful. Yeah, it really— it's, it's about being your own advocate, listening to yourself, and learning how to communicate with your body.
Exactly. And you did the same thing. I know.
Yeah, I did for a very long time, and I'm glad that's That's behind me. So it's the strength now. Like you said, it went from being a blockade to being the strength.
Exactly.
Yeah. Beautiful work. Well, thank you so much for being on the show and joining the conversation, Katie.
Thank you very much for asking me. It's been a pleasure being here.
Good. Excellent. And thank you all for listening to this episode of When Doctors Say We Don't Know with Katie Kay. This has been yet another engaging conversation. And my goal for those of you listening will hear a message of hope so you too can turn your experience of pain into triumph. If you are driving or simply can't click on the links to the show notes today, remember you can always hop onto theelevateinstitute.com and follow the podcast links for today's show. There's always more to talk about. Tune in next week for another new episode of When Doctors Say We Don't Know. This is Eva Vennari reminding you to question everything.
Mm-hmm.
