Katia Pérez Fuentes, The Energy Worker – The People Issue 2024

Creative facilitator, astrologer, hypnotist, and interdisciplinary artist Katia Pérez Fuentes, 29, is originally from New Mexico via Chihuahua, Mexico. They moved to Chicago ten years ago to get a BFA in studio arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and have since worked as an arts worker for citywide museums and art spaces. Five years ago, they became a full-time traditional astrologer and certified hypnotist, having studied with Mychal A. Bryan at the Oraculos School of Astrology, Los Angeles–based curandera Erika Buenaflor, and the Divine Feminine School of Hypnosis’s Shauna Cummins. They continue to facilitate art activities and especially enjoy working with public artworks in and around Pilsen, encouraging their community to “just pause everything else and exist and make and experience some kind of curiosity, play, joy, celebration.”

I grew up in a very immigrant neighborhood, a very low-income neighborhood in New Mexico. Up until this point, I’m the first of anyone in my family to enter the arts world, and to do the work that I do is such a privilege and such an honor. To be working with visual artists, literary artists, and also now like this magical-mystical—the mystical arts part of it—on a professional level is such a gift.

I’m a first-generation migrant, first-generation college student. I hold the highest level of education in my family. I am the first everything, basically. 

I came to Chicago just because someone said I couldn’t, and I set out to prove them wrong. It’s a very challenging story. And maybe I’m like, “It doesn’t really matter to share that! I don’t resonate with that narrative anymore.” But I had such audacity when I was younger. And I had a lot of anger. I also was in a lot of pain consistently—chronic pain. 

And this is where the trauma narrative of, like, “Oh, I don’t have to keep repeating or convincing people that what I experienced wasn’t good or healthy”—this is where I’m cautious with my words. But, there was a lot of trauma in my family. There was a lot of disconnection, a lot of repair.

So that’s one of the things that I’m ultimately always out to heal—the familial holes, the generational traumas, the disconnection from my family and our more cultural practices, the imposter syndrome with claiming any kind of more folk healing. Because I know that’s there, but it’s very different when you don’t have someone who’s a direct mentor in your family who is teaching you things, when you’re kind of on your own and you’re just like, “I know this!” 

Self-development ended up looking like these other things that have always interested me, which was astrology, hypnosis. It was the thing that I was doing on the side to keep myself kind of sane. Because when you work in the arts and you make cultural projects for a living—you make murals, you teach classes, you make art for different projects—what does your hobby become? What do you do when you’re like, “I need to do something different”? 

Hypnosis was a tool I constantly used, but it was imperfect. It didn’t have everything that I necessarily wanted it to have. To be totally candid with you, I’d spend my day doing DEIA [diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility] and anti-racism advocacy, and I couldn’t at the time find any hypnotists that also aligned with my values that are always trying to go the route that supports Black and Brown and queer creatives. 

I waited; I searched for the right teacher and eventually found them. Actually, my first astrology teacher [was Mychal A. Bryan]. I met him at the Queer Astrology Conference and would later have more than 500 hours of live instruction with him. I ended up going with him because he was also a trained hypnotherapist. I was like, “Oh cool, then I can get a feel for the hypnosis and also the astrology and also the tarot, the I Ching [Chinese book on divination]”—this person did it all. 

And then eventually from there, I was able to find two other mentors: one [Erika Buenaflor] that does more traditional curanderismo—healing rites from a Mesoamerican perspective—[and] specializes in folk healing and soul retrieval, although she refers to the practice as shamanic journeying; and then a certified hypnotist [Shauna Cummins] who practices in New York. She teaches from a divinely feminine approach while integrating principles from the lineage of Melissa Tiers’s neuroscience-driven hypnosis. And so I had these varying perspectives—one from my exact cultural background, a reconnecting Indigenous Brown person, Chicana, you know. And then I have a white lady in New York working from a science-based perspective. 

At the same time that I was learning both of these, I was like, “There’s a lot of similarities, we’re just using different words.” And one is leaning more on the folk traditions and just that kind of trust, that communal trust. And the other one is maybe leaning a little bit less on the folky stuff. They’re both very science-based. I don’t want to say that [one] is more science-y, because they’re both equally wonderful teachers. It was just different words that they were using. My curandera teacher has never used hypnosis. But in that class, I was like, “Oh, I’m doing the same kind of energetic and neural pathway rewiring in both of these courses.” What I’m inherently doing is this energy work. 

They’re a really wonderful pairing. It’s really helped me, which is why I offer the combination of both of those practices in my sessions with people. Because I don’t think I would have gotten to this point if I had just stuck to one or the other. I think it was doing it in tandem that really helped me. 

I can tailor my facilitation with hypnosis to your chart, specifically. The astrology aspect of it is like an access point that helps me—helps us—go deeper, farther, faster together than if we were just doing hypnosis and had to build that trust from like, I don’t know you; you definitely don’t know me. But when I see that, oftentimes two things happen in these sessions: one is I get to see the person and understand them and see how these patterns play out just before they even walk in the room. I already kind of know where some of the difficulties are or where some of the blessings and the strengths lie that we can lean on, right? And then the other thing that happens is when I can prove to them that I can see them or understand them, there’s more trust that’s immediately built between the client and the facilitator. 

I have seen people that are also kind of skeptical, and I’m like, “That’s totally fine!” I’m just going to read you just as I’m gonna read every single other person. If you have any questions, we’ll address them along the way. We usually do, after a while. I just think it’s really nice to have undivided attention and support from someone for one to two hours at a time. That’s such a gift. Think about where else we get that kind of undivided time and attention. So people really open up during those sessions.

This is one thing that’s part of a larger ecosystem that enhances the quality of our life. And that for me has been the biggest thing. I see everything that I do as interconnected because when I was struggling to go through college and make it, I found that it was very difficult to just make art and create things because I was so exhausted. I felt that I had to fight my way through certain things, and if it wasn’t me fighting through things, then it was other people in my community that I cared about fighting for their rights or their certain issues. It was this constant kind of advocacy. There are so many unspoken privileges between who makes it in the art world—who has time, energy, resources to just make art and be like, “Oh yes, I’m just gonna explore this theory or this practice or this lifestyle.”

I found that my saving grace was understanding that leisure was the ultimate use of our time. And “leisure” as defined by things that enrich the quality of your life, and that was defined as anything that was celebratory. Doing this because we want to do this. Anything that is celebratory, anything that advances your learning, anything that is playful.

And there’s also worship, which, I omitted that word because at the time it didn’t resonate with me. So I focus more on the celebratory, but anything that got you close to God, essentially. That was what was considered leisure. A waste of your time is idle time. And then time that you sold to other people, that was work time: “I’m only doing this because I’m trading my energy and time for money.” And that was this concept that shifted in my mind: my entire time every day has been given to someone else. I don’t actually own any of my time. 

I see that in my family. They don’t own any of their time. And this is so sad to me. So from my earlier framework, I really tried to find and do things that would give me time autonomy and bring a sense of pleasure and maybe ease, that really enhanced the quality of my life. 

Looking back on it, I would see these major, very specific transits or forecasts in the sky. And I’m like, wow, that’s exactly what this would have panned out to be. I don’t know if I’m making sense, but basically, I can tell you why I’m in Chicago astrologically, and it makes so much sense—that I was going to be pulled to somewhere along this region. And that wasn’t running through my mind when I was 18. It just happened. So now, looking back and seeing how everything lined up, and learning to look forward, and trying to anticipate major moves, major changes, I’ve started working with other people. And it just keeps lining up, so it’s a system that I really prescribe to. I really believe in it, and I’m very honored to be able to share this with other people.

This was originally published in the 2024 edition of our People Issue, the Reader’s annual special of first-person stories, as told by your neighbors, classmates, and the weirdo at the end of the bar.