This is me now, but in my old life, I was a compulsive, irritable, depressed, judgmental person with a really poor body image, and I couldn’t stand myself or my life.
Hi, I’m Sara, and I help anxious, stressed, overwhelmed and emotionally exhausted people reconnect with their authentic selves so they can get control of their lives.
Every morning
I’d hit snooze a bunch of times, wake up feeling groggy and already defeated, and drag myself into work - usually arriving late.
I was in a completely wrong fit career, as I now know I am a creative healer but at that time, I was sitting at a desk selling car loans over the phone all day.
At least people liked me, because I was giving them money to buy cars! I was climbing the corporate ladder like a good worker, from administrative assistant to team leader. Then I changed departments to advance my career further, like I was “supposed to” despite having little interest in it, and I was auditing internal departments. No one liked me anymore…
At lunchtime,
I’d eat my Lean Cuisine at my desk, or go out to a restaurant with co-workers and gossip about everyone else.
After work,
I’d head down to the company gym for my daily punishment (okay I do like the gym, but that wasn’t what that was about),
and then,
I was off to “my” bar for “happy hour” to try to escape the emotional exhaustion of trying to live a life that brought me zero joy.
I spent most of my time avoiding myself and trying to drown my overwhelmed feelings in doing all the “right” things (hello perfectionism?) because I didn't know what was wrong with me or my life, or how to fix it. And to be quite honest, I didn’t really have the energy or motivation anyway!
One day I was sitting at the bar after work and I had one of those lightbulb moments that this could not possibly be all there was to life.
We weren’t designed to just sit in our desk chair then sit on the bar stool, to feel unhappy and unfulfilled.
If that was all life was, then I didn’t want to have any part of it!
But I had a thought that there might be more. So I decided to try to find it.
And try to find it, I did. Some might call this a “dark night of the soul” but for me, even though I was on a long mission, it felt like hope.
I tried so many things, each with varying success. Maybe you’ve tried some of these too on your journey?
SUPPORT GROUPS
One thought I had was that my drinking was keeping me stuck in a cycle of avoidance of myself and my feelings.
I didn’t know what else I would do with my time if I didn’t drink. I didn’t know how I would be able to cope with my feelings if I didn’t drink.
So I explored quitting drinking, and found a support group called Women for Sobriety (WFS).
This group was hugely helpful to me, I made lifelong friends and learned how to live without alcohol. This is also where I started learning more about myself.
Support groups, though, are full of people, and drama is inevitable. Not the long term solution.
*Here I want to note that while for me, I found that living entirely alcohol free was the best solution, I don’t push that on to my clients. I am comfortable talking about alcohol use and exploring that with you if you want, but that would be your choice if you feel it is a part of your path and your journey.
SELF HELP BOOKS
I love to read so self help books were a natural stop for me, and I consumed them like air. At a certain point in time, I think I had read every self help book on the market. Literally. Feeling Good, by Dr. David Burns, The Secret by Rhonda Byrne, The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz, You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay, books by Iyanla Vansant, Pema Chodron… the list goes on.
Self help books have helpful information, tips and practices, but they only ever touch on one piece of the puzzle.
And, they only help if you actually implement them. Just reading them all won’t really do anything.
GETTING ORGANIZED!
I tried organizing my life with planners and apps. I had the Panda Planner, the Passion Planner, Franklin Covey, I tried bullet journaling… I really do love a planner.
Buuut they took so much time to set up, then it was hard to get in the habit of taking it with me or remembering to use it, plus my calendar was on my phone which meant things were in more than one place… I was already overwhelmed!
This just made it worse.
There was:
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Therapy
For me, it was hard to find a therapist that was a good fit and didn’t use a cookie-cutter approach (can we tell I don’t like that already?). And once I did find a good one, it was expensive when not covered by insurance.
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Massage and Acupuncture
Holistic therapies were helpful in relieving anxiety and pain and tension but the effects tend to wear off, and again, treatments could be expensive.
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Meditation and Mindfullness
Great tools for sure, and very helpful. When you can find the time… and you end up feeling even worse when you don’t follow through!
And then came energy healing.
To back this story up a little bit, during what turned out to be the last gasp of my corporate job life, I was studying to sit for the CPA (Certified Public Accountant) licensing exam. For those who are unfamiliar, this is a massive four part exam, and achieving the designation of CPA also has significant education and experience requirements. When people would find out that I was sitting for the exam, they’d ask me what I was going to do with my career when I got my license. I would always reply “I’m going to massage school!” to be funny, because it was the most 180 answer I could think of.
You know how you hear about manifestation, and how you can speak something into becoming truth?
Yeah. Well, I got my CPA license and then went to massage school.
A year later, I entered the wellness industry as a massage therapist. I heard that being able to do Reiki would make me more marketable. I had no experience with energy healing, I was just trying to expand my options to make money. So I initially found Reiki in 2010, as a practitioner.
My first Reiki class was life changing. Here I was, a (former) CPA, and my Reiki classmates were both blatantly psychic as hell. I thought it would never work, I would never be able to do it. And then I got my attunement and my world was blown open. I always wanted to be able to do magic! Not tricks, but healing magic. And now, I could!
The experience of my first attunement is still as fresh in my mind today as it was when I got it. After that, I got attuned to different levels and types of Reiki, as well as other types of energy and energetic modalities.
As a recipient of energy healing, my life was really changed with my first introduction to Starlight Energies. Starlight Energies are a powerful vibration from the seventh dimension. They originate from the core of Mother Earth as well as from the galaxy. They can help release old stuck memories and limiting beliefs about our self-worth stemming from this lifetime and often ones deeply rooted from past lifetimes.
Starlight Energy really had profound effects for me, creating clearing and large shifts in my life. I became much more aligned with my true purpose at that time in my life.
I opened my own massage therapy private practice. I came out as queer. However, I wasn’t receiving a lot of guidance along with the energy healing. It was still like I was in the self help world. And while blocks were releasing, and things were clearing, I was still stumbling along in a lot of ways.
Finally, I started working more closely with my Starlight Energy practitioner/teacher and ended up getting attuned to that vibration, as well as working with him as a coach at the same time. The combination of energy healing and coaching is what really helped me start to make huge progress on my healing path. I finished working with him and am now studying with a different teacher, Michelle Garber, through the Sacred Flame Wisdom School. With her, I am studying and experiencing practices and tools from the triple wisdom lineages of the Jaguar medicine of the Andes (shamanism), Vedic Tantra and the Sakya lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, in a unique and blended way. She also uses coaching and energy healing together in our one on one sessions.
All the things I tried before helped me in their way, on my journey. But the combination of these two techniques has helped me walk into some of my most significant and sustained growth, so much faster than either one alone. It has really unlocked the real shift into my authentic self, and continues to help me grow and follow my path in a focused way.
Through trying all of these different methods, I learned that finding order and balance in your life is reliant upon having a grounded sense of self and care for self.
Feeling resistance and dread around getting up in the morning and going through the motions every day was a symptom of my disconnection with my self. I did not know who I was, what I wanted, even what was available to me. Starting to take care of myself mentally, emotionally, spiritually and physically was life changing.
I found that the importance of self awareness and making yourself a priority, particularly in the management of your emotional states, cannot be overstated. Learning to access my emotions was a struggle, I won’t lie. To this day I have trouble putting names to them all, but I learned to let myself feel.
Because having emotions is not a bad thing! On the contrary, we came here to live a human life. Having myriad emotions is part of the human experience. Emotions are great messengers. Even when they feel uncomfortable. They are telling us about who we are and what we believe about things.
I discovered the importance of self love, and what these days is called “mindset” but really is how you talk to yourself inside your head and how that changes your attitude in your outer life, and therefore your experience.
Being perfect is not required, and is not possible.
Perfectionism is a way of trying to manage others’ perceptions of us, and what other people think of me - whether I’m in the loan department making people happy by giving out money, or in the auditing department striking fear in peoples’ hearts when I show up, or in any other circumstance - doesn’t have any bearing on my value or worth as a person.
I also came to realize the number one overarching point of all, which is:
it is vitally important to be able to listen to yourself and find your own path
rather than being bound to the one that is dictated by society or your family, or any of the other voices inside your head that are telling you who you should be or what you should do.
The should-y inner voices and the lack of self love, self care, and self awareness are old programming, created early in our lives from witnessing our caretakers’ or society’s responses to us, or through trauma, or even carried through from our ancestral line.
Learning to differentiate these thoughts, and identify your authentic desires apart from them is the real work.
And it is our job to release that old programming, and find wholeness, clarity and peace.
Now, I follow my heart and my intuition, and live a life that is in alignment with what is right for me.
I no longer hate waking up in the morning! I love to sleep - but I am peppy in the morning. I don’t even need caffeine! It’s probably annoying!
Instead of working in a financial institution at a 9-5 M-F, I changed careers into a job that I absolutely loved, doing massage therapy, and started taking energy healing classes. I worked at wellness centers, spas, and eventually opened my own private practice doing massage and energy work. I followed my heart to Pennsylvania and opened another massage practice. Then, I was able to realize it was time to shift into a new part of my path. I got certified as a health and life coach, and through my own experience of receiving coaching and energy healing in combination I have decided to develop my own program.
Being able to share my experience and my healing gifts in this combination allows me to help people like you find a way out of overwhelm, to a life of freedom to do what you actually want to do.
To help you learn how to connect with or re-connect with your own inner self to know what is really important to you.
To guide you in finding self love, and ways to prioritize yourself and your self care.
To support you in taking control of your life so that you are able to reach your own goals AND take care of your responsibilities.
Another thing the shift into knowing my authentic self has really made a difference for me with is that I am able to reliably protect myself from getting stuck in an emotionally exhausted state. I know myself better, I know my triggers better. Do you see yourself here?
When someone treats me like I’m stupid, I used to get SO ANGRY and stew on it in my mind for hours and days. Now, I can just let it slide off much more easily.
I would watch and read too much news, in the name of anxiety and needing to know what was happening in the world. I would pick up and internalize so much of the fear and hopelessness. Now I have one source where I get a summary of the news, once a day.
When I am endlessly aimlessly scrolling social media or compulsively binge watching shows, I now know that this is a sign that I need to do some insight and see what need I have that isn’t being met or what I might be trying to avoid.
I used to tend to take on too much, in part as a people pleaser, and in part because everything is interesting to me. Now, I can see it coming when I am about to overload and overwhelm myself, and put the brakes on.
Now, I know how to soothe myself and WHEN to soothe myself. I am able to accept myself in all emotional states and care for myself fully. I love and respect myself.
And I can help you reach the same place.
I’m still a work in progress. I actually think we all are, forever, because we are all changing beings in a changing world. We have many layers and much healing to do. If my story has resonated with you and you would like to explore what working together would look like, schedule a free introductory call!
And now for some FUN facts that aren’t about my healing and professional journey!
F-R-I-E-N-D-S
I probably know more Friends trivia than anyone on the planet. I’m mostly quirky Phoebe with a dash of Monica’s organization and a splash of Chandler’s sense of humor.
LGBTQ
I am a late-blooming queer and non-binary person (I use both they and she pronouns), and I welcome all individuals of any race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, gender expression, size, disability, and national origin to my practice.
My favorite
My ten year old nephew is my favorite person. I am the absolute laughably worst at video games and yet, he still tries to get me to play with him.
In my spare time
When I’m not working, I love to read all kinds of books, learn all kinds of things, color, and draw Zentangle. I also love playing with crystals. There’s no place in my living space where I’m more than 5 feet away from a crystal.
I love cats!
I live with two cats, a big orange chonk named Charlie and a svelte snooty gray diva named Phoebe. I call them Charles and Fee-fee (who knows which episode of Friends that’s from?)
Qualifications
I am a certified life and health coach through the Health Coach Institute, Starlight Energy practitioner, Usui Reiki Master, Healer Priestess in the Sacred Wisdom lineage, and I have too many other energy attunements to count.