Biography

Sara is an integral educator, depth psychotherapist, and ritual guide who harnesses the teachings of the nonhuman world to support emancipation from destructive patterns conditioned by dominant culture. Sara joined the faculty of the East-West Psychology department in 2021, with current and future courses including: Spiritual Counseling I and II, Research Methods I, Rage Against the Machine: De-Coupling from Internalized Techno-Industrial Capitalism, and Ecopsychology and Ecotherapy. Sara received her bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from Harvard in 2002, and her M.A. and Ph.D. from California Institute of Integral Studies, in Integral Counseling Psychology and East-West Psychology, respectively. From 2015-2017, Sara served as senior fellow of the Center for Writing and Scholarship at CIIS, where she offered seminars on both the traditional and psychospiritual dimensions of academic writing to the entire CIIS community. In Sara’s clinical and academic practice, she weaves together ecopsychology, psychoanalysis, Jungian and archetypal psychology, somatics, posthumanism, re-wilding, and Buddhist-informed transpersonal psychology. Sara's recent research has explored how collective trauma and resulting unconscious defenses perpetuate alienation from nature and animals. In her recently published article, Activist as symptom: Healing trauma in a ruptured collective, Sara explores the reciprocal suffering – and healing – of humans and nonhumans through the lenses of activists involved in open rescue. Sara’s research and pedagogy are hopelessly steeped in her longtime practice of Zen Buddhism, and she is committed to mindful, experiential, and multi-modal learning.