integration and healing services

counseling and healing services include:

• pranic psychotherapy
• pranic healing
• shirodhara
• hypnosis / trance work
• neuro-linguistic programming / nlp
  
• healthy boundaries (inner world and outer world)
• supporting healthy self identity
• deprogramming, deconstructing, and rebuilding one's 'reality'
• rooting out negative patterns in the psyche
• emdr for ptsd
  
• trauma issues
• loss, grief, survivors guilt
  
• empowering people to detect false teachers and faulty teachings
• exiting-cults and religions
  
• spiritual abuse issues
• spiritual authority sex abuse issues (organized or alternative religions)
• healing all forbidden zone relationships (therapists/teachers/mentors/drs who abuse)
• education about alternative groups as well as warning signs of immature teachers
• critical thinking skills
• psychic self defense
• education on self healing techniques
• meditation (22 years experience)
• yoga
• spiritual counseling
• navigating crisis and difficult transitions
• issues that arise with preparing for Birth
• issues that arise with preparing for Death
• on rare occasions I am available for rite of passage ceremonies for both birth and death

Sessions are done in-person. Other arragements can be made for people living in other locations. I am available for couples counseling and group therapy where more then one perspective needs to be understood in order to reach harmony, restoration, and balance.

some background.....

In counseling sessions I draw upon 22 years of personal experience navigating my way through the eastern subculture. Often times its called "walking a spiritual path". But in retrospect I see I was simply navigating my way through a culture. I say that because the fact that we are human beings... is the spiritual path! However, after an awakening experience I embarked out into the world at 14years old in search for enlightenment and the truth. I think everybody's basic goodness seeks to know the answers to these root desires of a human life...to know oneself at the deepest level....to remove all delusion....to stare reality in its face....to know "god"...and to be in union with "god". I, too, along with millions of others sought to find the answers to this basic desire.

Well, anyone with a sense of humor and an ounce of insight can image all the experiences a young person goes through in this quest. Since leaving home at 14 to start my adult life I have received quite a schooling by life over the years. "Retrospect" can be a tricky thing. There are so many ways to look back on prior life events. So many different perspectives that can be true for oneself. I find there is a balance to be walked between knowing I suffered on many levels of life and knowing I have been deeply blessed not only by some of the most sublime saints of our time but by reality/life, herself. It's honestly only through the reflection of others that I have begun to understand how unusual my life has been. I have simply lived it, and in doing that, there hasn't been a desire to compare my life with what is considered "normal" for other people. Being close to the earth seems normal to me. Knowing oneself deeply is normal. Being in connection to nature as a living entity and indeed my own self , seems normal to me. Yah, I missed out on pop culture! This is true!

Over these past few years, and perhaps through the simple act of aging, I have begun to understand the vast level of experience I have received in life. To put that in proper perspective, equally, I had to look deeply into others inexperience with consciousness or "reality". This discerning took some comparing and evaluating. For most of my life I have assumed people were operating at higher levels of consciousness, basically. I am not sure how else to say it other then that. In my naivety I walked through life assuming people were far more advanced then they are. I always saw the good in people. I always saw the light. I could always see where people were lying to themselves and would often vocalize this! It never outweighed their basic goodness in my eyes.

Obviously, this caused me undue suffering, as the mere fact the light is there inside someone does not mean they wish to feed and grow that light! I also did not concern myself too much with that other people were doing, per se. I think this protected me as well. I assumed people walked-their-talk and I understood people were learning. Therefore people need to be forgiven often in life. I had a long lesson that repeated itself of overestimating people. I had a long road of learning about the darker realities in life. Even though I experienced tremendous abuse and oppression since childhood, I was greatly unaffected or polluted by it spiritually speaking. Of course on the personality level and in the egoic realms I had alot of housing cleaning to do and did it with fury. I always felt the protection of Mother Earth in the face of what I endured. Her direct presence has never left me. How could it leave anyone in reality? But there is the ocean of suffering that can easily drown even the best of us...and often does. I had to work very hard to understand the depth of darkness that is alive on this planet. Everything endured gave me the chance to really understand what it is to be fully human...rather then this solely light-filled reality that I was sooooo sure was possible for everyone! Looking back I see this view as arrogance as well as innocence.

I have gained a deepened understanding about how Energy operates. Since everything IS energy...you can insert whatever word you understand most: mind, consciousness, humanity, blah blah blah. I am calling it...."how energy operates". Let me back up, actually....probably one of the most interesting discoveries I have made in these past years is how multi-perspectives are functioning in an unbroken stream of consciousness as "oneself" all the time. This is often happening in people while they might only be conscious of a few realities alive within the internal world. Meaning when people say and do things as their "self" this is not a solid and stationary reality. There are many aspects to oneself. The ground of "self" is infinitely vast. In fact the ground of oneself IS mother earth, herself. However people are primarily using "self/me/mine/I" as a illusionary reference point that people habitually recreate in order to gain a sense of safety from pain or dis-pleasure. When people reference themselves they are mainly speaking from habitual patterning. Such as operating from ego, conscious mind, unconscious mind (which is great! there is no problem with ego! ego is an organic flowering of humanity. I am in no way anti-ego. in fact that is very very dangerous to be anti-ego for too many reasons to list right now.) In addition to these wonderful aspects of ego and mind there is also; heart, spirit, astral body, dream body to name a few.....these realities are all alive within us whether we are aware of them or not. There is an ebb and flow of information always happening within us on all of these levels of reality. Sound bizarre? Please do not believe me!! Get on the meditation cushion (or in the sweatlodge, in the float tank, on the vision quest ridge or however you prefer to do journeying) and explore it for yourself. Your own direct experience and your own blood sweat and tears walking a spiritual path is the only thing anyone should ever trust. Every thing else is adopted belief.... therefore: Bullshit and Useless to oneself. I am sharing this information and pointing to it....as it is worthy of checking out for yourself. very worthy!

I have tried to see my life from a "western point of view" and I have to say I am not too found of that view of reality. I tried it on, so to speak, to see if there was some substance there that I lacked. I suppose there are many things I missed out on in the culture. I understand the reflections I get about my "unusual" life from people who have been deeply steeped in western culture. However, unlike western culture I listened to a call inside myself from a very young age. I was curious about something much more raw and close to the bone of reality then what was being offered to me in the western world of family, society, schooling, ect. My first memories in life are of spiritual questioning and self examination, starting from three years old and it never stopped. I never shut it down and it would of been impossible to shut it down, actually. Even the most asleep and numbed out person is not outside the realm of reality they are simply in a state of forgetting. And that forgetting is only happening on a few levels. In truth everyone is fully and totally "awake". ( Which "awake" is a word makes me want to puke as we get closer to 2012. It is so misused and misunderstood. Western culture is using it to sell dog food as spiritual nourishment.)

Enlightenment is an evolutionary process of removing veiled realities within oneself. Those realities do not appear out of thin air! There is not some stagnant state (or finish-line) that is "enlightened". There is NO "spiritual grammy award" called enlightenment that you get after your finest meditation! Its true there are markers along the way. There are levels or stages of knowing. There are moments of extreme bliss states to be discovered by oneself. These states can last months....I was in a state of samadhi for 6 weeks straight once. It doesn't mean anything in reality. Or at least it is not worth slowing down to rubber neck the crash on the side of the road! following me? There are stages...but its worth ZERO if it does not connect you to being a more fully incarnate ordinary human being. The most spiritual expression of enlightenment is being a True Human Being. Being fully human is to be fully awake. To be fully enlightened means you are profoundly grounded and rooted to Mother Earth. When this is done you see she is yourself and further more that the entire universe is also your own body. literally....and experientially. To conceptualize these statements is a pit of snakes I advise you stay away from. It has to be heard and investigated for oneself.

So back to my background....I did not study spirituality from a book. I studied it directly through experience and through traditional lessons / transmissions from teacher to the student. I learned through the thousands of years old oracle tradition. I had many teachers and I was in many traditional mystery schools. I simply sought to penetrate reality and know the underpinnings of not only my own mind but of consciousness itself. I sought enlightenment as if my life depended on it. I sought it without joke or bluff. I sought it without cowardly hesitation. I sought it as a warrior ready to die for what mattered. I did it like that...for decades. I shut my mouth and did the hard work that is required in practice, deconstruction, and self investigation. Having said all that....I was also very lucky. I was blessed, welcomed, noticed, and sought out by many spiritual masters. I am humbly forever grateful for such attention. To even type this brings tears to my eyes and makes my heart feel like its is exploding. I was also sought out by very dark forces. People who masked themselves as "spiritual teachers" who were in fact psychic vampires who desired to violently suck energy out of me. Such is life! :) We have to take the good with the bad...learn as much as we can.....and move on a quickly as humanly possible in our evolution.

So in closing...twenty plus years of walking a spiritual path.... I don't see a whole lot of loss for what was gained! I look around this western world and I see a world of people out of balance. I see a world of people who are having a very serious time grappling with the simple basics of who we are as human beings let alone our deeper purpose and meaning in life. There are plenty of beautiful sovereign individuals who are dissenting within the numbed out masses of the west...but I have always SEEN that! That has not been my growing edge. What I am seeing now....is alot of misunderstanding about what it is to be a human being. About reality, life, consciousness and enlightenment. About suffering and the misidentification that suffers. I am seeing alot of ignorance and deception. It really doesn't have to be like that. Life can be good and whole. But in order to reach that understanding...one has to understand what is happening on this planet and the forces at work here. There is a force alive on this planet that is causing all of the dis-ease. It is an elite force and the enemy must be known to oneself. otherwise its a lot of psychological masterbation.

Within the eastern subculture I have been lucky enough to be in the company of many truly incredible teachers, saints, and sages....as well as encountering many frauds along the way. Life gave me an insight into the darker realms of the subculture and the "guru hustle". It is amazing what some human beings are willing to do to other human beings in order to not have to truly work for their money! I witnessed the horrors of human exploitation that wears the mask of Spiritual Authority. My experience has given me a deep understanding of spiritual realities as well as the power of the human mind.

I have had years of training in yoga, meditation, hypnosis, trance, archetypes, storytelling/metaphor, counseling, pranic psychotherapy and pranic healing. These are a few skill sets I work with in session depending on what result is sought by my clients. I reeducated myself in the past 3 years of many of the modalities I had been trained in years prior. This reeducating of myself allowed me to see each of the tools with fresh insight. It was personally very healing and quite enlightening to revisit many of the skill sets. It enabled me to reclaim tools of therapy and to know the difference between proper use and mis-use of the skills. Truly embodying the understanding that any tool can be a weapon depending on whose hand it is in. I was able to see into the real source of each body of work and to engage each body of work the way it was truly intended.

I have integrated an understanding about how doctrines, religions, and "spirituality" effects peoples sense of identity and therefore effects our entire perception of reality. My passion in therapy is in helping people remove unhealthy doctrines and subtle thought patterns that are holding them back from living a fully integrated happy human life. What I would of once called enlightenment I now see is basic common sense. perhaps its simple evolution...but if it were only that...why on earth is there still so much mystery making in the spiritual arena and why aren't more people evolving ? It is my desire that my work with people facilitates their continued evolution and normalizes spiritual experiences as a common-place natural event.

please feel free to contact me anytime.

so@saraholiver.org