Hi, I’m Sara Taylor, PhD.
Generational patterns shaped my life long before I knew what they were.
I grew up surrounded by mental illness, heartbreak, and unresolved grief—challenges that splintered my family.
Combined with my own intense encounters with death and madness during my young adulthood, I decided to seek answers through science.
But after years of studying stress and mental health, I realized that knowledge alone wasn’t enough. I was dissatisfied and questioning everything.
That’s when I knew I had to go deeper—not just into research, but into myself.
Coping through intellect & Avoiding connection
When I first started thinking about a career, I knew I was split between creative writing and psychology. Mental illness had splintered my family many times over, and I wanted to understand it—not just for others, but for myself. Several intense encounters with death and madness during my young adulthood shaped my decision to ultimately go into psychology.
What I also knew, without a doubt, was that I didn’t want to be like the therapist I saw in high school. He was completely out of touch—a flat-affect, middle-aged man who responded to the 1% of my difficulty that I dared to share with a few empty Bible verses. Less than helpful.
But really, I didn’t want to deal with people. I didn’t want to relate—not up close and personal. So I chose psychobiology for my bachelor’s degree and behavioral neuroscience for my PhD. I could study the mind from the safety of the lab. It seemed like the perfect solution
The Science of Stress and Mental Health
I worked in several research labs, all connected to mental health and addiction. Some of the most impactful experiences included studying:
- Childhood bipolar disorder
- Pharmacological and alternative treatments for ADHD
- Prenatal stress as a risk factor for schizophrenia
- The interaction of genes and adolescent chronic stress on anxiety and depressive behaviors
- The impact of chronic stress on addiction-related neuroplasticity and behaviors
Eventually, I opened my own lab and focused on individual differences and more relevant ways to study stress-related outcomes. I initially loved the research—digging into how chronic stress shaped behavior, hormones, and the brain felt deeply important.
But no matter how much I dug in, I always hit a wall.
The scientific process was necessarily slow and hyper-focused on micro-level details.
The literature was often contradictory or irrelevant to real human experiences. Treatments were research-driven but disconnected from what people actually needed.
I felt confined and disconnected.
Oddly enough, it was the relating part of my job as an assistant professor—the very thing I had avoided—that began to pull me in a new direction.
Connecting with students who were drowning in oversized expectations (their own, their parents’, and the college’s) during office hours and teaching showed me how much more there was beyond just knowledge.
I found myself advising them, listening, and applying everything I knew in ways that felt meaningful.
A New Direction: Relating, Connecting, and Understanding
At the same time, I was navigating severe perinatal anxiety, then a baby who never slept, and my father’s untimely death. THe anxeity wasn’t just about the challenges of motherhood—it was tied to a generational pattern between mothers, children, and death. I felt trapped in something much larger than myself, which forced me to confront patterns and questions I didn’t know I was carrying.
It was a perfect storm for an existential “crisis”.
Ultimately, I knew I needed something beyond data. I needed to connect—not just with others, but with myself.
I was at a dead end, and no amount of pivoting within academia was going to remove that wall.
It was a wall I had chosen, but I’d chosen it out of fear—fear of relating to others, fear of knowing, and being known.
So I left.
Since then, my path has been one of continually stepping beyond that fear—into connection, complexity, and meaning.
Now, I help others do the same by working with the very patterns, fears, and walls that keep them stuck, disconnected, or afraid to move forward.
Relevant Training
To complement my 15 years of teaching and research in the neuroscience of stress and mental health, I’ve completed advanced trainings in generational trauma resolution, somatic healing and systemic healing. Together these trainings and how I use them allows mt to help people uncover hidden generational and existential patterns, transform emotional challenges and expand into lives filled with more meaning, satisfaction and ease.
My most relevant trainings include:
- Family Systems Constellations Foundations Training (Andrea Bosbach Largent; founder Bert Hellinger): Understanding and shifting generational trauma patterns with systemic phenomenology.
- GenoChart™ Multi-Generational Trauma Release Certification (Andrea Bosbach Largent): Certified in mapping and releasing multigenerational trauma using psychogenealogy.
- Compassionate Spirit Release & Curse Unraveling (Andrea Bosbach Largent & Gayle Revels): Advanced shamanic techniques for generational healing.
- Complex Trauma Training Levels 1 & 2 (Janina Fisher): Working with trauma using nervous system and parts-based approaches.
- Treating Complex Trauma with Internal Family Systems (Frank Anderson): Using IFS for healing complex trauma by working with parts and the core Self.
- Wayfinder Life Coach Training (Martha Beck): Foundations of life coaching, the change cycle, and personal transformation.
- Integral Somatic Psychology, Module 1 + Developmental Trauma: Prenatal and Perinatal Stages (Raja Selvam): Somatic approaches to trauma integration through emotional embodiment, esp. of existential emotions.
- Dropping into Pre- and Perinatal Implicit Memory with Ease (Ray Castellino): Working with unconscious memories and nervous system imprints related to prenatal and birth experiences.
- Alchemical Alignment (Tele Dardin, Modules 1-3; founder Brigit Viksnins): A somatic approach to trauma resolution and embodiment, particularly effective for resolving freeze responses. Rooted in craniosacral therapy and somatic experiencing.
- Activate Your Inner Jaguar (Kimberly Ann Johnson): Focus on developing a healthy fight response and understanding nervous system regulation in women’s health.
- Somatic Self-Compassion (Kristy Arbon): Techniques for building emotional resilience and self-compassion through body-based awareness.
Why This Matters
This work isn’t about quick fixes or perfection—it’s about resilience, connection, and meaning.
It’s about becoming more capable of facing life’s challenges without falling apart. It’s about freeing yourself from inherited patterns and opening up space for what truly matters to you—whether that’s more ease, purpose, or simply a more satisfying life.
Engaging in this work as both a practitioner and participant has transformed how I relate to myself, others, and the world. Every training I’ve taken has required me to go through my own deep processes—unraveling inherited patterns, facing existential questions, and embracing complexity in ways I never imagined.
By doing this work, I’ve been able to:
- Navigate some of the hardest moments of my life without losing my sense of self or making decisions I regret.
- Free up energy that was unconsciously tied up in generational and personal struggles.
- Embrace my emotional complexity and creativity without fear.
- Find an unwavering sense of belonging and meaning, even when things are in flux or chaotic.
- Build the confidence to live life on my terms, with clarity and purpose.
This work has changed everything for me—and it can do the same for you.
Are we a good fit?
We might be a really good fit if several of the following are true.
- You generally have a logical or analytical mind or have worked in an analytical or logical background
- You value creativity and think that art is medicine, even if you don’t think you are a creator (yet?).
- You are actively involved in or interested in spiritual or somatic practices that connect you to your intuition
- You have a lot of books but rarely read them straight through.
- You can see that your parents were humans and that what they did/didn’t do had consequences for you, but you don’t blame them for every difficult thing in your life
- You aren’t afraid of the occasional exclamatory F-word
- You aren’t afraid of being triggered and tend to like intensity
- You think are somewhat neurodivergent, but probably haven’t sought a diagnosis
- You have done a lot of personal work already, from trauma therapy to mindfulness or yoga.
- You’re primary mental health symptoms throughout life have included anxiety and some depression but maybe not enough to be fully clinical depression.
- You already have a pretty good idea of what your work/profession is, even if it’s shifting.
take the first step
Shadowlands Consultation
Uncover insights into elusive barriers and ancestral experiences that hold you back, while reassessing your strategies and support to identify why you’re stuck and navigate a way forward.
Still here!?
Well, here are some additional unusual tidbits about me!
- I’m named after Bob Dylan’s ex-wife and the song he wrote for her: Sara. I’m basically named after a heartbreaking divorce.
- I met Bob Dylan’s son, Jakob Dylan, of the Wallflowers at a gas station when I was 16. I got his autograph and told him I was named after his mother, at which point he asked the awkward question of whether my parents knew her. Ummm. No just really big fans. LOL. He still put me on his personal guest list to get into his concert for free that night.
- In high school, one of my best friends and I performed choreographed dances to ABBA songs at parties. That was the beginning and end of my performing career.
- My favorite job other than my current one was shoveling manure on a horse farm.
- I once accidentally ate a “special” brownie in graduate school and spent the rest of night using my knowledge of psychopharmacology to talk myself down from going to the ER over the crazy head pain I ended up with.
- I once tried to lead a “chocolate” mindfulness meditation in my behavioral endocrinology class to introduce our mindfulness-based stress reduction project. I was self-conscious and started laughing SO hard that I ended up snorting like a pig. Never again. lol.
- I used to be quite good at microsurgeries involving insertion of tiny catheters into the jugular vein of rats in order deliver IV drugs (pressing levers and all that). We used methamphetamine and “bath salts” in that lab.
- I published a review article on the neurocircuitry of addiction and one of the figures is an MRI photo of my own brain. Though now that we have way more than “PowerPoint” to create images at our fingertips, the graphics are a tad embarrassing.
- I am the worst text typer. Between my typos and autocorrect you have to basically learn a new language to communicate with me.
- I’m equal parts bubbly & silly + dark & melancholy.
