Inner Landscapes
Cultivate depth, inner strength, and meaningSeeking stability and eager to contribute meaningfully but held back by internal struggles and unresolved life events?
You’re in good company. I promise.
Many of us carry unsettled existential and identity-related disruptions that blur our paths and drain our energy, leaving us feeling stuck, spinning in place, or simply unmotivated.
This feeling becomes all the more acute for those among us eager to challenge the status quo. In our quest for change, every ounce of our being needs to be aligned and mobilized—truly, we need “all hands on deck” to make a lasting impact.
you may be facing challenges that manifest in several ways:
Resistance or Fragmentation Within Self: Feeling a profound disconnect between various parts of yourself, experiencing internal conflict and opposition that paralyzes action and dims your true desires. This fragmentation keeps you from being fully in control of your life direction, as if you’re constantly battling against yourself to move forward.
Unintegrated Experiences and Freeze Response: Holding onto experiences that, while no longer active crises, have not been fully integrated into your narrative, resulting in a freeze response when facing decisions or actions that could lead to personal advancement.
Emotional and Decision-Making Paralysis: Finding yourself unable to make decisions that align with your deeper aspirations due to emotional blocks or a chronic state of indecision stemming from fears of making the ‘wrong’ choice.
Navigating Life Transitions Without Anchors: Encountering significant life transitions—such as major career changes, entering or exiting significant relationships, or grappling with identity shifts—without a sense of stability or anchored self-identity, making these transitions feel insurmountable.
Echoes of Existential Trauma: Being influenced by significant, difficult to talk about life events—such as prenatal trauma, near-death experiences, suicide attempts, and significant losses. Though not actively destabilizing after therapy, they subtly shape your identity and how you engage with the world in ways that may not always be consciously recognized, often manifesting as persistent feelings of guilt, shame, or a pervasive sense of disconnection.
YOUR STRUGGLES DON’T DEFINE YOUR POTENTIAL
Here’s the thing.
Most therapeutic and self-help approaches are focused on getting out of crisis and finding management tools for emotions, thoughts, or behaviors that are interfering with your life and ability to do meaningful work.
If you are introspective and deep feeling, these approaches only scratch the surface of your identity and any underlying existential dilemmas. So it makes sense if you still feel unsatisfied with your growth and self-understanding.
Post-Traumatic Growth & Self Reclamation
This is where navigating Inner Landscapes comes in—designed to explore and reconcile these deeper layers, offering a path to profound self-connection and meaningful change. Inner Landscapes achieves this by focusing on:
- Existential Nervous System Work: Transforming the deep-seated, wordless threat responses into sources of strength, facilitating a mind-body connection that supports health and resilience.
- Somatic and Metaphorical Exploration: Utilizing creative processes to access and articulate these existential traumas, allowing for healing and integration.
- Fostering Inner Connection: Developing a compassionate relationship with oneself, understanding and embracing the parts affected by existential trauma, and moving toward a cohesive sense of self.
If you’re ready to explore these deeper layers, I’m here to guide you on this journey.
MEET SARA: scientist-mystic
Hi, I'm Sara Taylor, PhD., a former behavioral neuroscientist and psychology professor specializing in the impact of early and chronic stress on mental illness and addiction.
My personal experience with severe anxiety and panic during pregnancy, stemming from what I now know was generational trauma, alongside my disenchantment with academia, steered me toward a new direction.
Now, I leverage my background in stress and mental health to facilitate Generational & Existential Self-Reclamation, combining systemic family constellations, Norse shamanic healing techniques, and multidimensional somatic and nervous system support.
This blend of science and spirituality empowers me to guide others through the shadows and complexities of emotional and existential challenges inherent in doing meaningful work.
A PATH TO SELF-UNDERSTANDING & STRENGTH
Inner Landscapes guides you through the deep waters of your inner world, making space for you to:
- Harmonize internal conflicts to enable coherent self-direction.
- Foster self-acceptance to reduce internal resistance to personal goals.
- Facilitate emotional processing for the holistic integration of past experiences.
- Diminish the freeze response to enhance the ability to act on decisions.
- Cultivate emotional resilience for clearer, more aligned decision-making.
- Increase self-trust to minimize the fear of incorrect choices.
- Provide tools for establishing a stable sense of self through transitions.
- Enhance adaptability and confidence in facing life changes.
- Make sense of existential traumas, integrating them as sources of strength.
- Improve self-perception and interaction with the world beyond trauma.
THE INNER LANDSCAPES PROCESS
FOCUS: Begin by pinpointing the areas in your life where you feel a disconnect or find yourself immobilized. Clarify your goals for this exploration.
EMERGENT, CUMULATIVE LAYERS: Progress unfolds organically, guided by the innate wisdom of your body-mind-spirit. Each step is manageable and aligned with your goals and intentions, fostering change without force or overwhelm.
CREATIVE EXPLORATION: We’ll use a blend of somatic and shamanic techniques to explore your inner landscape through the felt sense, imagery, and metaphors. This creative engagement helps to unearth and address underlying issues.
INNER ADJUSTMENTS: Create emotional and energetic shifts to more fully claim your birth rights, enhance resilience and nervous system health, and move forward.
REORIENT TO MEANING AND POSSIBILITY: Shift from inflexibility to adaptability while cultivating a deeper sense of inner strength and meaning to provide satisfaction and momentum toward your goals.
Inner Landscapes Program Details
We work biweekly in 3-month segments, finding both flexibility and consistent reinforcement that supports change.
WHAT’S INCLUDED:
- 1 focusing session
- 5 Working sessions to explore the stuck places within your inner landscape and then create potent and effective change to support your focus and goals.
- Monthly office hours call
- Email or Voxer support between calls
INVESTMENT: $1500, paid as $500/month for 3 months
Ready to Explore your Inner Landscapes?
the first step is clarity
Out of the Fog Assessment & Consultation
Uncover insights into elusive barriers and the impact of early life and ancestral experiences, while reassessing your strategies and support to identify why you’re stuck and navigate a way forward.
CUmulative, Sustainable Change
The structured yet flexible and emergent approach of working biweekly over three months is designed to initiate significant internal shifts and introduce practical new approaches for ongoing self-exploration and growth beyond our time together.
These internal shifts are tangible changes in how you perceive, react to, and engage with the challenges you face.
Let’s also stay firmly grounded in setting realistic expectations—no quick fixes or promises of a problem-free existence are being sold here.
A deeply ingrained pattern, especially one built up over decades won’t completely disappear in this timeframe.
Your role in this process is also crucial. Active participation and applying what you learn to your daily life are key to lasting change.
If external factors might hinder your engagement, it’s essential to discuss them during your initial Out of the Fog Assessment and Consultation Session.
Science Meets Spirit:
Is my approach spiritual? I believe everything is spiritual because as humans we are spirit-embodied. However, what happens in session doesn’t mean you have to change how openly spiritual you are in your life, unless you want to.
This work does enhance own intuition and spiritual connectedness, especially if that is something you want. Many clients report finding easier access to their insights and spiritual connections during our sessions.
That said, my approach is not some made up process I pulled out of thin air! It is derived from my own critical, hypothesis-driven observations and refinements of established somatic, parts work, and shamanic healing traditions, some of which have been explored through scientific research or decades of use by practitioners.
Creative exploration
Isn’t this a little abstract?
Damn right, it is!
Internal Landscapes is a creative process of self-exploration and creating internal changes to support your desired life and meaningful work.
Self, psyche, somatic sensations, spirit, and metaphors are abstract. I think that’s a good thing because most of my clients have highly developed logical or intellectual minds (same, same).
If you could figure it out by thinking or talking about it, you would have already!
If you’re looking to loosen up and find alternatives to overthinking, this is for you.
Frequently Asked questions
How do I get started?
If you haven’t completed an Out of the Fog assessment & consultation, go to this page and book one. If in that session we determine this program is a good fit for you now, you will be invited to sign up.
If you’ve already done your assessment and consultation, you can email me at sara@sarabtaylor.com to initiate signing up or to ask any remaining informational questions.
DO I have to start with the assessment session?
Based on your written reflection and our 1:1 time I will also be able to make specific recommendations and projections about what is going on, what you might be able to expect and what else you’ll need to do to get what you want.
What is the commitment expected of me?
That’s just how reinforcement works.
I’m not going to be upset if you don’t, but if you might be… it would be good to consider if this is an investment you want to make.
What's the difference between this & Ancestral Throughlines?
This is because we aren’t shaking things up as much (as in reworking how your live out your “fate”).
In this work, what happens in session tends to integrate into your nervous system and inner life creating more access to health and choice. It’s gentler and more focused on building cores strength and capacity.
In some cases, I may recommend doing Inner Landscapes before engaging with extensive ancestral work.
And you don’t have to figure out which is a better choice on your own, the initial Out of the Fog Assessment and Consultation is designed to help you determine what the most effective and aligned next steps are.
What If I've already done Ancestral work with you?
Super! Welcome back, my friend.
If you’ve already completed work with me that involved an extensive ancestral history (previously called “unbound”) you do not need to complete an Out of the Fog session and you can absolutely sign up for Inner Landscapes.
Because you’ve already initiated ancestral work, we’ll continue to pull from it and all my skills and knowledge will be available to you.
Just email me at sara@sarabtaylor.com to initiate or ask any informational questions you might have.
Bonus: Clients who’ve completed ancestral work (through Ancestral Throughlines or my previous Unbound program) with me also receive 10% off of Inner Landscapes at this time, taking the price to $1350 ($450/month).
who is this a good fit for?
If you don’t think you as a person are interesting and worthy of exploration, you will be better served by a different modality!
If you have an urgent need to change, this work is not ideal either.
That kind of pressure will put you into a freeze response quicker than greased lightening.
However, if you want to work with being with urgency without going into shutdown, that would be okay to explore because you come in with full awareness about it!
Do you have a guarantee?
I work with what is available to be seen and that your body and internal wisdom present as ready to be worked with. Sometimes the route is more circuitous than we might like, but I’m not here to force. This in and of itself begins to rewrite old trauma patterns around boundary violations and stuck threat responses like freeze. I do my best to always reflect where we are in a larger change process too, so you know what’s going on. In addition, one of the first things we do is create milestones or evidence markers to know that what we are doing is having an effect.
Through this work, you will discover the deeper layers of patterns going on, and will have choices to make that open up new paths. Sometimes folks don’t want to make those choices and I absolutely respect that. I will support you in your no and your yes.
So while I can’t make guarantees, we can really make sure it’s a worthy investment with an Out of the Fog Assessment and Consultation. I can generally get a sense for what kinds of paces we’ll be working with and that helps us to create reality-based expectations for the work.
And if we start working together and find it really isn’t working or you have a major life change, we can part ways once the time I’ve invested into your case has been compensated.
Can I do this work while in therapy?
That said, this program and approach is ideal for folks who’ve already addressed major mental, emotional, or behavioral health concerns with a therapist or similar professional.
This is the place to work with the remaining shadows of things like anxiety, depression, etc after navigating the rough waters that can take you into therapy.
Are you ready to take the first step?
Out of the Fog Assessment & Consultation
Uncover insights into elusive barriers and the impact of early life and ancestral experiences, while reassessing your strategies and support to identify why you’re stuck and navigate a way forward.