My Story

If we haven’t met yet, my name is Sabrina Santa Clara. Let me help you get to know me a bit. My life has been a loom strung between worlds. Again and again I have been dropped into a new one, and each time I had to learn the weave of the place before I could find my way into the mandala of it.

I grew up in Chula Vista, part of the white minority in a border town where most of my neighbors were Mexican, Filipino and Guamanian. My own family branches reach back to the Azores islands of Portugal, to Mexico, and across Europe into Denmark, England and Germany, so my world was multicultural from the start. It widened in San Francisco, where I lived from about age 18 to 35. Then Wisconsin, a white culture shock I never saw coming. After that, Colorado, where I studied at Naropa, a Buddhist-inspired university in Boulder. A stretch in Las Vegas. A year back home, caring for my mother as Alzheimer’s untethered her from this world, string by string. And at last back to Colorado, my heart’s home, where I have put down roots in Longmont.

Belonging across difference came to me through practice and a great deal of work. Every new world was a discomfort and an awkwardness until I found my way to rest within it.

Since my early twenties, when I went deep into my own trauma work, I have been a bridge builder between worlds: the mundane and the mystical, the experiential and the practical. I have one foot planted in the professional world and the other in the hippie one. I am at home in the analytical mind and in the open heart. I am gender fluid, and I have loved both men and women. I sit with people in the depths of trauma, and I coach executives through decisions that shape whole companies. Movement, music and writing stitch the pieces together, and my poetry and essays carry the threads I have found no other way to say.

So when I speak of integration, I speak of a practice I earned along the way, over and over, and of a gift that has grown, over time, into expertise.

Through the wound first

I came to this work through my own wounds. I lived through significant and chronic trauma I wasn’t sure I’d survive. Its fallout was a tenacious eating disorder and its companions: anxiety, depression and a fair amount of rigidity. I struggled to keep my footing in my own mind while leading the double life of a professional who looked like she had it all together. It took me a long time to learn to love myself and to build a life that was rich and steady enough to stand on.

What helped was a tangle of many threads: yoga, body building, movement and dance; chanting, meditation, prayer and ceremony; teachers who were pastors, monks, rabbis and wise women and men; and a few very good therapists. I know how impossible healing can look from the bottom of the well. I also know the way back up. If you have parts that have fallen down a dark well, I will be there with you, with the ropes, pulleys and headlamps needed to climb back to the light.

Some wells are lined with promotions and a corner office, and the person at the bottom is the founder or executive everyone else leans on. I lived in that one too, for years. If you have built a successful life and feel hollow inside it, the same ropes will hold you.

Bringing my whole self to work

For years I was a human resources director by day, and a yoga teacher, bodyworker, dancer and meditation teacher in every other hour I had. Before that I spent years as a massage therapist, learning what hands can say that words cannot. At the office I kept my soul folded small and tucked in a drawer; after hours I let it unfurl. Living that way taught me what it costs to bring only half of yourself through the door.

In time I grew weary of a world whose values did not match my own, a world that kept asking me to trade my wholeness for my success. I could not shake the conviction that no one should have to make that trade. That conviction became my work.

Going deeper

So I went deeper: Internal Family Systems (IFS), Hakomi, organizational and depth psychology, and years of my own inner work. At forty I went back to school at Naropa University for a master’s in somatic psychotherapy, with a second emphasis in dance and movement therapy, and became a somatic psychotherapist.

From there I grew my own specialties, psychotherapeutic touch and neoshamanic IFS, and I teach for Fluence, where the deeply clinical and the deeply spiritual share one table. The analytical and the mystical have both claimed me, and I keep a seat at that table for each of them.

Many wells

My spiritual life has been woven the same way, from many threads. I have walked with Wicca, Buddhism, Sikhi, Judaism and Christianity, chewing the meat and spitting out the bones, as a pastor once told me. I have drunk from too many wells to believe any single one holds all the water.

What guides me now is my own connection to Source and to the animate world. When I sit before a vast, ancient ocean, I become a grain of sand on the shore, a drop in all that water, and I find great comfort in being that small. Some of what I know there, words cannot carry, so I make things: mixed media art from natural and repurposed materials, collage, jewelry, poems. And I dance.

With the people I walk with, the work is finding their own way in. For one founder it is a morning walk without a phone; for another it is a journal, a drum, a garden, or a long conversation with a part that has been carrying too much. Whatever the doorway, it opens onto the same ground: a deeper Self with its own wisdom about how to live.

Where the threads meet

Today I work as an elder and a spiritual doula, an executive coach, a medicine weaver and a threshold guide. I walk with founders who built the life and find it asking more of them, with therapists and coaches ready to go deeper in their own work, with people on a spiritual path who long to live closer to the sacred, and with anyone standing in the doorway of a loss or a great change.

If I have a medicine of my own, it is integration. I move between the ceremony circle and the boardroom, the therapy room and the dance floor, and I am at home in each. The crossing in front of you is one I have made, more than once, and I know where the footholds are.