I trained as an architect and built businesses from the age of 23. From the outside my life looked successful; from the inside I was in a slow collapse - achieving everything I'd been told to want and feeling less real with every year of it. That collapse became the work of my life.
I searched for years - meditation, Tibetan Buddhism, Kabbalah - and eventually found my way to shamanic lineages, where I stayed. Not as a visitor in ceremony, but as someone who kept returning because something real was happening that nothing else had touched. That path brought me through a death of identity: the architect and entrepreneur gave way to someone I hadn't yet met - a healer.
For nineteen years I've trained inside traditional lineage systems rather than clinical programs - apprenticing under Lakota and Wixárika (Huichol) peyote lineages; Shipibo, Huni Kuin, Yawanawá and Noke Koi ayahuasca lineages; Colombian taita Yagé lineages; and Sonoran Bufo alvarius and Kambô traditions. Part of that path included 2.5 years in personal dieta — the traditional apprenticeship of sacred isolation through which a person earns the capacity to hold ceremony for others. Over these years I've facilitated ceremonies and retreats and supported more than 15,000 people through preparation and integration. Today I run my own plant medicine retreat center in Peru's Sacred Valley.
What I bring isn't theory about the medicine - it's having sat in the fire with thousands of people, across dozens of lineages, long enough to recognize what a person's process actually needs versus what they think they need in the moment. The medicine opens the door, but integration is where the real work happens: what you do with what you saw, felt, or dismantled is what decides whether it becomes lasting change or just an intense memory.
Alongside my lineage training I've developed my own integration framework, Karmic Recapitulation, and a daily nervous-system-based meditation practice, The Remembering Method™. My work is documented in my book You Are God and shared with a community of 143K on Instagram (@sarakolata).