About Me

Sarah Friedlander MA, PhD
(ABD) & YTT-200

I feel so grateful and appreciative for your curiosity to learn more about me here. 🙂

My name is Sarah and I'm a sentimentalist. I love, admire, and strive to embody authenticity, courageous vulnerability, compassion, warmth, and radical honesty.

A big part of my life is incorporating practices to slow down, and stay close, clear, and loving to myself - daily meditation, mindfulness, yoga and movement, connection with others, play, journaling, and breathwork.

I've been an avid learner and practitioner of yoga, meditation and mindfulness for the past 15+ years, and of therapy and trauma healing for the past 6 years.

What I do in work, I do in life. Everything I do with clients I have integrated and used myself in my own healing journey (and continue to integrate and use as the process unfolds).

I view my healing journey as an exciting inner exploration. Once upon a time, I was a wilderness backpacker, spending months at a time off-grid and using a compass to find my way.

And now, the even more seemingly perilous, yet oh-so-rewarding adventure has been traversing the landscape of my inner world - my feelings and needs, blocks, judgments, parts, sorrows and regrets, yearnings and deep desires, coping mechanisms, joys and celebrations, defenses and armors, and more. Getting to know these, compassionately and with care, to have that beautiful clarity for my own inner compass.

I feel very fortunate to have had supportive mentors and teachers that helped guide me along the way. It is within these safe, nurturing relational connections that so much healing and growth happened and continues to happen.

And now it's an honor to be in the role of being a client's compassionate, supportive partner and guide on their own journey. To be the nurturing, safe relational container that someone needs for their own healing and growth.

I feel so very fortunate to do something I feel passionately about, that I find so much joy in, and as a means of providing for my family.  I am grateful to contribute to and be part of life energy this way.

 

A Few of My Loves and Things Tender to My Heart

I prefer rain/snow to sunshine, and cold to heat, especially if snuggled up inside.

Learning! Most of my free time goes towards podcasts, books and audiobooks, and courses. At any given time, I am likely in the midst of listening to a psychology/trauma/healing-oriented podcast/audiobook, participating in an online course, or reading a good ol' fashioned hard copy book.

Focusing. One of my favorite meditative healing modalities is called Focusing by Eugene Gendlin, which I'd succinctly describe as a meditative practice that combines the felt sense and parts work.

Oh, how I love nature. Oh, how I love trees and green lushness and fresh air and all its nervous system-regulating beauty.

Breathing, gosh. So simple and loving and available all the time. I love my breath and how it compassionately cares for me round-the-clock.

Yoga! I suppose there is no surprise there as I am a yoga instructor. 🙂 Yoga continues to aide my well-being and growth every day and I see how it aides others in my private yoga practice.

An ode to Nonviolent Communication: hands-down my favorite modality of all and the most life-changing for me, and something I strive to use in every breath of my life and being, in all my ways of living and doing, and in all my relationships.

Authentic relating and vulnerability - I love the messy, heart-rendering, dark-night-of-the-soul kind of authentic vulnerability. There is nothing more beautiful than being real. There is nothing that is more enough than being real. In my life, it seems I am reaching more and more to spaces and people who also value this.

Poetry that stirs my soul. It's more than the poem itself; it so delights me because it means that others also feels similar stirrings in reading that poem, and there is such joy at the visibility of shared human experience.

 

Therapeutic Modalities           

Both my work and personal life are strongly nourished by modalities like Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg (life-changing and by far my favorite modality), and the teachings of Jerusalem therapist/teacher Danny Cohen, compassion-based therapy, Internal Family Systems (Schwartz), Compassionate Inquiry (Gabor Maté), Focusing Therapy (Gendlin), Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy (Segal, Teasdale, Williams) and Mindful Self-compassion (Germer & Neff).