Sarah M. Sophia, B.A. (Hons), MA, has spent the past 20 years studying Plant Medicine. After several years of academic work — and three graduate degrees focused on the healing potential of shamanic states of consciousness and psychedelic medicine — she was introduced to Quechua Maestro Juan Naupari in 2005. From there, she entered a long apprenticeship and healing path with Grandmother Ayahuasca that supported profound personal transformation, including the healing of a decade-long chronic illness, the resolution of complex post-traumatic stress disorder, recovery from a lifelong eating disorder, and the eventual transmutation of complicated grief disorder.
Sarah holds graduate degrees in Classical History & Philosophy, Religious Studies, and Interdisciplinary Studies. Her SSHRC-funded research centered on Transpersonal Psychology, the therapeutic value of shamanic states of consciousness, the rise of cross-cultural Vegetalismo in the early 2000s, and the globalization of Ayahuasca. She has also trained in Relational Somatic Therapy and, since 2016, has devoted much of her study to working alongside counsellors and therapists exploring the relationship between Plant Medicine healing and deep trauma resolution.
Since 2009, Sarah has worked within the framework of North American Plant Spirit Medicine. Alongside isolation diets and relationships with several Amazonian Teacher Plants — including Bobinsana, Noya Rao, and Amazonian Black Tobacco — she primarily works with a group of 25 North American Power Plants. More than half of these have been part of long dietas lasting from 3 to 8 months. She carries more than 100 personal shamanic power songs, ceremonial songs, and icaros, received through 14 years of dieting with Master Plant Teachers.
She also apprenticed with Cree Elder Okimaw Piesew Awasis, from a family of traditional Medicine Carriers whose ancestral lands are near the Thunderchild Reservation in Saskatchewan, Canada. In 2016, she was honoured to receive a traditional First Nations Medicine Bundle, a Sacred Pipe, and the rites to pour Sweatlodge. Through this lineage, she received her ceremonial names, “Blue Thunder Woman” and “White Lightning Bear,” as well as the responsibility to carry certain prayers, teachings, songs, and ceremonial tools.
Sarah’s work is rooted in the medicine signatures of western North America and held within the wider web of local Plant Medicine wisdom. Her retreats, courses, and counselling practice bring together traditional Indigenous understandings of medicine and ceremony with western psychoanalytic and earth-based approaches. Her offerings are designed for the unique struggles faced by people raised within western socio-cultural contexts, especially in North America and Europe.
Her therapeutic framework is holistic and recognizes the many layers of a person’s experience: the physical body, emotional body, mental body, and energetic-spiritual body. Supporting someone on the path of personal development and healing means tending to all of these dimensions. Core modalities in Sarah’s work include Relational Somatic Therapy, Inner Child and Core Belief Work, shamanic and energetic practices, and psychoanalytic inquiry.
Over the past decade, Sarah has worked with hundreds of private clients, facilitated dozens of trauma-resolution group retreats, and led two well-received programs in Intuitive Development and Plant Spirit Shamanism.