Dr. Sara Sentell

For as long as I can remember, I've been curious and I've been a helper.

When I was in elementary school, classmates called me “the counselor girl” and they would come and tell me their problems on the playground. This evolved to facilitating peer support groups in high school, and then herbal tea “therapeutic happy hours” in college. I loved it then and I love it now. 

I started my career as a social worker—a lens I've held onto ever since. We all have our individual battles, but I firmly believe that we must always consider the systemic backdrop against which those battles are taking place. Working with teenage girls in residential treatment centers, I discovered two important things. First, my deep interest in questions related to body image and eating disorders. And second, the ways in which mental health is expressed through our bodies. Medication could only go so far and it was obvious to me that in order to heal, we needed to establish a dialogue with the body.

My story then took a brief foray into physical therapy school before landing in graduate and doctoral programs for Chinese Medicine and Naturopathic Medicine. There, I fed my desire for an integrative understanding of the human body that considers mind, body, and spirit and how these are woven into and through the world at large.

Eventually, my curiosity went even deeper and my tools felt ill-equipped to meet the challenges my patients were facing. I began to struggle. I was burning out professionally, going through a divorce, and being called to medicine that could go deeper with me. 

It was around this time that I began coming across research on psychedelics. I'd experimented a bit earlier in life, but this felt different. All my life, I was able to hold a bright light for others and I knew that my light was dimming. Working with psychedelic medicines helped me turn the light back on and I'm eternally grateful.

Now I get to weave a rich tapestry of education, clinical practice, and lived experience to support patients and clients as they find their way back home to their own light within. 

To cultivate my own balance when not practicing medicine, I spend my free time running, hiking, and boating along the many trails and rivers the Northwest has to offer or dancing, playing, singing, digging my hands in the dirt, and being delighted by simple joys.