About
The science of well-being only matters to me when it is offered in service of love.
I'm Sará — neuroscientist, contemplative scientist, educator, and practitioner. This is the longer version of who I am and how I came to this work.
I work from a simple conviction: that knowing about loving-awareness is not the same as knowing it.
Where I come from
I am a daughter of California. I was born in Woodland, raised between Los Angeles and Compton, and schooled at Pitzer and UCLA. I live now in San Francisco, where the fog and the ocean continue to teach me what my own teachers began. Place has always mattered to me — the land you stand on does not stay outside of your body.
I came to contemplative practice in my teens, the way many young people come to it: through a need that the world around me could not name. I have been practicing yoga and meditation for twenty-one years. The practice has held me through everything I have studied, every degree I have taken, every room I have walked into and not always belonged in. It is the one thing that has not asked me to be smaller than I am.
Practice · Twenty-one years in
How the work came together
For two decades I have studied the relationship between contemplative practice, the nervous system, and collective liberation. My doctoral work at UCLA followed a yoga and meditation intervention in an urban school and refused, at every turn, to disentangle the intervention from the human relationships that made it possible. That refusal became the seed of everything I have built since.
Out of that ground grew two frameworks — the Systems-Based Awareness Model (SBAM) and the Science of Social Justice (SSJ) — that I now teach, write, and consult from. SBAM is a way of holding the personal and collective nervous systems as continuous. SSJ is the larger inquiry: how do well-being practices, neuroscience, and the work of collective liberation become one motion when held in right relationship?
It is the question I am still living inside. I expect to be living inside it for the rest of my life.
Where I am now
I currently hold a Ruth Kirschstein NRSA NIH post-doctoral fellowship in Neurology at OHSU, a Garrison Institute fellowship, and a Society for Neuroscience scholarship. I serve as a core member of Google's Vitality Lab as their resident expert in collective well-being, and as a co-director of Mobius, an organization supporting liberatory technologists from marginalized backgrounds.
Alongside that, I am writing my first book on the Science of Social Justice, building Love Atlas — a trauma-informed companion for love, healing, and well-being — and slowly editing Yafah, a personal magazine named for my middle name, which means beautiful in Hebrew. They are different shapes for the same devotion.
I have had the gift of working in partnership with Google, Nike, Harvard Medical School, the Ford Foundation, MoMA, the Brooklyn Museum, Sounds True, Insight Timer, the Garrison Institute, and Jordan Brand. Each of those rooms has taught me something about how this work can be carried with integrity into places it would not have been welcome a generation ago.
If you'd like to stay close
Come walk with me a while.
Once a month or so, I send a quiet note — a reflection, a practice you can take into your day, and where I will be next. No funnel. No noise. Just the slow current of the work.
Coastal hills · Dusk over the Pacific