For Sara Joy, founder of Solana Soul, healing is often about looking beneath what appears on the surface. Drawing from a master’s degree in social work, experience in hospice and end-of-life care and more than 15 years of intuitive work, Sara helps clients explore the emotional and energetic patterns that may be keeping them feeling stuck.

Through intuitive guidance, soul and life coaching, energy work, grief support and a growing focus on sound and frequency, she brings together clinical understanding and intuitive perception in an approach designed to support the whole person.

“I’m able to find the root systems of whatever’s going on energetically, especially from their childhood, that is playing out in adulthood,” Sara explains. “When someone feels like ‘I’m stuck. I have this pattern. I’m lost. I don’t know what to do,’ then I can share what I’m seeing.”

An Unexpected Awakening

Sara’s path into intuitive work began unexpectedly in 2010. At that time, she is navigating personal struggles and searching for greater meaning when she experienced what she describes as a profound spiritual awakening.

“I just sort of woke up one day with it,” she recalls. “I wouldn’t have called myself an intuitive at all.” The experience initially challenged her religious beliefs and took months to reconcile. Eventually, a friend offered her space to begin providing free intuitive readings. The positive response encouraged Sara to continue exploring an ability that, despite its unexpected arrival, feels deeply natural to her.

“It always felt like it was from a place of goodness within myself,” she says. “It never felt bad. It never felt wrong. It felt like who I was.”

Getting Unstuck and Breaking Through Unhelpful Patterns

Her first business, Joyful Heart Wellness, centered primarily on intuitive readings. As her practice developed, however, Sara began to notice that identifying an issue is not necessarily enough. Clients may recognize a recurring relationship pattern, limiting belief or area of emotional pain, but still wonder what to do next.

That realization leads her to incorporate energy work and coaching.

“I would tell them what I was sensing and feeling, and more often than not, there was a piece in their life that was fragmented or stuck,” she says. “There were patterns, or they needed help getting out of something.”

Sara says the additional services evolved organically as she looked for ways to help clients move from awareness toward change.

Bringing the Subconscious Into Awareness

Sara describes her intuitive ability simply: “I read energy.”

She likens the experience to seeing something behind a person that they cannot see themselves. Her role is to bring those perceived patterns into conscious awareness, then use meditation, coaching and other exercises to help the individual explore them differently.

Sometimes a client comes to her because of anxiety, grief, difficult relationships or a general sense of being stuck. What emerges through the process may be connected, in Sara’s view, to an earlier experience or deeply ingrained belief.

“I bring what is in their subconscious, or the patterns and belief systems that have been holding them back, to the front, so it becomes consciously aware for them,” she explains. “Then we work on that through meditations, coaching and exercises to reprogram or retune whatever that is.” 

Master’s Degree meets Intuition

Her education in clinical social work adds another dimension. After significant experiences with loss, including her father’s death while receiving hospice care in 2014, Sara returned to graduate school to earn her master’s degree in social work with a focus that includes trauma and grief.

The training has provided tools that complement her intuitive approach.

“It’s given me a unique perspective because I feel like I can pull the practical clinical interventions that social workers use,” she says. “It has really helped me understand, from the brain side of things, how things are affected in the brain versus energetically.”

Creating New Rituals Around Grief

Grief support has become a particularly personal component of Solana Soul. Sara has experienced the deaths of her mother, father, brother and a close friend, and her hospice work has placed her alongside others navigating loss.

She views grief as highly individual, but believes people can develop recurring emotional and energetic patterns around it.

“Everyone expresses grief differently. We all feel grief differently,” she says. “But there are energetic patterns in grief that we can get stuck in.”

A person may believe that feeling happy means they are no longer honoring someone who died, for example, or repeatedly return to routines associated with that person even when those routines intensify their pain. Birthdays, anniversaries and holidays can bring those feelings forward again.

Rather than encouraging people to abandon remembrance, Sara helps them consider creating new rituals.

“It’s about creating new patterns of remembrance,” she explains. “People can honor their person without feeling drowned or overwhelmed by the grief.”

Exploring Healing Through Sound

The newest evolution of Solana Soul brings sound into Sara’s work through vibroacoustic therapy. The practice uses low-frequency sound vibrations that can be experienced physically through a specialized therapeutic system, creating an immersive opportunity for relaxation.

Sara sees the modality as another layer of her energy-based work and has been using the system herself as well as introducing it to clients.

“Energy work is wonderful. Intuitive guidance is wonderful,” she says. “Sound is this additional step. It’s almost like fine-tuning everything.”

She is also becoming certified in a frequency-based service using a person’s voice to help create an individualized sound-frequency program. Sara plans for clients to be able to listen to their customized frequencies at home, then return for reassessment and adjustments. Because this service does not require use of the vibroacoustic system, she expects to eventually offer it remotely as well as in person.

The expansion feels fitting for someone whose connection to sound extends well beyond her professional life. Sara sang when she was younger and remains passionate about music and live performances. Outside Solana Soul, she is an enthusiastic Wisconsin sports fan, enjoys traveling and spending time with her two adult children, friends and family, and shares her home with two rabbits, two cats and two dogs.

Through all of the changes in her work, Sara’s focus remains on helping people better understand themselves while bringing together the practical and intuitive perspectives that have shaped her own life.

Solana Soul is located at 200 W. Main St., Ste. 210, Wales. To book an appointment with Sara, call 262-361-2555 or visit SolanaSoul.com. 
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